August 2024: Research-based practices, remembering Kenneth Grange, the excesses of postmodernism
We're gearing up for the new season of Scratching the Surface!
In July, we rebroadcasted three of our favorite episodes from the archive: our 2023 conversation with artist and writer James Bridle, our 2020 conversation with designer and author Alicia Cheng, and our 2022 conversation with designer and activist Chris Rudd.
EDITOR’S NOTE
I may not be doing interviews for the show at the moment but I can’t seem to stop interview people. The summer has been spent interviewing dozens of designers for a project that will be announced soon. For Fast Company, I also interviewed Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter, the creative director and academic director respectively of the Stanford d.school. They have a new book out called Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide To Designing a Thriving Future. I was admittedly conflicted about the book and was interested in talking to them about how they think about the role of design and how it fits into larger political and economic trends. It was a surprisingly generative conversation that I hope asked some tough questions. If you’ve listened to the recent episodes of Scratching the Surface, I think you’ll see some similiar themes crop up in that conversation. You can read it here.
That said, I’m now fully back into podcasting mode. I’ve scheduled the first slate of guests and finalizing the lineup for the Fall season. I start recording new episodes next week. I’m excited to be back. We’re also planning on new Scratch pieces, so if you have pitches, send them my way.
Thanks, as always, for listening, reading, and following along. If you find this newsletter useful, consider forwarding it to a friend or supporting us on Patreon. If you have pitches, guest suggestions, or want to chat, you can always leave us a note.
Until next month,
Jarrett
SCRATCH
Recent essays, interviews, and stories published on our Scratch platform.
Jessica Helfand on painting, faces, and research as artistic practice
For Patreon subscribers, we caught up with the designer, artist, and author to talk about her new body of paintings.
Remembering Kenneth Grange: The Pentagram Years
In memory of the industrial designer and Pentagram co-founder, we’re publishing this exclusive edited excerpt from Lucy Johnston’s new monograph.
PAST GUESTS
Recent work, writing, and news from former guests of Scratching the Surface.
📸 In The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka on TikTok’s favorite camera.
♥️ Allison Arieff review’s Kevin Barry’s new novel, The Heart in Winter, for the San Francisco Chronicle.
🏊♀️ In The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright asks if Paris can deliver the greenest Olympics yet.
🌆 Hosting the Olympics is costs billions, Michael Kimmelman writes, but what do cities get back?
👎 In The Nation, Kate Wagner writes about the awful plan to turn Gaza into the next Dubai.
💧In Untapped, Alexandra Lange writes about future-proofing a house where water is the focus.
📽️ In The New York Review of Architecture, Christopher Hawthorne writes about Vincent Scully.
🍿 Justin Beal writes about two short films, Coro: Los Murmullos and Ready Mix, for Material Intelligence Magazine.
⏳ Also In Material Intelligence (which is edited by Glenn Adamson, by the way), Shannon Mattern writes about sandpaper.
🔭 Justin McGuirk writes that design can help us imagine different futures.
🎂 PIN-UP celebrates five years of Beatrice Galilee’s The World Around.
BOOK ROUNDUP
Recent books that have arrived in the studio. All links are Bookshop.org affiliate links. If you order through Bookshop, we get some money to help support the show!
A Book About Ray by Ellen Levy (MIT Press)
The first full-career survey of the idiosyncratic life and work of Ray Johnson, a collagist, performance artist, and pioneer of mail art. In A Book about Ray, Ellen Levy offers a comprehensive study of the artist who turned the business of career-making into a tongue-in-cheek performance, tracing his artistic development from his arrival at Black Mountain College in 1945 to his death in 1995. Levy describes Johnson's practice as one that was constantly shifting—whether in tone, in its address to potential audiences, or among three primary artistic modes: collage, performance, and correspondence art.
Glenn Murcutt: Unbuilt Works by Nick Sissons (Thames and Hudson)
A thinker ahead of his time, Glenn Murcutt is one of the world’s most celebrated architects, having won the Alvar Aalto Medal, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. He is known for his highly considered process of discovery that responds uniquely to the Australian landscape. Working in close collaboration with Murcutt, architect Nick Sissons, Murcutt’s former student and assistant, presents a selection of never-before-seen projects documenting some of the esteemed architect’s most notable works.
Bruno Munari by Aldo Tanchis (Corraini Editore)
A facsimile edition of the crucial 1987 survey of Munari’s wide-ranging work. Designed by Munari himself, this was the first comprehensive account of his remarkable and vast oeuvre and explores Munari's relationship to the artistic trends of his times, his attention to the world of children and didactics, and the many other peculiarities that made Bruno Munari such an original figure.
Lucia Moholy: Exposures (Hate Cantz)
A prolific writer, photographer, portraitist and documentarian, Lucia Moholy was as active in avant-garde circles as she was in the field of information science, advancing an expansive understanding of visual reproduction. While previous publications on Moholy have limited her accomplishments to the five years she spent at the Bauhaus, Exposures presents the full breadth of her writings and photographs for the first time. Extensive essays drawing on new archival discoveries offer insights into her early life in turn-of-the-century Prague, her involvement in the radical social movements of the 1920s in Weimar Germany, her wartime documentations via microfilm and her work in the Middle East on behalf of UNESCO.
Building Culture by Julian Rose (Princeton Architectural Press)
An insiders look at art museums and how they shape the ways we view art, through sixteen interviews with leading architects like Frank Gehry, Elizabeth Tiller, and Walter Hood on the museums they designed.
JOB WATCH
Tracking new jobs, appointments, and career moves in and around the design industries.
The School of Visual Arts appoints Randy Hunt (friend of the show!) as the new chair of the MFA Design program, succeeding founding chairs Steven Heller and Lita Talarico.
Scott Klinker is stepping down as chair of the 3D Design Department at Cranbrook to focus on his studio practice.
Lydia Kallipoliti is joining Columbia GSAAP as the new director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program.
OMA partner Ellen van Loon is retiring after twenty-six years at the firm.
READ/WATCHED/HEARD
Articles, books, videos, and other ephemera that caught our eye this month.
📕 8 Revelations from Louis Kahn’s Last Notebook, by Sam Lubell for The New York Times.
🪦 Industrial designer and Pentagram co-founder Kenneth Grange died at 95.
POSTSCRIPT
I’m on the record of being an unashamed lover of the excesses of postmodern architecture so I was overjoyed to discover Ricardo Bofill’s delightfully weird Les Espaces d’Abraxas, built in Paris in 1983. I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it before because it immediately reminded me of an exaggerated Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building in New York or Kengo Kuma’s M2 building, two buildings I love. I occasionally save my favorites over on Are.na.