December 2024: The Smithsonian Design Triennial, applied arts, and Thanksgiving Square
Thank you for supporting Scratching the Surface in 2024!
In November, we spoke with interior designer, gardener, and applied artist Petra Blaisse about collaboration and collage and KoozArch’s Federica Sofia Zameletti about independent media.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Happy December! This year has proven to be a generative and productive year for me. By the time you get this email, I’ll have just submitted the draft to a new book project that’s consumed much of my time this year. I’ll have more to say about this next year but until then, I’m grateful to have completed it and looking forward to new projects next year.
I continually feel grateful for the opportunity to do this show. The conversations I’ve had, the networks we’ve built together, the things I’ve learned have influenced me at the deepest levels. It’s a lot of work and doesn’t always fit neatly with my “real” job as a professor and writer (and still, sometimes, designer). Scratching the Surface — and this newsletter — are made possible, then, 100% because of listener support which gives me time and space to research, record, edit, and write. If you like this show, and are reading this newsletter for free, that’s possible because of those on the paid tier. If you’ve found value in this work, I hope you consider supporting us in the new year.
As a thank you, I’m offering 20% off memberships for 2025. That means you can get a year’s worth of benefits for $4/month or $40/year. That’ll get you bonus conversations each month, new exclusive stories, and some other fun things we have planned in 2025.
But beyond those benefits, these members are really just a way to send a signal that this work is valuable and that you want to see more of it in the world. For that, as always, I thank you.
See you in the new year,
Jarrett
SCRATCH
Recent essays, interviews, and stories published on our Scratch platform.
PAST GUESTS
Recent work, writing, and news from former guests of Scratching the Surface.
💻 For Untapped, Anne Quito explores the place of the handmade artifact in a tech-obsessed era.
🏋️♀️ Alissa Walker visits a storied Olympic site in LA to see how preparations are going for 2028.
📚 Nina Paim’s new project, Bikini Books, has launched. Their first book is a longform interview with Briar Levit on design, feminism, and friendship.
🟩 Mindy Seu traces the origins of internet green.
🌈 For Kazaam, Alexandra Lange writes about Project Color Corps and how paint can empower children and transform schools.
🪑 For Frieze, Justin Beal reviews the new show on the work of sculptor Scott Burton.
🎷 In the newsletter Herb Sundays, Michael Cina writes about the origins and evolution of smooth jazz.
🧢 Sarah Rich launches new project, the Department of Invisible Labor.
😱 We had a handful of reviews of The Met’s Paul Rudolph show last month but here’s another: Oliver Wainwright in the Guardian.
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!
The Farm at Black Mountain College by David Silver (Atelier Editions)
Through deep original research, The Farm at Black Mountain College follows renegade students, faculty and farmers as they establish a campus farm in the 1930s, build a better farm in the 1940s and watch it all collapse in the 1950s. We meet a new cast of BMC characters whose stories have seldom, if ever, been explored, and whose adventures in agriculture illuminate what exactly happened at BMC across the decades, from optimistic community building to its plunge into substance-addled scarcity.
The New Sustainable House by Penny Craswell (Thames & Hudson)
Designing with the environment in mind is not new. What is new is the increasing number of ways houses can be more sustainably built. With a fresh focus on design ingenuity and innovative technologies and materials, The New Sustainable House demonstrates that there is more to ecologically motivated construction than solar panels and water tanks. This survey shows that the environmental impact of every home, no matter the size or location, can be greatly reduced with creative and responsible design.
Glitchy Vision: A Feminist History of the Social Photo by Amanda K. Greene (MIT Press)
Glitchy Vision takes a feminist approach to media history to examine how photographic social media cultures change human bodies and the experience of being human. To illuminate these glitches, Greene focuses on the inevitable distortions that arise from looking at the past through the lens of the present. Treating these distortions as tools as opposed to obstacles, Greene uncovers new ways of viewing social media cultures of the past, while also revealing parallels between historical contexts and our contemporary digital media environment.
Evidence by Larry Sultan and Robert F. Forth (DAP)
In 1977, American photographers Larry Sultan (1946-2009) and Mike Mandel (born 1950) published a book of photographs titled Evidence. The book was the culmination of a two-year search through the archives of 77 government agencies, educational institutions and corporations, including General Atomic Company, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the San Jose Police Department and the United States Department of the Interior. This new, definitive edition features revelatory new scans--many made from the original negatives--which greatly enhance the eerie objectivity conveyed by the book's title.
Thomas Heatherwick: Making (Thames & Hudson)
Filling almost 650 pages, this fully revised and updated edition of Heatherwick’s classic monograph illuminates the imagination behind more than one hundred and fifty of the studio's extraordinary works, from London to Shanghai, New York to Tokyo. Now with sixteen new projects, the book covers the entire span of the studio’s work since 1994.
READ/WATCHED/HEARD
Articles, books, videos, and other ephemera that caught our eye this month.
🖨️ How a Storied Printmaker Advances the Practice of Architecture (Untapped)
🖼️ The new issue of PIN-UP magazine is guest-edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen and focuses on museums. (Fischli and Olsen edited Art Applied, the monograph of recent guest Petra Blaisse.)
JOB WATCH
New jobs, retirements, and promotions in and around design.
Nora Burnett will be the new director of ICA Boston.
POSTSCRIPT
As we return from Thanksgiving break, I was delighted to learn of Dallas’s Thanks Giving Square, a park in Downtown Dallas that is anchored by a spiral temple designed by Philip Johnson. Maybe I’m the last person to know about it, but I’m always amazed there are original Johnson structures I hadn’t seen before.