"I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it is always June", ponders Anne Shirley in Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1915 novel Anne of the Island. "You'd get tired of it", sighs her adoptive mother Marilla Cuthbert by way of reply. "I daresay", responds Anne, "but just now I feel that it would take me a long time to get tired of it..." Thoughts we very much concur with as we survey and contemplate the varied profusion of new architecture and design exhibitions sprouting forth in June
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Cranbrook An Alma Mater; An Academy of Art; A colony of experimentation Cranbrook Academy of Art arose on the Cranbrook Estate, a private fiefdom nestling quietly in a forest glade to the north of the contemporary Detroit ruled by the Booth dynasty; and a fiefdom which in the Age of George and Ellen of Booth developed from an agrarian farm into a garden of creativity. As the Cranbrook Scrolls record, George of Booth was a devotee of The Artsandcrafts, a movement most popularly embodied by
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While we'd all much rather physically visit architecture and design museums, our current enforced virtual patronage does allow us all an excellent opportunity to begin to understand architecture and design museums as more than just an exhibition space with shop and café, and to begin to learn to interact with them, and for all their collections, in new, proactive, manners. To understand architecture and design museums as tools as much as institutions. And while a virtual visit can never
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"...when we shall hear The rain and wind beat dark December, how, In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse The freezing hours away?" asks Arvirargus of his brother Guiderius in Shakespeare's play Cymbeline, before lamenting, "We have seen nothing" Easily solved old boy, a visit to an architecture or design exhibition should not only provide for new, stimulating, impressions but plenty of discourse throughout not only December but for many, many months to come. For all a visit in December
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"Father of Eero....." So or similar is in many circles the accepted form for referring to the Finnish architect and urban planner Eliel Saarinen. A highly unsatisfactory term of reference and one which in many respects denies and defames how much more there is and was to the man and his talents. Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950) Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen was born on August 20th 1873 in the remote eastern Finnish town of Rantasalmi where his father served as a Lutheran pastor. In 1875 Eliel's father
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