As cultural movements go, postmodernism enjoys a fairly dubious distinction: Despite its pivotal role in defining the playfully garish aesthetic of the late Seventies and Eighties, it remains a despised and convoluted term, seemingly slapped on any creative work that either rejected convention and commercialism or flagrantly embraced them. But if you’re among those who never quite understood what, say, Philip Johnson’s AT&T building has to do with Jean-Paul Goude’s photos of Grace Jones (left), or Peter Saville’s album art for New Order—all considered postmodernist landmarks—London’s Victoria and Albert Museum may clarify matters with the September 24 opening of “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990,” a sweeping survey that pays particular attention to the genre’s roots in design and architecture. Continue reading
Next month, the Indianapolis Museum of Art will open to the public the house that Eero Saarinen designed for the industrialist J. Irwin Miller and his wife, Xenia, giving design pilgrims one more reason to visit Columbus, Ind., the mecca of Modernist architecture that Miller sponsored. The stone- and glass-walled house, which Saarinen completed in 1957, includes about 14 acres of landscaping by Dan Kiley and meticulously preserved interiors by Alexander Girard, who sank the world’s first conversation pit into its living room. 
about me
I am a freelance writer, editor, and curator living in New York City, and the co-founder of Sight Unseen, an online magazine that uncovers what’s new and next in design and the visual arts. I spent four years as senior editor at I.D. magazine, and I am currently a contributing editor for T magazine in the New York Times, as well as a design market editor for Bon Appetit. Here you'll find a selection of my work, filed under the categories above. Click here to contact me.Sight Unseen Twitter
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