Once I met a man from the Cote d'Ivoire and as he said the name of that place out loud – Cote d'Ivoire – it conjured an entire world.  The same happened recently when I heard architect Angela Garcia de Paredes say mulberry tree.  She was speaking about a kindergarten that her office, Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos in Madrid, just built in Gandia, Spain.  This site for the school had a ring of six old mulberry trees at the center.  Rather than cut down the trees, the architects built the school around them.

Sometimes I think architects shouldn’t be allowed to speak about their work.  They use fancy words, they go on too long, and, even if the work is powerful enough to speak for itself, they end up confusing matters.  Paredes was an exception; she spoke with great simplicity and power.  The essential absurdity of speaking about architecture is built into the way architects are trained, in a studio setting with wordy presentations and critiques.  Just last week I sat on the jury for a first year interior design studio.  The students had been saddled with a highly theoretical, terminology-heavy design problem.  Nonetheless each one presented drawings and models that were sculpturally and spatially resonant.  If we need to speak about architecture at all – something that’s not at all about language – then maybe all that’s needed is one word.

For a very long time, what inspired envy more than anything else were ladies I saw on the subway carrying authentic Hermes Birkin bags.  Now, what inspires envy more than anything else are kids I see on the subway sporting Dr. Dre Beats “Studio” headphones.  They’ve been designed by the rapper/producer to deliver recorded music in all its richness while reducing outside noise.  And they’ve been designed to call attention to themselves.  They’re huge – each earpad is fist-sized, and hides a pair of AAA batteries – and they’re awesome.  They come in all different colors but my favorite are the red ones, which are an impossible-to-avoid shade right between fire engine and Ferrari.  It’s a joyous, electric color.

Unlike a lot of fancy headphones, the “Studio” headphones are designed so that the headband, the earpads, and the connection between them all feel substantial.  These are headphones for a serious audiophile, that can cost more than an MP3 player, and that would look right on a DJ or a recording studio technician.  So it’s funny seeing them plugged into a tiny player or phone.  I remember the first generation of Walkmen, when the devices were showy and the headphones were small.  Since the release of the iPod and its little white earbuds, the listening device has became a discrete, precious object and the headphones have just about disappeared.  The Beats headphones turn that around, drawing attention away from the music player to the act of listening, and to the listener himself.  They turn headphones into fashion.

Seeing a photograph of a building is, really, seeing a fantasy.  This hit home last week when I heard Charles Kramer, an architect at Beyer Blinder Belle, speak about the rehabilitation of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at JFK Airport in New York City.  Kramer explained that the interior of the building has been refurbished with the original white penny tile.  The only surfaces inside the central space that aren’t finished in tile are the counter and flight board at the information station, shown above.  I had always thought the interior was white-tinted concrete.  The notion of penny tile – just that word penny – takes some wind out of the storied, soaring structure.

It’s the famous photos of the Terminal by Ezra Stoller that, to a large part, shape that fantasy.  They’re richly textured, and brilliantly composed to dramatize the building’s gentle asymmetries.  Here the sweeping forms look like they’re made of some magical, immaculate material, not like they’re covered in cheap tile.  Kramer explained that three sizes of penny tile were used, each smaller than a penny.  The largest tiles were laid out over the surfaces in sheets and then loose, smaller tiles were set in between to accommodate the complex, curving geometries.  I haven’t been inside the building yet, but imagine that a great deal of the fantasy survives.

Until recently the only Willem De Kooning paintings I knew well were the big, tumultuous ones in the “Woman” series from the early 1950’s.  After seeing the artist’s current retrospective at MoMA, called, simply, de Kooning: A Retrospective, I realized that “Woman” marked just one passage in his career.  Like no other painter except Picasso, de Kooning had periods.  The friend I visited with, a Dutchwoman, taught me how to pronounce the artist’s name correctly (VILL-um duh KOH-ning), and then observed that de Kooning had all that Picasso had except for genius.  I see what she was getting at.  Each of De Kooning’s periods is well-represented at MoMA, and each is powerfully reminiscent of the work of one or more of his contemporaries.  As I walked through the galleries I recalled Picasso, Chagall, Leger, Kandinsky, Rothko and, greatly, De Kooning’s Springs, Long Island neighbor Jackson Pollock.

But I also found in de Kooning’s work, more than in the work of any of these other painters, a pleasure in the physical act of painting.  In De Kooning, even more than in Pollock, the hand of the painter is insistent.  This is especially so in the later canvases.  My friend noticed that after the late 1960’s De Kooning rarely lifted his paintbrush from the surface, and moved paint back and forth in luscious, churning strokes that turned in and around on themselves.  If Picasso had a masterful, plastic intelligence that could shape any material at will, then de Kooning had an intelligence about saturating a canvas with life.  He rarely leaves a corner unoccupied or uncomposed.  In his last years, he was painting large, luminous, white-based canvases cut through with lines of strong color.  They’re like maps of a place he knows well.