I swoon for Mr. Bates, I swoon for Lady Mary’s drop waist gowns, and I swoon for the house itself, Downton Abbey. The show is filmed at Highclere Castle, the real-life home of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, a young couple who look alarmingly non-royal. The current structure was built between 1838 to 1878 on an historic site that has been continuously occupied since the 800’s. Like Downton, Highclere served as a hospital during WWI and, in the happier times before and after, as a venue for highly glamorous parties. The house has neo-Gothic facades with a storm of crockets and finials disguising its hearty stone walls. But its interiors, cavernous halls furnished with dark orientals and spindly tables and chairs, embody a restrained, anglophilic glamor.

An American equivalent might be the Henry Clay Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York, which houses the Frick Collection. This grand limestone house and its gardens fill and entire block above East 70th Street, yet still feel intimate, like a family’s home. The rooms are finely scaled and spin off a skylit courtyard that’s a bit like Downton’s entry hall, although much smaller. Just the room names themselves – Garden Court, West Gallery, Oval Room – conjure a finer life. On a weekend afternoon the museum is filled with visitors plugged into their audio guides, focused so hard on the docent’s recorded voice that they’re inattentive to the stupendous artwork in front of them, including several iconic Vermeers and Rembrandts. As I made my way through the galleries, rediscovering a Whistler here and an El Greco there, I felt an incredible sense of ease. It could imagine that this place was still a house, and that it was entirely open to me.

February 22, 2012 by Nalina Moses

At a Q&A session at SVA last week New York Times chief architecture critic Michael Kimmelman talked about his beliefs, his writing, and the role of the architecture critic. He was voluble and charming (think Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer), and got things started by proclaiming, joyously, “I don’t care about criticism." We were gathered in a small conference room lined with bookshelves and filled with rows of grey Aeron chairs. Just as Kimmelman took his seat up front, a woman in back cried out in alarm; she was sliding out of hers, which was tilting and spinning precariously. The gentleman sitting next to her offered a steadying hand and explained, calmly, "Don’t worry. The chair is supposed to do that.”

The Aeron chair has become a high design cliche. Too often it’s specified to communicate fabulous taste, without regard for its proportions or dimensions. At a corporate design office where I once worked the entire floor was fit-out with grey felt carpet, long black counters, and black Aerons to dazzle potential clients. The chairs have sophisticated ergonomics, with knobs at the back and bottom to adjust the tension and height. Yet mine always felt wrong, as if it been designed for a creature several times my girth. And I never felt sheltered by the chair, as I do inside that other great corporate office chair cliche, the Eames. Instead I felt as if my Aeron was about to catapult me directly into my (chic, flat, black) computer screen. Along with the horrid office coffee, that chair kept me in a continual state of over-alertness. In addition, the Aeron takes up more space than you think – it’s high and wide. At the Kimmelman event I couldn’t see beyond the chair in front of me and barely found room to set my bags on the floor. Though set out neatly, the chairs were twisted this way and that, and gave the room a strong sense of disorder. These chairs don’t work in groups, they don’t work in small spaces, and they don’t work for some body types. Have the designers specifying them spent time in them?

February 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses

At L&M Arts there’s a show of Andy Warhol’s illustrations titled, cheerfully, Who’s Who in Holiday Hats. Framed and hung, in a profusion that calls to mind Allan McCollum’s installations, are two folios of ink and watercolor illustrations: one of the aforementioned hats from a 1964 McCall’s spread, and another from 1955 called A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu. The drawings of the hats, each one named after a historical or literary character, are witty, but the drawings of the shoes are super sweet. Rendered on large sheets of stiff, slightly bruised, yellowing paper, with wavering India ink outlines and translucent candy-colored washes, they feel a bit like pages torn from an illuminated manuscript, one all about shopping and dressing. And the drawings are brilliantly condensed, without a single errant gesture. Warhol the illustrator gives us only what we need to see each shoe.

The show proves to me once and for all that while Warhol had a prescient flair for self-promotion and not-ironic detachment, he was at heart a superb graphic designer. The shoe drawings will be familiar to many museum-goers because they’ve been reproduced on Warhol Foundation-licensed merchandise: a children’s book, tote bags and note cards. But I wish that you all could see them in person, framed, on the wall. The artist has rendered each shoe with tremendous precision and attention. These drawings are small, true gems.

February 17, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Don’t fix what’s isn’t broken is my response to New York City’s plan to improve the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Philanthropist David H. Koch, who’s donating $60 million to finance the work, saw the refurbished fountains at Lincoln Center and then prodded the Met to do something about their “crummy” ones. The new design, by Philadelphia-based landscape architects OLIN, replaces the long, low fountains at each side of the museum entrance with smaller square ones, and frames the two underused, street-level side entrances with stands of trees. The plan of the project released to the Times has a hollow prettiness, filling the space with trees, cafe tables and umbrellas. The amateurish quality of the drawing certainly doesn’t help.

The plaza, as it is, is a vibrant urban space. On cold days, like today, there are groups of visitors gathered on the entrance steps, some waiting for others and some just sitting there. On warm days it feels like a festival, the entire length of the plaza thick with artists, food vendors, tourist and park-goers. On the final evening of the Alexander McQueen show last summer, just before midnight, lines of brilliantly turned-out scenesters and fashionistas snaked around the fountains for a final entry, a spectacle of crazy, urban glamor. True, the fountains are dismal, and rarely offer anything beyond a burble. But that only keeps the area clear for small children and dog walkers. Why can’t the Met keep the plaza they’ve got, which works, and clean and light the fountain properly? The two side entrances that the new plan highlights are awfully small. To turn them into proper entrances will require significant architectural work (larger openings, windows, some interior replanning) and not just rows of flowering trees out front. There’s something nice about leaving this monumental public plaza in this, the city’s toniest precinct, unadorned, rather than turning it into an open air food court. The real magic, after all, happens after you step inside the building.

February 16, 2012 by Nalina Moses