Though I don’t speak Italian, the word brutto popped into my head as I was walking through Carlos Scarpa: The Architect at Work, an exhibit of his drawings at Cooper Union. These aren’t drawings to frame and hang in the living room like Frank Gehry’s lyrical doodles. These are, as the title suggests, documents Scarpa is using to hammer out geometries, proportions and details for two projects he completed in the 1980’s near the end of his life: Villa Ottolenghi and Villa Il Palazzetto.

Scarpa is an architect’s architect, so I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I don’t care for the work of his that I’ve seen in photographs. His buildings have an obtuse physical expressiveness that overwhelms spatial clarity. Why does every column, door handle, and water spout (the architect is from Venice and often incorporates water elements), need to be so highly particular? But I was charmed by the drawings at Cooper, which are both precise and dreamy. Scarpa isn’t drawing to show what each house will look like but to determine what it will be. He drafts construction lines with a hard, fine pencil and then fleshes them out with shading, color-coding, notes, and numbers. The sheets have a sodden quality; they’re thick with work and thought.

April 18, 2012 by Nalina Moses

An official poster for Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming slave saga Django Unchained was just released. It’s a bold graphic, in red and black, reminiscent of constructivist, primitivist, and mid-century modern aesthetics, and particularly, as others have observed, Saul Bass’ work. But the text on the new poster is isolated and terribly buttoned-up; it looks more like a caption than a title. The imagery doesn’t soft-pedal the theme, but it lacks the kooky emotionalism of some of the unofficial fanboy posters that have been circulating online. I want so much to see a hand at the top shaking the chain, like the hand in posters for The Godfather.

It’s a shame the designers didn’t try to incorporate Tarantino’s handwriting, which resembles that of an obsessive, over-stimulated, ten-year-old boy. I’ve been smitten since seeing the title page he crafted for the final draft of Inglourious Basterds, where he draws S’s like those in the Kiss logo. His hand, with its sloping, bloated block letters, looks like a serial killer’s, and yet there’s real tenderness in it. Look at the tenuous closing of the capital G in the Django poster and the tiny, trembling quotation marks. It’s a rich graphic.

April 17, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Architect and critic Witold Rybczynski spoke recently about one of Norman Foster’s first works, the Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts in Anglia, Norwich, which he’s just written a book about. While Rybczynski didn’t have anything particularly resonant to say about that building, he did a brilliant job of introducing Foster to the audience. To do so he showed slides of the Reliance Reliance Controls Factory in Swindon, England, a project Foster had completed just a few years earlier in 1967, in collaboration with his classmate Richard Rogers.

Foster’s first commissions were for warehouses and industrial buildings, which makes perfect sense, because his work is all about magnificent shells. He seems much more concerned with external structures than interior worlds, and yet the structures he devises often make splendid interiors. It’s easy to lampoon his recent work. The London Gherkin and the Hearst Tower in New York are better-known as emblems of urban ostentation than as architecture. But when looking at photos of the Reliance building it’s easy to see what Foster’s interests are and where his work is headed. These structures are banal syntactically, close to vernacular forms except for their exposed tie rods and attenuated, unperturbed horizontal proportions. (They were razed in 1990 to make room for a big box computer store.) They are super-fine sheds.

April 16, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Rosamond Bernier went to Paris the same way that Isak Dinesen went to Africa, with crazy dreams in her head. Both of these privileged, high-spirited ladies got up and moved far away from home, throwing off conventions that might have held them in check had they just stayed put. And both of them, in between their adventures, wrote. Traveling to Paris after the war to serve as a European cultural editor for Vogue, Bernier fell right in with Picasso, Matisse, Miro and other art stars, started the magazine L’Oiel, and then returned stateside triumphantly, writing art history books and lecturing at the Met.

Today, at ninetey-five, Bernier retains an aura of glamor. She wears couture separates, grooms herself regally, and walks with the assistance of a handsome young escort. She spoke in New York recently to promote her latest book, Some of My Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir. As slides flashed on the screen she offered up gossip about her brilliant friends. Before meeting Picasso, she remembered, her publisher advised, “Whatever you do, don’t wear a hat and don’t ask any questions.” Those words served her well. The great painter made her a confidante and granted her exclusive access to some of his work. Bernier lives life big. When she married her third husband, art critic John Russell, at the Glass House in Darien, Aaron Copland was the best man, Leonard Bernstein was a witness, Richard Avedon was the photographer, and Philip Johnson was in attendance. Looking back at it all and summing it up, she said, “I made terrible mistakes and had a marvelous time.” There has got to be some wisdom in that.

April 06, 2012 by Nalina Moses