A story in last month's Metropolis, Modernists at Play, featured designs for children by noted twentieth century architects. These playrooms and pieces of furniture are sweet because they’re so small and because they're mostly personal, intended for the designer’s own children. But Aldo Van Eyck’s drawing for an array of playground equipment made my heart leap. Van Eyck pictures each plaything – sandbox, jungle gym, swingset – as a platonic figure, built from geometries of circle, square, and line. Spread evenly across the blank page, these figures have a bright, musical energy. It’s as if Van Eyck intends to set children within a field of cartesian space, one filled with adventure and pleasure.

Working for the city of Amsterdam as a young architect in the 1950’s, Van Eyck designed about 700 playgrounds in the city. Most are gone. The ones that we have photographs of seem both elegant and audacious because they are so simply composed, with a handful of play pieces set strategically within a flat, open plot. These toys, because they’re idealized in form, are ripe with possibility. They aren’t proscriptive; they're generic objects for children to climb on and jump from and run in between. Are children happy in this sort of playground? It’s hard to know. But it must take an imaginative leap for a child to enter and make the landscape their own. Maybe they invent nicknames for the elements, and games for each one too. Today we give children entertainments that are, whether educational (Reading Rainbow) or escapist (Mulan), structured and predictable. Van Eyck gives children a lot of credit. He doesn't set them in a scaled-down version of the city, or on courts for games with readymade rules. He lets them play.

December 11, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Most media commemorations of the fifty year anniversary of the Kennedy assassination were ripe with sentimentality. Cathy Horyn’s essay in the Times about the skirt suit Jacqueline Kennedy was wearing that day stood out because it was both dispassionate and poignant. Why is the suit such a brilliant icon? Photos of the striped button-down JPress shirt the president was wearing when he died have been published repeatedly. It’s a gruesome artifact, caked with blood and clipped neatly where the bullet entered and exited his chest. But this garment lacks the mythological charge, both the glamor and the horror, of the First Lady’s pink wool boucle suit. In the iconic black and white AP photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One, we see see her only from the side and only from the waist up. But we know that she’s wearing bubble gum pink, and that the front of her skirt is stained with blood.

Much is made about Jackie’s White House fashions, but what she wore was conventional, not so different from what other women of her station were wearing. The pink suit isn’t even a real Chanel, but an authorized knock-off from a Park Avenue dress shop called Chez Ninon. Perhaps Mrs. Kennedy’s conservatism is what’s most remarkable about her presence in photographs of the assassination; she dresses and behaves absolutely appropriately right through the tragedy. It’s as if her style is guided by a deep unchanging sense of order, and that this is what holds her together. Mrs. Kennedy never cleaned the suit. Eight months after the assassination she had it sent, along with her shirt, stockings and handbag, to the National Archives in Potomac. The items are still there today, sealed in an airtight container, available only to researchers. At the request of her daughter Caroline Kennedy the suit won’t be displayed publicly until 2103. Besides being tasteless, a bit of assassination porn, showing it isn’t necessary. We all already know it.

December 10, 2013 by Nalina Moses

As I stepped out of Grand Central Station yesterday I saw one of the city’s new prototype taxis — a Taxi of Tomorrow — roll by, carrying passengers west on Forty-Second Street. This new taxi design is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s scheme to standardize the city’s fleet. His opponents have noted that the vehicle is not hybrid and not handicapped accessible, and that city hall doesn’t have authority over the Taxi and Limousine Commission to specify what vehicles they use. What’s critical to the entire project but never really discussed is the new taxi’s image. The Taxi of Tomorrow is a big boxy tangerine-colored van. More than a machine of deisel and steel, it looks like a mobile storage shed. Stopped on Forty-Second Street behind a red light, squeezed between city buses and black towncars, the taxi looked ungainly.

Of course there’s nothing essentially glamorous about the Nissan sedans that make up the bulk of the taxi fleet now. But at least they look like cars, like instruments of motion, with a compact low-to-the-ground profile. These vehicles offer independence from the sidewalks and the subways, and they offer transport, both literal and imaginative, to some other place: to a party, to a job interview, to a rendezvous, to a mysterious unexplored corner of the city. The Taxi of Tomorrow has a sadly utilitarian profile. Rather than speed or transport, it offers space inside for stretching and storage, though not enough, apparently, to accommodate a wheelchair. From the outside the van looks like a beast of burden, a mule with which to cart old furniture to the dump, to shop for groceries, or to take small children to school. These vehicles need to be useful, but they also need a little panache. Why should our taxis, such an integral part of city life, be clunkers like this? For anyone who has, late at night, after dinner and drinks, hailed a cab in a half-dream state, and hurtled down Park Avenue, when there’s no traffic and noise, through the dazzle of light thrown from empty glass towers, a cab feels like a chariot. Why can’t a cab look like one too?

Photograph by Nalina Moses.

November 23, 2013 by Nalina Moses

There’s a big black bear on Madison Avenue, presiding over the private school kids, museum-goers, ladies who lunch, and stroller-pushing nannies who pack the sidewalks there. He’s perched twenty feet above street level, on the giant, L-shaped billboard at the northeast corner of 84th Street, and he’s in town to announce the new outpost of LA-based designer James Perse. The sign, about twenty-five feet tall, wraps the top three floors of a small four-story building. It’s constructed from translucent white fabric that’s pulled tight over a steel frame. And it's entirely blank except for the stark black profiles of a grizzly bear and a five-point star, both icons lifted directly from the California state flag. The bear is about twenty feet high and lumbers left, on all fours, across the corner of the billboard, from the side street onto Madison Avenue. The star, five feet high, floats in front of him, right off the top of the sign.

There are trendy new boutiques popping up all over this neighborhood, just above and below 86th Street, but the sidewalk experience here remains stubbornly uninspired. The small storefronts, tucked along the bottom of limestone apartment blocks, have ladylike window displays and hand-painted signboards that cultivate a cloying, small-town feeling. So this bear lights up the place like an explosion. The immense black-on-white sign is graphically arresting, visible from over two blocks away, and builds excitement for the brand without flashing lights, bright colors or sexed-up imagery. The sign also makes an alluring dress for its building, a slim, postmodern steel and glass block. In daylight, from across the street, both the building and the screen’s delicate metal skeleton are visible behind the graphic in ghostly profile, and the tarp shimmers as if it’s taking breaths. It’s an eruption of life into the streetscape.

Photograph by Nalina Moses.

October 24, 2013 by Nalina Moses