The belief that the recession might be over didn't last long in the United States after yesterday's bad news regarding July's weak retail sales and weekly jobless claims. The cruel rebuke, after so many signs of optimism, led us to a measure of introspection about the State of the Design Economy. As the Great Recession chugs on, at least for a bit, who are the design industry's winners and losers?
Loser: Rarified Design Retailers Do you smell something? It's the whiff of death coming from design emporiums such as Moss that rode the coattails of irrational exuberance, but failed to adjust themselves to the new consumer reality. The economy may come back, but the appetite for limited-edition gold-painted centerpieces and hand-molded clay dining chairs will not. In fact, they already feel like relics from a bygone era.
Winner: Etsy If anything came out of the recession it was a fresh appreciation for the kind of homespun items sold on Etsy, the four-year-old online marketplace for handmade goods. The site had record sales on Sept. 29th, the day the stock market plunged sharply, and it continued to break records as conditions deteriorated during last year's holiday season. The post-crash consumer seems to want to feel a direct personal connection with the designer or craftsman, just as she does when she buys carrots or milk at a farmer's market.
Loser: Shelter Magazines The recession required glossies to cultivate their lifeline to luxury advertisers while bowing to readers' budget concerns. It was a delicate balance--too delicate for many. Domino, House & Garden, In Style Home, Blueprint, Home, Cottage Living, O at Home, and Country Home all closed. The bell may toll for more: Dwell has lost almost half its advertising in the last year, according to The New York Times, and rumors circulate that Architectural Digest, the grande dame of shelter, may soon be shuttered.
Winner: Design blogs The lust for design porn didn't disappear; it just migrated to design blogs such as Apartment Therapy,Materialicious, and Remodelista (above) where houses, rooms, and furnishings are shown in a more personable, less institutional tone than magazines. Page views for Apartment Therapy, for example, have more than tripled since the beginning of 2008, according to Alexa, a tracking service.
Cohousing arrived from Denmark 20 years ago. Like many Scandinavian exports, it seemed both old fashioned and progressive: Residents have their own living quarters, but they share common areas and eat communal meals prepared by residents at least part of the time--like a shtetl for the Ikea generation.
Cohousing was supposed to be the next big thing, but for whatever reason it never caught on. Maybe it smacked of communism, or maybe flashbacks of shared refrigerators in student housing put people off. In any case, cohousing was thrown on the scrap pile of living trends that never materialized. Now the mortgage crisis is reviving interesting in shared housing as Americans, particularly the elderly, contemplate more efficient and congenial ways of living. You might think of it as a coop with an Obama spin. There are now 226 cohousing communities in America in varying stages of development, according to the Cohousing Association of the United States with new facilities underway in Brooklyn and downtown Oakland.
The renewed interest in cohousing is a direct result of the housing woes, as Americans look for alternatives to the expense--and isolation--of suburban living. Food, repairs and other living expenses benefit from an economy of scale, and residents say they're comforted by the sense that they're facing financial hurdles together. "I had a pretty robust portfolio of investments that I was going to retire on," one prospective resident told The New York Times during a tour of Bay Area cohousing facilities. "Now I'm feeling the financial pressure to live with people. I can't continue to live in my big old house."
In truth cohousing is not all that different from a coop or gated community, except that meals are prepared together and residents share maintenance costs and tend to help one another with babysitting, errands and other small-scale assistance. In a few cases cohousing has merged with the local food movement to produce communities like Tryon Farm in Michigan City, Indiana where residents farm their 170-acre grounds together and share chores the feeding of goats and chickens. Cohousing may hold particular appeal to baby boomers as a more dignified version of the conventional retirement home in which residents share health aides and look out for one another. The new wave of cohousing may not be all that different from how our great grandparents lived.
Ten years ago the fashionable destination for design-minded travelers was the Guggenheim at Bilbao, where Frank Gehry's titanium acrobatics famously cast their spell. When design tourists pack their black clothing this month they will more likely head to Barcelona or Stockholm. Next year it may be Belgium. That's right, Belgium may be the next the design destination. The country prides itself on maintaining a discrete, lowlands profile, but it has quietly gained influence. Here are six reasons to keep your eye on the Belgian design scene.
1. Where fashion goes, design follows. Thanks in part to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp is home to a lively community of fashion designers, including Martin Margiela, Dries van Noten, and Ann Demeulemeester. The cross pollination with design can be seen in the many boutiques, like FCS, located in a warren of industrial riverside buildings, which sells both clothes and home furnishings.
2. A distinct Belgian style of interior design is emerging. Unlike its neighbor, the Netherlands, Belgium has a great disparity between rich and poor. The wealthy serve as patrons of a national design style that is suited to the mood of the moment: large in scale but simple, with untreated woods and other quiet materials with muted color. The mood is Scandinavian minimal, but with a hint of grandeur. The example above is by Axel Vervoordt, an antiques dealer and designer.
3. Belgian architecture is poised for its moment. Their work may have been too subdued to get above the white noise of the go-go years, but Belgian architecture seems just right for a post-crash culture. It tends to be respectful of tradition and sensitive to its surroundings, like this converted barn by Rita Huys of Buro2.
4. Interieur may be the best small design show in Europe. People are starting to pass on the gargantuan Milan Furniture Fair in favor of smaller shows where they can get noticed and do business in a more relaxed manner. The Interieur Biennale in the small city of Kortrijk is gaining a reputation. It is no doubt helped by Belgium's proximity to a cluster of other countries.
5. Belgium has the greatest landscape architect you've never heard of. Jacques Wirtz, a master of European landscaping, is particularly known for sculpting evergreens to create undulating waves of foliage, like those shown above. Like the Flemish painters, Wirtz and his two sons evoke space with light and shadow. With a portfolio of high-profile projects nearing completion, they're about to get a spate of attention.
6. Brussels has the world's coolest landmark. Every great city needs a defining landmark. For Brussels that centerpiece is the Atomium, a 335-foot high cluster of metal spheres built for the 1958 World's Fair. The fair ended after six months, but the Atomium lived on as symbol of the country's faith in a nuclear future. Today it has enormous retro appeal, all the more since its interiors now include lighting by Ingo Mauer and furnishings by Vitra. It's as is Design Within Reach redid the Eiffel Tower.
Houses are like animals. They have their own morphology: They adaped and changed and developed new traits over long periods of evolution.
As a concession to warm summer days like today, for example, the traditional home took on back porches, sleeping porches, screen porches and patios. The traditional home of Victorian vintage often included breezeways (above), an open area between two structures used as a seasonal indoor-outdoor living area.
Modernism was like a reset button: it erased everything that came before and began from scratch. But in the 80 years or so since modernism took hold, many of those earlier features have reappeared in new forms because they make practical sense. The old-fashioned breezeway, for example, has made a comeback in structures like the Louver House (above) by Leroy Street Studio. For whatever reason, the new breezeways seem to occur only in big rectangular houses like this one; they tend to look like monopoly pieces with a hole punched in them.
Online design coverage usually means an endless scroll of new products and zoomed-up homes with little discussion of what it all means.
Design's corner of the blogosphere got a little more serious over the weekend with the launch of a new site called Change Observer, one of four sites now aggregated under the auspices of Design Observer, a six-year-old site known for its interviews and essays on visual culture. With these new components Design Observer stakes a claim as the dominant site for weighty design commentary.
Change Observer is a response to the design field's new do-good spirit. The long spree that propelled designers like Tord Boontje and Marcel Wanders to the forefront of our cultural lives is over, at least for now, leaving designers to figure out what role they might play in a new economy more intent on innovation and problem solving than the platinum baubles of prosperity. Change Observer, takes that shift as its beat, with an emphasis on design's impact on housing, infrastructure, health, education and climate change.
It will cover "anything that improves the lot of people." said Julie Lasky, the site's editor.
Lasky's husband, the design journalist Ernest Beck, will serve as editorial director of a Change Observer conference to be held in Aspen this November. Both ventures are launched with a $1.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Design Observer, which has 1.5 million page views a month, was started six years ago by a group of designers and critics that includes Michael Bierut, a partner in Pentagram, and the husband-and-wife team of William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand whose portfolio includes the design of The New Yorker Web site. "Design Observer is fundamentally different than sites that purport to tell you what's cool in 200 words or less," Drenttel said. "The intent is to create a hub for serious editorial content."
In the early 1990s, in the wake of the Gulf War and the accompanying spike in energy prices, the economy soured and design firms evicted swaths of junior employees. It was a bad time: between the high tide of employment in July 1990 and the low point in January 1993 the number of architecture jobs dropped 14.6%, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. In New York, architecture positions fell 23% between 1990 and 1992.
Many of those young designers left the field for good. They took their training and skills and went elsewhere--construction, real-estate development, teaching. As the first group of graduates trained in computer rendering, they were eligible for big pay jumps in the flush young computer game industry. Over the long run, the design firms probably suffered more than their cast-off staff did. When the economy gained steam a decade later, after the tech crash and 9/11, design firms struggled to find midlevel talent to draft and manage projects. The shortage of experienced hands was one of the factors that led firms to begin outsourcing work to India and Eastern Europe over the last five years or so.
Are we on the brink of another lost generation? Employment at architecture firms peaked a year ago at 224,500. By March it had dropped about 13%, double the rate of lawyers and accountants. The figures don't reflect the bloodbath at the most high-profile firms. Frank Gehry's office has collapsed its staff from 250 to 112 over the past year, according to Architectural Record.
Design usually lags behind the rest of the economy, and it has not yet seen any signs of improvement. The AIA's Architectural Billings Index, one of the profession's leading indicators, dropped to 37.7 in June, down from 42.9 in May. Even grimmer, the FMI Construction Outlook, foresees a 13% decline in 2010.
Fallback jobs outside of architecture and design may not be so easy to find this time around, in part because opportunities in technology and real-estate are not as plentiful as they were 15 years ago. So what will become of all those young designers fresh from school with ambitions and ideas? They can always wait tables.
Newsstands are crammed with shelter magazines that dictate how your home should look. Cantilevered credenzas, bamboo modern beach furniture, appliances in bold colors--these are furnishing of the moment.
Will they gratify you? Not unless you understand the emotional roots of your likes and dislikes, according to Toby Israel, an environmental psychologist and author of Some Place Like Home. Just as therapy helps a patient unravel family patterns and predilections, design psychology shows how we're unknowingly influenced by the design and décor we knew in our formative years, for good or ill. Israel helps clients "design from within" by plumbing what forms and objects from the past have positive associations. "We all have an environmental autobiography," she said. "Why not open this treasure chest and think consciously about what gave you pleasure?"
Last week US magazine asked Israel what the Neverland Ranch tells us about Michael Jackson. In a follow-up conversation with me, Israel said it was no coincidence that Jackson named his ranch Neverland, the home of Peter Pan's Lost Boys. "Because he was a child star he just didn't have a normal childhood," she said. "It seems to me he was healing his wounds by recreating the kind of place that he would have liked as a child."
Another example of a notable figure unknowingly reacting to childhood: The architect Michael Graves grew up in Indianapolis where his father worked in a stockyard. Ten years ago Graves designed a home for himself from a warehouse in Princeton, New Jersey. Observing that the warehouse contained a series of pen-like rooms, Israel suggested to him that he may have recreated the stockyards he'd seen as a child. "To prove that I was absolutely wrong he drew the floor plan of his house," she said. "Halfway through he dropped his pencil and said, 'My God it's exactly the same.'"
Is real-estate development always good? Is a community succeeding only if it's growing? That was the post-war assumption in this country as skylines inched upward and suburbs sprawled. But like so many economic presumptions, the growth-is-good model may now be collapsing on itself.
Flint, Michigan, for, example, was once a thriving factory town with 79,000 locals employed by General Motors. Today it's one of the poorest cities in the country with 20% unemployment and block after block of abandoned closed homes. The possibility of shrinking the city was raised some months ago at a Rotary Club talk by acting mayor Michael Brown. It has since become a volatile issue in the mayoral campaign.
The plan has been backed by Dan Kildee (above), the treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint. The goal would be to create a smaller, more manageable city with improved services. If the plan is adopted the city would bulldoze entire neighborhoods--as much as 40 percent of its area--and return the land to nature.
The Obama administration has asked Kildee to study how the shrinking city approach might benefit other rust belt cities, according a political Web site called The Washington Independent.
"The real question is not whether these cities shrink--we're all shrinking--but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," Kildee said.
Kildee is in a position to reshape the city because of a state law that allows local governments to buy up unused properties. As county treasurer, Kildee heads the county bank which as of March owned 3,678 properties.
Before a new American car industry can rise up, the vestiges of the old one must be buried. The two bankrupt companies, Chrysler and GM, closed assembly lines for much of May and June, and more than a dozen plants will likely be permanently shuttered as they continue to rejigger themselves for the future.
So what will happen to those hulking structures, with their cavernous hangers and assembly lines that spanned multiple city blocks? Many, unfortunately, will join Detroit's growing inventory of abandoned buildings. Some will be razed to make way for the new. But what about preservation and reuse? Wouldn't it make sense to preserve at least some of the plants as artifacts of an industry that helped build the American middle class? Can't we do something interesting with the dark grandeur of their rusting shells? Here are three ideas for adapting the plants to new uses:
1. Turn them into park monuments. These days, landscape architecture is less about beautifying places in the conventional sense and more about preserving industrial relics as monumental memories of the past. Witness Gas Works Park in Seattle (above), which uses a coal gasification plant as its centerpiece.
2. Convert them to indoor markets. Retail space may not be Michigan's top priority, but a farmer's market/crafts outlet configured from an industrial shell could be unusual enough to draw shoppers. The precedent that comes to mind is HD Buttercup (above), a furnishings outlet in the former Helms Bakery in the Culver City section of Los Angeles.
3. Replace the assembly line with a concert stage. Would you pay to see Wilco play in a former blast furnace? I would. A former Thyssen plant in Duisberg, Germany, is now home to concerts and theatre performances (above), staged in smelting works and other raw industrial spaces.
Before a new American car industry can rise up, the vestiges of the old one must be buried. The two bankrupt companies, Chrysler and GM, closed their assembly lines for much of May and June, and before this is all over more than a dozen plants will likely be permanently shuttered.
So what will happen to those hulking structures, with their cavernous hangers and assembly lines? Many will join Detroit’s growing inventory of abandoned buildings. But would it not make sense to preserve at least some of the plants as artifacts of an industry that helped build the American middle class? Should the rusting shells in all their dark grandeur not be saved? Here are three ideas for adapting the plants to new use:
1. Turn them into park monuments. These days landscape architecture is less about beautifying places in the conventional sense and more about preserving industrial relics as monumental memories of the past, like Gas Works Park in Seattle (above) which uses a coal gasification plant as its centerpiece.
2. Convert them to indoor markets. Retail space may not be Michigan’s top priority, but a farmer’s market/crafts outlet configured from an industrial shell could be unusual enough to draw shoppers. The precedent that comes to mind is HD Buttercup (above), a furnishings outlet in the former Helms Baker in the Culver City section of Los Angeles.
3. Replace the assembly line with a concert stage. Would you pay to see Wilco play in a former blast furnace? I would. Something like that is happening at the former Thyssen plant in Duisberg, Germany, where concerts and theatre performances (above) are staged in smelting works and other raw industrial spaces.
In truth cohousing is not all that different from a coop or gated community, except that meals are prepared together and residents share maintenance costs and tend to help one another with babysitting, errands and other small-scale assistance. In a few cases cohousing has merged with the local food movement to produce communities like 
