by Witold | Jun 13, 2020 | Modern life
It was the great Cole Porter’s birthday on June 9. In 1934 he wrote the musical Anything Goes. The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today And black’s white today And day’s night today . . . And though I’m not a great romancer I know...
by Witold | Jun 8, 2020 | Modern life
I note that Christo Javacheff passed away recently. I was not a fan of his work. On the occasion of his and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park I wrote in 2005 in Slate: “Jeanne-Claude has been quoted as saying that she thinks that Olmsted would be “very...
by Witold | Jun 3, 2020 | Modern life, Urbanism
The veneer of civilization is perilously thin. I was living in Montreal during the 1969 policemen and firemen’s strike. It lasted only sixteen hours but that was long enough for things to unravel. For the first half day, drivers observed traffic light signals, then...
by Witold | Apr 19, 2020 | Modern life
In 1973, my friend Martin Pawley published The Private Future: Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West. According to his Guardian obituary (he died in 2008) the book “foresaw a society with ever greater technical means of communication becoming...
by Witold | Apr 9, 2020 | Design, Modern life
Nicholas Fox Webber, the author of a biography of Le Corbusier, has recently published iBauhaus. I have not read the book yet, but the subtitle, “The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design,” says it all. There is no doubt that the iPhone is a...
by Witold | Apr 3, 2020 | Modern life
According to the United Nations Secretary-General, the coronavirus pandemic is the “greatest test” the world has faced since the United Nations was formed in the wake of the Second World War. One of the results of that global war was the ascendancy of modernist...
