Stefanie Posavec, A Week of Schedules. From "Dear Data" by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec.

The designer Giorgia Lupi was born in 1981 and believes that she is part of a special bridge generation. “I was raised in a completely analog environment,” she says. “I was a teen-ager when all of the awkward connection and human connection needed to be made in real life. But, at the same time, because I started to use technology as a teen-ager, I’m fluent in both worlds.” This week, Lupi joins the graphic-design firm Pentagram as the only partner who has a focus on information design. Her work, consistent with her upbringing, brings a tactile feel to computer code, and her appointment is an occasion to assess information design—a field located between graphic design and data science—and the possibilities it holds.

Sitting in Pentagram’s crisp quarters, on Park Avenue South, Lupi cuts an extremely organized figure: petite and black-clad, with a looping black necklace and round black glasses, accented by a cap of red hair. Born in Modena, Italy, and trained as an architect, Lupi had her first brush with information design while in college via an exercise in urban mapping, inspired by the planner Kevin Lynch. In his landmark book, “The Image of the City,” published in 1961, Lynch asked people to draw their city for a visitor, paying attention to their own everyday paths and major landmarks, without reference to geography. Of course, each person’s map, both in Lynch’s book and Lupi’s exercise, was different—but that did not mean that one map was more accurate than another. Rather, each person was telling a different story through cartography.

Walter and Ise Gropius, a few year after their marriage in 1923. Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

Walter Gropius has always seemed like the grayest man of the Bauhaus. Mies van der Rohe had his whiskey-colored skyscraper and book-matched marble. Marcel Breuer had his winking butterfly roofs and the cantilevered cane chairs at every architect’s dining table. Gropius’s design signifiers are much drier — flat roofs, glass corners — and have now been thoroughly absorbed into the general collection of modernist imagery. Even his one completed attempt at a signature skyscraper — Manhattan’s Pan Am tower, that prismatic doorstop straddling Park Avenue — is hard to love.

Fiona MacCarthy, the author of previous books on Lord Byron, Eric Gill and William Morris, acknowledges his image problem in her preface to “Gropius: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus.” “Not the least of the myths I have had to contend with in writing his life is the idea that Gropius was doctrinaire and boring,” she writes, laying blame for this characterization at the feet of Tom Wolfe, in “From Bauhaus to Our House,” and Alma Mahler, Gropius’s first wife, in her memoirs. MacCarthy perceives Gropius a bit differently — as one might hope for a biographer. “I see him as in many ways heroic, a romantic and optimist, a great survivor,” she writes. What’s more, “Sexually Gropius was far from negligible.”

The subtitle has a double meaning. Gropius, who was born in Berlin in 1883, built both the flat-roofed, glass-cornered building that housed the Bauhaus school in Dessau and the faculty and curriculum for a modern school of design.

Ruth Asawa, November 1954. Photo by Nat Farbman for LIFE.

In January 2017 I wrote an article for Curbed about Japanese American designers and the internment camps. I had admired and written about the work of Isamu Noguchi, Ruth Asawa, George Nakashima for years, but I had never heard about their World War II incarceration, or thought about how that experience changed the trajectory of their lives. After the article was published, I felt there was more to the story. I pitched it to the producers of KCET series Artbound as the subject of a one-hour documentary, part of their ongoing exploration of California and the arts. They said yes, and recruited a directing team from the Japanese American National Museum.

Last night that episode aired on KCET, and is now available to stream online as “Masters of Modern Design: The Art of the Japanese American Experience.” I was a co-producer for the episode, and I am hoping there will be a New York City screening in the near future.

From the iconic typeface of “The Godfather” book cover to Herman Miller’s Noguchi table, the influence of Japanese American artists and designers in postwar American art and design is unparalleled. While this second generation of Japanese American artists have been celebrated in various publications and exhibitions with their iconic work, less-discussed is how the World War II incarceration — a period of intense discrimination and hardship — has also had a powerful effect on the lives of artists such as Ruth Asawa, George Nakashima, Isamu Noguchi, S. Neil Fujita and Gyo Obata.

The kitchen, photo by Jan Vranovsky.

Orange, mango, strawberry, lime. If an apartment could be said to be bursting with fruit flavor it would be this three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Tokyo’s Nagatacho district, renovated by Adam Nathaniel Furman, a British architectural designer, for a pair of very adventurous clients over the past two years.

Mr. Furman’s clients, a mixed Japanese-expat retired couple, who regularly host guests from abroad, had owned the 1,700 square-foot apartment since the 1980s, just after the building was completed. The existing layout was dark and self-contained, with small rooms off a long corridor and ceiling heights of under eight feet.

Sterling Ruby and Raf Simons's Madison Avenue Calvin Klein store. Photo by Elizabeth Felicella.

In March, eight exclamation points marched across the back wall of the Grand Palais at Akris’s fall 2019 ready-to-wear show in Paris, exuberant punctuation in the all-white room. Those exclamation points came from a 2006 work by the late artist Richard Artschwager and were made of horsehair, a material associated with upholstery rather than art.

In his nearly 40 years as Akris creative director, Albert Kriemler has frequently joined forces with artists. For past collections he has worked with 103-year-old modernist painter Carmen Herrera, contemporary photographer Thomas Ruff and minimalist architect Sou Fujimoto. “It’s really always based in my case on my personal experience with the artist,” Kriemler says. He works only with the artist’s approval. “You do it with the green light,” he says.

Other artist-designer collaborations that surfaced during the fall 2019 shows: Stella McCartney sent multiple looks down the Paris runway adorned with necklaces and belts made of wrapped and woven yarn by Sheila Hicks, an 84-year-old fiber artist who received a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2018. A couple of weeks earlier in New York, designers Adi Gil and Gabriel Asfour incorporated scraps of discarded paintings by their neighbor, artist Stanley Casselman, into the fall collection they showed at the Guggenheim Museum.

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels.

By the time I started reading the disintegrating stack of Archie comics at my grandparents’ off-the-grid Vermont cabin, the references were already outdated.

Archie Andrews was created by John Goldwater and Bob Montana in 1941 (though authorship, as in so many illustrated universes, is in some dispute) as an everyteen. Maybe my mother and her sisters, who bought most of the comics, had occupied that high school world. Hanover, New Hampshire, their hometown, still has a functioning soda shop within walking distance of Hanover High. But for me it was as distant as outer space … except for Betty. Betty Cooper was blonde like me. She had a ponytail like me. She was smart like me. Would I grow up to be a Betty?

In Archie lore, people say our red-headed hero never decides between Betty, the girl next door, and Veronica, the rich brunette vamp, but that wasn’t my perception of events. In comic after comic, Veronica swoops in for the clinch. She needs Archie. She pays for Archie. She drives off into the sunset with Archie. And Betty is there, holding the socket wrench, grease on her snub nose, having fixed that car. Maybe over Archie Comics’ 77-year history Betty did, once or twice, get her man. I haven’t read them all and I suspect no human could. After a while, the hijinks become numbing. How many times can Archie fall into Veronica’s pool?

Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partners / The Boundary via Building LACMA.

In 2013, a new proposal for LACMA by Peter Zumthor, a Pritzker-winning Swiss architect who has no public projects in the U.S., showed a jet-black blob on the north side of Wilshire that seemed to ooze between the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits and the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum.

But environmental and spatial concerns forced Zumthor to revisit that design—which had been dubbed “the Inkblot.” Black became beige, due to heat-island concerns, and the blob moved away from the tar pits and across the boulevard, where it now touches down in a museum-owned parking lot. Between 2017 and 2019, the design changed yet again.

LACMA director Michael Govan defended Zumthor’s new design in both a weekend interview and an op-ed at the Los Angeles Times. But Curbed’s urbanism editor Alissa Walker and architecture critic Alexandra Lange took a stroll Friday around LACMA’s campus, and they are not convinced.

What follows is their conversation about the role of museums in urban life, the controversy surrounding Zumthor’s design, and how the new LACMA must meet the street.

Illustrations by Ellen Surrey.

Walter Gropius published the founding manifesto of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919. Both the Lyonel Feininger woodcut of a cathedral on the cover and the first line of the four-page leaflet exalted architecture: “The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building!” he wrote. “Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and as separate parts.” Gropius’s new school would reunite craftsmen and artists in the modern era, allowing them to work in tandem toward a common goal as they had building medieval cathedrals.

But collaboration, and craft, didn’t mean an end to old hierarchies. If the ultimate goal was the building, then the architect (all of the directors of the Bauhaus were, in fact, architects) would sit on top of the design hierarchy. When we think of the Bauhaus today, the image is often still a building: the one Gropius designed for the second incarnation of the school, in Dessau. It is only as we look to the interiors of that building—to its lamps, to its curtains, and to the credits on the photographs of all of the above— that we can see the work of women.

As Sigrid Wortmann Weltge writes in the introduction to her book Women’s Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus, female students “arrived at the school with an astonishing diversity of talents, convinced that this avant-garde institution would accept them as equals.” Alas. Many of these students had already studied art elsewhere—and they were eager to learn from masters like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy—but “they were segregated and given their own workshop, the Weaving Workshop, regardless of talent or inclination,” Weltge writes.