We just learned about Pritzger Prize-winner Hans Hollein's passing here.  

I worked for him many years ago, during a summer when Vienna was home for me.  It was a grungy office, but everyone there was super smart, with all the requisite design talent, and we were all multilingual as well.  (We had five different words for "shit" in the room I worked in.)  I worked on the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art, as well as Hollein's competition entry for the Walt Disney concert hall in Los Angeles, which of course was won by Frank Gehry.  

While I'm certainly not in love with everything Herr Professor (as he was referred to) Hollein did, his comment that "Everything is Architecture" has stuck with me.  Stacy and I have never just designed one thing.  Whether it's a garden, or a building, or a drawer pull, or a cabinet, or an urn for a loved one's remains, or a stereo speaker, or a table, or a restaurant, or a serving tray, or your office, or your home, it's all architecture on some level.  We can put the same amount of rigor into designing any of them.  Each piece is part of the fabric of our environment, and each  contributes to it in some way, so each piece deserves our consideration.  We like that attitude.  Sometimes it fits between your fingers and sometimes it's all around you, with awe-inspiring scale.  But it's all architecture.    

Happy Earth Day everyone!  OK, OK, maybe you have a slightly nagging feeling about this.  It’s one of those events that feels like a reminder, like maybe you’re not eating enough healthy food or exercising enough.  “Am I really doing all I can to help the planet?”  Probably not, right? 

We could all probably consume less, drive less, remember to turn out the lights more often, use less water, pick less toxic products from less far away, and the list goes on and on.  And then we feel a little guilty about it.  And we think about how insurmountably huge the Earth’s problems are.  And then we think about how ineffective we are, and it’s all hopeless.  Earth Day, how depressing, I don’t want to think about it!  And yet…

And yet… every little bit really does help.  Look at your good side: Maybe you already recycle, maybe you eat organic, maybe you traded your SUV for a Prius, maybe you do take shorter showers.  It’s all good!  And it’s all cumulative.  Enough of us taking these baby steps results in real movement.  You probably already have more insulation, better fuel economy and a smaller carbon footprint than your parents did. 

Where we live, Styrofoam food containers are already banned, if we don’t bring our own grocery bags to the store we have to pay for them, and our building codes are about to change again, requiring ever more energy efficiency.  While this may all seem inconvenient, it’s also progress.  At Fringe Studio we deal with a couple of larger-scale issues: Did you know that our buildings contribute far more to climate change than our cars?  Every project we do improves energy efficiency somewhere.   We wish we all could be less wasteful about furniture, too.   Most of it has been shipped around the world, contains chemicals we don’t want to think about, and will be thrown out after a few years, where it will contribute to landfill volume for many years.

As members of the Sustainable Furnishings Council, we are committed to doing things more conscientiously.  The fiberboard is formaldehyde-free, the finishes are low-VOC water-based, the sourcing is local.  The wood slabs you see on our site?  All salvaged.  We can even tell you where some of the trees fell down.  Some of it was retrieved from burn piles!  Imagine: you could buy something made from someone else’s trash, that you would keep for a long time, and that is really beautiful.  That would feel good, wouldn’t it?

Want to feel even better?  Just click on the images below, and you will become a highly educated consumer, just like that.  

Now pat yourself on the back!  We can make a difference.  Happy Earth Day!  

"Furniture contains numerous traces of what we are and who we are and who we think we are."
An interesting article from the BBC of all places:  http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26881731

We think very hard about the design of pieces, but they become truly interesting when they become imbued with history, meaning and their place in our lives.  An example: after more than 10 years our Jean Prouve dining table has scratches, dings, and sun damage.  It has seen our kids' childhoods through.  Anyone who knows us has sat at it.  It has hosted countless meals, countless games, countless hours of work, countless spills, toys, candle wax, and whatever else has been the focus of our attention.  It has always been a beautiful piece of design, and it has held up remarkably well.  With the wear that it has, though, it is now not just any Prouve table.  It is our Prouve table.  

As the BBC article says, our table contains those traces of what we are and who we are.  We, and our table, live full lives and we have the scars to prove it.  Our goal with the pieces we design and create is to be similarly powerful.  Brand new, they make a statement about how you care about design, how you love things that are different, and how you love materials combining and complimenting each other.  As the pieces age, they have the capacity to take a few dings and gain some soul as they share their history with yours.  Bring it on!

We are pleased to have placed our Media Divide cabinet in the Design for Living house for this weekend's Silicon Valley Contemporary Modern Home Tour.  Details are here:

http://modernhometours.com/event/modern-home-tour-conjunction-silicon-valley-contemporary/

Our friend KC Cullen designed the house.  She is one of the most talented people we know, and as always did a great job.  Of course, the cabinet fit perfectly, too.

I love the crisp red color of this facade.  It makes the terra cotta work pop beautifully. Even the black on the fire escape somehow helps the composition.  So where exactly was I when I snapped this photo?  Not in New York, but in Legoland!  We took our son Graham there a couple of weeks ago.  It's no surprise that lots of architects started with Lego bricks.  I wasn't surprised to read that a disproportionate number of the professional Lego builders at Legoland list architecture as a big interest of theirs.  Their take on many architectural landmarks was very well done.  I recommend a visit.