A few months ago Eleanor Gustafson and I spent a day as guests of Historic New England. We had wanted to see what I like to think of as the bookends of that organization’s historic houses—the 1938 Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with its spare, modernist decor and bracing use of industrial materials, and the rambling, mysterious Beauport in Gloucester, …
Design and reform: the making of the Bauhaus
October 2009 | In our time the name Bauhaus has become a synonym for high modernism, a stand-in for the purist design language of the years between the two world wars and beyond. For many it is now a stylistic descriptor, a sort of shorthand for a specific look, often understood without any temporal attachment or historical meaning. But the …
Editor’s letter, May 2009
Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Pochoda welcomes us to our latest issue
Kem Weber and the rise of modern design in Southern California
On the Barker Brothers’ Los Angeles 1926 shop opening and the work of Kem Weber
A rare Kem Weber chair shows the European side of American modernism
An elusive armchair makes an appearance
In memoriam: Joan Kaplan Davidson, 1927–2023
Her grandson remembers the philanthropist, historic preservationist, and materfamilias.
Making Faces
Federal American Vernacular Portraits, 1790s to 1840s.
Current and coming: Hector Guimard, Architecte d’art, at the Driehaus
The artist’s six-decade career is explored with one hundred pieces of decorative and fine art dating from the Belle Époque and beyond.
Endnotes: Sweet History in Spain
Chocolate is a sugary treat and a historical tool at the Museo de la Xocolata.
New Light: More on Federal Bostonians and Their London Jeweler, Stephen Twycross
A continued study on the work of English jeweler Stephen Twycross.