There’s a new bright spot in the typically dark, gothic-tinged world of fashion designer Gareth Pugh (pictured above, at far right). The 26-year-old Londoner and Central Saint Martins graduate, who last year said that he had yet to sell a dress, has been awarded the ANDAM (Association Nationale pour le Developpement des Arts de la Mode) Paris International Fashion Award. Founded in 1989 and supported by such corporate sponsors as Galeries Lafayette, Longchamp, and LVMH, the ANDAM award is now the largest international fashion award, with a prize of 150,000 euros (that’s $236,312, at current exchange rates). Past winners include Martin Margiela (1989) and Viktor & Rolf (1994). According to WWD, Pugh will use the funds to help finance his first Paris runway show this fall. Pugh has previously shown his collections, in which we’ve detected an enduring Wizard of Oz flying monkey flair, at London Fashion Week. ANDAM will officially bestow the prize upon Pugh at a ceremony during Paris Fashion Week in October.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Elsewhere, while Starck and Foster are charting the seven seas, Frank Gehry is in his rumpus room in the basement, trying to figure out how to clear off some space in his trophy case, as it’s just been announced that the starchitect will be receiving the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s Venice Biennial in September. Hopefully those extra couple of months will give him enough time to find a space for the new award. We recommend maybe just moving the Pritzker into the garage, because, really Frank, you never use the dang thing anymore. Here’s a bit:

With this award, the desire is to stress — in line with the spirit of the 11th Architecture Biennale — how much Gehry’s work is the significant result of years of experimentation. “Frank Gehry has transformed modern architecture”; writes Aaron Betsky in his motivation. “He has liberated it from the confines of the ‘box’ and the constraints of common building practices. As experimental as the art practices that have been his inspiration, Frank Gehry’s architecture is the very modern model for an architecture beyond building.”

The Board has also underlined the important presence Gehry will have in Venice with his Venice Gateway, the water gate linking the city to the airport.

A ha! There’s the line. Very clever, you Venetians — give him the award so he’ll one day finish the big project you’ve hired him for (and maybe it’ll also persuade him to stay on budget, too).

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What’s with these famous architects and designers and gigantic yachts? Maybe taking a page from Philippe Starck‘s plans to build a massive “green” boat, Lord Foster has gotten into the game and has teamed up with a boat manufacturer to design super-yachts (or “really big yachts” if you don’t like reading prefixes), the first of which will roll off the assembly line in September. But, somewhat like Starck’s commitment to earth-friendly floating behemoths, Lord Foster is also doing his part and the super-yachts will be available by timeshare for an annual fee of $2 million, thus allowing the mom and pop shop owner to experience super-yachting on a regular basis. Here’s a bit:

Participants can spend up to 34 nights every year on board one of the $16m yachts. Each vessel accommodates 12 guests and eight crew.

The aluminium-hull, 132ft yachts are said to provide significantly more light inside and deck space outside than rivals in the same class.

The part-time owners will be able to enjoy a glass-walled main saloon with 180-degree views. Over the eight years of the scheme, the owners can rent the super-yacht out for up to $80,000 a week in high season — and can expect to recoup 70% of the initial investment when each of the luxury boats is sold.

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As a Catholic, it is this writer’s duty to always be on the lookout for ways to work in references to the Pope in everyday conversation. It’s just what we Catholics do. So, understandably, we were excited to retire the old standard when asked an obvious question: “Do I want to go to the carnival?! Is the Pope Catholic?! Of course I want to go!” with a newer, hipper version that the kids would respond to: “Does the Pope wear Prada?!” That would work, of course, had the speculations that the Pope’s bright red shoes were, in fact, specially designed by the Italian fashion house. Sadly, the rumors that we were in the midst of a “Fashion Pope” came to an end this weekend, as it was confirmed that he isn’t wearing Prada after all, but shoes made by a simple cobbler in Novara, Italy. But while that news is sad, we’re hopeful for something else to come around one day soon. Until then, we’ll just suffer through some good ol’ Irish Catholic guilt for wanting it so badly to be true.

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One more and then we’ll lay off, we promise. You’ll recall we spent some time passing you along to various links when Daniel Libeskind‘s Contemporary Jewish Museum opened in San Francisco. Although those were terrific, a vast majority were filled with a lot of “Isn’t this building just the bees knees?!” and didn’t give a very good tour of the place. Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal‘s David D’Arcy took a trip to the new museum and offers up a great tour of both the building and the artwork therein. It’s a swell piece, with lost of detail about nearly everything, for all you Libeskind buffs or fans of contemporary Jewish things. Here’s a bit about working within the building and the limitations learned from Libeskind’s other museum projects:

Past the CJM’s gift shop with Libeskindian angularity and jagged windows that double as product displays, and up a shimmering white staircase that will test the nimbleness of aged donors, the feel gets lighter. Underneath the upward pointing tip of the tilted cube is what the museum calls the yud space — named for the Hebrew letter it resembles. Inside, the white conical volume’s 36 diamond-shaped windows are arrayed like stars in a mythological sky. Their shadow-play on the sloping walls as light passes through is beguiling. “Flat objects” — CJM talk for painting and sculpture — will not be exhibited there. It’s a wise decision, given the struggles in Mr. Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum and his Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to show paintings in galleries built with his branded tilt. So far, the yud space will be used for readings and sound installations and for rental events.

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After we posted news of it a few weeks back, followed shortly thereafter by 99% of every blog on the planet, thus making it a viral-y thingie, Wired has returned to David Byrne‘s Playing the Building project and have put together a video tutorial of just how the thing works, what’s connected to what, and so on. You might be a little tired of seeing the project talked about by now, but this one’s some fun, getting into the technical end of things. And really, who can’t get enough of listening to Byrne’s carefully-paced speaking voice?

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What do you get when you cross Gio Ponti with Piero Fornasetti and a bunch of caterpillars? All we know is that it involves lithographed butterflies—and you can sit on it. Continuing with our collaboration theme, in today’s Friday photo, we bring you the butterfly-adorned, lacquered ash armchair designed by Ponti and Fornasetti around 1951 for Fornasetti Milano. The chair was sold last month for $60,000 (a steal compared to that Titanic life preserver we told you about earlier this week) at Wright‘s sale of “objets d’affection” from Nilufar Gallery, the Milan-based design and textiles mecca founded by Nina Yashar that this year is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. The sale’s stunning exhibition catalogue (designed by Rick Valicenti/Thirst with Wright’s James Potsch and Jennifer Mahanay) describes Nilufar as “one of the most singular voices in design today. Channeling the energy of Via della Spiga, the works are fashionable—at once reflective and progressive. Harmonious compositions of color, line, and form meld against a backdrop of modern and contemporary history.” Just thinking about it gives us, well, butterflies.

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On Wednesday evening, many art lovers not dining at David Zwirner for the Friends of the High Line benefit could be found several blocks east at the Strand, where painter Christopher Wool (above, at far left) and writer/musician Richard Hell (center) sat down to talk about words with Barry Schwabsky (far right), the poet and art critic. Hell and Wool, which only sounds like an unstoppable vaudeville duo, teamed up to create Psychopts (JMC & GHB Editions), a slim paperback that collects 57 images of deceptive word pairs that caught Hell’s attention over decades of reading. Out of the corner of his eye, he would spy “incest.” The word was “nicest.” He saw “Sinatra” in “sirens” and mistook “salve” for “slave,” while “facts” turned into “farts.”

“I’ve been collecting these pairs of words for years, but hadn’t been able to figure out how to use them,” Hell told the capacity crowd, which included painter Dana Schutz and a group of art students visiting from Stockholm. “For 30 years these things had just been mildly frustrating me.” The idea for the collaboration was born after Hell and Wool, already friends, saw the 2006 exhibition at the New York York Public Library on artist/writer collaborations. They spent more than a year of Thursdays together to choose word pairs from Hell’s list, experiment with typefaces, and figure out how to combine them into a single image. At first, Hell said, they “looked too much like design, something that could be in an advertisement.” A breakthrough came when they turned to one of Wool’s favorite tools. “We attacked the words with a Xerox machine,” said Hell. The resulting images (like the salve/slave example, pictured above) wobble and glow with the ghostly fuzz of degraded copies.

continued…

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Bravo‘s Shear Genius, a Project Runway for hairstylists, is back for its second season. Heavy on the “cut”-related wordplay, the show puts vaguely menacing Danish hairstylist René Fris (who we could swear we once saw in a Mentos commercial) in the Tim Gunn role and is hosted by actress/Kmartist Jaclyn Smith. Shear Genius celebrated its season premiere on Tuesday with a pop-up salon in New York’s Times Square and recruited students from the School of Visual Arts, under the guidance of SVA 3D Design Program chairperson Kevin O’Callaghan, to design the temporary salon as well as ten salon chairs that Bravo’s “The Dish” blog describes as “pretty damn amazing.”

Among the wacky hair chairs is the trio pictured above. Created by Sarah Nguyen, the “DJ” chair (at far right) is a stack of hair-themed record albums ready for playing on its giant turntable base while Kathleen Ugurlu‘s “Jock” (center) is for the hirsute baseball fan (we think the batting helmet is a nice touch). But we find ourselves unable to resist the garden gnome-accessorized “Backyard” chair designed by Kaori Sakai in a bold palette of green, red, and yellow. It comes with a grass-tufted seat backed by a garden gate, a hose, cooler, and a full grill setup, complete with ketchup, mustard, and corn on the cob. Check out all of the chairs and vote for your favorite here. The winner gets a $5,000 prize, which we’re hoping is payable in cash rather than hair products.

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Peter Wayner has picked up on the trend of the world seemingly now needing a constant stream of new type in his piece “Down with Helvetica: Design Your Own Font.” It’s about the desire to move away from the fonts everyone has access to and hiring out to create a unique design for each project. In the piece, they get into conversations with a number of different designers like Charles Andermack and about companies like FontStruct, as well as talking to these client people who are now thinking along these lines and are providing the bread and butter for the aforementioned designers and companies. Here’s a bit how Andermack (or Chank Diesel as you may know him) offers an inexpensive custom handwriting font service to people and then turns it around to sell as something new:

Mr. Andermack asks clients to copy a collection of words in their handwriting, then scans the letters into his computer and produces a font. The only catch is that Mr. Andermack keeps the rights to resell the font to others. He publishes a collection of distinctive handwriting fonts to ad directors who want to capture a particular style or era. Your handwriting could end up in the next bundle. Exclusive rights cost more.

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On to happier news. First we should say that we don’t like to brag, but sometimes you just can’t resist. This week, the firm RMJM Hillier released an extensively-researched survey ranking the best cities in the country for design. And who came out first? That’s right: Chicago. Close second, of course, is our co-editor’s stomping grounds, New York, which we’ve always thought was pretty nice and all, but according to facts and figures, which including polling data and consulting with the AIA, just can’t hold up to the awe-inspiring design might of The Windy City. BusinessWeek has put together this great slideshow, pulling out what RMJM said about what made each town so design-friendly and here’s a little bit of what helped give Chicago the edge to take the win:

Although the Big Apple outperformed the Windy City on several criteria (including its number of Community and Housing Awards — received for design excellence in residence building and community planning — and its overall collection of 17 AIA awards for innovative architecture), Peter Schubert, RMJM Hillier design director, says Chicago’s position as a bright-green city tipped the scales. “The green aspects of a city — its sustainability, environment-friendly initiatives — were the most important features of design we considered,” he says. Schubert also cited Chicago’s long history of architectural innovation and its reputation for being design-oriented as further reasons it took the top slot.

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We’d been following the recent flooding throughout Iowa pretty closely because we lived there for a couple of years not long ago. Because we were primarily concerned about the more personal things, like making sure our friends were okay and their homes were still above water, it hadn’t even dawned on us that there was a design angle to the whole thing until we read this piece in Metropolis about all the flooded architectural landmarks in the state. Suddenly it got us remembering where all the famous buildings were located in Iowa City, where we’d lived. The new Steven Holl arts building that was just recently finished! The Frank Gehry over by the student center! All of it was in close proximity to the Iowa River and the piece painfully describes to what degree these places were affected by the rising waters. Here’s to hoping everything gets successfully repaired and we don’t lose any of what made Iowa that much more beautiful.

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Apart from chocolate rivers (particularly those with an appetite for chubby, evocatively named German youths), waterfalls are surely the most mesmerizing of nature’s wonders, even if they are not so much natural as the spirited creations of a Danish/Icelandic artist and stop running at the stroke of 10 p.m. every night. Today saw the launch of Olafur Eliasson‘s monumental, multi-site public art project, “The New York City Waterfalls,” four cascades rising as high as 120 feet out of New York Harbor. Announced in January, the Public Art Fund project was realized in eco-friendly collaboration with Tishman Construction Corporation and a team of nearly 200 designers, engineers, and construction workers.

In the press release issued today from his office, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the waterfalls “a beautiful symbol of the energy and vitality that we are bringing back to our waterfront.” Meanwhile, Eliasson says, “they will give people the possibility to reconsider their relationship to the spectacular surroundings…and evoke experiences that are both individual and enhance a sense of collectivity.” But our favorite description comes from New York Times art critic Roberta Smith. “They could almost fool King Kong into thinking he is back home,” she writes in her review published today. “They are the remnants of a primordial Eden, beautiful, uncanny signs of a natural nonurban past that the city never had.” The watery paradise lasts through October 13.

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