Most people have probably seen this video, but I thought it was worth seeing again. Dave Eggers won the 2008 TED Prize for his education and literacy work with kids, and in this entertaining acceptance speech he provides a history of the project. He’s the founder of the fantastically successful Once Upon A School which develops free drop-in tutoring centres for kids. The centres are entirely manned by volunteers – writers (including Eggers), professors, grad students, and others with flexible schedules. Quite apart from the genius of the overarching idea, Eggers also intuitively understands the role design plays in making kids and teenagers actually want to drop in for one-on-one tutoring after school. The spaces are wildly imaginative and hilarious without looking childish. In fact they must – and do – appeal to adults as well, because they are all multipurpose centres with a retail front, adult office space and kids’ tutoring area. For example, at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, Eggers’ publishing concern McSweeney’s Quarterly operates out of the back; there’s a functioning “Pirate Supply Store” in the front, and the kids’ tutoring area is in between.

There’s nothing about this project that isn’t just total genius. Below is the facade of 826  Valencia, decorated with a mural by graphic novelist Chris Ware depicting the history of language, speech, writing and publishing. Exterior photo by David Hilowitz; sandwich board photo by Dan Rochman.

Above is the Pirate Supply Store, built to feel like the inside of a ship. Photo by Willy Volk from the Flickr Creative Commons. The shop is beautiful but funny, full of elegant-looking gags: for example, as you stand and read a framed list of ways to play practical jokes on pirates, a wooden hatch opens overhead and covers you in string mop heads. Below, a visitor to the store awaits his measure of lard in exchange for which he has bartered a lock of his hair. Kids who’d just finished a workshop rushed out to witness the transaction. Photos by rgr.jnr on Flickr. Eggers and co. were forced to dream up the store component because the building rental contract stipulated there must be retail activity – hence, of course, a pirate supply store, which just happens to be a retail success in itself. Every centre has its own shop: in New York it’s the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company. All profits from the stores go to support the tutoring centres, whose extra projects include publication of the childrens’ writing and field trips. The further advantage of the shopfront is that the centres are easily accessible and embedded in the neighbourhoods they serve. To date tens of thousands of kids have been given chances they would otherwise never have had. It’s not surprising that the idea has taken off across the country. When Eggers jokingly wrote “You shall know our velocity,” he wasn’t kidding.

I can forgive Paola Antonelli for liking Karim Rashid because I love her. She’s the design curator at the MoMA in NYC and she has this amazing knack for animating our built and designed environment in an entertaining and charming way while also lightly inserting some very serious remarks about its history and politics. This TED talk is from 2007. I was so happy to hear her comments about design in North America – how, contrary to the way design is understood in Italy, design mistakenly tends to be viewed here as decoration. She also speaks about the problem of design’s over-associated with luxury, and this is probably a natural extension of the former point. Antonelli was at one point a contributing editor for Nest Quarterly of Interiors (under her former name, Paola Lenti) as well as Domus Magazine and many others. There’s a great interview with her on designboom, where I fell in love with her for hating those 80s blouses with the fabric tie around the neck and for saying that as a teenager she dreamed of being Paula Nelson, the fifth Beatle.

Pail of rusty nails as companion for orphaned streetlamp cut off from street below.

More houses by Paul Rudolph. I’m not sure why I like him so much; maybe it’s that he was willing to try so many versions of modernism, or it’s the use of white, or that he went so adventurously, successfully space age in the 60s and 70s, or the glam. I really like all the low Japanese-style seating, often in one-step-deep conversation pits – it’s something almost all his houses have in common, whether they’re strict midcentury modern or 60s/70s mod. Whatever happened to conversation pits? I believe he’s underrated. His Modulightor house was in the previous post, and above is the Milam Residence; below is the Green Residence.

The Bass Residence, looking like a white Frank Lloyd Wright:

Below, the Cohen House, also via here, shown present day (in condition almost identical to original, for resale since it’s currently for sale) and also shortly after it was built. But what happened to the cool lamps flanking the fireplace?

The Hiss Residence, also known as the Umbrella House. All photos by Kelviin of the Paul Rudolph Foundation.

Below is the fairly psychedelic, late 70s glam Edersheim Apartments.

Rudolph’s own apartment in the Beekman Building: lots and lots of parties. Lots and lots of house plants.

And finally, as already shown in our first Rudolph post, the Alexander Hirsch Residence, later owned and refinished by Halston:

More photos from “The Bloomingdale’s Book of Home Decorating,” 1973, by Barbara D’Arcy. These displays –  a Japanese room, a psychedelic red room and a room done in a sort of wild Tudor hunting lodge style – were built inside Bloomingdales in the late 60s or early 70s. See more of the amazing display rooms D’Arcy designed for Bloomingdales in our earlier post,  The Saturday Generation. 

This is artist Donald Judd’s loft in Soho, maintained as a museum but only open infrequently. It was one of the first artist’s lofts in Soho – not to mention in New York – and is now almost the paradigmatic example of loft living. Judd bought the entire 1870’s industrial building for 70,000 in 1968 and moved in with his family. One of the central figures in minimalist art, Judd clearly lived his own aesthetic. His interest in industrial materials and engineering methods is evident here in the lack of any attempt to domesticate the space as well as in the simple, unadorned furniture he built for it. The NYT ran an article a while ago which included an interview with Judd’s son Flavin, who was 6 months old when he moved into this loft and who nostalgically described the Soho of the 60s and 70s as a small town smelling fragrantly of the cigars manufactured nearby. These days there’s a certain huffiness out there about modernism and minimalism’s supposed kid-unfriendliness, but Flavin Judd remembers this space – ground zero of minimalism – happily and even nostalgically (there’s a small image of the Judds at home, below). “There were “the best Swedish breakfasts on the second floor — 50 people would come over — ham, cheese, weird flatbreads, salmon,” Flavin Judd said. “It was a great place to grow up.” To read the whole story, which includes information on the heritage restoration of the whole building, see the NYT. See also this blog’s previous post on minimalism.vs. maximalism in interiors. There’s a good shot of the a reproduction of Judd’s famous daybed on AT , and lastly, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change by Sharon Zukin provides a really fascinating portrait and social history of artist’s lofts, including 101 Spring Street. According to the Judd Foundation website, tours of the Spring St. building and loft are suspended during restoration but will start up again in 2010.

Photos from the NYT and from DiscoContinental on Flickr. Take a fun quiz (is it a Judd or a piece of cheap furniture?) here.