KGB Limited

KGB: Secret agents of design

The KGB trio; left to right David Khouri, Christian Bunce and Roberto Guzman. All images courtesy KGB Limited.

You’ve all heard of fashion police? The Special Forces of interior design? Out of their Chelsea office in New York City, the trio that comprises KGB is designing furniture and interiors that are up-to-the-minute modern, yet designed with classic principals of beauty, harmony and balance. Their use of hard-to-find industrial materials—things you have never seen used before in this kind of an application—combined with the precision and detail of their work creates pieces that are ultimately timeless.
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Cynthia Connolly: A Poetic Documenter of Our Changing World

“Great Falls, Montana 8-97” from the Souvenir postcard series, set 1. All photos courtesy Cynthia Connolly, www.cynthiaconnolly.com.

The frame captures an instant, a flash, something out of the corner of your eye as you walk. It is this immediacy which makes you look twice and then you recognize that bit of the familiar: an ice box from an old gas station, a logging truck as it passes you on the highway. Cynthia Connolly’s work is a memory of something real. Once you see it you are happy for the reminder. Continue reading →

Artisanal Spoonmaker Dan Dustin

Photo Courtesy of Clive Russ Photography www.cliveruss.com

The Art of the Everyday

A spoon is one of our most basic tools, having lived and evolved within our grasp for as long as man has used tools. It has come to symbolize comfort, closeness and nurturing. We spoon medicine or chicken soup to comfort the sick. We soothe a rough day with spoonfuls of ice cream. We spoon each other when we sleep side by side. Continue reading →

Artist Michael Henry Hayden

Love in the time of Dinosaurs: Artist Michael Henry Hayden

Visual artist Michael Henry Hayden is not a geologist, nor an architect, but perhaps he could have been. His installations, sculptures and painted works seamlessly explore the relationship between the epic forces of nature and the manmade world, asking us to re-examine their inherent relationships.

Flirting with Immersion (2009) is a sculpture made from birch trees and birch plywood and was inspired by a trip to the petrified forests of Arizona. Mimicking the way the trees would look buried on snow or floating in milk, the sculpture makes solid what appears to be a liquid relationship.

Hayden draws a fuzzy line between the organic and the contrived. His sculpture “Flirting with Immersion” features white birch branches partially submerged into a perfectly flat white surface, also made of birch plywood. His painting “Cleanup” depicts a gang of prison inmates picking up litter along a stretch of highway. A common enough scene in daily life, to be sure. Continue reading →

Catherine Nolin Fine Art

Detail Oriented, 2011l 11” x 14”; acrylic on canvas

Decorative and delighful

Catherine Nolin’s world is one filled with pattern and porcelain, upholstery and fine furniture. Her interiors are accented with fine art and books and little dogs; all things delightful and precious….but she is no decorator! Catherine Nolin is a painter. Most of her paintings are of interiors, like those you see in Architectural Digest or Elle Décor. But Nolin seems to paint something more. Her work speaks of our interior lives; of the private worlds we build that are as much a reflection of our emotions as they are of the spaces we occupy. Continue reading →

Harry Weese

Norton's new book the Architecture of Harry Weese by Robert Bruegmann, with Kathleen Murphy Skolnik, now available. Weese's Pentagon City station, photographed by Ben Schumin, November 24, 2004.

Washington D.C.’s 100 mile metro system; the Time Life Building in Chicago; the First Baptist Church, in Columbus, Indiana; the Humanities Building at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (widely considered one the Midwest’s best examples of brutalist architecture) the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago’s Loop (also in the brutalist style), and a striking triangular building intended to hold prisoners awaiting trial: these are the works of Harry Weese. Continue reading →