LMNOP May Workshop

Managing Client Expectations During a Crisis

This month’s workshop will focus on how to manage client expectations during a crisis: Maintaining transparency and communication without speculation, resiliency facing delays and market changes outside of one’s control, and protecting and future-proofing your interests. We’ll also take a look at historic economic downturns – what we can learn from them?

Jennifer Graham

Perkins + Will

Associate Principal, Senior Project Manager, with over twenty five years of experience in the commercial interior design and architecture niche with a concentration on operational strategy, leadership and project delivery & execution. Jennifer brings superior negotiation skills and the needed balance of management, technical & emotional quotient skill to each situation. Experience spans from New York City projects, to national and international clientele. Jennifer is skilled at understanding how local conditions impact a client’s project objectives and provides ongoing client relationship management, maturity, and assurances.

Katie Devlin

Mace North America

Versatile architect, resourceful and creative individual with experience in all areas of pre-design, architecture, interior design, consultant coordination, construction and project close out.
Portfolio of work includes corporate headquarters for many Fortune 500 companies, technology and broadcast centers, public and private sector offices and health care and education facilities. President of Canstruction© New York Inc., a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization that organizes and manages the annual design-build competition where architects, engineers, contractors, and students compete to create and build sculptures entirely made of canned food, which is then donated to City Harvest.

Please join us on Tuesday, May 26th at 6:30 PM on Zoom.  When you register you will be sent the Meeting ID.

Please click here to register – space is limited!

Ricci Studio

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you would be interested in samples for a current project or would like budget numbers on an upcoming residential, hospitality of commercial project.

daniel.tillman@c3design.info

Modern Metal Design: Brass-ish

Shown here Modern Metal patterns: Square Squared, Moroccan & Marshmallow in powder coat Baritone

Brass is hot right now, but it can be pricey.  Modern Metal offers a new collection of brass powder coat colors.  We call it Brass-ish.  These brass finishes offer a high style look at a friendly price point.  We are huge fans of this powder coat option – it is durable, retains color & gloss, and even has UV stability.

For more information: daniel.tillman@c3design.info | http://www.c3design.space

 

IIDA NY Design Camp

DESIGN CAMP: DESIGN WITH A FRIEND

Marbling Workshop
Led by Shaw Contract’s design director Susan Smilek.

Register your child and a friend to join us for this interactive and creative workshop! (Parents do not need to register)

Participants will be introduced to the creative and technical process behind making carpet collections. They will get to design their own works of art through marbling on paper and ceramics.

Ages: 9 – 12 years old

Drop off is optional. Parents/guardians are welcome to interact with the workshop alongside their child.

Speaker:

Susan Smilek
Design Director
Shaw Contract

Register

Saturday, March 7th

1:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Shaw Contract Showroom
853 Broadway, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10003

Tickets: FREE

(limited space available)

Abraham Moon & Sons | Fine Wools

Founded in 1837 and with our roots in apparel, we are one of the last remaining vertical woollen mills in Great Britain, with a reputation for consistent quality and innovative design. Here you can discover more about the Abraham Moon mill, our illustrious company history, and the many natural benefits of wool fabrics.

1837 – A memorable year in at least 2 respects. It was the year in which Queen Victoria succeeded to the British throne and it was also the year in which Abraham Moon & Sons was founded.

Abraham Moon, a considerable standing in the community of Guiseley, on the Northern fringes of Leeds and the Southern fringes of the Yorkshire Dales, supplied many local families with yarn to weave cloth on hand looms in their homes. When the cloth was woven he would collect the pieces, paying the weavers for their work. The cloth was then scoured (washed) locally and hung out to dry in the surrounding fields. Abraham would then transport the pieces by horse and cart to Leeds for sale in the market.

1868 – Abraham had a three storey mill built on Netherfield Road in Guiseley, less than 300 yards from his house at the top of Oxford Avenue. The mill had an abundant source of local water which was soft and ideal for scouring (washing) and other processes necessary in woollen manufacture. Today we still use the pure water springs underneath the mill for scouring; as manufacturing technology progresses with time it’s these simple historic details that make our fabrics special.

The newly built railway to Leeds ran directly behind the mill which had its own sidings. This proved an invaluable form of transport both inward (wool for processing, coal for power) and outward (distribution of cloth to the expanding consumer network). The company’s records show exports to both Western Europe and Japan as early as the 1890’s.

1877 – In August 1877 Abraham Moon lost his life in an accident. A report from the local newspaper at the time sets the scene:

“Mr Moon was attending the annual Yeadon feast in his horse-drawn carriage. When a band struck up the startled horse bolted down Henshaw Lane. Two passengers managed to jump clear and were unharmed but Mr Moon stayed in his carriage trying to calm his horse. In its panic it tried to turn into a familiar lane where there was no room for the carriage. The vehicle demolished part of a wall into which Abraham Moon was thrown. He died soon afterwards from a head injury”. The article goes on to report that the horse survived the accident!

After his death, Abraham’s son Isaac succeeded him in the business, which continued to flourish throughout the remainder of the Victorian era.

1902 – The original multi-storey mill burned to the ground. Undeterred Isaac Moon built a much larger single storey mill. By this time the mill had become fully vertical, meaning all manufacturing processes took place on one site – from raw wool through dyeing, blending, carding, spinning, warping weaving, and finally finishing the fabrics. We are one of the very few remaining vertical woollen mills left in Great Britain today. Isaac Moon took the business forward until his death in 1909.

Design and pattern books which date back to the early part of the Twentieth Century tell a story in themselves. Fashion fabrics from 1900 to 1913 gradually give way to army shirting, trouserings and greatcoat cloths from 1914 which in turn are replaced by the emerging fashions of the 20s. Today designers use the old pattern books for inspiration with new designs and the re-creation of retro looks.

1920 – The Moon family sold their shares in the company in order to pursue other interests. The shares were purchased by Charles H Walsh who was both designer and mill manager at the time with the borrowed sum of £33,000, the equivalent of £1.25m today. Charles’ death in 1924 saw the company passed onto his son Frank, who was already in the business.

1954 – Frank’s nephew Arthur took control, only retiring as chairman in 2010. The current managing director is John Walsh, the fourth generation of the family which succeeded the Moon dynasty. 1952 also marked a further extension of the mill, still located at the original site on Netherfield Road, making more room for the warping and weaving of the fabrics.

1990 – Throughout the 1990’s, wool faced increased competition from man-made fabric. While many mills tried (and failed) to compete on price, Moon focused on quality and concentrated on the luxury market, taking advantage of the manufacturing control and consistency that only a vertical mill can offer. Our customer list includes major international brands such as Burberry, Paul Smith, and Ralph Lauren.

2009 – Bronte Tweeds was purchased by Abraham Moon & Sons. Already a well-known producer of throws and tartans, the combination of Bronte’s extensive market knowledge and our dedicated in-house design team and manufacturing versatility has seen our accessories division grow exponentially in the years since. Bronte Tweeds was rebranded as Bronte by Moon in 2013.

Weaving, coding, and the secret history of ‘women’s work’

by Evan Nicole Brown, fastcompany.com
November 6, 2019 10:00 AM

Before the fast-fashion business model made it possible for clothing companies to churn out 700 shirts a day, textiles in the 19th century were created using a much slower and more mathematical process: the Jacquard loom. This machine, which used carefully designed punch cards to determine the sequence of weaving operations, created patterns out of thread based on a binary system. (Since woven textiles are created with interlocking threads, you can only ever see a warp or a weft thread on the surface, which is essentially a zero or a one.) The intricate Jacquard loom and its innovative punch card input method would go on to inspire the first general-purpose computer, and English mathematician Ada Lovelace is widely credited with publishing the first algorithm to be carried out by this Analytical Engine. As a result, the relationship between woven textiles and computer science was born, and women sat squarely at the intersection of this technical Venn diagram.

In an effort to tease out these overlapping industries, multimedia artist Ahree Lee has developed an interdisciplinary exhibit called Pattern:Code as part of her residency at the Los Angeles-based Women’s Center for Creative Work. The show is focused squarely on labor, especially undocumented or unrecognized work performed by people undervalued in society. Tracing the history of women in crafts to their more modern participation in computing was an exercise perfectly at home at the WCCW—a center for all kinds of feminist activity, research, and art making.

“Weaving has always been in the wheelhouse of women, and it took an incredible amount of time to weave and produce clothing and all the textiles needed for the household, like bedding and draperies,” Lee says. “Agricultural labor was more dangerous because of the large equipment so that tended to fall on the men, and that’s how this division of labor was formed. Women could do the textile labor at home where they could be watching over the children . . . it was easily interrupted.”

Lee explores domestic labor by creating weavings that illustrate self-generated labor data and research on statistics of women in STEM. One piece, a square tapestry with a triangular image called Disrupting the Industry, is a woven infographic depicting the number of women who got bachelor’s degrees in computer science between 1966 and 2010.

“It starts out pretty low and it steadily increases [until] it reaches a peak in 1984, then it sharply drops off and in 2010 it goes back to where it was in 1966,” Lee says. “It’s called Disrupting the Industry—a phrase used over and over again in pitches from Silicon Valley startups so it’s seen as this good thing—but disruption in any other way is bad. There’s this bias toward disruptive behavior in tech bro culture . . . but historically this other quality was valued in computer programmers.”

These qualities, which women were widely thought to naturally possess, were diligence, patience, and the ability to be detail-oriented—perfect for the tedious and technical work of both weaving and coding.

Another example of Lee’s thread-based data visualizations is her weaving called Ada, which is woven with a secret message.

“In that piece the dark dots represent the punches of a punch card, [which] I based on the standard IBM punch card, and I encoded a message in those two woven punch cards which is actually Ada Lovelace’s quote: ‘The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves,’” says Lee. The multimedia artist uses a lot of the same fibers throughout her work, namely cottonwood yarn.

Lee is also is spearheading public programs and hosting workshops throughout her four-month residency. The practice of female weaving workshops nods to the Bauhaus school of the early 20th century, where women who wanted to study art were invariably placed.

“The women weavers turned weaving as something pictorial or maybe not as rigorous as architecture or sculpture into something that was very architectural . . . a design activity that you can undertake for the benefit of industry and that’s production,” Lee says. “Weaving very much has a lot of engineering elements to it—you have to take into account the strength of fibers and how they’ll intersect.”

Throughout the course of her residency, Lee is also working on a visualization of her own labor; last year, the artist started meticulously tracking her time to figure out what she was doing each day. The result will be a series of weavings—seven in total, for each day of the week—that will depict all of the labor she engaged in between the hours of 6 a.m. and midnight. Using a color-coded key, with each hue representing a different type of work, Lee will divide her labor into six or seven different categories—from cooking, to childcare, to crafting.

“All these things are very ephemeral, they’re not tracked by society [because they’re] not a part of productivity,” Lee says. “Part of what I’m doing by documenting all this labor is making it tactile and visible and tracked . . . and part of my art output, and therefore valued.”

Pumpkitecture! Architectural Pumpkin Carving Competition

Start off your Halloween weekend at the Center for Architecture’s third annual Pumpkitecture! competition! 20 New York City-based firms will go gourd to gourd to once again compete for the Pritzkerpumpkin.

Who will squash the competition? What firm will succeed in summoning the Brutal ghost of Marcel Booeuer or invoking the spirit of Michael Gravesyard? Will the Crowned Curibita be inspired by Frank-o-Lloyd Wright’s Guggengourd? See for yourself at Pumpkitecture!

Come witness architects live-carve extraordinary structures and vote for the People’s Pumpkin!

Pumpkitecture! will take place on Friday, October 26 from 6:00 – 8:30 PM. The carving will commence at 6:15 and will run through 7:30. Contestants will briefly defend their designs, after which jurors will deliberate and pick the winning pumpkin.

Festive food and beverages included.

Participating Firms (list in formation)
Architecture Research Office (ARO)
Bernheimer Architecture
DXA Studio
Ennead Architects
GRT Architects
ikon.5 architects
Leroy Street Studio
LTL Architects
MdeAS
Mitchell Giurgola
Quennell Rothschild & Partners
Robert A.M. Stern Architects
Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers
SITU
Studio Joseph
Weiss/Manfredi

Jury (list in formation)
Chen Chen and Kai Williams, Founders, Chen Chen and Kai Williams
Ashley Mendelsohn, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum
Ellen Van Dusen, Founder and Designer, Dusen Dusen
Dr. Takeshi Yamada & Seara

A program of Archtober, NYC’s annual architecture and design festival happening during the month of October. See the full events lineup at archtober.org.

REGISTER