Roy McMakin: When Is a Chair Not a Chair?

Text by John Baldessari, Michael Darling and others

Here is what’s so great about Seattle furniture maker Roy McMakin: he lives effortlessly within the multiple worlds of craftsmanship, design, architecture and the higher realms of conceptual art. Yet there doesn’t appear to be a stuffy bone in his body, at least not in his end products, which include wooden chairs and chests of drawers of the kind your grandmother would love. McMakin’s furniture is, in fact, filled with all kinds of visual puns and anthropomorphic conceits that belie their ordinary appearances. The rear end of a plump-looking wingback armchair, for instance, sits on the floor as if it has a giant tush, and some of his seats sport tails. In another series, he gives wooden benches uneven legs that render them useless and, by degrees, closer to art. Five essays in this book describe his creativity and personality as almost one and the same, though the images do a much better job of revealing McMakin’s world of furniture misfits as a rich and fun-loving place to be.  By Catherine Osborne, deputy editor at Azure.

Skira Rizzoli   ISBN 978-0-8478-3357-3

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What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs

Edited by Stephen A. Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth

Most urban thinkers find it difficult not to talk about Jane Jacobs. For that reason, the 30 essays collected in What We See are rich with a passion seldom displayed in books of this nature (you know, the kind with study guides in the back). A glance at the contributors’ list makes it easy to see why: the writers include architects Jan Gehl, Peter Zlonicky and Ken Greenberg, along with Janette Sadik-Khan, New York’s revolutionary transportation commissioner; and Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. All are esteemed advocates of the Jacobsian vision.

Collectively, their essays demonstrate the power of walkable, vibrant streets. In “The Intelligence of Informality,” urban development professor Nabeel Hamdi looks to developing world cities as laboratories for “bottom-up self-organizing collectivism, those ‘quantum and emergent systems’ that, as Jane Jacobs argued long ago, give cities their life and order.” Lerner’s essay itemizes the changes undertaken in Curitiba that follow the Jacobs model, while former Toronto mayor David Crombie pays tribute to his city’s most famous social activist.

New York’s transformations receive significant attention in this book, and rightly so; Jacobs fought passionately to preserve such landmarks as Grand Central Station and Greenwich Village. Sadik-Khan brags about the kilometres of bike lanes and plazas built on reclaimed streets that now exist throughout Man­hat­tan thanks to Jacobs and her legacy. Gehl puts the credit where it’s due in a personal letter to Jacobs: “It took quite a while to get to this day from the troubled days in 1961 when your fight for a better New  York was argued and carefully documented in your book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Forty-nine years to be precise, but now the day has finally come.”  By Todd Harrison, editor at Spacing, a Toronto print and online network about the urban landscape.

new village press   ISBN 978-0-9815593-1-5

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