Introduce yourself here  

Stephen, 64
in San Francisco, once of New York and Massachusetts, cabinetmaker/designer with a lifelong love of twentieth-century architecture and furniture.
This is a wonderful place to hear and speak of design. Our hosts, Patrick and Alix, patiently endure all points of view, and occasionally egg us on with interesting design challenges.

I'm 25 and live in the South...
I'm 25 and live in the South of England. I'm a full time mid 20th century dealer in design & art. I have been running my business for just over 2 years, and interested in the subject for approx 5.
My other main interests include playing football and motor racing.

Boston
AJ from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. I'm an artist/sculptor, design addict, Eames fanatic, social & political activist and all around goof-ball. 🙂 I work in the design field and live in constant envy of those that actually ARE designers, rather than a sycophant like myself.

Danny, 44
Danny, 44.
Chicago, USA.
Work in print advertising / production.
Modern design fan / hobbyist / dilettante.
Misanthropic nihilist that, strangely, likes to be around people.
Amazed by the knowledge and insight i've read here, not just from the design professionals, but from the laymen as well.
Plus, the back-and-forth petty arguments and insults can be somewhat deliciously entertaining (you know who you are).

David, 40. I'm a server...
David, 40. I'm a server admin for the library at UCSC. Also a sculptor and musician. A design addict, particularly mid-century furniture. The addiction started with a single Burke tulip chair (also a recovering Star Trek geek, and these were used in the original series). Love Eames, Saarinen, Jacobsen, etc.
fm

Kerry alias Olive 46, Northwester nMassachusetts
Biochemist by education, Biotech marketer in first career, Renewable Energy consultant now in my second career. Big time enthusiast of color and using color, with a fair amount of expertise from my former career in helping explain the affects of light and color in spaces. I would be delighted to talk your ears off on either renewable energy and sustainable living or color.
My design addiction wanders from Mid-Cent to minimal asian. I collect (and use) tetsubin teapots and early 1970's cookware. I have a secret fetish for Pucci fabrics.
My home is a passive solar design hand-built by an architect for his own home and as an experiment in sustainability.
My fondest dream is to find work with a builder/architect that believes that healthy sustainable homes can be beautifully designed and modernist rather than ugly mud-covered yurts with tacky hand-carved woodwork with gnome faces in it.
My favorite possession is my nelson bench.

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I've seen the gnome faces! and the bad bad bad amateur carvings of pixies. LOTR has so much to answer for.

Henry Santoso
Architect, now developer and vintage collector, Melbourne, Australia. Born in Indonesia but Chinese heritage. Big fan of Danish design, and Australian, Panton, rosewood, hoping to have a shop.
http://desiretoinspire.blogspot.com/2007/03/grant-featherston.html

farah, 35, san francisco, marketer
miami before that and haiti as a child and teenager. i like clean, simple lines regardless of period. i tend to opt for functional beauty. every piece of furniture must be able to multitask.
other interest are sailing, caribbean art, economics, and traveling.

bill
production glassblower by day, sculptor otherwise. and i am learning woodworking and object design. my first lamp was a finalist in a national competition! currently finishing art grad school in wisconsin. i have been trying to analyze my design addiction in mental health terms. having said that i appreciate virtually all modern movements ( although i still choke on memphis furniture) and am studying their social aspects and design's future. and this has been a phenominal year for outstanding ebay finds for almost nothing. best of a great crop was six ponti artisan ladderback chairs. the auction went a full week and no one else noticed them. i got the set for 250. have you ever held your breath for a week? there is hope for those of us on an artists budget sometimes.

gerrit
gerrit, living in ghent (belgium), age 33.
education; productdesigner besides that some economical studies (postgrad) and creative like woodworking, ceramics, ...
work; worked for different companies as a designer; mostly furniture and lighting companies. now working for a 'natural ventilation' company in a awesome building.
interests; design, architecture, contemporary art, travelling, comics.
dreams; plenty...
designaddict; mmmyes but i am disgusted by that 'design for dummies'idea (ohoh let us buy a corbusier lc1 or barcelona-mies, or...: aaaargg there is so much more out there!! design that has not been corrupted by the marketeers or hypemakers)
respect; my credo is not that you have to earn respect; no eveybody got my respect, you can only loose it...
sport or art; yeah: art. Sport is dangerous it leads to national feelings and eventually to war as art unifies all cultures, colors and visions in its beauty.

d.c.
DA village idiot; mid 50s; central California; former real estate consultant; masters degree; came to appreciate architecture in consulting; came to appreciate design through collecting; as soon as I got seriously interested in design I quit collecting; am presently focused on contemporary design philosophy (or the lack thereof); prefer space to surface; coined "heavy modern" to distinguish contemporary modern revival from early and mid modern; find most contemporary modern to be post modern shorn of ornamentation, i.e., surface design rather than space design; all time favorite architects: Wright for his houses, Michelangelo for miscellaneous, John Russell Pope for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC, Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles for the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey; favorite contemporary architects: Arthur Erickson, Gehry, and Renzo Piano (still struggling to understand and not just enjoy Piano, though); all time favorite designers: Raymond Loewy, Hans Wegner, Tapio Wirkala, the Eames, Sottsass; favorite contemporary designers: K. Grcic, Citterio, De Winter; architect I didn't like until I got his concept of processional space programming--Philip Johnson; architect whose buildings I still do not like--Philip Johnson; noted recent trends in architecture/design: surfaces, heaviness and massiveness probably invoked to combat "the unbearable lightness of being" (Czeslaw Milosz's brilliant expression); most respected building metaphor: Gehry's Bilbao Museum which expresses simultaneous collapse and emergence of contemporary global order; hope for architecture and design: a design philosophy with an ethical realm that stops insulating and protecting people from oppressive change in the world, or dealing in surface abstractions to distract them from it, and begins to express possible solutions to oppressive change in the world through a contemporary form language that struggles as honestly with "the unbearable lightness of being" in a totalitarian age as Czeslaw Milosz did in his poetry and novels. We are all Czechs now. But just as the Czechs eventually emerged from their oppressor, so to will the rest of earth's nations. But it will take awhile. It turns out Kafka was the prophet not just of the 20th Century, but of the 21st as well. Humanity designed and bungled its way into the current impasse. It will have to design and bungle its way out of it. Good design can be part of the solution, or part of the problem. I come here to encourage it in the only insignificant way that I can to be part of the solution.

please explain
It turns out Kafka was the prophet not just of the 20th Century, but of the 21st as well.
Not getting off the original subject... i would like to know why you feel this way about Kafka
If you have ever been to Prague in Check Republic (The greatest city in the world for Architecture . The first time i ever saw a cubism building, simply amazing and 210 identifiable architectural styles to look at ) but Kafka is a g-d in that city. please explain to me

kafka
Kafka found a way to express the criticism of post war rebuilding that we were unknowingly creating a world that further alienated us from who we want to be. One of K's characters wakes up one morning as a cockroach, remember? Totally unassimilated, the cockroach was a symbol of that alienation. Kafka was a Jew, so most anti-semitic central europenas don't bother with him too much except in Prague to sell Kafka teeshirts.
I think it was Kundera, not Milos, that coined the lightness of being phrase. But yes, that echoes that existential impotence, in a East Block communist type of way.
Every good idea turns totalitarian if it requires compulsory enrollment. Anyone who says he has THE answer should have his wings clipped.
My humble opinion is that this modern world is in dire need of some serious regression. The more that idea is resisted, the more difficult-to-reverse trouble occurs.

room 606
thanks for your explanation.. I read Kafak as a high schooler 40 years ago and he fascinated me that he was Jewish and from Prague.
When I was in Prague 6 years ago i was so impressed with the city and loved it more than any city i have ever been in .
On the tours around the city Kafkas name came up constantly, especially in the old Jewish section near the old synagogue and the Jewish cemetery. They truly treat him like a profit in Prague,
Now the French they do love there Victor Hugo. and the Israelis love Martin Buber , We Americans like our Hemingway but he was far from a Profit around here...
I guess I need to go to Barns and Nobel and find a book on this fascinating writer .