Knoll apartment in Paris August 1954 Esquire magazine  

Thanks
Thanks for posting these interesting photos. Fifty five years ago and it could be today.
Amazing to think that 55 years before THAT it was 1899

Amazing what a good color...
Amazing what a good color shot does to bring out the Knoll apartments true beauty. That would have been a good life, living where you wanted, and working with cool furniture.
Does anyone know if those jute rugs they always show in the Knoll settings are still being produced? They were really popular in a lot of 50s magazines. They must have been hard to clean, but I like the patterns.

Already in 1927
*
Already in 1927
Summer night in quiet level suburban streets,
lights still on in two out of three houses,
five small green lights edge the driveway
of a brick house two doors down, cold lights
in the warm dark air ... Hundreds of lives
within three blocks - persons who look away -
and this is only one modest suburb
in North Carolina or Connecticut. Too many:
persons who are looking away. From you.
But what about 1927? Then too
lamps burned in thousands of windows
within a few miles, and were seen
through the thick of summer night meaning
lives, averted, oblivious, unreachable;
a boy and a girl said goodnight at the door
and from her window she watched him walk away
into the ripe darkness of June 1927. She felt
his steps leading to a city job and other girls,
girls with expensive hats. She felt
so small, lost and small ...
She sat on her bed for twenty minutes -
then she tied a paisley kerchief in her hair
and washed her face and read a novel by Hardy
and grew up and married a partly good man.
She survived the infinity of 1927:
since already in 1927 the problem was
present will all ingredients, the steps fading,
lamplight cold in the warm air on this block
and the next block ... So
it's an old condition. The liquid darkness
and voices from the far side of the playground,
newspaper on the davenport filled
with unromantic activity, what Coolidge said
about aid to farmers; already in 1927
you had to pass through squares of darkness
and small cirles of yellow light alone.
My father, for instance, was thirteen:
he shut the back door and climbed the creaky stairs,
making plans.
*
Probably should have posted this in the design/politics threads. It's a poem by Mark Halliday, titled Already in 1927. I've learned not to announce anything as a poem. It's akin to announcing the Marshall Tucker Band to your buddy from Newport as Southern Rock, your jazz-loving buddy who might otherwise possibly not be a better guy for having heard 'Can't You See'.
I said possibly.
I like thoughts such as the one Annette poses, although I find I can rarely make sense of it all any more on my own.
*
http://wiredforbooks.org/markhalliday/already.htm