Architectural Digest (July 25, 2023) – Today architect Nick Potts joins AD in New York City for an in-depth walking tour of Billionaires’ Row in Midtown Manhattan.
West 57th Street has been attracting Manhattan’s wealthiest residents for centuries–a former amalgamation of brownstone and gothic mansions in the 1800s, the street has evolved into a hotspot for supertall luxury skyscrapers boasting the three tallest residential buildings in the world.
Join Nick as he deep-dives into the area’s rich history and explains why Billionaires’ Row could only be built on 57th Street.
There’s nothing like an icy drink or frozen treat to help tame summer swelter, keep you hydrated, quench thirst, and satisfy a sweet tooth. Unfortunately, cool treats are often over-processed and packed with added sugars. Keep your cool with less processed, fruit-forward icy drinks and treats that are as healthy …
In 1847, Sir John Franklin and a crew of 128 men disappeared while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage. A National Geographic team sought to find evidence of their fate—but the Arctic doesn’t give up its secrets easily.
BY MARK SYNNOTT
Jacob Keanik scanned his binoculars over the field of ice surrounding our sailboat. He was looking for the polar bear that had been stalking us for the past 24 hours, but all he could see was an undulating carpet of blue-green pack ice that stretched to the horizon. “Winter is coming,” he murmured. Jacob had never seen Game of Thrones and was unaware of the phrase’s reference to the show’s menacing hordes of ice zombies, but to us, the threat posed by this frozen horde was equally dire. Here in remote Pasley Bay, deep in the Canadian Arctic, winter would bring a relentless tide of boat-crushing ice. If we didn’t find a way out soon, it could trap us and destroy our vessel—and perhaps us too.
In 1845, British explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men set out in search of the Northwest Passage—a fabled sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific that would hasten trade between Europe and Asia. None of Franklin’s crew survived. The Norwegian ship Gjøa in 1903-06 made the first successful passage. In 2022, a National Geographic team attempted to retrace Franklin’s expedition to find fresh evidence of its undoing.
The Local Project (July 25, 2023) – From the moment the gates opened, client and interior designer Gillian Wynn knew Palms Residence was the secret garden house she had been looking for. After enlisting the help of Olson Kundig for the architecture and design of her home, Gillian delivered a brief that asked for something that was unlike the past work of the studio.
Video timeline:00:00 – Introduction From The Homeowner 00:57 – Collaborating With The Architect 01:28 – Intertwining The Indoors And Outdoors 02:43 – Venice’s Natural Light 03:14 – The Unique Kinetic Sculpture 04:09 – A Modest Palette 04:56 – Disappearing Into The Garden 05:27 – The Deconstructed Geometry Of The House
As the agenda of the residence was mostly focused on emphasising the garden, both Tom Kundig, Principal and Founder at Olson Kundig, and Gillian knew that in order to make her vision come to life, the home needed to be manipulated around nature. Seen throughout the house tour is a yoga studio, living and dining areas and a couple of bedrooms, each space blurring the lines between indoor and outdoor living and taking advantage of the paradise-like climate of Venice. Employing a number of design techniques,
Olson Kundig treats architecture like “layers of clothing,” in that there are multiple ways to open and close the home and manipulate how one can enter and exit. Yet it is how the garden is shaped around the home to encourage light to trickle through the trees and inside to complement the interior design that turns Palms Residence into a secret garden house. With the focal point of indoor and outdoor living, the home is complemented with wide glass doors and a glass-walled stairwell that invites the light in and creates a warming character.
Moreover, due to the home’s location, there is a magical quality of natural light that emphasises the architecture and interior design from the moment the sun rises and until it sets. Additionally, the home’s private yoga studio features a Gamelatron installation, a kinetic sculpture designed by the owner’s close friend Aaron Taylor Kuffner. Composed on site, the sculpture emits a sound bath via Indonesian gongs, which sets the tone of meditation and flow for the rest of the secret garden house.
LA Review of Books (Summer 2023) – In this elemental issue of LARB Quarterly, no. 38: Earth, we found new ways of looking at the planet. Writers were free to take up the theme casually or catastrophically, studying the earth beneath their fingernails or the planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away. We imagined being sealed outside, dreaming of coming home.
ON AN UNUSUALLY rainy evening in Los Angeles this March, at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, two investigative reporters from Germany gave a talk about a financial scandal known as “cum-ex.” Against the backdrop of a mid-century modern terrace, its polished cement looking dull and gray in the storm, the pair flashed through a series of slides about international tax embezzlement.
A relatively small drip of funds from the German cultural ministry sometimes supports talks like these in the name of Mann’s legacy. When the capital of German literary life was exiled to Los Angeles around the Second World War, the author built a home that now still hosts salons in the name of democratic cultural exchange.
THE YEAR WAS 1971, the place Łódź. Journalist Hanna Krall was interviewing a pioneering heart surgeon named Jan Moll. The good doctor, apparently unhappy with the outcome of previous interviews, told Krall that everything journalists ever wrote about medicine was nonsense. So, if she wanted to avoid doing the same, he strongly suggested she have her article vetted by a certain cardiologist, a Dr. Edelman, who, said Moll, would correct her mistakes. Krall agreed and arranged a meeting. She sat down with Marek Edelman in the Grand Hotel café, where it took 15 minutes for him to read through her article.
The Globalist Podcast, Tuesday, July 25, 2023: Israel passes a controversial bill to limit the Supreme Court’s power. Plus: French president Emmanuel Macron’s Pacific tour, Cambodia’s one-horse election race, and, as thousands of people are evacuated from Greek islands, we ask: how do repatriation flights work?
Complaining of an unaccountable judiciary, the far-right governing coalition, despite months of mass protests, voted to strip the court’s power to override “unreasonable” government actions.
The Israeli prime minister has pushed through the first part of his judicial overhaul, but in doing so has deepened a rift in Israeli society and propelled the country into an uncertain new era.
What the Collapse of Spain’s Far Right Means Going Forward
About the only thing clear from Spain’s muddled election results was that Spaniards were turning away from the political
Seeking Full Honors, Some Ukrainian Families Wait to Bury Their Dead
Thousands of families have buried soldiers in cemeteries across Ukraine in “Alleys of Heroes.” But some have held off, awaiting a version of Arlington National Cemetery.
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (July 24, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week:a report on the technology behind babymaking, why optimism about the world economy might be premature (10:30), and what the hype over Barbenheimer says about the movie industry (16:17).
Little Big World (July 24, 2023) – Schloss Elmau is a five-star hotel and national monument, situated between Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Mittenwald in a sanctuary of the Bavarian Alps, Germany.
It lies at the foot of the Wetterstein mountains. It’s the only venu, that has hosted the G7 Summit twice. I was lucky enough to be invided by them to shoot footage from the summer activities in the valley sourrounding the hotel. Thanks to Naomi Jödicke for making this episode happen.
The New Yorker – July 31, 2023 issue: The ‘rich and famous’ above the law, a small-town newspaper lands ‘Big Stories’, how Larry Gagosian reshaped the art world, and more…
With a common touch that appeals to juries and a client list that includes Elon Musk, Jay-Z, and Megan Thee Stallion, he’s on a winning streak that makes his rivals seethe.
In the summer of 2018, four years before he bought Twitter, the entrepreneur Elon Musk was facing legal consequences for two of his more reckless forays on the social-media platform. A boys’ soccer team in Thailand had been trapped in a flooded cave for more than two weeks, and a caver involved in the rescue said on CNN that a bespoke submarine Musk had sent to save the children was a “PR stunt.” Infuriated, Musk told his twenty-two million Twitter followers, without basis in fact, that the caver, Vernon Unsworth, was a “pedo guy.” The tweet went viral, and Unsworth’s attorney threatened to sue Musk for defamation.
It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion, looking pretty relaxed for a man who, the next day, would host a party for a hundred and forty people. A pair of French bulldogs, Baby and Humphrey, waddled about, and Gagosian’s butler, Eddie, a slim man with a ponytail and an air of informal professionalism, handed him a sparkling water.
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