“We are creating stages for people to perform on in some way, but it’s a very scripted and considered display,” he said. “Cooking could be a display, for example, with your partner watching you from the bedroom.”
He talked about tuning the privacy of each room, using shades or scrims to have larger or smaller openings, as you would change the aperture of a camera. “So if you don’t want your partner to see you shaving your legs in the shower,” he said, “you can pull the shade.”
Like the clothes Marc Jacobs designed for his own label and for Vuitton this fall ”” skirts bunched into the waistbands of pantyhose at the back, see-through dresses with bras and panties sewn onto them ”” Graft’s peekaboo interiors are a sly commentary on a culture that continues to find new ways to display ever more intimate, and mundane, details of domestic life. In a YouTube world, one’s home is no longer one’s private retreat: it’s just a container for the webcam.
In New York City, where the streetscape is being systematically remade by glassy towers like the W, which have been spreading like kudzu in the seven years since the first two terrarium-like Richard Meier buildings went up on the West Side Highway, the lives of the inhabitants are increasingly on exhibit, like the performance art wherein the artists “live” in a gallery for 24 hours and you get to watch them napping or brushing their teeth.
It’s not always a pretty picture.
In September, Curbed, the feisty New York City real estate blog, posted a photograph of a newly completed, glass-walled condo building on East 13th Street. You could see right into the apartments, which looked most like messy dorm rooms. It was a grubby retort to the marketing hoo-ha that surrounds these now ubiquitous buildings and trumpets a sleekly attractive lifestyle accessorized by midcentury modern furniture and designer clothing. There were unmade beds jammed right up against the glass, mangled paper Venetian shades, a towel over a chair.
Accompanying the photo was a report of a sighting of a guy in boxer shorts doing push-ups. “Doesn’t the first condo association meeting need to include a window coverings workshop?” the post wondered plaintively.
Read it all and please take the time to look at the picture of the building.
TMI
Weren’t we all aware already that New Yorkers will believe absolutely anything? Now when the current diva at the Metropolitan Opera passes by practicing for tonight’s rehearsal and hits that high E-flat …
How awful. We have become so self-absorbed that we think everyone wants to look a us.
This is achitectural FAcebook, what narcissim and exhibitionism look like in buildings designed for people who were taught that each of them is unique and precious and can do anything if only they put their minds to it. Tastelessness and vulgarity as Art Nouveau, the television screen built into a building that is an art museum for the utterly self absorbed.
LM