Connect design with travel and what do you get?
That's the question
we're addressing in this issue of Culture+Travel. Of all the many ways
to answer it, the one that comes to mind first is the
one we concentrate on the least. Though the concrete aspects of travel—designed things like hotels, luggage, planes, buildings—are obsessions around here, it's more that they've been woven into every story we've covered than that they've been the subjects of the stories themselves. (Though our Compass sections are about nothing but concrete reality, in the form of the very latest hotels, restaurants, galleries, and, particularly in this issue, shops.) What we're celebrating here most of all is vision, because that's what underlies all design, and shapes every place. We posit New York as a nexus for world design, charging three of its most influential curators (of shops) to name their choices for whom to watch next. Not a single one actually hails from New York—call it the melting pot as design crucible. We visit Scandinavia, whose two new opera houses join a world-beating pack of several classical music arenas. Of the new ones, Oslo's especially breaks new ground—all audiences have walk-on roles here, since the architect created a strollable roofscape. Also, we ponder the repercussions of this century's most influential map, the interactive astral travel tool that is Google Earth; we take a novelist's tour of a remixed global skyline painted onto an airport wall; and we view the worldwide phenomenon that makes exciting performance art out of that deadly ordeal, the architecture lecture. The tales here won’t bore you either. Witness the two French design dynasties from opposite poles of the design continuum, art and commerce. The story of Victor Vasarely and his Provençal foundation features waxing and waning fortunes, sons fighting fathers, mystical geometry, and an evil stepmother—and you can visit! Meanwhile, the not—remotely dysfunctional Hermès clan is evolving. Its new generation has taken that totem of Parisian chic, the iconic, costly Hermès silk scarf, and turned it into art by printing Josef Albers's works on it. Though can a painting reproduced on a luxury accessory really be art? If the disparate concepts of travel and design can intersect in so many ways, then sure, why not?
—Kate Sekules
The "Fall 2008 Editor's Letter" originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Culture+Travel's Fall 2008 Table of Contents.
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