How do you dress a Duck? That problem has vexed officials at the University of Oregon for years. Their team, with its less-than-combative name, has experimented with all sorts of colors and accoutrements. This year, they decided to abandon the diamond plate steel design on the shoulders ("don't tread on me?") in favor of wings on a forest green outfit reminiscent more of sylvan elves than of brute bruisers. But never mind: if the combination doesn't quite fly, at least it doesn't quack.
Above: the new University of Oregon football uniform.
You would think that college football uniforms would be a great opportunity for each school to show off its character, roots and aspirations. Alas, most are designed by an anonymous workshop, as often as not owned by Nike. Only certain local traditions survive, and usually only on helmets: lighting bolts enliven the heads of the Air Force cadets, yellow wings those of the Michigan Wolverines (who knew those semi-mythical creatures could fly?). Best of all, Notre Dame includes real gold in its head ware, making the Fighting Irish sparkle like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
From the head down, though, you usually get a mishmash of colors, partly because there are different outfits for home and on the road, and for special occasions. On the road, you are supposed to wear white, though the NCAA bent the rules this year by letting UCLA and USC play each other in full Technicolor—I especially like the Trojans' yellow pants with red stripes and red jerseys with yellow accents. Clemson keeps it all orange, while Syracuse's black shirts and orange pants are pretty striking. Old favorites like Ohio State continue to be a sartorial embarrassment (this, on top of their disappointing record this year) in white, red and black combinations.
From left: the Ohio State football uniform; the new University of Cincinnati football uniform.
As a Cincinnatian I particularly like the new accent on the University of Cincinnati Bearcats' uniform. Their black pants now sprout a swerving stripe that extends up to the white jersey and all the way to the shoulder. It unifies the uniform and exudes speed and strength. And clearly, it's invigorated both the 10-0 team and its more design-conscious fans.
Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back on Thursday for his next post.
Even the most avant-garde architecture can be branded. Proof: one
corner of a new shopping mall in Las Vegas, designed by Daniel
Libeskind, the architect who traded in his mystical stance as a guru of
deconstruction to obtain the Ground Zero commission. Part of the $11
billion City Center development opening next month, the half-million
square foot mall—called Crystals in reference to its design—is a
collection of metal-clad shards gesturing beyond the Strip to Nevada’s
craggy peaks. One of those sharp shapes houses a new Louis Vuitton
store. Rather than covering their establishment with the familiar “epi”
checkerboard pattern of brown and yellow, Vuitton has instead merely
appropriated the metal skin, covering it with a sea of “LV” monograms.
Vuitton has a history of working with the avant-garde. Most recently, it
let the Japanese artist Murakami develop their brand into a fairy tale
world inhabited by wide-eyed children. The company has also hired good
architects—such as Jun Aoki and Peter Marino—to design their Asian
flagship stores. And they’ve managed to make whatever these designers
come up with feel like a natural extension of their two most famous
trademarks: the “epi” and the “LV” monogram. Here in Las Vegas, they’ve
been remarkably subtle. All they’ve done is take Libeskind’s metal skin
and replace its abstract panels with a sea of “LV” monograms. The skin
is the same, the building is the same, it just becomes a bit of
advertising in three dimensions.
Then again, the whole City Center development is quite a departure from
what was once the Neon Oasis, lending Las Vegas urban sophistication.
The LV monogram on the Libeskind sums it all up: commerce is no longer
crass, architecture can play the tables, and dreams, whether in the form
of handbags, Venetian lagoons in the desert, or jutting architectural
peaks, become weirdly real.
Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back next Thursday for his next post.
Montana, my home state, has gone back to black: After following all the other states in adapting those horrid plates with lurid pictures of landscapes and stupid slogans, Montana now shows just the state's outline around white numerals. And it's beautiful.
American license plates were once both simple and diverse. Every state had its own color combination. I was particularly fond of California's black and yellow. The numbers and letters were always rough, and usually a bit tall and narrow, so all those numbers and letters could fit the standard plate. But then the engineers took over and scientifically proved that certain color combinations were safer. Not to be outdone, the accountants figured out that people would pay extra for eagles soaring, wagon trains rolling, flags waving and broncos bucking. In most states, prisoners still made the plates and one of a handful of companies set up the presses, but the images lost their graphic purity and devolved into bumper stickers.
Montana, the Big Sky State, is now bigger than all that again. Its plate is strong and clear and the same one is offered to all. And its typeface, "Penitentiary Gothic," conveys both the ruggedness of the state's landscape and a slight tinge of outlaw danger. Montana's got it right.
Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky is the architecture world's ultimate insider and tastemaker. He curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back next Thursday for his next post.
Think your coat is a work of art? At the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, you can display your overcoat, raincoat or jacket for all to see in the Merry-Go-Round Coat Rack. Installed there last year by Dutch designer Wieki Somers, it just won this year's Dutch Design Award, and rightly so: rarely has something as mundane as a locker and so functional been such an occasion for competitive display.
To operate this carousel of temporarily discarded clothes, you put your coin in the slot, release a lock and hang your garment on the hook that comes free. Then you pull it up above your head with bungee ropes, secure it and lock the contraption back up, so that nobody can touch that coat of many colors until you have finished with your museum visit. Somers, who first made a splash with a tea pot in the form of a pig skull and accompanying water rat fur cozy, makes the exploded locker look like a cross between a laundry rail and a fair carousel.
There are no plans yet to franchise the exhibitionist storage device, but I'm looking into it for the art museum I run in Cincinnati.
See Aaron's previous posts HERE. And check back next Thursday for Aaron's next post.
Critic,
curator and museum director Aaron Betsky is the architecture world's
ultimate insider and tastemaker. He curated the Venice Architecture
Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute
from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. Look
for him Thursdays on the Editors' Blog, where he'll be design spotting for W.
On a recent trip to Amsterdam I was almost run over. And not by a truck or a Range Rover but by a harried mom on a bike, carrying a load of blond-haired tykes to a soccer game. Her vehicle of choice was the "bakfiets," a new version of the old cargo bike, which has a plywood box mounted on the front, the better to show off your kids. And the Queen of the Road was not alone: the bakfiets has become the family status mobile of the Netherlands.
Not only is it easy on the planet, the bakfiets is big enough to seat up to three kids strapped into their car seats, with room left over for the groceries. No more Mommy Vans or Sprawl Rovers. It helps if your daily rounds are measured in kilometers, not miles, and involve the kind of dedicated bike lanes that cities around the U.S.—in imitation of the Netherlands—are now installing. Talk about mom power.
This model (about $3,000) is available in the States via Dutch Bike Co.
He may be best known for his paintings of Campbell Soup cans and for his statement, "Everybody will be famous for 15 minutes," endlessly quoted in reference to celebrity culture.
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How do you dress a Duck? That problem has vexed officials at the University of Oregon for years. Their team, with its less-than-combative name, has experimented with all sorts of colors and accoutrements. This year, they decided to abandon the diamond plate steel design on the shoulders ("don't tread on me?") in favor of wings on a forest green outfit reminiscent more of sylvan elves than of brute bruisers. But never mind: if the combination doesn't quite fly, at least it doesn't quack. 
Above: the new University of Oregon football uniform.
From left: the Ohio State football uniform; the new University of Cincinnati football uniform.
