Sandwiches

So, sure, "Le Frank" is just the name of the lovely cafe on the ground floor of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, not the name of the building, not the name of the institution. Still, if you happen to arrive between exhibitions, when the galleries are empty of everything but the architecture, you can be forgiven for thinking the whole thing is just a monument to Frank Gehry, that the real show is permanently installed outside on the seemingly endless cascade of decks and gardens under those lively canopies. And a stirring monument it is—more so, we're sure, when the weather is fair and the skies clear, at the end of a long march out from the center of town.

In spite of the title of this post, we're not actually sure Galerie Patrick Seguin wants visitors, at least we're not sure they want visitors like us—browsers, not shoppers. The place is a business after all. But with a focus on Jean Prouvé—his furniture and his demountable houses—and with additional works by the likes of Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret, and Le Corbusier, all in a gallery designed by Jean Nouvel, what are we supposed to do, not visit? Sorry, but clearly they're asking for it (and they did buzz us in when we pressed the call button out front). And while we made a show of flipping through the catalog of their deep collection of vintage Prouvé, and the kind gallery assistant made a show of taking us seriously, we weren't fooling anyone. Still, well worth the trek and the mild embarrassment.

Radical in 1977, radical in 2017: Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's Pompidou Center in Paris, with the inside on the outside, color coded by function and organized around the idea of movement. Of course on the day we visited we couldn't move inside from outside due to a workers' strike (En Grève!) so we have no idea if with the inside on the outside the outside is likewise on the inside. Though if the inside were truly on the outside these exterior photos would show the Cy Twombly exhibition our traveling companion was hoping to see since of course the inside of a museum isn't just filled with the electrical, plumbing and ventilation systems but also the art. False advertising!

More unsuckiness in the form of another fine Larimer mural, this one from Evan Hecox, long a DB favorite, on an otherwise plain block building at 2944-6. Clean and graphic and hella-Colorado-y, a most welcome addition to the hood. And now that we've got this fresh new site which we can actually update (that old piece had been busted on the back end for years), we'll try to keep more current with the radical changes in our regular stomping grounds—some unsucky, some (sadly) super sucky. This piece here is clearly a win for the good.

Anyone looking for an example of how to smartly integrate housing into a landscape, how to enforce sensible design covenants to preserve a bit of integrity without stifling creativity and individual expression, or really, just an example of an ass-kicking walking trail along a jaw-dropping stretch of the northern California coast need look no further than the Sea Ranch. With landscape design and the overall master plan by Lawrence Halprin and an ever changing collection of subtle, handsome houses by a range of architects. Hell, even the graphics are dialed. Smart and handsome, head to toe.

At the end of another summer of growth, for our company and for our beloved shop compound (the buildings and the plantings), we thought it was high time to snap a few pics for posterity. Here, our front entrance, with the powder coated db popping off as proudly as ever against the rusty background of the front wall. More pics, including one or two of the workspace out back, after the jump.

Another beautiful and beautifully odd show from Tom Sachs: Space Program: Europa at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. It's the second one of his Space Program exhibitions we've visited (the first was Mars at the Park Avenue Armory in New York), though this time we missed the demonstration that brings the whole show to life. Still, with the blatant tribute to the beauty of the obviously handmade (and to the act of hand-making) and its joyous serious silliness, even inanimate this work is lively. Above, Bonsai, in bronze, molded from, yes, Q-tips, toothbrushes and tampon tubes. More images from the show after the jump and of course more on the Space Program shows through the links above.

It's like magic, really. Not that we could make an animated gif that shows our Armadillo coffee table transmuting from walnut to oak and back again ad infinitum. Nor that we could make the two versions of the same table in exactly the same way and at exactly the same size. No, what's magic, really, is that the Horsehead Crating interns managed to place the two tables in precisely the same location to enable this low-tech illusion to work so prettily. Sure, the captains of that lunatic crew have done much of this capably in the past but those boys are highly trained monkeys. The interns? Like newborn gorillas, stumbling over their own feet. Coming soon to the shop section of the site and to our new showroom (the oak table that is, not the newborn gorillas).