Category: architecture

Gotta admit, 2025 was that kind of year, and I lost track of Christopher Wool’s See Stop Run exhibition, which I’d assumed ended in a tasty book. Turns out it up and moved to Marfa, the artist’s own [other] home. It’s installed for two whole years in two large gallery spaces, right in town, on Highland Avenue.

Mary Etherington’s review for Glasstire is a useful compare & contrast. One big specific difference may be due to ceiling height. Wool’s first foray into mosiac is shown in 16.5 x 11-ft portrait mode in Texas, while it was shown in 11×16.5 landscape in New York. Considering the 4x larger mosaic Wool made for Hudson Yards is also horizontal, the change doesn’t feel like a corrective as much as a variation.

The bigger difference is one Etherington works around to: the change in context. At first it seems obvious that means the difference between NYC’s sprawling, gutted skyscraper floor, and the adapted storefront white cubes in Marfa. And that compact blankness certainly intensifies the works’ relationships with each other vs the space.

Instead/also, it is Marfa and West Texas itself that makes the difference. I lol’d when Etherington literally called out Wool—again, a fairly longtime Marfa resident—for Marfa sculptural appropriation:

Pretty much everyone in Marfa has a collection of found wire. A visitor to Marfa picked up some cheese at the store and a little wire on the street, then posted it on social media. In New York, the smaller gauge wire sculptures felt out of place, too familiar. My dismissiveness was born of what felt like appropriation of the essence of Marfa. Don’t @ me.

What makes it click, though, is Wool’s installation of gigantized, wire-inspired sculptures in three scattered sites around town. So he’s not just taking from the Marfa found wire culture; he’s also giving back.

Disruption of Time & Place in the Classroom [glasstire]
See Stop Run still running [seestoprun]
Previously, related: Adam & Eve & Charles & Christopher

Swiss Cheese Day was yesterday, and Peter Huestis celebrated on Bluesky by posting about the swiss cheese freight elevator doors Roy Lichtenstein painted in his 29th St. loft in 1984. The loft was sold, probably in the 90s, and the buyer, unsurprisingly, wanted to keep the doors, and so they were entered into Lichtenstein’s catalogue raisonné. The most important part to me, though, was the security bar, painted to match, which did not get a CR entry separate from the doors. If that was all a trip into the Lichtenstein Foundation website yielded, it would have been enough.

But no. There is another. And another. And another. Lichtenstein made THREE more sets of Swiss cheese doors. They’re dated to 1993, fabricated in 1993-97 [by Jack Brogan, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell’s guy], and only installed, posthumously, in 1998. They were mirror finish bronze, and they were made for two entrances and an elevator in the atrocious house Hugh Newell Jacobsen built in Bel Air for Betsy and Bud Knapp, one-time owners of Architectural Digest and Bon Appetit.

After another artist praised them, I had to reconsider the bronze doors, and I found an explanation that lets me agree: Lichtenstein created these doors so that every time the Knapps entered their 15,000 square-foot home made of fifteen 1,000-square foot post-modern pavilions, they were faced with their own reflections, and compelled to remember that they were people who commissioned three sets of mirror-finish bronze cartoon Swiss cheese doors.

The Knapps could only endure the self-scrutiny for so long. They put the house on the market in 2011 for $24 million. Nobu bought it in 2013 for $15m, said not my existential terror, and got rid of the doors.

At least until then they were contained. They now roam the earth who knows where, just waiting to strike again. The Knapps’ Jasper Johns, meanwhile, has, after a couple of stops, been safely ensconced in Larry Gagosian’s place since at least 2021, when it was loaned to the Philadelphia Museum’s half of the retrospective.

It was nice to start seeing emails from Patrick Parrish in my inbox again, but it was not until he posted his speedrun of the recent design auctions in NYC that I realized how much I’d missed his design blog, MONDOBLOGO, in my online life.

Here is Parrish’s photo of Marcel Breuer’s lights reflected across a Ron Arad chair, one of two that didn’t sell at Sotheby’s. He also has photos of a private dinner being set up in the gallery, which used to be the Whitney Museum of American Art, then the Met, then the Frick.

On the French Rivierea there’s a villa one hilltop over from Éze that has always blown my mind. In a place where everyone else’s houses and villas are built cheek-to-jowl, the Château Balsan sits on its own 70 hectare (172 acre) hill that drops to the sea (or to the railroad track, at least). It was built in 1920 by Consuelo Vanderbilt and her French second husband Jacques Balsan (thus the name, though they called it Lou Seuil), in collaboration with the landscape architect of Blenheim Palace (she’d been traded to the Duke of Marlborough by her mother).

In all the years I’d known about the house, I’d known about the Vanderbilt connection, but not anything of its current/latest owner. Until yesterday. Vanderbilt died in 1964, and by 1969, it was owned by France’s leading mall developer, Robert Zellinger [de] Balkany. That’s when married his second wife there, Princesse Marie-Gabrielle de Savoie, the daughter of the last king of Italy. Judith Benhamou reports that it was around this time he added the “de” to his name, and insisted on being addressed as Barone, though I don’t think that’s how defunct Italian titles work.

Anyway, he filled Château Balsan and his multiple other houses with extravagant furniture and objets, long after he and the Princesse divorced in 1990. This buck wild vermeil candelabrum, for example, he bought at Christie’s in 2004.

It was made for the Duke of York, King George III’s second son, in 1824, and depicts Hercules slaying the Hydra; each of its nine heads holds a candle. It stands 35 inches high, and is made from 35 kg of silver. It’s a baroque pastiche composition by Edward Farrell, the master silversmith at Kensington Lewis, who fed the Duke’s massive silver habit. Relatedly, it was first sold after the Duke’s death in 1827, along with all his silver, to settle his massive debts. Most of the stuff, though, including this candelabrum, ended up selling for less than a quarter of what it originally cost, which, combined with the death of his main client, kind of crashed Kensington Lewis’s retail business.

Anyway, ZdeB must have bought it after it failed to sell in 2004, because it is not listed. He died in 2015, and the candelabrum was the top lot in a 2017 700-lot sale of stuff from Paris and Éze, the fourth time it came up for sale at Christie’s. Not a lot of bangers; only 20 lots sold for more than GBP 100,000, but he made it up in volume, I guess.

It seems like the house remains in the family, though if it sold, it’d probably be the most expensive house in the world, and would sell to someone far worse than a mall developer.