We were at Design Miami, the annual show of design art, or limited-edition furniture and accessories, that ended on Sunday.
At the moment, it has a show of design work -- lamps, chairs, carpets -- by Brooklyn artists, which is fun, though it's when you start to move farther into the borough that things get interesting.
I first became aware of his work in 1987, in connection with a show of designs for low-cost housing organized by the Architectural League.
Its latest effort is a show of designs for the New Acropolis Museum, a $100 million project scheduled for completion in 2004, in time for the Olympics in Athens.
Inside, the Queen, 85, in cerise cashmere, and the 30-year-old duchess, in a teal LK Bennett suit, watched a fashion show of designs by graduates.
The inventions she had on display at the show of designs for working life were typical of her rough-textured, conceptually clever style: a fur-covered floor cushion implanted with a laptop, a computer keyboard with a built-in snack bowl and a workaholics' bed with his and her computers sunk into the mattress.
The style emerged from the legendary Exposition Internationale des Art Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925 – a grand showing of design and decoration, from furniture and accessories to interiors and architecture, mapped out in acres of precious veneers, marble and onyx, stainless steel and aluminium, all much influenced by Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian archaeology.
But do they show evidence of design?
Douglas Burton, one of the owners of Apartment Zero, a store in Washington, made a pass through Eindhoven for the store's show of Dutch design last year.
The whole arc of American building has come to this: selfish formalism born from the need to claim space in the fashion show of the design press.
The United States had to take a pass when offered a choice exhibition space at the great Paris show of modern design in 1925, the "Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes".
