Today, I’m meeting with the artist Michele Oka Doner in her 5,000 square foot loft, a former button factory, in downtown Manhattan. She leads me through a labyrinth of fossils, beehives, nests, shells, roots, and other organic matter that serves as both her medium and her inspiration. Occasionally, she pauses to recite a poem from memory.
“If I hadn’t been a fashion designer, I would have become an architect.” – Calvin Klein
Alastair Gordon talks to legendary fashion designer Calvin Klein about creating a Hamptons beach house for himself. Calvin describes the long and painstaking process of collaboration he went through to create his own minimalist sanctuary on a sweeping ocean-front property in Southampton, NY. In the process, he treated every surface and material with the same intense attention to detail he used in his collections. As Calvin says in the podcast, “If I hadn’t been a fashion designer, I would have become an architect.”
Host: Alastair Gordon / Guest: Calvin Klein / Additional Guests: Edwina Von Gal (landscape designer), Fred Stelle (architect), Michael Lomont (architect)
“I’ll just step over to Green Gables after tea and find out from Marilla where he’s gone and why,” the worthy woman finally concluded. “He doesn’t generally go to town this time of year and he never visits; if he’d run out of turnip seed he wouldn’t dress up and take the buggy to go for more; he wasn’t driving fast enough to be going for a doctor. Yet something must have happened since last night to start him off. I’m clean puzzled, that’s what, and I won’t know a minute’s peace of mind or conscience until I know what has taken Matthew Cuthbert out of Avonlea today.”
POETICS OF PLACE 