When I first saw this picture of Louis Vuitton's flagship store in Manhattan I thought it was AI. That is where we are right now. When something looks wild, I just automatically assume it's fake. But alas, it's not fake. Louis Vuitton is renovating their flagship store at the corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue and so, naturally, they decided to completely cover it with luggage facade wraps.

These wraps make the entire building look like six grey trunks stacked on top of each other and are a nod to a 19th century luggage design from the company. They even used real metal details throughout. Apparently the heaviest luggage handle weighs something like 5,000 pounds.

This is wild and remarkable in so many ways. The scale of it is remarkable. This is a 15 storey building concealed entirely by luggage trunks. It also speaks to the scale and dominance of New York as a city. Not every city can absorb a pile of giant luggage trunks and not bat an eye. But in New York, it's just another noteworthy thing within its relentless urban grid.

I also can't help but think of the work of architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In 1972, they published a book called Learning from Las Vegas. And in it, they defined two types of contrasting buildings: decorated sheds and ducks. Decorated sheds are, as the name suggests, nondescript buildings. Think big box stores. These buildings get their specificity from signage and other ornament because, without this, they'd just be nondescript sheds.

Duck buildings are, on the other hand, buildings that take on a symbolic form. In other words, their shape and construction tell you what they're all about. The term duck comes from an actual building that looks like a duck, namely The Big Duck on Long Island. This is a building that was built in the 1930s to help promote the owner's duck farming business and is now on the US National Register of Historic Places.

The Big Duck is and was an actual building, whereas Louis Vuitton's trunks are just temporary construction wrap. So they're not exactly the same thing. Still, the similarities are there. Both were erected to promote their respectiveness businesses. And both tell you, through their form, what's meant to happen inside. So in this sense, Louis Vuitton has just created its own Big Duck.

Photo by Brad Dickson via Dezeen

Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse in Marseille is, as I have mentioned before, one of the most important and influential multi-family buildings of the 20th century. As an architecture student, this is one of those buildings that you get indoctrinated with, so I was excited to visit it for the first time with Neat B in 2022 on what was our second visit to Marseille. We're big fans of the city. Here is the post I wrote following that visit.

Today, let's look at one of the actual suites, which is currently listed for sale through Architecture de Collection. But first, a reminder: The complex was originally constructed between 1948-1952 and was meant to serve as a new housing model for post-war France. In 2016, the building was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, today, you'll sometimes find things like a Chanel fashion show taking place on its rooftop.

The suite that is for sale is Type E, which is about 100 m2. It has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. A balcony. And a view of the Mediterranean. It is listed for 650 000 €, which works out 6,500 € per square meter. For Toronto readers, this is right now the equivalent of C$965,485 or about C$897 per square foot. The monthly copropriété charge is about 300 € and the annual property taxes are about 2000 €.

Does this seem reasonable or expensive to you?

For more info, click here.

Photo by Louis Charron on Unsplash

This is a longstanding joke / criticism among nerds:

Namely, it is the fact that the charging port for Apple's Magic Mouse is on its bottom, meaning, when it's being charged, you can't use it. This would be annoying if you ignored the low battery warnings and let it die in the middle of working on something critically important. And so lots of people think it's a ridiculous design. But is it? Here's an excerpt from a recent post by John Gruber of Daring Fireball:

Yes, with the charging port on the mouse’s belly, you cannot use it while it charges. There are obvious downsides to that. But those positing the Magic Mouse as absurd act as though Apple doesn’t know this. Of course Apple knows this. Apple obviously just sees this as a trade-off worth making. Apple wants the mouse to be visually symmetric, and they want the top surface to slope all the way down to the desk or table top it rests upon. You can’t achieve that with an exposed port.

This is an argument that feels right. Apple is not the kind of company that makes arbitrary design decisions. And the deliberate decision they have made is that a more perfect design is more important than solving for the few instances where a user was negligent and forgot to charge their mouse. Gruber goes on to say, the "charging port placement is an opinionated design, not an absurd design."

But this then raises another question: Is opinionated design the right approach?

For well over a century, one of the maxims of good design has been that form should follow function. In other words, the shape and design of an object should relate to its intended use. And so, in this instance, if "function" involves using the mouse while it's being charged then maybe, by this criteria, it isn't a good design. Then again, it is a wireless mouse. Maybe Apple doesn't want you to use it while it's charging.

Let's consider another design object that you touch with your hand: Walter Gropius' famous door handle.

Originally designed in 1922, the simple design consisted of a square bar and a cylinder. And its job was to communicate to you that, in order to use it, you should grab the cylindrical part, and not anywhere else. So on this level, the design was responding to its intended use, to our hands. Grab here. But is this truly an example of form following function? It's debatable.

Architect and professor Witold Rybczynski, who I would say generally isn't a fan of modernism, has argued that it's not. His critique of the overall Bauhaus movement -- of which Gropius was the founder -- was that it was actually a design school dedicated to "form follows predetermined aesthetics rather than form follows function."

In some ways, he's right. You can tell when something came out of the Bauhaus, just as you can tell when something is from Apple. There's a particular aesthetic and stubbornness to maintaining it. That's why the Magic Mouse can't be charged while in use and why Apple, equally famously, clung to the simplicity of a single-button mouse. Two just didn't look as nice.

But I see this as an honorable quality. Having an opinion is better than not having one. And there are lots of objects out there without one.