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Wallpaper* August 2006 Digest

July 26, 2006 at 9:55 AM | 0 Comments

The cover of Wallpaper's annual Design Directory is a bit of a mess: one or another version of pop art meets some kind of bad "cyber" art circa 1996. What's the aim here?

Happily, the cover doesn't direct the book. Possibly the most surprising item is Eva Hagberg's on the modernist gems strewn around Columbus, Indiana. Columbus, it turns out, can claim amazing buildings designed by the Saarinens, Deborah Berke, and I.M. Pei, among others.

Yet possibly even more surprising than an ode to a town in Indiana is Warren Singh Bartlett's "Trip" feature on Riyadh and Jeddah, and not only because tourism to Saudi Arabia is, as yet, close to nonexistent for non-Muslims. The feature functions more as a sociology of contemporary Saudi Arabia than as a travel primer. We learn, for example, that Bluetooth is a key flirting technology, which makes the Kingdom seem considerably less exotic to anyone who's spent time watching television advertisements in, say, Germany.

Also in the August issue: some gorgeous California houses by Ray Kappe, Neon phones designed by Naoto Fukasawa, South American fashion designers, a tribute to barely trafficked Gander International Airport, and a dossier on the biggest names in Italian design.