Covenger & Kester

Ghost Architecture: The John Fava House by Carter Sparks...

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:30:16 -0400

Ghost Architecture: The John Fava House by Carter Sparks (1956)

Located on a one acre lot just off of Winding Way, the Fava House is in serious disrepair. One of Sparks’ earliest known works, it shows a sometimes reckless creative ambition that many of his later works do not. FLW’s influence hovers like a ghost in the spaces, angles and flow. It’s nice to see that the kitchen showed some respect for the homeowners, affording them a open view and soaring 15’ panes of glass above the sink. You could be washing dishes, or you could be in church.

John and Joan Fava were avid painters, writers and talented musicians who had a fondness for stories of the Wild West. Mrs. Fava is the daughter of Carmel area painter, Margaret Seagraves. A small cloisonné pin of a gold saddle and lasso is embedded into the shard glass fireplace surround.

The Favas lived in the house for nearly 60 years until they could no longer take care of it. It was sold to a party with a promise to fix the place up, but they tore off the delapidated carport and sun deck without doing any other repairs. Perhaps the task was too great, but they walked away. The house fell into Foreclosure and sold at auction in March 2012.

Reminds me a little of R.M. Schindler’s Van Dekker House—both now and then.

Also, that bridge!

See what remains of the Fava House here.

Greta Grossman: A Car and Some Shorts at R Gallery in TriBeCa....

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:52:31 -0400

Greta Grossman: A Car and Some Shorts at R Gallery in TriBeCa. Go!

I’ve spent the past few months flying back and forth...

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:22:00 -0400

I’ve spent the past few months flying back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, and every time I’ve landed at LAX I’ve had to make my escape through some long, windowless tunnel. The only redeeming aspect of these transitional spaces has been the colorful tile mosaics running along one wall, from one end to the other.

At first I didn’t really notice them. Then, at some point, I started to look forward to them. But it wasn’t until now that I actually bothered to find out who put them there.

Turns out it was an L.A. designer named Charles Kratka, who studied with Alvin Lustig, worked for Charles and Ray Eames, and had a rewarding career of his own.

The son of a printer, Kratka was born Oct. 12, 1922, in Pasadena and grew up in Eagle Rock.

After attending UCLA, he enrolled at the Art Center College of Design and later taught at the school. During World War II he served as a pilot in the Navy.

From 1947 to 1953, Kratka worked as a graphic designer for architect and designer Charles Eames. Kratka left to teach before going into interior design and planning.

Kratka also oversaw the design of the original interiors for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when it opened in 1965.

Two years later he opened his own interior design firm in West Hollywood.

As for the mosaics themselves…

Completed in 1961, the mosaics were designed to make the approximately 300-foot tunnels seem shorter, said Ethel Pattison, the airport’s historian.

“He was a grand artist, way ahead of his time,” Pattison said. “His approach to the walls was novel and gave passengers something of interest to look at.”

Kratka told his daughter that the brightly colored geometric panels in the seven tunnels were designed to represent the changing seasons.

School students on field trips heard another story. Tour guides compared a walk alongside the mosaic to traveling across the U.S., which reflected Kratka’s original intent, said Ann Proctor, director of volunteers at the Flight Path Learning Center-Museum at LAX.

The blue tiles at the entrance represent the ocean and are followed by browns, yellows and oranges for the geography of the heartland, according to the museum.

“There was one line of red tile in the middle, and we’d say, ‘We’re halfway across now, in the Midwest,’” Proctor said. “The blue on the other end, that was the Atlantic Ocean.”

Photos via Kid Made Modern.

More Lost Lustig: Menasco Manufacturing Company’s 1946...

Fri, 10 May 2013 14:14:00 -0400

More Lost Lustig: Menasco Manufacturing Company’s 1946 Annual Report.

Seeking further information on Alvin Lustig’s Los Angeles design work, I recently got in touch with a Southern California graphic designer named Ken Parkhurst. Parkhurst told me that he’d worked for Lustig in the late 1940s and recounted how he’d gotten the job.

I’d been a student at Los Angeles City College during World War II. Just before or after the war ended, Alvin called the school and talked to the teacher who recommended me. Alvin had also gone to City College and studied under Harry Koblick.

There was a little company called Menasco Manufacturing. It was originally a builder of racing airplanes. Al Menasco had started it; later they got into landing gear. Apparently Alvin knew the man who had become CEO of Menasco after Al—a PR guy who had taken over. So Alvin put me into Menasco Manufacturing Company as the in-house designer. I was a kid at that point. Twenty years old.

But Alvin was a young man also. He designed the annual report and the trademark, and then I followed through and produced the work. After that Alvin opened small office in Beverly Hills, California and hired me as his assistant. I was the first assistant he had. This was in 1946.

After I got off the phone with Ken—he had a lot to say about Lustig, more of which later—I Googled “Menasco Annual Report 1946.” There was only one relevant result: a personal blog post by Katherine Pandora, an associate professor of science history at the University of Oklahoma.

Turns out Katherine’s grandfather once worked at Menasco—and was featured in the 1946 report:

Robert B. Barnes [was] an antsy high school dropout from small-town Ohio who was gifted at working with machines (he was a race car driver in the 1920s). He ended up in LA, becoming an employee at Menasco in Burbank in 1940. That’s a picture of him from Menasco’s annual report in 1946, which featured his story of rising from a lathe operator (.95/hr pre-war) to a position as an “experimental machinist” (1.90/hr), and about how he had been rewarded by “a committee made up of his fellow workers and management representatives” for a “suggestion he submitted for improving the handling of one of the parts of a landing gear.”

It was Menasco, in fact, that would later be the company that designed the landing gear that made it possible for the Shuttle to touch down on the ground upon re-entry. A small part of my grandfather’s mind and hands had gone into the eventual developments that allowed each Shuttle journey to regain physical contact with home.

Katherine and I went on to exchange a few emails, the end result of which is pictured above. Here for the first time are selected images from Lustig’s lost Menasco report, graciously scanned, uploaded, and sent to Covenger & Kester by Prof. Pandora herself.

Writes Ken Parkhurst:

As I remember, Lustig came up with the lowercase Futura bold “m” as a logotype for Menasco, and did layouts for, I think, just about all spreads. I produced camera ready art for the whole thing, following Alvin’s layouts and verbal instructions. I remember his little symbolic men design, for which I carefully drew finished art.

I think Alvin’s innovations—the small month-by-month charts atop each page and the clean type format—while appearing prosaic now were actually very fresh at that time, at least by West Coast standards.

We were called commercial artists out here. The phrase “graphic designer” wasn’t heard.

I for one think it’s a lovely bit of commercial art.

Mustang on the Sunset Strip.

Thu, 09 May 2013 23:45:00 -0400

Mustang on the Sunset Strip.

Partying at the Gotham Book Mart: This photograph, taken on 9...

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:11:17 -0400

Partying at the Gotham Book Mart:

This photograph, taken on 9 November 1948, by Life Magazine photographer Lisa Larsen, captured some of the assembled guests at possibly the most famous literary party in American history.

The scene was the Gotham Book Mart — New York City’s most famous bookstore. The occasion was to welcome the poets, Sir S.W. Osbert Sitwell and his sister, Dame Edith Sitwell, to the United States to do a series of readings.

Seen in this image are, front row: William Rose Benet, Charles Ford, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell; Middle row: Stephen Spender, Sir Osbert and Dame Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop; Back row: Marya Zaturenska, Horace Gregory, Tennessee Williams, Richard Eberhart, Gore Vidal, Jose Garcia Via, and W. H. Auden.

One of the guests, the noted poet Randall Jarrell, preserved this copy of the print among his papers now in the Stuart Wright Collection. On the verso Jarrell commented: “I thought you’d want this for the eyebrows. Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop are just behind me, Auden on the ladder, Spender sitting table to far left. What could have possessed me to cut off so much of the moustache? That isn’t Medusa in middle with snakes, but that awful creature Edith Sitwell.”

N1 rug by Michael Boyd. Designed for Boyd’s restoration of...

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:53:00 -0400

N1 rug by Michael Boyd. Designed for Boyd’s restoration of the Wirin House (Richard Neutra, 1949). Pictured below in its natural habitat.

The House of Jean Prouvé. Via ES

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:28:00 -0400

The House of Jean Prouvé.

Via ES

In 1952, Alvin Lustig designed the interior of an Upper East...

Thu, 02 May 2013 11:00:00 -0400

In 1952, Alvin Lustig designed the interior of an Upper East Side apartment—including most of the furniture—for William Segal, the brilliant, polymathic, self-taught artist and publisher of Gentry, Men’s Reporter, and American Fabrics magazines. Lustig had previously designed Segal’s offices and served as art director of at least one of his publications, and the two men were close.

Segal moved out several years later and eventually passed away. But today the apartment remains largely intact a few blocks east of its original address, thanks to his second wife, the French artist Marielle Bancou-Segal, 92, who hasn’t changed a thing. The light fixtures, the sofas, the storage units, the shelves, the desk, the headboard, even the rugs—all of them are one-of-a-kind Lustig designs.

Preserved in amber—not as a museum, but as a home.

“It’s interesting,” she told me. “[This place] is neither modern nor old. It is something very pleasant to live with. My husband was an artist. I am an artist. You can’t but keep something like this.”

It was a honor to visit with Ms. Bancou-Segal this morning. More to come…

Cranbrook/Case Study/a good pipe. Rapson and Eames.

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:17:00 -0400

Cranbrook/Case Study/a good pipe. Rapson and Eames.

“I’m in Love (Demo),” John Lennon (1963) Two...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:05:56 -0400

“I’m in Love (Demo),” John Lennon (1963)

Two questions:

1) How did I not know about this before? Most of the Lennon-McCartney cast-offs are second rate. “I’m in Love” is not. It’s been stuck in my head for three days.

2) Why did Lennon give it to The Fourmost? Their Merseybeat version is respectable but it’s clear from the demo that it was intended as a Shirelles/Arthur Alexander/R&B thing. It would have sounded great on With the Beatles.

Chelsea.

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:59:50 -0400

Chelsea.

While digging through the Alvin Lustig files in the Archives of...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:06:00 -0400

While digging through the Alvin Lustig files in the Archives of American Art last month, I found a typewritten list of Lustig’s work with additions in his wife Elaine’s hand: a “Greatest Hits” of sorts that Lustig was putting together as part of a book proposal shortly before he died in 1955.

The works were divided up by category: Book Covers, Magazine Covers, Advertisements, Architectural Lettering, Miscellaneous, and so on. Most of the references would be familiar to any fan of Lustig’s design. But under Architecture and Interiors was a name I’d never seen linked to Lustig’s:

“Loft Candy”

A quick Google search led me to Loft, Inc.: “the largest maker and seller of candy in the world in the second decade of the 20th century.”

A subsequent image search led me to Flickr—and the Lustig-like postcard you see above.

Could Loft’s Candy Garden of Union, N.J. be a lost Alvin Lustig design?

Armin Richter Interiors, La Jolla, CA. Not a bad selection.

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:10:00 -0400

Armin Richter Interiors, La Jolla, CA. Not a bad selection.

This is the card that launched Alvin Lustig’s career as a...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:36:10 -0400

This is the card that launched Alvin Lustig’s career as a book-jacket designer.

In 1934, Lustig, then 19, “enrolled in the Art Center School,” writes Steven Heller, “because it had the best technical faculty on the West Coast. Wanderlust overtook him, however, and in 1935 he did a three-month stint at Taliesin East.”

Heller continues:

Though disappointed by the overall experience, [Lustig] was sufficiently impressed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s colored-pencil sketches for stained glass windows, which had a typographic feeling, to begin his own typographic experimentation. Back in L.A., Lustig happened into a bookshop designed by [Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright,] and owned by Jacob Zeitlin, to whom he showed his portfolio. Impressed with Lustig’s novel illustrative-type treatments, Zeitlin commissioned him to do a Christmas card that was printed by Ward Ritchie, a fine-book printer and publisher. Ritchie, in turn, was excited by Lustig’s typographic experimentation and encouraged him to design books.”

Lustig’s work for Ward Ritchie—”novel experimental ‘typecase pages,’ using geometrical printer’s ornaments, rules, and furniture as abstract illustrations, notably for Ward Ritchie’s Ghost in the Underblows by Alfred A. Fisher and Robinson Jeffers by William van Wyck”—soon made him a sought-after book designer, and in 1940

Zeitlin introduced Lustig to James Laughlin, legendary publisher of New Directions, who commissioned him to design book jackets. The first one he did, for Henry Miller’s Wisdom of the Heart, was in his typecase style, but he soon began experimenting with photomontage and abstract imagery on jackets that later became classics.

Moral of the story: You never know where good work will lead.

For more rare Lustig ephemera, check out the incredible PROJECTOBJECT shop. The beyond-scarce Zeitlin card pictured above currently resides in the private collection of PROJECTOBJECT proprietor Aaron Cohen, who graciously agreed to share these images with Covenger & Kester. Thanks, Aaron!

Our new house in Los Angeles. Can’t wait to get...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:39:58 -0400

Our new house in Los Angeles. Can’t wait to get started.

More to come…

Ghost architecture: The Daugherty House by R.M. Schindler...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:00:11 -0400

Ghost architecture: The Daugherty House by R.M. Schindler (1946)

“For all its ranch air, this is no unsophisticated adobe,” wrote Esther McCoy in the Los Angeles Times’ Home magazine in 1950. “It makes fullest use of urban planning and the most modern materials.”

The Daugherty house used to be located on Louise Avenue in Encino, CA. Not anymore, as far as I can tell.

The Breeders cover “So Sad About Us” on Letterman...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:03:36 -0400

The Breeders cover “So Sad About Us” on Letterman (1992)

The Breeders, kids!

1stDibs living room wish list. From top: Knoll, Aalto,...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:24:00 -0400

1stDibs living room wish list. From top: Knoll, Aalto, Måås-Fjetterström, McCobb, Aubock.

The French do Los Angeles as only the French can do...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:34:13 -0400

The French do Los Angeles as only the French can do (1969):

Inhabited by individuals who live together but never meet, a city wedged between the desert and the ocean, constantly under threat, its heaving heart torn, dislodged, deprived of a centre…