Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

Spoiler alert! The Japanese maple in Jeff Dauber’s San Francisco backyard is not at the center of a carbon-sucking vortex. Sorry, sci-fi fans, but the Berkeley-based architect Thom Faulders’s perfectly flat deck only looks like its far corner has its own warped gravity. Ever since Francesco Borromini’s Gallery Spada, in Rome, forced perspectives and architectural patronage have gone hand in hand, but whereas the Renaissance architect employed a mathematician to make that arcade seem longer through foreshortening, Faulders used 3-D–modeling software to achieve Deformscape’s dipping effect. Read More …

Design USA: Contemporary Innovation is a retrospective of American invention. The exhibition, which opened last month at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and coincided with the fourth annual National Design Week, marks ten years of the National Design Awards program. Organizers Jeannie Kim, National Design Awards manager, and associate curator Floramae McCarron-Cates, present 78 award winners in the Cooper-Hewitt’s ground-floor galleries. It is a straightforward conceit: Design USA looks backward in order to look forward. Read More …

There are some unexpected pairings at Street, the restaurant recently opened in Los Angeles by the chef Susan Feniger. Take, for example, the menu, which draws on pushcart offerings from around the world: Korean mung-bean pancakes and Thai curries face off but don’t fuse. The least likely union, however, has to be between Feniger, famed as a co-owner of the Border Grill and a co-host of the 1990s Food Network show Too Hot Tamales, and Street’s architect, the coolly cerebral Neil Denari. Read More …

With “McMansions” increasingly giving way to “tiny” houses, the desire to downsize and be more ecologically and economically prudent is a concept many are beginning to embrace. Focusing on dwelling spaces all under 1,000 square feet, TINY HOUSES (Rizzoli, April 2009) aims to challenge readers to take a look at their own homes and consider how much space they actively use.

Ranging from tree houses to floating houses, TINY HOUSES features an international collection of over thirty modular and prefab homes, each one embodying “microgreen living”, defined as the creation of tiny homes where people challenge themselves to live “greener” lives. By using a thoughtful application of green living principles, renewable resources for construction, and clever ingenuity, these homes exemplify sustainable living at its best.

On Feb. 19, President Barack Obama signed an order establishing the White House Office of Urban Affairs. First announced just days after the historic U.S. election last November, the office—which will be headed by Bronx Borough president Adolfo Carrión Jr., who has a master’s in urban planning and spent three years in the New York City Department of City Planning—will serve as a bridge between federal dollars and the programs that affect metropolitan America. Among other pursuits, its mandate covers community development, housing, job creation, manufacturing innovation, sustainable technologies, and infrastructure. Read More …

A loaded paintbrush in hand, the artist Kathryn Pannepacker crouches down and applies a black stroke to a steel panel. It’s a late afternoon in January, and it’s starting to snow. The welcoming glow of the Sunoco mini-mart and the car wash’s green neon signs cut through the gathering dusk. She finishes the touch-up on her Wall of Rugs #2 mural (Jordon now reads Jordan), rights her tall frame and surveys Philadelphia’s Broad and Lehigh Streets. Kitty-corner is the empty Botany 500 building, the apparel company’s brick edifice, a commemorative remnant of a once-booming garment district. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, Philadelphia was famous for its textiles—silk hosiery, men’s suits and wool carpets. Read More …

NATALYA KASHPER sat in her minimalist living room, a light-filled space made rich with rough brick walls, a sculptural masonry fireplace and wooden ceiling joists. She looked out of the arched windows, framed in deep wood casements, and took in the view.

“I remember coming to SoHo with my mom and thinking, ‘This is so beautiful,’ ” said Ms. Kashper, who grew up in California. “SoHo is the epitome of an old American city.” Read More …

Fans of Pin-Up, the gold-covered New York-based publication that mixes architecture and bondage at will, will be pleased to note that it comes out of a long line of magazines, available via the mail but not necessarily naughty. Mimi Zeiger is a self-described “old zinester,” who printed the first issue of her zine about architecture, loudpaper, as a graduate student at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. It was her graduate thesis, and she printed it on paper from de-commissioned maps and put a picture of Elvis on top. More recently, Zeiger added an online component,  her blog; now she is re-visiting zine history with A Few Zines, an exhibition that opens tonight at Columbia’s Studio X.

Upon its publication in 1996, loud paper joined Lackluster, Infiltration, Dodge City Journal, and Monorail as alternatives to trade and academic journals by mixing architecture and pop culture and cultivating a social aspect. To hear Zeiger tell it, publishing architecture zines was part of a vital network of sub-cultures. Zeiger’s was her interest in the Indie music scene: “You couldn’t miss it,” she says, “I was more of arty kid than a punk rock kid. You found your way through sub-cultures.” She compares the types of connections to a Facebook network today, as a community where acquaintances for whom it was relatively easy to reach out. It also brought advertisers together with writers; “Ads were part of the editorial” says Zeiger, describing ads for Dischord Records laid out alongside MIT Press. People have stayed involved, opening magazines of significant distribution like Dwell and American Craft.