Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

At 95, the dancer, choreographer and activist Anna Halprin has no time for nostalgia. Last summer she celebrated her birthday with a performance on the dance deck at her home in Marin County. Bare feet on redwood boards, white hair framed against the pine trees beyond, she was as present and lively as when her late husband and collaborator, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, first built the deck for her in 1954. Read More …

Let’s talk about the insidious return of hippie architecture. Over the past year, as trend-watchers tracked the disciplinary resurrection of Postmodernism and the painful deconstruction of Brutalism, a shaggier architecture shuffled into the room bringing with it a waft of patchouli.

Viewers of Mad Men know what I mean. A chunk of the show’s finale last month was set in a yurt-esque structure poised on the cliff edge of the Pacific. It was there, in a group sharing exercise, that ad man, philanderer, and searcher-for-identity Donald Draper found his enlightenment surrounded by longhairs and macramé, not bouffanted secretaries and glass curtainwalls. Read More …