Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

PATRICK SISSON

Phloem Furniture

Interview

Forma

Issue 3

Link

Phloem Furniture

 

 

You could call furniture maker Benjamin Klebba a craftsman. The 36-year-old looks the part—beard, Portland address, can probably plane a board in the time it takes you to finish this sentence, and will debate the pros and cons of walnut versus ash with the fervor music fans reserve for end-of-year album lists.

But it’s more than a craft. Take his Peninsula Chair, an example of his crisp, minimalist aesthetic which debuted at last year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York. A tight web of angles and joints supports two strips of tanned leather, inviting someone to settle down amidst earth tones and grain. It’s a parabola breaking a thin plane between two armrests—geometry that sings. And ideally, it’s more than a design object.

“People have a chair that they sit in, read in, are comfortable in, and feel a sense of attachment to. When someone tells me ‘we read a book in your chair every night,’ that’s really awesome.”

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Behind the Scenes: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Interview

Dwell

March 5, 2014

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Behind the Scenes: The Grand Budapest Hotel

When we first see the Grand Budapest Hotel in Wes Anderson’s visually stunning new film of the same name, she appears a withered beauty during a flashback to the 1960s. The garish green and orange lobby sticks out like a dye job crying for attention. But then, as the film’s narrator, Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), recalls the grand dame’s glory days in the ‘30s, when he worked as a hotel lobby boy, the camera races across a resplendent red carpets as if panning across the profile of a starlet.

In a film filled with stars like Ralph Fiennes and Jude Law, this magnificent room plays a leading role. As production designer Adam Stockhausen explains, it’s by design, since the built-from-scratch interior pulls inspiration from the world’s best hotels, both real and cinematic. “We realized pretty quickly there was no way we could do what we needed to do in a real hotel,” says Stockhausen, who worked with Anderson before on Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Limited. “A real hotel has its own guests, its own thing going on, and there’s no way we can take it over for the amount of time we need to. We couldn’t build the whole thing from scratch, either, we’ll never be able to afford it.”

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An Oral History of the Green Mill

Article/Interview

Chicago Reader

March 20, 2014

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“Three shots closed Texas Guinan’s show at the Green Mill cafe, Lawrence avenue and Broadway, at 4 o’clock yesterday morning. The internationally known night club hostess was asking the suckers to give the little girl a big hand.”—Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1930

An Oral History of the Green Mill

It’s not uncommon to walk into a bar in Chicago these days and feel like the present is the past: drinkers belly up to polished wood, sipping drinks concocted from small-batch whiskies and admiring each other in the soft glow of exposed Edison lightbulbs. We’re living in a cocktail renaissance, a period when authenticity and history, even if the bar only opened last month, mean something. And that’s a good thing.

But if real is what you’re looking for, there’s no better place to find it than at the corner of Broadway and Lawrence. For longtime Chicago residents the Green Mill is so well-known it’s almost an afterthought. But the bar’s story—its place in Prohibition lore, its importance to Uptown and the local music scene, and more dramatically, its own rebirth after decades of neglect—make it a singular piece of Chicago history.

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Sound of the City: Wallace Detroit Guitars

Article/Interview

Nothing Major

October 3, 2013

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Detroit boasts a history of legendary axmen—Jack White, Ted Nugent, Robert White, Wayne Kramer and Dennis Coffey to name a few. And now, thanks to the passion project of commercial real estate director and woodworker Mark Wallace, the next great musician on that list may kick out the jams with a guitar made from a chunk of the city itself.

Built in a Corktown workshop, Wallace Detroit Guitars are fashioned from wood salvaged from the city’s recently demolished buildings. Each instrument will be branded with the address of the home that provided the wood, reinforcing the local heritage of the material.

So far, Wallace has created two prototypes that need to be tested, but a recent $8,000 matching grant from the Knight Foundation should allow him to expand production. Eventually, he wants the finished product to include more salvaged material from other local companies, like a strap made out of leftovers auto parts.

“One of the great things about Detroit is the collaboration,” he says. “Everyone wants to work together because they know they’re making the city a better place.”

Wallace’s project is currently getting off the ground thanks to a grant from theKnight Foundation.

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Interview: Karim Rashid

Article/Interview

Nothing Major

August 20, 2013

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When Bata Shoe Museum Senior Curator Elizabeth Semmelhack first began assembling the exhibit that would become Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture (on display in Toronto through March 30, 2014), she hit up the right contacts. Erik Blam, manager of Run-D.M.C., and Bobbito Garcia, author of the sneaker bible Where’d You Get Those? both lent their expertise. But it may have been the choice of industrial designer Karim Rashid as exhibit designer that helped articulate just how forward-thinking footwear can be.

Rashid’s exhibit layout, heavy on digital themes and shades of neon, is another in a long series of curvy, colorful argument for the primacy of technology in design. For decades, the award-winning designer has been making a similar statement in his work for clients as wide-ranging as Umbra and Method to Veuve Clicquot and Artemide.

The history on display at the Bata Museum would thrill any sneaker freak—plastic domes encase rare and colorful kicks, like shoes from the 1860s, a replica of Jesse Owens Adidas from the 1936 Olympics, and the 1986 Puma Computer shoe, a Nike+ precursor that plugs into a Apple IIe and tells you how many calories you’ve burned. Nike designer Tinker Hatfield’s sketches of the iconic Air Jordan XI grace a back wall.

But it’s the focus on technology’s role in pushing sneaker design forward that makes Rashid, himself an avid runner, a fitting choice. When we spoke to Rashid from his office in New York, he explained why progressive advances make shoes so fascinating, why trends shouldn’t trump technology, and how custom pink shoes tend to get weird looks on the street.

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Visionary Cities and the Phantom City App

Article/Interview

Nothing Major

August 2013

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History—and city skylines—tend to be constructed by the winners, but that’s never the whole story. Alexander Eisenshmidt, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, discovered the truth of this maxim while researching unfinished Chicago building projects and collecting a dossier of grandiose proposals, eccentric dreams, and impossible ideas that form an alternate skyline, a city that “exists in our architectural consciousness.”

“Visionary Cities”, now on display at Chicago’s Expo 72 Gallery, fuses this fantastical landscape with the city of today. A 160-foot panorama showcases incomplete projects superimposed onto the current street grid, such as a recreated Sears Tower from Greg Lynn, a massive, 1,500-foot-high lakefront obelisk proposed for the Columbian Expedition and Adolf Loos’ alternate Tribune Tower. The companion Phantom City iPhone app, which focuses on the same lost projects, lets you pull up images of the buildings while touring the city.

Chicago’s not the only city with this handheld view of speculative proposals.CHENG+SNYDER designers Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder previously created theMuseum of the Phantom City app for New York in 2009, showcasing unrealized projects such as a Midtown dome dreamed up by Buckminster Fuller and an alternate World Trade Center site.

 

The outlandishness and provocation of these types of conceptual constructions helps push architecture forward, says Eisenshmidt, an important lesson for today.

“I’m more interested in releasing those visionary projects into the public ether to steer a kind of discussion about visionary thinking within architecture and urbanism,” said Eisenshmidt. “It’s also a critique of the city at its current state. It’s not that I want those buildings built, but you have relatively little vision now. Decision makers and high-stakes players are less fascinated about them. It’s very much a city that gets excited about planters on the street sidewalks, and as nice as it is, I think Chicago can aim much higher than it currently does. It’s about thinking back to a time when Chicago was a city that was doing it. Chicago is only what it is today because risk was taken.”

“Visionary Cities” can be found in the “City Works: Provocations for Chicago’s Urban Future” exhibit at Expo 72 in Chicago’s Loop through September 29. The Phantom City app, produced in collaboration with Cheng+Snyder, can be downloaded here, along with their app for New York architecture.

 

Local Aesthetic: Portland Design Guide

Feature

Nothing Major

July 19, 2013

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handeye

 

In the second installment of our Portland Design Guide, we zero-in on stores and galleries with a focus on the handmade and hands-on. From a legendary outdoor brand to the nation’s oldest craft musuem, Portland offers a range of designers and designed objects reinterpeting the region’s design heritage for today.

Poler

 1300 W Burnside / polerstuff.com

An important place to outfit before any outdoor trek, or merely a one-stop shop to gear up for the seasonal shift to fall and winter, Poler’s new flagship store (as of March 2013) showcases the best of the local outdoor brand, as well as rotating pop-up displays and camp coffee gear from Stumptown. “Poler is an amazing brand with deep roots in Portland, utilizing the design talents of locals like Marc Smith,” according to Jason Sturgill, a local artist and educator. “Their camping gear is top-flght, and the amazing store design is worth a visit by itself.”

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Stefan Sagmeister / The Happy Show

Feature
Nothing Major
July 19, 2013
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The Austrian-born, typography-tweaking graphic designer takes a stark view on what makes us tick in his latest exhibition, The Happy Show.

Sagmeister_JohnMadere

Photo: John Madere

For an art installation that examines what makes us feel good, Stefan Sagmeister’s The Happy Show, on display at the Chicago Cultural Center through September 23, doesn’t stay fixated on the sappy and upbeat. A Blaise Pascal quote (“All men seek happiness… This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves”) as well as a disclaimer at the entrance (“if you regularly weep into your pillow at night, visiting won’t keep you from doing so”) paint a less alluring picture of our collective mental state than the designer’s punchy typography, infographics and videos, hung on bright yellow walls.

Sagmeister, the Austrian-born, award-winning graphic designer who currently heads NYC-based firm Sagmeister & Walsh, doesn’t shy away from displays that incite—his famous 1999 AIGA lecture poster featured text carved into his torso. But in our discussion of his current exhibition, Sagmeister asserts that he’s just being honest. He brings this combination of bluntness and charm to The Happy Show, a concept that came to fruition during a year-long sabbatical (Sagmeister takes a trip every seven years to recharge) to Indonesia in 2008.

We spoke to Sagmeister at the opening reception to The Happy Show in Chicago about what the exhibit has taught him, and how his non-scientific self-experimentation lead to confusing results.
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Blue Sky Bakery Case Study

Helping a Bakery Rise Up and Reach Out
Blue Sky Bakery & Café Case Study
EPIC
Link

Blue Sky Bakery & Café in North Center serves the community in both senses of the word, providing baked goods and sandwiches as well as job training and employment experience to homeless and at-risk youth. For teens hungering for a better life, the non-profit’s 12-week paid program lays the foundation for success, imparting self-confidence and job skills. But the effort that comes with running the cafe means the marketing effort has never reached its full potential. Enter EPIC, to bring the messaging to maturity.

The EPIC volunteer team, led by Radhika Gupta, Senior Interaction Designer at Acquity Group, rebranded Blue Sky, explaining cooking’s role as a vehicle for social change. A tattoo-inspired logo that hit the perfect note was the cornerstone of the campaign, and numerous other touch points, like new business cards and signage, told the story of the social enterprise.

The team approached community engagement from multiple angles, crafting a strategy to increase traffic, catering orders and neighborhood awareness, while letting customers know about “baked goods for the common good.” Zeroing in on moms and commuters, the team drafted posters and formulated interactive means of engagement, like a “keep the social change” jar and a collective program to sponsor the training of an additional youth at the bakery. Striking photography by Robert Olding – which incorporated mouthwatering food imagery and the children of two team members – spoke to the mommy demographic.

As one of the new taglines explained, Blue Sky promises “social change, powered by your appetite.” The EPIC team’s communication strategy raised awareness of the bakery and café’s social mission and helped locals become more invested. In the end, what is a good neighborhood café and if it doesn’t bring the community together?

Case Study by Patrick Sisson

EPIC TEAM, CHICAGO
Radhika Gupta: Team Lead

Andrew Berriz: Strategist
Kenny Lapins: Writer
Nicole Nejati: Project Manager
Robert Olding: Photographer
Spencer Rysman: Designer
Nicholas Stocking: Strategy
Libby Taggart: Researcher/Designer
Brad Tippett: Web Designer/Developer
Jennifer Wisniewski: Designer

The Olympic City

Feature
Nothing Major
June 21, 2013
Link

With Rio racing to prepare for 2016, Brazilian protests against stadium spending raging and the price tag for the Sochi Winter Olympics rising precipitously, the subject of infrastructure spending for the bi-annual games is a heated one. But it’s the second life of these structures which often leave a permanent mark on the urban landscape, marks that are explored in The Olympic City project.

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Urbanized, Objectified and Helvetica) and photographer Jon Pack examine the aftermath of the games, chronicling the legacy of leftover structures in neighborhoods and cities long after the games have ended. The first phase of this ongoing project, covering Athens, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Helsinki, Mexico City, Moscow, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, Lake Placid, Rome, and Sarajevo, has been collected in The Olympic City book out this month.
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© 2025 PATRICK SISSON | Writer and reporter