Lecture and Master Class at the ICAA

We would be remiss if we did not mention our recent lecture at the ICAA, the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art in New York, entitled Pencil and Brush: Architectural Watercolors, held on the evening of the 23rd October. It was an illustrated lecture on the history of French classicism from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and we were delighted to see many familiar faces and speak to a sold-out house.

As the body of the lecture was illustrated with images of rather staid classical buildings, we ended the talk on a lighter note with the image of this tent (at top) once in the gardens of the Parc Monceau here in Paris, and an audible gasp actually went through the audience.  

The Saturday following, we held a master class on watercolor technique for architectural rendering, sharing our trade secrets to an over-subscribed audience. It was a day-long affair, from 10 am to 6 pm, with an hour's pause for lunch. We enjoyed giving both presentations immensely and the organizers were very pleased with the response, and we look forward to a new series of talks next year.

Our Architectural Desk Boxes Featured in Traditional Home

A far-too-long hiatus, but we are back to report that Traditional Home has featured our new desk boxes in their holiday issue. A small neoclassical ensemble for your desktop.

There are three boxes, each of them in architectural shapes: the Tower stacking box, the Orangerie pencil box and the Palace letter caddy (above, with the original watercolor).

You can find them at our AW online shop.

And here is the Traditional Home clipping:

A new video featuring AW journals, boxes, stationery and table lanterns

Recently, we've been busy in the editing room and are happy to post a new video compilation of the first two seasons of paper products we've designed for Libretto Group of NYC.

The video runs just over two and a half minutes and showcases our boxed note and correspondence cards, hardbound journals, desk boxes, table lanterns, nesting boxes, and holiday items as well. Enjoy.

To locate a store near you, visit Libretto Group, or order at the AW online shop.

A new video of our book CENTRAL PARK NYC: An Architectural View

We are delighted to post this new video of our Rizzoli book, CENTRAL PARK NYC: An Architectural View. It runs two minutes and features numerous images, both our watercolors and photography old and new, that enrich the book's pages.

Enjoy.

An ICONic Article

We are delighted to note that, this past Sunday, our work was featured in Welt am Sonntag, the Sunday magazine of Berlin's newspaper of record. In a rare honor, the watercolor vignette of A is for Acanthus from our Architectural Alphabet was featured as the cover illustration.

But of course it was Einkuss, Bernd's Belgian pug, who stole the show.

Table lanterns, journals and boxed stationery now available at the AW online shop

 

Some weeks ago, we had announced that, after a much-too-long hiatus, our ever-popular table lanterns have returned, now distributed worldwide through Libretto Group. We are pleased to announce today that the lanterns are also now available at the Architectural Watercolors online shop for all those who do not have Libretto retailers in your area.

To accomodate these additions, we have reorganized the AW online shop, adding product categories for the table lanterns as well as our new lines of boxed stationery and hardbound journals.

We are also happy to report that Libretto will soon be releasing three new table lantern designs and several other stationery products for the spring season, and we will be posting about them shortly.

Below are photographs of these new AW products and hotlinks to them:

 

 

The Belvedere table lantern

The Tea House table lantern

Mr. Jefferson's Folly table lantern

 

Pagodas, A year of watercolors  hardbound journal

 

Love, Triumphant hardbound journal

 

 

Pagodas notecards folio

Celebrating Central Park NYC at Librarie Galignani, Paris

We're delighted to announce that Paris' premier bookstore, the august Librarie Galignani on the rue de Rivoli, will be hosting an evening celebrating publication of Central Park NYC on the fourth December--hélas by invitation only, but we hope if you have recieved your invitation that you'll join us then.

We will give a short talk about the book and Central Park, and then be available to sign copies. These are festive evenings that mingle current events and the love of books, and Galignani has created a wonderful authors' program that has made it a center of Parisian culture. Needless to say, we are honored and are looking forward immensely to the soirée.

A Year of Pagodas agenda

As a part of our first season of paper products for Libretto Group, we have also designed an agenda, A Year of Pagodas, that features a dozen spreads of our Chinoiserie fantasy watercolors, one for each month of the year (below is a sample spread for October).

Pagodas is a B5 format, hardbound notebook (7" x 10") with 144 ruled pages, twelve double-page spreads and a ribbon marker.

The cover features a crisp blue-and-white toile de Jouy pattern, reversed for the endpapers (bottom), which also include a whimsical bookplate. The page ends are gilded and each month's ten lined pages are crowned with that month's pagoda silhouetted in miniature.

As with the other items in the collection, please follow this link to find a retailer near you or contact Libretto Group directly.

Table lanterns are back

In our last post, we mentioned that we have a new design partnership with Libretto Group of New York, manufacturers and distributors of innovative paper products. Libretto's other design partners include Christian Lacroix, the New York Times and London's Victoria & Albert Museum.

In addition to the Chinoiserie note cards featured in our last post, Libretto is also distributing our ever-popular table lantern designs: the Belvedere (above, a neoclassical pavilion), the Tea House (below, a Chinoiserie pagoda) and Mr. Jefferson's Folly (bottom, a Georgian/neoPalladian pavilion). These paper lanterns have been extremely popular and unfortunately they have also been out of stock for some time, but we are delighted to announce that they are once again available—and worldwide at that.

Also, Libretto will be launching a new series of lanterns early in the new year, with an even greater variety of designs to choose from, and we will be posting about them in due course.

If you wish to purchase, please look here for a store near you or contact Libretto Group directly for your nearest retailor. Also, Libretto will shortly be expanding their website to include an advanced store finder to make finding a retailer an easy task.

Chinoiserie note cards in Architectural Digest

Architectural Digest has featured our new package of Chinoiserie note cards in their latest issue (screen capture below), available at The Frick Collection museum shop in Manhattan and at select retailers worldwide.

There are two folding cards each of four motifs, reproducing our watercolors of fantasy pagodas framed by a deep red Chinoiserie fillet/border. The reverse of the cards feature the pagodas in silhouette against richly colored grounds (below). The images are printed on a heavywieght laid paper and are packaged with envelopes in a handsome paper wallet.

The card set is part of our first season of designs for Libretto Group, manufacturers of innovative stationery and paper products. Libretto is a dynamic company based in Manhattan with a worldwide distribution; their other design lines include Christian Lacroix, The New York Times and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Central Park NYC Exhibition at Didier Aaron, Manhattan

The New York Times T Magazine, 24 October 2013

This past month has been a very busy time as we launched our latest book, Central Park NYC, and prepared an exhibition of the watercolors illustrating that book at Didier Aaron, Inc. in Manhattan.

The eponymous exhibition opened on the 22nd with a private preview for the Woman's Committee of The Central Park Conservancy, and it was an ebuillant evening and a true pleasure to meet so many dedicated benefactors of the park. New York itself was as vibrant as we've ever experienced it, and it was an enormous pleasure to spend even such a short time in our former home.

The following evening was the exhibition's general opening, and shortly after the New York Times T Magazine published this online review, with a gallery of six watercolors from ths show.

The exhibition at Didier Aaron, Inc. runs until November the 8th. The gallery is open from 10 AM to 5:30 PM, Monday to Friday, tel. 212-988-5248.

Central Park NYC: "redefines the coffee table book"

We are extremely pleased to announce that Rizzoli published Central Park NYC: An Architectural View this past Tuesday, September 10, accompanied by a review in that same day's edition of the New York Times.

From the Times review:

...in “Central Park NYC: An Architectural View” (Rizzoli, $75), the artist-authors Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams explore the park’s multitude of overlooked smaller structures, statues, benches and bridges.

Their original watercolors and photographs and revealing text redefine the coffee table book: More than just pretty pictures to be savored, these images will enrich and deepen the reader’s experience of the park.

We are delighted that the Times recognized and lauded the underlying rigor of this book. We should also point out that beyond the park's structures and ornaments, our true focus is rather upon the park's design, divided into thirteen chapters that examine important features, such as the Mall, Bethesda Terrace and the Belvedere, and others devoted to design elements, such as the park's monuments, its bridges and arches, its water features, and its rustic structures.

To peek inside, you can visit this link to the book's Amazon page, where you can access an interactive pdf with a shocking number of the book's pages put online for your perusal. While pasting the link, we were delighted to see that Central Park NYC has already reached the #1 position in Amazon's landscape architecture category, and horrified that only 2 copies remain in stock. Our thanks to everyone who made this possible!

Maintenant ouvert! Now open!

Well, we're deep into the second week of la Rentrée and this means that all of Paris's surfeit of boulangeries, agences immobiliers and pressings—the stalwart pillars of the French economy, such as it is—are now officially reopened for business. And so, dear readers, are we.

We have been busy during our hiatus, mind you, and spent no appreciable time in traffic jams on the autoroutes or lying on cobble-strewn beaches, hélas, but this does however mean that we have much to report and to catch up on. 

We will be posting a number of announcements about developments in our work these next days, so please check back with us often during September.

And the first order of business is to report to those patiently awaiting the reopening of the Architectural Notecards online store is, firstly, thank you for your patience!, and secondly, it is again online (click on the treillage pavilion at right) with a spanking new format, and hopefully without any fatal bugs. As those of you who deal with this sort of thing know, patience when upgrading a website is not only a virtue but a sorely taxed necessity.

First thing you will notice is that each card is presented at full scale, so you will be able to see the majority of our watercolors online in great detail, making the boutique a virtual gallery as well. 

As an added bonus, the entire Architectural Watercolors website has been upgraded as well, with a responsive format that will make it fully accessible to those of you with tablets and smartphones. It is still a bit rough about the edges, so please bear with us as we polish and expand existing content in the coming weeks. The shop is fully integrated with the main site and is also responsive for those of you wedded to those clever little microwave emitters, which adds up to over half the page views in the US, so none too soon! 

Alors, bienvenue!

We're back with a book: CENTRAL PARK NYC

We're back, and we've returned with a book—well for now, at least the publication date for a book.

We are delighted to announce that our publisher, Rizzoli International Publications, will publish Central Park NYC: An Architectural View in late September of this year. Central Park will be a large-format hardcover—a hefty 208 pages and 10 by 12 inches—with 61 of our own watercolors (good Lord, have we really painted that many?), augmented by 60 color and 55 black-and-white illustrations.

The volume surveys the architecture and history of Central Park, from its inception to the present day. Over the course of thirteen chapters, we examine the constituent elements of the park, the park's evolution, and the buildings, sculptures and ornaments that enrich this original template, crafted by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, for what became America's Greensward Revolution.

We are extremely proud of this book, our eighth, and know that it has much that is new to say about the how and the why of the creation of Central Park. An outgrowth of our exhibiton at Didier Aaron, Inc. celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the creation of Central Park, the book is also copiously illustrated with contemporary photography and archival documents and photographs. 

We have paid particular attention to the archival photo selection, wishing to surprise by "the shock of the old," as it were. Likewise, contemporary photographs come from a variety of photographers who have captured the park in stunning moments of beauty.

The men who built Central Park, photographed on Willowdell Arch in 1862.

 From left: comptroller Andrew H. Green, engineer George E. Waring, 

architect Calvert Vaux, gardener Ignaz Pilat, designer Jacob Wrey Mould, 

and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. 

We will be mounting an exhibition of the watercolors that illustrate the book at Didier Aaron, Inc. in late October and early November of this year, and will post with exhibition dates closer to the time of publication. 

For now, we simply wanted to announce that—after a long and productive hiatus, for which we still have several announcements before us to make—we have again returned to posting at NOTED, and that Central Park NYC is well on its way to publication—at last!

Our Excuse is a Book

No, it isn't that we are still on an extended summer vacation in the south of France; in fact, we never had time to take more than a weekend off all year. We indeed have been remiss for not posting sooner, and our sincere apologies for having let that drag on so long. But we have been exceedingly busy—actually, entirely consumed would be more accurate—with a new book project.

Our publisher made us an offer we could not refuse—complete editorial control—and so we did not refuse; such gifts are almost never offered to authors and we would have been churlish, or fools, to decline. The downside was that they had a wildly ambitious schedule, but we thought, "Well, it is humanly possible."

Indeed it is humanly possible, just as we predicted, but it has made the summer and fall, and the coming month at least, a time of intense charette and equally intensive research, writing, layout work and editing.

Preparing a book is a bit like herding both elephants and fleas together, even in the best of circumstances; there are so many little things that need to be watched while doing the big things. Here, occupying the positions of author, illustrator, layout person and packager all at once, we are faced with an exponential increase in both elephants and fleas, and as the project has advanced we have been consumed these past months by painting, painting, painting, then writing, writing, writing. Then writing some more when not chasing all those fleas and herding the elephants.

Publication is scheduled for sometime in 2013. Perhaps we've moaned a bit too much about the work before us, but when preparing a book we wouldn't have it any other way.

We hope to return as early as we can to posting here; we have much to share. And we also hope to be able to announce the full details of the publication of the magnum opus soon.

The Potocki palaces

We have had the great good fortune to create commissioned portraits of two exceptional palaces, the first in Lviv (Ukraine) and in now in Paris, legacies of the renowned Potocki family, ancient and influential Polish nobles, comparable to the Stroganoffs of Russia and the Rohans of France. (Below, Jacques-Louis David's famed equestrian portrait of Count Stanisław Kostka Potocki, which the painter later recycled for Napoléon.)

The family's history is inextricably enmeshed with that of Poland, and unfurls a staggering procession of statesmen, generals and magnates stretching back to the 10th century. Until the calamity of World War II befell Poland, the family's several branches held over forty major town palaces, châteaux and manors and controlled over a quarter of the country's territory. In comparison, the French Bourbons appear dilettantes in the domain of architectural patronage. Today former Potocki properties are found from Georgia and the Ukraine in the east to Paris in the west, and several notable examples are illustrated at the end of this post.

Above is our freshly completed elevation of the Hôtel Potocki, built in 1884 by the architect Jules Reboul, which stands at 27 avenue Friedland in Paris's 8th arrondissement. The hôtel was among the grandest town palaces built in Paris in the late 19th century, designed in the neo-Louis XIV style that defined the era, its central, square-planned dome evoking the Tuileries palace and its column screens recalling the Enveloppe of Versailles.

The Potocki family was admired in Paris for their remarkable generosity to their countrymen and for their extensive charity works; for example, they erected the church of Corpus Christi on donated land adjoining the hôtel during its construction. The dependencies, formerly located on rue Châteaubriand and today destroyed, were renowned for their stables, which featured 38 mahogany horse stalls with rose marble watering troughs and some fifty grooms on permanent call.

Heirs sold the hôtel to the Paris Chamber of Commerce in 1923, which carried out two campaigns of renovations, the second in the early 1930s employing the era's foremost talents: renowned art-déco decorator and ébeniste Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, the silversmiths Christofle (which executed the remarkable monumental bronze door seen in the detail at top), the sculptor Joseph Bernard and the interior decorator Jules Leleu.

The watercolor itself is a vast miniature, well over a yard long, and required months to execute. One number stands out: 1364, which is the number of window panes drawn and painted.

Below is our earlier watercolor depicting the former Potocki Palace in Lviv, today a residence of the president of the Ukraine.

Other former Potocki residences include the "Versailles of Poland," Wilanów Palace,

the beautiful Łańcut Castle near Rzeszow, Poland,

and its handsome orangerie,

the neoclassical jewel of Natolin on the outskirts of Warsaw,

the Potocki Palace, Warsaw,

the magnificent neoclassical Potocki Palace in Tulchyn, today the Ukraine,

the Potocki Palace in Radzyń,

the Italianate Krzeszwicke Palace, today in disrepair.

Again, just a sampling of a remarkable architectural heritage.