Tziporah Salamon in The Rain

Come rain or come shine style icon, Tziporah Salamon always looks absolutely fabulous. I caught her on a way to a meeting in SoHo, when it started to pour all of a sudden. Tziporah and I ran across the street to a semi -covered building and got some great shots.

Style is Healing:The Style Crone Shares How Dressing Up and Blogging Helped Her Heal After Her Husband's Passing From Cancer

This past week I got together with Judith Boyd, the 69 year old blogger behind the inspiring and heartfelt Style Crone blog. I met Judith last year and was touched my her amazing story and wonderful style- I have been following her blog ever since.Judith's husband Nelson was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 2005. In July of 20120 they started a style blog as means to creative collaboration and healing. I asked The Style Crone to share a few words about how blogging and dressing up have helped her through challenging times. You can read her inspiring words below and make sure to check out her blog HERE.

"Style Crone was launched in July of 2010 in the midst of living with my husband Nelson's rare form of cancer, which was diagnosed in 2005. Style Crone would not exist without his encouragement and support. Believing that style is healing, we began the blog together. Nelson was my photographer as I created outfits, frequently including pieces from my vintage collection and always a hat, as we faced his treatments, procedures and the progression of his disease. 'What To Wear To Chemo' became a regular series. Taking photos of my outfit in the exam room before the physician arrived provided distraction, a strategy to deal with anxiety and the active choice to thrive in the midst of intrusive treatments when so many things were outside of our control. 'Bloom Where You're Planted' was also an ongoing feature, with a photo of The SC in a favorite hat. It had become clear that our difficult journey included new and meaningful insights along with unpredictability and the awareness that every moment was precious.

Nelson transitioned in April of last year, and I blogged throughout the experience of his death. What began as a blog about outfits, aging and caregiving became a blog about outfits and grieving. Style Crone provided a lifeline as I described my experience of loss through style, painting on the blank canvas of my life. Processing my transformation through creativity became an exercise in mindfulness. I received support from a community of bloggers and readers, and found comfort in continuing the blog that was born in collaboration with my beloved life partner of 33 years, who was no longer physically present. As I approach the anniversary of Nelson's death and internalize his many gifts, I feel hopeful with a softening of sadness and vulnerability. I am aware that I am moving forward, knowing that the magic of our relationship will be with me always."

Judith Boyd
The Style Crone

Elke Kuhn

I ran into artist, Elke Kuhn, at  turban making workshop put on by the milliners guild last night. She looked as fantastic as ever in her wonderful accessories and wonderful hat. Elke and I are making a date for me to visit her at her house. I can't wait to see all of her amazing creations!

Me-Commerce

Debra Rapoport always has the most amazing accessories, most of which she makes by hand out of recycled materials. People always stop her to ask about her wonderful industrial felt hats and bracelets and lately she has been selling them right on the spot. Debra says, " Everyone these days is so into E-commerce, well I'm about Me-Commerce-I am my own store." If you do want to indulge in a little E-Commerce, which could eventually lead to some Me-Commerce feel free to email Debra at Debrathenutritionista@gmail.com .

Ilona Royce Smithkin's Reaction to The Advanced Style Book

I stopped by Ilona Royce Smithkin's apartment to show her a copy of the Advanced Style book. Check out her reaction to seeing herself in print, in the video above. The book also includes an amazing conversation between Ilona and Dita Von Teese! I'm having a great time showing all the ladies their photographs in my book and can't wait to celebrate its release May 22.

Caves of New York

[Image: "Caves for New York" (1942) by Hugh Ferriss].

After writing the previous post—about Hong Kong's impending infrastructural self-burial in the form of artificial caves beneath the island city—I remembered an image by Hugh Ferriss, preeminent architectural illustrator of the early 20th century, exploring huge air-raid shelters for New York City carved out of the rock cliffs of New Jersey.

"These shelters were to be 30 meters high and 60 meters wide and cut into the cliffs of the Hudson Palisades along the New Jersey side, and were to house planes, factories and hundreds of thousands of people," Jean-Louis Cohen recounts in the recent book Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War.

[Image: The New Jersey Palisades, via Wikipedia].

While this, of course, never happened, it's a heady thing to contemplate: an alternative New York City burrowed deep into the geologic mass of New Jersey, a delirium of excavation heading west, away from these islands at risk from wartime annihilation, in a volumetric Manhattanization of empty bedrock.

Burying Bits of the City: Hong Kong Underground

Several months ago we looked at a network of artificial caves being built beneath Singapore that will, upon completion, extend the city's energy infrastructure under the Pacific seabed; and, back in 2010, we took a very brief look at huge excavations underneath Chicago, courtesy of a feature article in Tunnel Business Magazine.

Now, according to the South China Morning Post, civil engineers in Hong Kong are exploring the possibility of developing large-scale underground spaces—artificial caves—for incorporation into the city's existing infrastructure. In the full text of the article, available online courtesy of Karst Worlds, we read that the Hong Kong government "is moving towards burying bits of the city—the unsightly ones—in underground caverns, freeing up more land for housing and economic development."

[Image: From the Enhanced Use of Underground Space in Hong Kong].

This is part of a larger undertaking called the Enhanced Use of Underground Space in Hong Kong initiative, a study, backed by Arup, that "would give the government a basis for policy guidelines to encourage cavern developments for both public and private sectors." Private-sector caverns beneath the city!

[Image: From the Enhanced Use of Underground Space in Hong Kong; view bigger].

Specifically, city engineers "will begin by identifying suitable rock caverns to house 400 government facilities that can be relocated, notably the not-in-my-backyard utilities disliked by nearby residents." These include "sewage treatment plants, fuel storage depots, refuse transfer stations and columbariums." The University of Hong Kong, for instance, recently "hid a saltwater reservoir in an artificial cavern next to its Centenary Campus, in a project that cost HK$500 million"; these are referred to as "water caverns."

Inspired by the fact that "caverns have been used as wine cellars, data centres and car parks in Finland and other countries," Hong Kong's Secretary of Development, Carrie Lam, has "called Hong Kong’s rock formations a 'unique geological asset' and urged the city to take caverns into consideration."

[Image: From the Guide to Cavern Engineering].

The awesome scale of some of the proposed excavations can be seen in this animation, where, at roughly the one-minute mark, we dive underground and begin to fly through linked 3D models of future freshwater reservoirs. A related PDF outlines a new landscape category—the Strategic Cavern Area—wherein "a strategic area is defined as being greater than 20 hectares in area and having the ability to accommodate multiple cavern sites." (The idea that your neighborhood might be declared a Strategic Cavern Area, and thus cleared of its building stock, brings to mind a student project featured on BLDGBLOG last month, the "Lower East Side Quarry" by Rebecca Fode).

[Images: From the Guide to Cavern Engineering].

Sadly, we missed an opportunity to participate in a Hong Kong-based cave-design contest—its deadline was September 2011—called the "Rock Caverns—Unlimited Creativity" competition: "Competition entrants are required, with their unlimited creativity, to propose ideas related to the potential usage of underground space in Hong Kong." A detailed design guide, called the Geoguide or Guide to Cavern Engineering, was published, and it remains available in full online.

This booklet is nothing less than a builder's guide to artificial caves. As Chapter 4 helpfully explains, for instance, "In common with other complex constructions, the design of a large underground space is an iterative process where a series of factors influence the final result," with prospective cave-designers required to use "numerous iterative loops" to create "a cost-effective cavern installation." The rest of that chapter goes on to explore cavern cross-sections, layout, shape, rock bolts and pattern bolting, and even intra-cave pillars, all of which should find their way into an architecture school design studio somewhere soon.

[Image: From the Guide to Cavern Engineering].

In any case, while I feel compelled to point out the obvious—that a high-tech labyrinth of artificial caves dug beneath the rocky hills of an over-urbanized tropical archipelago is an incredible setting for future films, novels, and computer games—I should also mention, more prosaically, that Hong Kong's impending subterranean expansion will doubtless offer many lessons relevant to cities elsewhere, as public-private underground partnerships increase in both number and frequency, with space-starved global mega-cities turning to partial self-burial as a volumetric infrastructural solution to the lack of available surface area.

Room and Billboard

[Image: The Billboard House by Apostrophy].

A project featured on designboom a few weeks ago explored the architectural possibilities of billboards: the Billboard House by Apostrophy is a "residential prototype that combines the concept of outdoor media with housing." As such, it recalls earlier projects, such as Single Hauz, squeezing domestic space into an unlikely structural situation.

[Image: The Billboard House by Apostrophy].

Apostrophy's house was installed and debuted at a fair in Bangkok, serving as a demonstration project, or proof of concept; it is transportable by truck, so, in theory, it can move between urban sites, being reattached to different masts in whole other neighborhoods and cities, while one of its facades remains operational as a revenue-generator for residents, displaying ads or other media content (it could also be a kind of live-in outdoor cinema for traffic jams).

[Images: The Billboard House by Apostrophy].

In any case, here are some shots of the interior, which features your standard modern amenities, including things like hydroponic gardens, a partially outdoor dining room, and space for storing bikes.

[Images: The Billboard House by Apostrophy].

More images and diagrams can be seen over at designboom.

Helen Drutt on The Go

At 81, contemporary jewelry collector, Arts and Crafts lecturer, and museum curator Helen Drutt is definitely not slowing down. She traveled from Germany to North Carolina, and then hopped on a plane back to New York yesterday to give an introduction to a lecture at Bard graduate center. Helen always looks divine in her signature look of all black, a beautiful hat, and amazing  piece of contemporary  jewelry.

BeetleCam

I'm increasingly interested in the rise of remotely controlled, semi-autonomous and/or fully autonomous camera systems as the future of landscape photography—using drones, for example, as a technical and aesthetic solution to various problems of landscape representation. So I was immediately intrigued by the BeetleCam project—an "armored robot," in the words of New Scientist, designed by London-based photographer Will Burrard-Lucas—if only because of the weird comedy of watching lions, in the video embedded above, aggressively interact with a wheeled device they don't otherwise understand.

But photographers sending machines into (or above) previously inaccessible spaces and scenarios will only become more common, whether it's into the center of "a pride of feasting lions," as Burrard-Lucas has done, into a leaking nuclear power plant, or, for that matter, down into the tiniest pipes and wires of a building, in a kind of architectural angioplasty, as worm-like endoscopic camera-drones learn to crawl and squirm inside the city, documenting places humans might not ever have been.

Demolition Composites

[Image: Composite photograph by Andrew Evans].

Andrew Evans, previously featured on BLDGBLOG way back in 2007, recently got in touch with some composite photographs taken of demolition sites in Philadelphia.

If you look closely through the layers, you can see remnant images of wrecked interiors.

[Image: Composite photograph by Andrew Evans].

And, on the edge of the city, ruined buildings stand like ghosts guarding an urban perimeter that keeps expanding, the city always flinging more pieces of itself further into what used to be woods and streams in a spectral ballet of cranes and skyhooks.

[Images: Composite photographs by Andrew Evans].

So we could roam the streets and suburbs holding cameras, like architectural PKE meters, tracking the profiles of erased buildings, earlier roads, forgotten districts, even entire islands entombed beneath airports, scanning sites for lost towers and halls that once stood there, twisted interiors still hovering somewhere in memory and broken rebar.

See a few more demolition composites over at Andrew's Flickr page.

Style Consistency

Last night, I was looking through photos of one of my favorite Advanced Style icons singer, Rita Ellis Hammer. I love how she is very consistent with her look-she has developed a personal style that works for her and she sticks with it.Rita uses accessories, like a pair of sunglasses or a great bag, to transform her look from chic and trendy, to effortlessly glamorous. Its amazing how you can change a look by simply adding or removing a few key accessories. Rita chooses comfortable styles and always adds a pop of color and great accessories, to create her signature look. How would you describe Rita's style?

The Power Of Color

Last week my dad and I visited The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I was looking at the paintings of Surrealist women artists, including Frida Kahlo, when I noticed this women all dressed in purple. I love how she arranged the elements and color in her outfit, just as the painters whose work we were viewing had. I waited until she was finished with the exhibit to ask if I could take her photograph. What I love about style is that it is a vehicle for personal expression. Style can change your mood and the mood of others around you. As soon as I spotted this women in the gallery, I immediately began to smile. Fashion can also be used as means to making a statement-one that has the power to make you think about the world around you.Older people are often made to feel invisible in our society.I love when older women wear color because it is a way of communicating their visibility in the world.

Many people ask me if the people I photograph are looking for attention-if they are dressing up because they want people to notice them. Anyone of these marvelous ladies and gentleman will tell you that they are dressing up for themselves, because it makes them feel good. As they have gotten older their message has changed. They are no longer saying "Look At Me", but rather "I am Here".

Marisela Federici

When I was in Rome I was introduced to the most spectacular and inspiring women. One of these amazing ladies was Marisela Ferderici. I met Marisela at her villa "La Furibonda." She welcomed me and my mom into her garden, dressed in a gorgeous yellow dress and perfectly coiffed hair. Marisela told me that usually wears hats(a favorite accessory amongst the Advanced Style set.) She explained that, "Wearing a hat always keeps you neat, especially when there isn't a hairdresser around (for example when you're traveling). Moreover when you get older and your forehead doesn't look as it used to, a hat will always make you look stylish. I will even wear a hat when I am dressed in a gym suit in the garden." Marisela gave us a tour of her beautiful grounds, before moving into the living room to talk a little about her life and style. Check out our interview below:Have you always loved fashion?

I don't like Fashion. I don't follow trends.

So you are more about style?

Yes I love style. I have had the same hairstyle since I was 12. I grew up in South America and there you are already considered a woman at 13. I always wanted to look older than I was. People tell me that I have looked the same for 40 years because I never change the way I dress, it is me.

Did you dress up when you were younger?

No I didn't. I wanted to look like my mum, I wanted to be charming. When I was 13 or 14 my style icon was the Duchess of Windsor; she wasn't an ordinary beauty. She had class and her hair was always gathered up.

How did your mum dress?

She was very classic, just like I am now. That was real elegance. Women from another era, international,elegant with low-heeled shoes.

When did you arrive in Italy what did you think about the style?

40 or more years ago. It was around '68 and women were wearing jeans and taking their bras off. I've never worn jeans in public. I didn't want to look like the others. I wanted to create something identifiable. I wanted a signature, something that spoke of my personality.

Do you have any style advice for younger women?
Most important is water and soap. You have to be natural and feel comfortable with yourself, in order to give a lot to others.You must be honest with the image that you see reflected in the mirror. You must ask yourself if what you see in the mirror is what you want other people to see. Any other words of wisdom?

1."You are not what you are, you are what you want to be."

2."You don't have to look like your friends, you have to be daring."

3."You have to look for your style the same way you look for a boyfriend.You have to keep trying until you find the right one."

How did you develop you personal style?

It was how I always wanted to look. I used to go to fashion shows, but not anymore.People these days don't understand fashion. Its all about brands, fragrances, fabric. Its all business now.

What is the difference between fashion and style?
Fashion is focused on brands. You enter a room and you can see a beautiful dress from a beautiful brand. When someone is stylish you remember the person, not the dress. The whole should be very natural. It shouldn't be too aggressive; it must be harmonious.

How do you feel about getting old?

It's hard, but you have to live your life. There's nothing worse that a young lady wanting to be an old woman or an old woman wanting to be young. You have to live within your moment. Your body has it's own way and you have to accept it.When you get older you love different things. You change your way of thinking. I like being a lady of my age. I have a duty to my family. I always want to be beautiful for my husband, for my family and first of all for myself. Beauty can open a lot of doors, but more important is to keep those doors open. Real and true beauty is something absolute from within. It is other-wordly. Something that never passes no matter what age or gender.

Purple Hat, Roma

This handsome gentleman was riding his bike through the Roman neighborhood of Trastevere when I caught up to him at a stop light. I asked if I could take his photo and he shrugged his shoulders and gave me a quick wink. I am always on the look out for a great hat and I think beautiful shade of purple suits this man perfectly!

Advanced Copies of The Advanced Style Book Are In

Will and I holding the first advanced copies of my book

Advanced copies of the Advanced Style book are in! I just got back from Rome and my amazing editor, Will Luckman dropped off a few copies for me to look at. It's strange, overwhelming, and super exciting to see the final product in person. I am very happy with the results and can't wait for everyone to see it on  May 22. If you would like to preorder a copy of my book it is available on amazon HERE.

A Parisian Grandmother in Peacock Feathers

(Photos by Marine Pierrot)

Many people send me wonderful pictures of their grandparents, friends and other relatives. I always love receiving these great pictures of older people who have touched their lives. Since Advanced Style is really about my personal interactions with people that I meet walking around, I rarely post other people's photos. When Marine Pierrot sent me these pictures she had taken of her 84 year old grandmother in Paris, I couldn't help but include them here. They were just too marvelous not to share with everyone. I asked Marine if she would ask her grandmother a few questions and share some of her style secrets. Check out a short description of her grandmother and the questions that follow below.

My grandma is a child of the 30's and always lived in Paris. She spent her holidays in Deauville.Very early on she appreciated art and painting. She became a painter and met her fourth lover (Francois) and a few years later met my grandfather (Alain Detry). Her favorite artists are Mucha, Chagall, Rodin, Klimt, Tamara de Lempicka, and Dali. She loves: High fetish heels, Kimonos, Aubrey Beardsley,Oscar Wilde, Art Deco, Flapper Dresses, Jazz, Classique Music, Beatles and 70s Rock.

My grandmother is called Jeanine Detry and she is 84 years old.

How has your grandmother influenced your style? What are her influences?
Very early on my grandmother taught me to love silent movies (Louise Brooks, Charlie Chaplin, Murnau, Fritz Lang). She also taught me to love old movies starring Michel Carne, Fred Astaire, Gerard Philippe, and the music of the 20th Century and art of course. Like her, I have liked to draw since I was child. She always urged me to develop my imagination. Her favorite model is Louise Brooks, and the roaring 20s are her favorite period. It's also my aesthetic period. I'm a flapper girl. I wear and collect flapper dresses, cloche hats, flapper shoes, fur coats, kimonos... I always listen to jazz and classical music. Like my grandmother I'm a music lover, and its my job now.

She is a free and modern woman who is open to the world. The way she paints is singular and particular. She possesses her own style.Recently she gave me a beautiful present. She gave me an antique 1920s silk kimono with embroidered roses (in silver thread) which belonged to her mother.

Do you remember any advice she had given to you?
She approves of my aesthetic and professional choices. She often says to me that if she was not my grandmother she would like to be my friend. When I was younger she often advised me to wear my hairstyle to show my neck and nape of my neck (I have very long hair). In regards to make-up, she likes the very made up eyes and powder that illuminates the face. Indeed perfume is very important to her. She wears "Bel-Ami" by Hermes(that she also offered to me) and sometimes opium by YSL. I love Guerlain and I wear "L'Heure Bleue" (created in 1912).

She always advised me not to follow rules imposed by fashion. I think my grandmother and my mother taught me the art of being a woman and acting like a woman.

Tell me a little about her style?
Daily my grandmother likes wearing long black or burgundy skirts with soft cashmere vests. She also wears Asian jackets with mandarin collars. She makes herself up everyday very diligently and wears fine gold jewels. She loves peacock feathers and decorates her apartment with them. She puts them in big vases. Her haircut has been the same since she was 20 years old: The flapper haircut of Louise Brooks. (She like very high fetish heels, but can't wear them anymore, thus she wears moccasins.