“There’s this weird thing about liking what other people don’t like…. When someone says ‘That stuff is ugly,’ I am immediately drawn to it because it just means it’s challenging.

“Take Memphis furniture and objects…. They were the scourge of the design world for the longest time, and I always found it to be the most legitimate design movement since the Bauhaus. It was a worldview of what design could be….

“When I was 16, I worked at Fiorucci. Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Medini and Nathalie du Pasquier had all worked for Fiorucci [as design directors], and I knew immediately that what they were doing was looking back at [1950s] Americana.” — JimWalrod (1961–2017)*

Walrod—an interior designer, collector, architectural historian, former co-proprietor of Form and Function, co-curator of Paul Rudolph: Lower Manhattan Expressway at The Drawing Center, consultant to Ang Lee on The Ice Storm, design advisor to David Bowie and Mike D (among many others), collaborator with André Balazs on the interiors of the Standard Downtown in Los Angeles, Apartamento contributing editor, and author of I Knew Jim Knew—died unexpectedly last month.

*Patrick Parrish, “Jim Walrod: Under the Radar & Over the Top,” Apartamento 10 (Autumn/Winter 2012–2013): 60.

Also see:

nytimes.com/2002/12/01/magazine/what-a-design-guru-really-does.html

powerhousebooks.com/newsletters/140214/

drawingcenter.org/book/176/?page=2

wmagazine.com/story/remembering-jim-walrod-death

Jim Walrod , I Knew Jim Knew (2014). Image credit: Powerhouse Books.