about

Chairs and Buildings is a notebook of ideas and visual food for thought.

Annie Coggan   is an educator, artist/ designer and entrepreneur.  Coggan has founded and conceived Rattle Bag Workshops; design thinking for non-designers, Little Building Café in Starkville, Mississippi, Coggan and Crawford Architects and Chairs and Buildings Productions. As editor of Chairs and Buildings, she has developed virtual space for design thinking and a physical studio for furniture, product, interiors, events and publications. She has published work in Furniture A+D and Journal of Architectural Education, designsponge and Remodelista as well being contributor to the literary journal A Public Space and Herman Miller’s Lifework blog.  She is on the adjunct faculty at Parsons/New School, F.I.T. and SVA in New York City.   In 2010, Coggan was an artist in residence at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn and continues to teach workshops and serve on the Board of Directors. Coggan is currently at work on a book that explores historic house museums and their design potential.

Tami Wedekind-(west coast editor) earned her master’s degree in architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and has worked in the offices of Frank Gehry and Associates, and Rios Architects.  Currently she is a principal designer with Twichell Studio Architects in Culver City.  Her own business tamiwedekindworks is an art studio that is a vehicle for her unique abstract patterns.  She creates works of art that impact their environment through scale, color and texture.  They may function as wall hangings, window treatments, room dividers – or fashion.   tamiwedekindworks ideally works with architects, designers and art consultants interested in involving her fiber art early in the design process.  Her guest blog entries on Chairs & Buildings provide a platform for her musings on the intersection of weaving and architecture.  There is a rich history of weaving and architecture starting with the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop.  She looks for examples of artists working both on and off the loom that are giving three dimensional form and engaging space, with fibers.

Benjamin Marcus is an architect, graphic designer & illustrator with his own practice in New York City. His early career included stints in the offices of Ray Eames, Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava & Gaetano Pesce, among others. Marcus’s portfolio includes a diverse range of projects, from luxury retail to residential, furniture to package design, and he sees architecture as constituting any design that shows us how to see.  With his particular love of film, Marcus sees much of the role architecture has always played – as a lingua franca uniting various cultures with a universal formal language – now performed in the medium of the moving image.  His blog Architecture of Film is a growing collection of stills and clips showing how movies sometimes feature good design, and sometimes are themselves works of architecture, from opening credits to costumes, sets & cinematography. Another of his blogs, Great Kitchens in Film is a visual compendium of exemplary movie sets where residential kitchens serve their plots in exemplary ways. His contributions as guest of Chairs and Buildings, focuses on the myriad instances of design’s strong hand in the making of movies.