You can always count on a certain number of bricks to go astray and lead nontraditional lives as garden pavers or door stops. Some begin humbly as the ballast which keeps oceangoing ships afloat; others unfortunately get tapped to be murder weapons. But, as every first-year architecture student is taught, there's a secret ambition locked away in the heart of the common brick. It wants to be an arch. When renovating a Manhattan loft office, architects Scott Specht and Louise Harpman decided to ask stacks and stacks of common plastic ice-cube trays what they wanted to be. Ultimately, the designers resolved to install masses of the translucent blue trays as lenses over large-scale backlit wall panels. If not exactly playful, the decorative effect of this gesture was to be at least smashingly provocative - call it less-is-more, with a twist. By comparison, Frank Gehry's chain-link fencing panels in Santa Monica seem restrained and tasteful -almost bourgeois.
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