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Near Atlanta, the diverse suburb of Morrow, Georgia, is an EV charging desert. If you live in an apartment in one neighborhood and own an electric car, you might have to drive 20 minutes to get to a public charger. Thats why a local green bank wanted to support a new charging station in the area. It should have been a simple project, beginning with a small group of six chargers. Then came Trump. Were talking about a project that could have been up and running by now, says Reginald Parker, president of Freedmen Capital Foundation, a green bank in Georgia. It had a months delay. Over the last month, prices have gone up. The market has changed tremendously. And that type of uncertainty for the project adds costs that small businesses, in general, are not ready for. Exactly the type of project that the green bank wanted to support Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan bill that Congress passed in 2022, there was funding for the work. Last year, the first national green bank opened with $5 billion in funding from the IRA. The organization started creating a network of state and local green banks. (Despite the name, these arent typical banks with deposits. Instead, they’re institutions that make green loans for projects like community solar installations or green building retrofits.) Freedman Capital Foundation, named after a late-1800s bank established for formerly enslaved people, was chosen to be part of the network. The new charging station was exactly the type of project that the green bank wanted to support. The communities that are EV charging deserts are the first and hardest hit by climate impacts, Parker says. Helping residents switch to EVs can help cut emissions. It can also reduce air pollution and help people save money on fuel. It also builds energy independence, he says. Oil and gas are derived from some foreign sources. Electricity is all domestic. One part of the charger project had already been funded. A grant from the Department of Transportation helped cover the cost for the local utility to set up the electric infrastructure needed for the chargers. The small organization that will operate the charging station, called TABT, is paying to install the chargers. The last piece of the fundingthe money to cover a loan for the equipmentcame from the EPAs Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program created by the IRA. Trump pauses IRA funds On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order telling agencies to pause all funds under the IRA. At first, grantees under the EPA program could still access the money sitting in their accounts. But in February, Trump-appointed EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said that the EPA would revoke contracts for the fund. The agency made baseless accusations of fraud. It froze $20 billion in grants. Citibank, directed by the government, froze the money in the account of Coalition for Green Capital, the nonprofit running the national green bank. Freedmen Capital Foundation was able to get its funds from the nonprofit just before that account was frozen. But the EPA warned it not to move forward on projects. “Everything had to stop,” says Parker. At the same time, some of the EPA’s grantees, including the Coalition for Green Capital, sued to force Citibank to unfreeze the money. A federal judge blocked the freeze. Appeals are still underway, and the money at Citibank still isn’t accessible. But the first court order meant that Freedmen was able to begin using the money it already had. (Another piece of its funds, for technical assistance, got stuck in the freeze.) In March, the utility finished upgrading the electric infrastructure needed for the chargers. If the project had happened normally, TABT could have ordered the chargers in advance. Installation could have started right away; the process could have taken as little as a week, and the chargers could be in use now. But because of the delays from the EPA’s actions, nothing was ready to go. ‘Instead of making investments, we are wasting time and resources’ Freedmen Capital Foundation has been scrambling to finalize the loan for the project. Trump’s chaotic rollout of tariffs means that the cost of supplies for making EV chargersfrom steel to electronicswill jump. “If we weren’t able to move within the next week or two, the owner would be subjected to higher prices,” Parker says. Despite the delays, the project is unusual in that it’s able to move forward. Most projects that were set to receive funding through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund are now stuck in limbo, waiting for the next stage in a lawsuit. A judge may issue a preliminary injunction this week that allows organizations to access their money, though the government will immediately appeal and could try to claw the money back. From solar energy in Arkansas to hydropower in Alaska, local projects that lower energy costs and support domestic manufacturing arent currently able to move forward, forcing communities to wait for the jobs and economic opportunity theyre counting on,” says Brooke Durham, a spokesperson for Climate United, a nonprofit that received a $6.97 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grant that was frozen. “Instead of making investments and delivering on those promises, we are wasting time and resources fighting an unnecessary battle in court. This program isnt about politics; its about saving money for hard-working Americans who are struggling to pay for groceries and keep the lights on.
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E-Commerce
Behind some of the most recognizable iconography in the world, from American presidential campaign logos to New York City subway signage and Apple keycaps, is one Swiss designer and a textbook he published in 1949. Youve probably never heard of either. Walter Käch was a calligrapher and educator at the Zürich School of Arts and Crafts in the late 30s and 40s. During this time, he published a simple manual, called Lettering, which laid out his approach to crafting letterforms, letting students learn about proper technique and trace and copy letters directly inside the book. Experts have credited Lettering for popularizing the idea of type families and directly inspiring the creation of Univers and Helvetica, two of the worlds most famous typefaces. Over time, Kächs contributions have largely been overshadowed by those of his students. Now, theres a team working to fix that. This week, the first modern reprint of Lettering was published through a collaboration between Dinamo type foundry, the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, and the graphic design firm Omnigroup. For the designers behind the reprint, its a passion project thats been more than six years in the making. [Photo: Michelle Mantel/courtesy Dinamo Editions] The book that inspired Helvetica Fabian Harb is the cofounder and head of type design at Dinamo. He discovered Lettering while studying at the Basel School of Design, where he learned that, despite being printed in an extremely limited run (likely between 500 and 1,000 copies), Kächs manual has had resounding ripple effects on how typefaces are designed today. [Käch] really went about type design in a quite broad way, Harb says. If you look through the manual, it’s not just sans serifs; it’s also about serifs, its also about script typefaces. Back in those years, there wasn’t a lot of teaching material around, so this being such a proper folder, I’m 100% sure it traveled and people that were teaching in other places also drew from the same material. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Letterings holistic approach to type design represents one of the first true explorations of a versatile type familyor a cohesive system of fonts with various weights and orientationswhich is the standard in todays industry, where most new typefaces come with eight to 10 different weights. Käch also directly inspired his student, Adrian Frutiger, to conceptualize the typeface Univers in 1957. Univers is now one of the most influential typefaces of all time, appearing everywhere from George W. Bushs two campaign logos to some of Apples early keycaps and the UNICEF logo. Likewise, the font Helvetica (the basis of NYC’s subway signs) is believed to pull direct inspiration from Kächs work. [Photo: Michelle Mantel/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Theres a direct connection to Univers and Helvetica, which are typefaces that just became so big, so visible, and so influential up until today, Harb says. Designers definitely know Univers, and Helvetica is probably known even to people that dont have anything to do with graphic design. Helvetica is so closely connected to Käch, but nobody knows about him. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Reprinting an iconic text The idea to issue a reprint of Lettering came as Harb learned more about the text for himself. In school, Harb discovered that copies of the manual are considered rare and precious, and those that are available in Switzerland are mostly held by libraries that dont allow them to be checked out. Meanwhile, designers interested in owning their own copies often found themselves in intense bidding wars on eBay, as those “in the know” on the manual’s influence jostled to secure a version for their collections. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] It was a little bit of a sport to check the eBay and see, Okay, is a copy coming up? Harb says. Then everybody would bid on it, and basically whoever had the most money would get it. Very often it went for crazy prices, especially as a studentlike somewhere like 250 and 350 Swiss francs. Due to the manuals interactive nature, nearly all surviving copies of Lettering tend to be in poor condition. People worked with them, a lot was traced in them,” Harb explains. “You can see that sometimes, people drew their own guidelines to figure out the proportions. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Finally, in 2014, Harb’s type foundry Dinamo was able to secure its own copy of Lettering through his connection with the Basel School of Design. The acquisition began a years long exploration of Kächs work for Harb, starting when he designed a custom typeface inspired by Kächs core teachings called Walter Alte. When Walter Alte was used in a contemporary art exhibition, the publicity led Leonardo Azzolini and Simon Mager, cofounders of Omnigroup, to connect with Harb over their shared interest in Kächs work. Together, the three created another Käch-inspired typefacethis time translated for a digital agecalled Walter Neue. Both Walter Alte and Walter Neue were officially published in 2022. As Harb, Azzolini, and Mager dedicated months to closely studying Kächs principles, they realized that the rest of the design community should have access to this resource, too. So, they joined forces with the Museum für Gestaltung on a new reprint of Lettering, a project that took another three years to complete. [Photo: Michelle Mantel/courtesy Dinamo Editions] The 2025 reprint of the manual, designed by Omnigroup and co-published by the Museum für Gestaltung, is made to come as close to the original as possible. All of the text, Harb says, has been copied one to one. And, just like the trailblazing 1949 text, the new version of Lettering allows todays generation of type designers to trace directly in the book itself. The book is now available online for 48, a far cry from the cutthroat prices on eBay. Still, Harb says, anyone with an interest in type design should get the chance to look at one of Kächs original manuals at least once. [The reprint] is very similar to the original, Harb says. But if you ever have the chance to see the original, youll see that it has a richness of materiality that, in todays world, is almost impossible to recreate.
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E-Commerce
The Postwar design phenomenon known as mid-century modernism has been backand thrivingfor years now. In addition to a steady stream of new products from major retailers that cash in on the clean curves of the past, people continue to buy originals, reissues, and knockoffs of icons like the Eames Lounge Chair in droves. But if theres one person Id wager loves it just a bit more than the rest of us, its journalist Dominic Bradbury. In the wake of his tomes Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Masterpieces and Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Houses, today Bradbury is back with another book: Mid-Century Modern Designers, a hulking A to Z chronicle of 300 design pioneers known and unknown. [Photo: courtesy Phaidon] I do write about contemporary design and contemporary architecture as well, Bradbury says. But I have become slightly obsessive and fixated on this period. I just find it so exciting and so inspiring in lots of different ways. Naturally, it was thus more difficult for Bradbury to stop at 300 designers than it was for him to reach 300 in the first place. His initial list comprised some 450500 names, and he whittled it down using a number of criteria. He and the publisher wanted an international focus and a diversity of disciplines, with a particular focus on those designing for home or personal use. They also wanted a mix of big names like the Eameses, Alvar Aalto, and Lina Bo Bardi, as well as more obscure designers who played a critical role in the movement. What I find really exciting about doing these kind of big, research-led books, is you’ll always discover something new, Bradbury says of resurfacing lesser-known talents. To that end, on the eve of the books publication, we asked Bradbury to select his top five forgotten mid-century Moderns who helped define their era. Their work speaks to the question of who gets remembered and who gets left in the pastand perhaps also shines a light on why the world still cant seem to get enough mid-century modernism at large. It’s such an extraordinary period of innovation and excitement and so many ideasand just also this really incredibly optimistic feeling, which I think we’re probably all in need of at the moment, says Bradbury. Yrjo Kukkapuro [Photo: courtesy Phaidon] Yrjö Kukkapuro (19332025) The Finnish Kukkapuro used to sit in the snow to study the shape of the human body as he was working on his best-known piece, the 1964 Karuselli (carousel) Chair, according to Bradbury. Kukkapuro later covered himself in chicken wire to create a plaster mold of himself reclining, all of which played into the final design of the reclining swivel chair. He was one of the early masters of ergonomics, Bradbury notes. The chair found fame when it landed on the cover of architectural and design magazine Domus in 1966. Its production continues to this day, although Kukkapuro is often overlooked in lieu of more famous Finnish designers, such as Alvar Aalto. When you’re going around Scandinavia, you sometimes see these chairs in hotel lobbies and things like that, Bradbury says. They’ve become a bit of an icon. Nanna Ditzel [Photo: courtesy Phaidon] Nanna Ditzel (19232005) You may not know the Danish Ditzel by name, but youve probably seen her most famous workor copies of itwhich she designed with her husband, Jrgen Ditzel: the 1957 Hanging Egg Chair. It is also still in production today, like many of her creations. I really admire her for her combination of craftsmanship and organic materiality, Bradbury says, adding that while other egg chairs of the period might have been created using fiberglass or other solutions, the Ditzels used natural wickerspinning an expressive take on traditional materials in a modern context. Thanks to such decisions, as Bradbury notes in his book, Ditzel offered an engaging version of warm Modernism. While Ditzel may not be mentioned in the same breath as other master Midcentury Scandinavian designer, Bradbury says that like many on this list, her work is being rediscovered as people search archives for pieces that could be suitable for reissue or collection today. Borge Mogensen [Photo: courtesy Phaidon] Brge Mogensen (1914-1972) Mogensen trained under Kaare Klint, the father of modern Danish furniture design. Bradbury says a major part of Klints approach was making sure one understood traditionand that carried over to his protégés output. Mogensen’s work [features] this combination of looking to the past and looking to the future at the same time, says Bradbury. So he would take traditional forms of furniture, like a hunting chair, and then reinterpret them in this sort of modern idiom. That yielded such pieces as the 1950 Hunting Chair and his 1958 Spanish Chaircreations that make one ponder the broader question of why some designers get overlooked in mid-century modern history at large. Bradbury says one key part of the equation is whether or not a designer’s work took off internationallylike, say, Finn Juhls did in the U.S. and Asia. Another major factor Bradbury is mulling at the moment: How designers were (or were not) embraced by the media, and how they promoted themselves. (The mid-century era is kind of when that started becoming more and more important, he says.) He says the Scandinavians were adept at it, and they would band together to do shows and exhibitions to get eyes on their workand as a result, many left a lasting impression in mid-century Modernism to this day. This contradicts the British mid-century modern designers below. John and Sylvia Reid [Photo: courtesy Phaidon] John & Sylvia Reid (19251992; 19242022) While many mid-century modernists are known for their high-end output, the married Reids became ubiquitous for their lower-priced furniture designs from the U.K. stalwart Stag Furniture. The Reids bedroom collections targeted young couples, who could buy a set or a piece at a time. They were very popular lines in the U.K. during the Postwar period, Bradbury says. Their furniture was beautifully designed, well-made, but quite affordable. Like Charles and Ray Eames, they werent limited to furniture, and were wildly talented multidisciplinary designers who also worked in lighting and graphic design. Unlike the Eameses, they didnt receive an enduring acclaim that persists to this day. Sergio Rodrigues [Photo: Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images] Sergio Rodrigues (19272014) Bradbury started to notice a pattern when working on his book New Brazilian House. We just kept seeing these amazing pieces of furniturebeautiful mid-century chairs with wooden frames and kind of slouchy leather cushions. We’d say, who designed those? And [the answer] would be Sergio Rodrigues, he recalls. As Bradbury details in his new book, Rodrigues created his signature Mole Armchair in 1957 after photographer Otto Stupakoff asked him to create a comfy couch for him. He later had another hit in 2002 with the Diz Lounge Armchair; a culmination of a long career. There was something quite joyful about his workyou just wanted to relax into his armchairs or his sofas, says Bradbury. They’re the kind of chair you can’t walk past without wanting to sit yourself down and spend a moment. Ultimately, Rodriguess work was spotted and appeared in international trade shows, leading to distribution abroad. But what of the other South American mid-century modernists lost to time? [They] just sort of stayed at home and concentrated on [their] home marketbut that doesn’t mean the work is any less amazing, Bradbury says. Who knows: In the current era of mid-century rediscovery and reappreciation, it may only be a matter of time before we see these mid-century modern designers anew, as well.
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E-Commerce
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