Coconut "Macaringues"

For a party this week I tried - emphasis on tried - to make coconut macaroons. However, we inadverently bought finely grated, untoasted, unsweetened coconut, not the larger shredded sweetened coconut called for in the recipe. So I toasted the coconut myself and added extra sugar, but the end result favored the meringue, meant to hold the cookie together, over the coconut, which nearly disappeared. The cookies were still quite tasty, and I have decided simply to pass this off as an invention: the coconut macaringue. Enjoy!

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Book Review: "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age"

Reyner Banham 's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) is an engaging overview of the important theoretical developments of the early 20th century leading up to the "International Style" of the 1930s-40s. Banham does a fairly good job, in my opinion, of avoiding excessive editorializing, although he has a clear viewpoint on the Modern Movement and finishes with a strong conclusion. In opposition to his teacher, Nikolaus Pevsner , whose own history of modernism came out in 1936, Banham dismantled the " form follows function " credo that became the stereotype of modernism, arguing instead that formalism (a preoccupation with style and aesthetics) was an important, if not overriding, concern of Modern architects. Two sections of the book struck me in particular: his analysis of Le Corbusier's famous book Vers une architecture (Toward a [new] architecture) from 1923, and his Conclusion (chapter 22), where he breaks the link between functionali...

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