Wallace, Wright Together at Last
PERSONALITIES AS DIVERSE as spam king Sanford Wallace and architect Frank Lloyd Wright highlight this month’s roundup of DM coverage in the mainstream press.
In GQ, writer Don Steinberg suggests changing the “economics” of the Internet. He writes: “What if you had to pay your ISP to send e-mail? Just 10 or 20 cents per message. Your e-mail bill would come to $20 or $30 a month, but it would subsidize your Web surfing, which your ISP could provide for free. The bill would change, however, for spammers.”
It’s an interesting idea, especially if America Online would have to pay itself for the junk e-mail messages sent to its users.
Steinberg also reports that Wallace may be getting out of the junk e-mail business in favor of food service, alleged to be Wallace’s first love.
About three-quarters of a century ago, Frank Lloyd Wright was just one of many architects who sold house plans through the mail. If an article in the July 2 New York Times is to be believed, the fashion has made a comeback, with such name architects as Michael Graves and Robert A.M. Stern participating.
The bulk of Tracie Rozhon’s piece, “The House Is in the Mail,” focused on the reactions of the architects to how the buyer/builders adapted the plans to their particular needs. A sidebar reviewed five popular plans for aesthetics and “buildability.”
One architect, Hugh Newell Jacobson, claimed the plans for the 1998 Life dream house turned into his “own private oil well,” but others were less fortunate. Duo Dickinson sold some 30 plans (for which Better Homes and Gardens paid him $5,000). He claimed in the article that it took 16 sales “just to pay me back for my time.”
Perhaps Dickinson should subscribe to DIRECT as well as Architectural Digest.
