Word: swid
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...energetic partnership that was formed in 1986 by Stephen Swid, Martin Bandier and Charles Koppelman to produce records for other companies. The firm scored a major coup that year when it paid $125 million to buy CBS's music-publishing division, which held the rights to more than 200,000 songs ranging from Over the Rainbow to the score from Hair. Less than three years later, SBK turned around and sold the catalog to Thorn EMI, the British entertainment giant, for $295 million. As part of that deal, EMI gave $30 million to Koppelman and Bandier (Swid had left...
Since he has completed only a dozen architectural works, Holl is best known for the dinner plates and candlesticks he designed for the upscale marketers Swid Powell. But in his buildings he has found a way out of architecture's tired to-and-fro between caricature modernism (the neurotic Rubik's Cubes of the deconstructivists) and caricature classicism (the pretty confections of the postmodernists). His best work combines virtues of 1920s European rigor and 1980s American charm, of Gropius and Graves. His designs tend toward the ascetic, and he is determined to invent, not simply revive old styles...
...Mack. Today as then, the hip bourgeoisie is overeager to embrace bratty, nihilistic expressionist painters. If the confident, public-works liberalism of the 1960s is our version of Vienna's 19th century Ringstrasse urban renewal, then Reagan is our reassuring figurehead Franz Josef. The Wiener Werkstatte? The firm of Swid Powell, for whom the most prominent architects design tableware. Turn-of-the-century Viennese could feel cataclysm coming -- and in retrospect, the anonymous presence of young Hitler makes that last-waltz skittishness seem almost operatically prescient. Today the moment-by-moment potential for nuclear war supplies the apocalyptic undercurrent...
...these busy architects, who often compete against one another for seven-figure commissions, get together on tableware? Easily, say Nan Swid and Addie Powell. The two ebullient women, both former executives of Knoll International, invited nine architects to lunch at Manhattan's sumptuous Four Seasons restaurant in 1982. They presented a detailed plan for the line, but had so little capital that they could offer the architects no fees, only the promise of royalties. Says Swid, 42, whose husband Stephen is Knoll's cochairman...
...chutzpah." That, apparently, was enough. "An architect stood to toast the venture," recalls Powell, 40, a veteran management executive. "But another said, 'Sit down, we've got too much work to do.' " Last month Swid and Powell showed buyers their new pieces, including four porcelain patterns and, to satisfy customers who want complete place settings, solid black and white plates, cups and saucers to harmonize with the designs. Store buyers are pushing them to add items like sheets and towels. But the women make it clear that they will go only so far in pursuing the vogue...