SAVANNAH MODERN

Savannah, due to years of benign neglect, is among the bestpreserved towns in the South, organized around beautiful squares shaded by oaks with Spanish moss. The Telfair Museum of Art sits on two of the squares, and this month, an addition to the museum, designed by Moshe Safdie, is going to put a bright white cube of a modern building smack in the middle of the neoclassic gentility of Savannah. There are already many modern boxes desecrating Savannah, and Safdie's design was scrutinized by a review board for years. Multiple redesigns were ordered. The Jepson Center, as the new building is known, comprises two separate structures connected by glass bridges, straddling a historic lane. It houses the Telfair's modern and contemporary art collections. First exhibitions: new paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, and a collection of more than 20 works by various artists associated with the late Kirk Varnedoe, a Savannah native, who was head curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

TIMES TWO

The last of the die-hard moderns, Massimo and Leila Vignelli— the husband-and-wife team responsible for the clean look of everything from the interior of a Lutheran church in Manhattan to national railway signs in Italy— have turned their attention to the Swiss watch manufactured by Pierre Junod.

The Vignelli dualtime watch comes in a steel-backed case with a calfskin strap. The unusual side-by-side clockfaces give the watch a racetrackshaped face, enclosed by a scratch-proof crystal.