architect

On Rize (Or Forcing A Luxury Highrise On A Neighbourhood That Really Doesn’t Want It)

April 5, 2012

UPDATE: This disastrous, precedent-setting development was passed by our City Council, dominated by supposedly “green” Vision Vancouver, in a 9-1 vote. It was not sent back to design; only vague requests to the developer to make it smaller and less ugly were uttered.

Perfect chair

March 31, 2012

When humans apply this much care to designing things, it makes me almost teary. This chair is a life-raft on a tidal wave of mass-produced cynicism. The person who made this chair was doing something so careful it’s almost spiritual.

Categories: architect, architecture, craft, design, favourite, furniture, Uncategorised

Houses in New Delhi by Edwin Lutyens

January 25, 2012

English architect Edwin Lutyens designed much of the British colonial power’s New Delhi between 1912 and 1930, and his aesthetic dominates the city. While in Delhi I have been staying in a Lutyens-designed house, now a guesthouse in walking distance from the famed Lodi Gardens and from India Gate, also designed by Lutyens.

Categories: architect, architecture, design, landscaping, Uncategorised, urban planning

Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright

January 8, 2012

Photography is only minimally allowed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter house in Arizona, Taliesin West, so most of these photographs are only exterior shots. I confess I’ve always been less impressed by FLW’s work that most are, so this post is not in praise of FLW or Taliesin West.

Categories: architect, architecture, design, furniture, interiors, textiles, Uncategorised

Arcosanti, by Paolo Soleri

January 5, 2012

Arcosanti, designed by Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri, is an experimental architectural complex perched on the side of a gulch in the Arizona desert, about 70 miles north of Phoenix.

Ice Cube narrates Ray and Charles Eames in L.A.

December 7, 2011

“Charles and Ray Eames, husband and wife team… They were doing mashups before mashups even existed.”

Ice Cube studied architectural drafting before becoming a rapper.

Thanks, Krista Jahnke for finding this on archinect.

Categories: architect, architecture, cities, design, music, Uncategorised, video

McCabe & Mrs. Miller by Robert Altman: shot in Vancouver, soundtrack by Leonard Cohen

December 3, 2011

McCabe & Mrs. Miller, released in 1971, was one of Robert Altman’s earliest feature films (after M*A*S*H*, That Cold Day in the Park, and Brewster McCloud).

Weekend Cabin by Mark Osburn of Osburn Clarke

November 15, 2011

Beautiful simple cabin by my architect friend Mark Osburn and his firm Osburn Clarke. Via Adventure Journal.

I heard another architect say lately that the cabin form is the vernacular architecture of British Columbia, and that is probably true.

Melbourne – now the most livable city in the world – and its cycling Director of Design, Rob Adams

October 25, 2011

Rob Adams, Melbourne’s Director of Design

Melbourne, now deemed the most livable city in the world, has bumped Vancouver from top spot. Never having believed Vancouver deserved that spot, I’m happy the designation has gone to a city that probably does.

The End of the Age of Tall Buildings

October 12, 2011

Vancouver towers from Wikimedia Commons

[Update: see post on this topic on the Vancouver Lights blog. Also see this critique of glass highrises by Lisa Rochon in the Globe and Mail.]

Apologies that this is such a long post.

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This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest. As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board." As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more ____________________________________

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

architect

On Rize (Or Forcing A Luxury Highrise On A Neighbourhood That Really Doesn’t Want It)

Perfect chair

Houses in New Delhi by Edwin Lutyens

Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright

Arcosanti, by Paolo Soleri

Ice Cube narrates Ray and Charles Eames in L.A.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller by Robert Altman: shot in Vancouver, soundtrack by Leonard Cohen

Weekend Cabin by Mark Osburn of Osburn Clarke

Melbourne – now the most livable city in the world – and its cycling Director of Design, Rob Adams

The End of the Age of Tall Buildings

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