March 12, 2011
Tunis’ Hotel du Lac, above, was apparently the inspiration for the sandcrawlers in Star Wars.
It’s interesting that this example of sci-fi brutalism isn’t very well-known and in fact I can’t even locate the name of the architect or year it was completed.
February 20, 2011
Above is an artist’s rendering of the new mega-casino planned for Vancouver. Those three towers jammed up against the stadium in that awkward manner are the “entertainment complex” hotel towers, where presumably you can rent by the hour.
January 25, 2011
Wallander, the Swedish detective of Swedish books, TV and film, has now appeared in a BBC remake starring Kenneth Branagh. Shot in Sweden, the BBC remake has a Bergman-like mute bleakness despite the attractive minimalism of (most of) the interiors.
January 15, 2011
The entire 16th C town of Trinidad on Cuba’s south coast is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its heritage designation, as well as the complete—and for a Vancouverite visually relieving—absence of land speculators and developers in Cuba has kept the town very close to its original condition.
January 7, 2011
Hemingway locales in Cuba: La Floridita, one of the several bars that claim he invented the daiquiri in. (Though this one is the most likely.) The room on the fifth floor of the Hotel Ambos Mundos, where he wrote two novels is remarkably small, though the views are great.
January 6, 2011
Not far from Havana, this is the fishing village where Hemingway kept his boat during the decades he lived in Cuba. A local told me this house belongs to a fisherman.
January 3, 2011
This is the Cuban villa where Hemingway lived from 1939-1960 and wrote many of his best known novels. It sits high in the town of San Francisco de Paula about half an hour outside Havana, and from the patio you can actually see Havana in the distance, hence the name Finca Vigía or “Lookout Farm.” The villa was discovered by Hemingway’s wife at the time, Martha Gelhorn, who was seeking somewhere spacious for the two of them to live.
Just off the Playa Ancon outside the town of Trinidad, Cuba.
December 11, 2010
My sister, an emergency pediatric doctor, can’t watch House M.D. because she says the medicine is either wrong or stupidly farfetched, and I feel the same way about the decor. What is all that pricey midcentury modern design doing in a hospital?
December 5, 2010
The Kastrup sea bath is by White architektur, Denmark. Via archdaily. Photographs: Ole Haupt, White Arkitekter, Erco Lighting, Åke E:son Lindman
The idea behind this swimming platform and pier is that in the not overly warm Danish summer it shields swimmers from the wind and contains the sun.
