architecture

Depth in surfaces – Wang Shu’s Ningbo Museum

May 4, 2009

Museum designed and built as if by archeological time. The Ningbo Historic Museum was designed by Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio. Photos by Iwan Baan, via archdaily.

Categories: architect, architecture, design, Uncategorised

How rooms and architecture affect mood and creativity

May 2, 2009

Jonas Salk claimed that it wasn’t until he left his basement lab in the States and went to clear his head in a monastery in Assisi that he was able to solve the puzzle of polio.

Categories: architect, architecture, art, cities, design, green, interiors, landscaping, Uncategorised, urban planning

Cosmic dust, on tumblr

April 16, 2009

If tumblr is a bellwether—and it may not be—then the sixties & seventies are back, in style if not in substance. So many of tumblr’s weird little blogs, each of them a kind of eclectic personal bulletin board, feature this kind of rock and roll Hair: The Musical meets back-to-the-land handmade-house thing.

Categories: architecture, design, fashion, green, interiors, Uncategorised

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

April 2, 2009

The photo above shows the central living area of a rural farmhouse on the border of Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures. The house was restored by Kenji Tsuchisawa who bought it as a rundown heap when he was only 20, after seeing a photograph of a traditional Japanese farmhouse on a Tokyo magazine cover.

Categories: architecture, design, favourite, interiors, Uncategorised

So you think you’d like to live in a church…

March 26, 2009

When I was a kid my parents had Arlo Guthrie’s record Alice’s Restaurant , a spoken folk song plus narrative set in a converted church in Massachusetts in the sixties, and I knew the full monologue off by heart.

Still-unsurpassed box store architecture: SITE

March 15, 2009

I first saw these amazing buildings, almost all of which have now either had their facades removed or have actually been demolished, in the November 2007 issue of Wallpaper. The BEST Products Company of Richmond, Virginia commissioned architect James Wines’ SITE (Sculpture In The Environment) to build nine commercial buildings for them in the 1970s and early 80s.

Categories: architect, architecture, design, Uncategorised

Valentine

February 14, 2009

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone.

A few more spreads from our collection of the sadly long defunct Nest Quarterly. So many magazines have died this year, but I still miss Nest the most.

Categories: architecture, art, book, design, interiors, Uncategorised

Handbuilt houses of the Pacific coast

February 10, 2009

Sometimes after seeing too many chichi, precious, and citified houses, too much shiny, overproduced design, and everything just starts to look too estranged from the materials it was made from, as an antidote I go look at pictures of handbuilt houses.

Categories: architecture, British Columbia, design, green, Uncategorised

Terunobu Fujimori, Japanese architecture historian turned architect

February 7, 2009

Terunobu Fujimori has been called the world’s only “surreal architect.” Obviously this is false, but there is a fantastical quality about his work that isn’t typical among architects, even when they’re trying for the new, strange or sci-fi.

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

DIY: paint your linoleum floor white

February 3, 2009

When I moved into this typical 1930s apartment in Vancouver’s east side in 1999, the first thing I did was paint over the kitchen’s dingy gold linoleum flooring. The linoleum was the worst thing about that apartment.

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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. ____________________________________

architecture

Depth in surfaces – Wang Shu’s Ningbo Museum

How rooms and architecture affect mood and creativity

Cosmic dust, on tumblr

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

So you think you’d like to live in a church…

Still-unsurpassed box store architecture: SITE

Valentine

Handbuilt houses of the Pacific coast

Terunobu Fujimori, Japanese architecture historian turned architect

DIY: paint your linoleum floor white

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