book

Books

December 6, 2010

Room with Finn Juhl furniture and lots and lots of books. It’s worth reprinting this Anna Quindlen quote on books:

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”
~Anna Quindlen, “Enough Bookshelves,” New York Times, 7 August 1991.

Categories: art, book, favourite, furniture, graphics and signage, humour, interiors, on the fridge, Uncategorised

Chuck Davis, 1935-2010

November 20, 2010

Above: the superb book design on Davis’ often-reprinted books from the 1970s.

Chuck Davis died early this morning at age 75. Chuck was arguably Vancouver’s most well-known historian; certainly he was its best-loved historian for anyone who grew up in Vancouver in the 70s or 80s.

Koolhaas Houselife

August 9, 2010

While on the topic of buildings that don’t always function the way we want them to, I was reminded of the quite hilarious 2008 documentary Koolhaas Houselife, in which a housekeeper talks about the difficulties of cleaning one of Koolhaas’ houses.

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

“Some of our more arrogant and careless buildings are at war with time and change, and they always lose.”

August 8, 2010

“Buildings are the wealth of nations, our largest capital asset. They are the ornament of cultures and they are where we spend most of our lives. Some of our more arrogant and careless buildings are at war with time and change, and they always lose.

Categories: architect, architecture, book, design, Uncategorised, video

Alexander Calder with car

June 21, 2010

Calder with his self-designed BMW. His face too is a good design.

Via the always interesting Wary Meyers, authors of the fun Wary Meyers’ Tossed & Found: Unconventional Design from Cast-offs.

Categories: art, book, design, favourite, green, Uncategorised

Diet Cookbook, 1974, plus nudity

July 7, 2009

This 1974 book cover has everything including mod 3D typeface, superimposed naked women in psychedelic colours, and an author named bureau of consumer research in lower case.

Categories: book, Canadian design, design, graphics and signage, Uncategorised

Marguerite Duras’ bedroom in Neauphle, France, 1960s

February 16, 2009

There’s something compelling about this photo of the bedroom of novelist Marguerite Duras in the house she bought in Neauphle, outside Paris, in the 1960s. The thin cot bed is so peculiar, like something she might have grown up with during her impoverished colonial childhood in French Indochina.

Categories: book, design, interiors, textiles, 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

Egle Amaldi’s bookshelf & modernist Cado shelving

January 17, 2009

These staggered, airy midcentury modern arrangements are so much less chichi than the many fancified contemporary bookshelves you see around.

I love this simple, balanced living room belonging to Italian architect Egle Amaldi in the 1960s.

Categories: architect, book, design, DIY, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

More Furniture in 24 Hours – 4 pieces

January 9, 2009

A final post on great DIY furniture from Spiros Zakas’ 1979 “More Furniture in 24 Hours” book. If you want the building plans for any of these pieces, go to this Flickr set.

Categories: book, design, DIY, furniture, Uncategorised

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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. ____________________________________

book

Books

Chuck Davis, 1935-2010

Koolhaas Houselife

“Some of our more arrogant and careless buildings are at war with time and change, and they always lose.”

Alexander Calder with car

Diet Cookbook, 1974, plus nudity

Marguerite Duras’ bedroom in Neauphle, France, 1960s

Valentine

Egle Amaldi’s bookshelf & modernist Cado shelving

More Furniture in 24 Hours – 4 pieces

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