September 11, 2009
“Our lighting is hand-built in Japan from natural materials, including the hand-made paper (washi) of Eriko Horiki, the bent Japanese cedar of Toshiyuki Tani’s Wappa series, the coiled beech wood of the Bunaco Lacquer Ware Company, and the todomatsu pine slats of Takumi Kohgei.
August 30, 2009
This house is called the Yakisugi or “charred cedar” house. Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori is using a traditional Japanese technique of charring as a way to finish and preserve wood. See another charcoal house by Fujimori here.
August 13, 2009
This is the paper-based pavilion designed by Arthur Erickson for the UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements that took place in Vancouver in June of 1976. The pavilion, part of Habitat’s exhibit, was erected in front of the old courthouse (now the Vancouver Art Gallery).
June 10, 2009
Modernist Vancouver house of the painter BC Binning, who painted his own interior and exterior murals. Photo by Arne Haraldsson. See here for more information on this heritage-protected house.
In my neighbourhood there’s a heritage program called True Colours wherein you can receive a pat on the back from heritage types and sometimes free paint if you agree to paint your house in the original house colours circa 1901.
May 17, 2009
Photos are all from the 1975 edition of Inside Today’s Home by Ray and Sarah Faulkner, Holt Rinehart Winston. (The 1954, 1960 and 1968 editions of this book are all worth collecting too, if you can find them on abebooks.) The word “today” somehow sounded more optimistic then than it does now, though of course back then you did have the bomb to consider.
May 5, 2009
On a trip with friends to the west coast of Vancouver Island one summer, I found a tin “Holly Hobbie” mug that had washed up on shore. The next morning I showed it to my friend Jonathan, who was cooking us breakfast.
March 15, 2009
There is something so beautiful about the way photographs and other objects are hung on the walls in traditional rooms in Greece. The objects are prized yet there’s also something casual and unprecious about the way they accumulate.
February 11, 2009
The so-called “afghan blanket” seems to go to Value Village to die. It’s hard to know which is more disturbing: the synthetic nature of the object itself, or the fact that it is still, amazingly, given everything that has happened over the last fifteen or more years, called an “afghan.” A search online to discover the origins of this craft object immediately turned up “The All American Denim Stripes Afghan.” No lie!
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.
February 4, 2009
Textile looms and computers share a common history; Babbage used punch cards in his Difference Engine after seeing a Jacquard loom at work. This carpet by Richard Hutten is called “Playing With Tradition” and it plays on the historical relationship of looms and computers by looking exactly like a digital image that has been pixel-stretched.
