design

Coast Salish storm sewer cover by Susan Point

February 5, 2011

Storm sewer cover by Coast Salish (Musqueam) artist Susan Point and her daughter Kelly Cannell, depicting four small eggs in the centre, spinning out to tadpoles that become frogs radiating out to the edges. Point is a Vancouver-based Coast Salish artist and master carver whose work has been commissioned for the Vancouver International Airport, the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology and the Smithsonian in Washington.

Wallander

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.

Categories: architecture, design, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

Sigmund Freud’s office

January 23, 2011

Perhaps one of the world’s most famous interiors. Most photographs of this room show the same angle so it’s hard to know if they’re the same photograph or many photographs of the same thing.

Categories: art, design, favourite, furniture, interiors, textiles, Uncategorised

Tourist, Havana

January 20, 2011

No comment, other than to say I hope this person is not Canadian.

Note the Che cap.

Categories: design, humour, politics, Uncategorised

Rebar chairs

January 19, 2011

Rebar chairs, Trinidad and Cienfuegos, Cuba.

Categories: design, furniture, Uncategorised

Handmade garlands, Cuba

January 9, 2011

At a music school in the town of Trinidad.

Categories: design, DIY, green, textiles, Uncategorised

Modernist house, Cojimar, Cuba

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.

Categories: architecture, design, Uncategorised

Hemingway’s villa in Cuba – Finca Vigía

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.

Categories: architecture, design, furniture, interiors, landscaping, politics, Uncategorised

Coast guard tower, Cuba

Just off the Playa Ancon outside the town of Trinidad, Cuba.

Categories: architecture, design, Uncategorised

Che by Félix Beltrán

December 31, 2010

This poster of Che by well known Cuban designer Félix Beltrán was commissioned by the Castro government upon news of Che’s 1967 murder in Bolivia. Soon after Che’s body was found, versions of this poster were produced in a number of different languages for all the embassies in Cuba, while the Spanish-language version lined the streets of Havana on the day of his 1967 memorial parade here.

Categories: design, favourite, graphics and signage, politics, 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. ____________________________________

design

Coast Salish storm sewer cover by Susan Point

Wallander

Sigmund Freud’s office

Tourist, Havana

Rebar chairs

Handmade garlands, Cuba

Modernist house, Cojimar, Cuba

Hemingway’s villa in Cuba – Finca Vigía

Coast guard tower, Cuba

Che by Félix Beltrán

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