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Gabriella Crespi

April 6, 2009

A quasi-surreal or space age ‘Polished Steel Coffee Table’ by Italian architect and designer Gabriella Crespi looks like a metal crystal formation of some kind.

Categories: architect, design, favourite, furniture, Uncategorised, women designers

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

Pillow sofa

March 3, 2009

I kind of want this, but for practical reasons it would have to be upholstered to match the dog (white). Found on atelier29. Can’t determine the name of the company, because the original source is entirely in Japanese.

Categories: design, favourite, furniture, 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

Playing with Tradition rug by Richard Hutton

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.

Categories: art, craft, design, favourite, textiles, Uncategorised

I have no clue why they dance so madly.

February 1, 2009

From the YouTube description:

Germany 1970. The German moderator discuss in the beginning how boring and lame the official looks are and that the fashion and color designers came up with the following outfits to make the game more interesting and colorful.

Categories: design, fashion, favourite, humour, textiles, Uncategorised, video

Molo

January 15, 2009

Just a few blocks up the road from my studio is the workshop of Vancouver’s Molo Design. You’ve probably seen their accordioning softseating or their softwall room dividers which are now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Eileen Gray’s E-1027 house

December 24, 2008

In the late 1920s, the modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray designed and built a landmark piece of modernist architecture in the form of a seaside house.

What makes something arty or bohemian?

December 3, 2008

The use of the word “bohemian” is getting curiouser and curiouser (to quote Alice in Wonderland). Bohemian! Arty! What do these even mean now? To choose a trivial example, is this round object in our studio arty?

More Nest Magazine.

November 10, 2008

I’m still missing Nest Magazine. For much more information, see the previous post. I certainly understand from first-hand experience that these design projects are labours of love and very hard to sustain over time.

Categories: book, design, favourite, graphics and signage, interiors, 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. ____________________________________

favourite

Gabriella Crespi

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

Pillow sofa

Terunobu Fujimori, Japanese architecture historian turned architect

Playing with Tradition rug by Richard Hutton

I have no clue why they dance so madly.

Molo

Eileen Gray’s E-1027 house

What makes something arty or bohemian?

More Nest Magazine.

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