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I miss Nest Quarterly Magazine.

November 9, 2008

I have been really feeling the absence of Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors magazine lately, more than four years after it became defunct. On a whim I Google searched “I miss Nest Magazine” this week and found out how very not alone I am.

Categories: architecture, art, book, design, DIY, favourite, graphics and signage, interiors, Uncategorised

We’re sorry about the War of 1812 (Goodbye George Bush)

November 6, 2008

Circa 2007. Canadian comedian Colin Mochrie heaps mockery on soon-to-be-voted-out George Bush in his persona of newsman Anthony St. George on the Canadian comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes. We are sorry.

Categories: Canadian design, design, favourite, humour, politics, Uncategorised, video

Minimalism vs. maximalism – “minimum is maximum in drag.”

November 2, 2008

It would be hard to count the number of times I’ve seen a photo of a beautiful minimalist interior in a blog and then scrolled down to the comments to discover that many people find it cold, sterile, clinical, unfit for kids, even morally reprehensible.

Categories: architect, architecture, art, design, DIY, favourite, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

The nomad thing.

These “modern nomad” or “urban nomad” styles appeared in Canadian fashion magazine Flare this fall, and Vogue and and others published similar photographs. Since fashion and other areas of design tend to be strangely prescient about historical circumstances – for example, American Depression-era styles were on the runway for nearly a year and a half before the recent stock market crash – does this interest in nomadism mean anything?

Categories: design, favourite, textiles, Uncategorised

Felice Varini – geometry projected on architecture

October 30, 2008

Swiss artist Felice Varini applies these geometric “perspective-localized” paintings to rooms and other architectural surfaces. Varini’s perspectival installations are interesting in that they project visually compelling geometric shapes onto architectural spaces but the shapes are only seen in their perfect geometric form from a single, specific vantage point.

Categories: art, design, favourite, interiors, Uncategorised

The oldest textile fragment in the world.

For the record, an image of the oldest fragment of textile ever found. This is a Neolithic fragment of linen from Egypt circa 5000BC—a shred of clothing that belonged to someone 7000 years ago.

Categories: craft, design, favourite, textiles, Uncategorised

Everyone loves an indoor swing.

October 28, 2008

A swing inside the house changes things. Yes, not everyone has a ceiling high enough or room wide enough for a swing, and yes, most of the photos we found of indoor swings pictured them in lofts—and in lofts you can do many things indoors that people normally do outside.

Categories: design, DIY, favourite, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

Berber rugs, the art of a “people from between somewhere and nowhere.”

October 8, 2008

Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen used these rugs regularly in their interiors, which is not surprising. Their unusual combination of minimalism and handmade detail, restraint and inventiveness works well with modernism’s aesthetics by both echoing the abstract geometry of the architecture and also counterbalancing that austerity with some softness.

Categories: craft, design, favourite, interiors, textiles, 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

I miss Nest Quarterly Magazine.

We’re sorry about the War of 1812 (Goodbye George Bush)

Minimalism vs. maximalism – “minimum is maximum in drag.”

The nomad thing.

Felice Varini – geometry projected on architecture

The oldest textile fragment in the world.

Everyone loves an indoor swing.

Berber rugs, the art of a “people from between somewhere and nowhere.”

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