October 19, 2009
I was in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History this past week. My childhood fetish for rock-collecting came back in a rush, and the Minerals and Fossils sections filled me with a deep hankering to build my own rock display.
October 13, 2009
Bringing a Christmas tree inside is actually a relatively new phenomenon. It does not go back to pagan times. It started in Germany, where one tree was brought into the local guild hall but not into every house.
September 29, 2009
The term “used future” was coined by George Lucas to describe the unkempt reality of life in outer space, specifically Han Solo’s dingy Millennium Falcon.
September 25, 2009
Discuss.
September 8, 2009
Things for the homemade space station where we’ll live in some sort of harmony and wear space rags.
August 14, 2009
The blog YOU HAVE BEEN HERE SOMETIME does, as its title suggests, provoke an uncanny sensation. It’s halfway between a feeling of deja vu and a renewed sense of the mysterious life of objects.
July 6, 2009
This is Karim Rashid’s new “Bite Me” Chair, a garish blobject in the shape of a bubblegum-pink molar. There was a pretty unanimous chorus of dislike and disapproval of this chair on the CDR (Canadian Design Resource) blog in May, and Rashid – the master of plasticky furniture that looks carelessly cheap when it’s made and then ages badly – totally deserved it.
June 27, 2009
This disassemblable spiral staircase by French industrial designer Roger Tallon is, not surprisingly, in the design collection of the MOMA. It is both ingenious in engineering terms and beautiful.
June 24, 2009
Berlin’s modernist and contemporary architecture stands in for Aeon Flux‘s fictional city of Bregna in the year 2415 with surprisingly little alteration.
June 23, 2009
Above, the 1970s modern two-level platform in painter Frank Stella’s loft, from the classic book Inside Today’s Home. Below, a recent photo of the renovated 1950s conversation pit in the Number 31 Hotel in Dublin.
