furniture

Aalto’s Villa Mairea in Finland

June 20, 2009

Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland, built between 1937 and 1939 as a rural retreat, is considered one of the greatest houses of the 20th century. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who curated a major retrospective of Aalto’s work at the Barbican in London in 2007, says photographs give no real sense of Aalto’s buildings.

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

When “today” had the ring of “tomorrow”

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.

Categories: architect, architecture, art, craft, design, furniture, interiors, landscaping, textiles, Uncategorised

Donald Judd’s loft at 101 Spring Street

April 25, 2009

This is artist Donald Judd’s loft in Soho, maintained as a museum and open for viewing after recent restorations. It was one of the first artist’s lofts in Soho – not to mention in New York – and is now almost the paradigmatic example of loft living.

Categories: art, design, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

Interiors from the film Tommy, 1975

April 10, 2009

Ann Margret as Nora Walker Hobbs in Ken Russell’s 1975 film “Tommy.” This scene, not to mention the whole film, was absolutely formative for me (and apparently I’m not alone).

Categories: design, fashion, favourite, film & TV, furniture, interiors, textiles, Uncategorised, video

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

Furniture makers of Middle Earth

April 5, 2009

I find this Todd Merrell Antiques magazine ad weirdly compelling. If you end up at his website (now defunct) it’s like being transported into Middle Earth or the underworld. You might have to retrieve an amulet with the help of a talking dog with eyes as big as saucers or something.

Categories: design, furniture, Uncategorised

So you think you’d like to live in a church…

March 26, 2009

When I was a kid my parents had Arlo Guthrie’s record Alice’s Restaurant , a spoken folk song plus narrative set in a converted church in Massachusetts in the sixties, and I knew the full monologue off by heart.

How Greeks hang things on walls

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.

Categories: craft, design, DIY, furniture, 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

Afghan war rugs – where are the red rugs?

February 11, 2009

While on the topic of Afghanistan, here are some examples of Afghani war rugs. Production of these pictorial rugs began in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion and persisted throughout the civil war and into the US invasion.

Categories: design, furniture, politics, 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. ____________________________________

furniture

Aalto’s Villa Mairea in Finland

When “today” had the ring of “tomorrow”

Donald Judd’s loft at 101 Spring Street

Interiors from the film Tommy, 1975

Gabriella Crespi

Furniture makers of Middle Earth

So you think you’d like to live in a church…

How Greeks hang things on walls

Pillow sofa

Afghan war rugs – where are the red rugs?

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