interiors

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?

San Francisco live/work loft with Frankenstein painting

November 23, 2008

A favourite San Francisco live/work loft space. I partly love it for the great painting of the burning ruin—the text at the bottom reads “Monument to Frankenstein.” I can’t find the source of this photo so if anyone knows, please tell me.

Categories: art, design, interiors, Ouno Design News, Uncategorised

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

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

Oak Rooms – Gentlemen’s Club in Notting Hill

November 7, 2008

Seriously, is there still such a thing as a gentlemen’s club? Alright, so if we’re going to have gender segregation, then women might want a club too, in my case a women’s club where people can talk about books or politics or even men but where no one ever mentions Sex and the City.

Categories: design, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

On the cheap in NYC

November 6, 2008

Art and architecture students produce creative DIY interiors on small budgets in NYC. For details see the NYT article. A wire cloud sculpture; a kitchen table made easily from a wood slab and tube legs from Home Depot; hanging wood light fixture made from ply offcuts; small space made larger via a loft bed and storage steps, with a desk surface made by resting a wood slab on two filing cabinets; spare paint used for wall decoration; spectacular chandelier made from plastic bags; kitchen cabinet made with a jigsaw and waste plywood.

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

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

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

Floating furniture.

October 29, 2008

Maybe this is another version of the indoor swing, I don’t know, but there’s something magical about suspended furniture. It’s by architect Robert Bernstein and was profiled in the NYT style section a while back.

Categories: architect, design, furniture, interiors, 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

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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. ____________________________________

interiors

What makes something arty or bohemian?

San Francisco live/work loft with Frankenstein painting

More Nest Magazine.

I miss Nest Quarterly Magazine.

Oak Rooms – Gentlemen’s Club in Notting Hill

On the cheap in NYC

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

Felice Varini – geometry projected on architecture

Floating furniture.

Everyone loves an indoor swing.

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