interiors

No, you bite me, Karim Rashid.

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.

Categories: cringe list, design, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

Roger Tallon’s helicoid spiral staircase

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.

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

Architecture in the movies, Part 4 – Aeon Flux

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.

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

Whatever happened to the seating platform, the conversation pit?

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.

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

Architecture in the Movies, Part 3 – Logan’s Run

June 11, 2009

The 1976 film Logan’s Run, a sci-fi dystopia about a domed post-apocalyptic society that euthanizes its citizens at age 30, heavily occupied my late childhood imagination.

Categories: architecture, design, fashion, film & TV, interiors, Uncategorised, video

Dance scene from Band of Outsiders

May 23, 2009

From Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part, or Band of Outsiders. Not design except in the larger sense, but it’s in the favourites category thanks to my friends Maxwell and Hadley who made about thirty of us learn this sequence for an art event a couple of years ago.

Categories: cities, design, interiors, Uncategorised, video

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

How rooms and architecture affect mood and creativity

May 2, 2009

Jonas Salk claimed that it wasn’t until he left his basement lab in the States and went to clear his head in a monastery in Assisi that he was able to solve the puzzle of polio.

Categories: architect, architecture, art, cities, design, green, interiors, landscaping, Uncategorised, urban planning

Stellated polyhedra – mathematical models

April 29, 2009

When I was about 12, my dad and I built four stellated polyhedra (star-shaped, many-sided platonic solids). Dad, a mathematician and math teacher, used the book shown below as a resource and then worked out his own dimensions and angles (you can see his notations right in the book).

Categories: art, design, DIY, 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. ____________________________________

interiors

No, you bite me, Karim Rashid.

Roger Tallon’s helicoid spiral staircase

Architecture in the movies, Part 4 – Aeon Flux

Whatever happened to the seating platform, the conversation pit?

Aalto’s Villa Mairea in Finland

Architecture in the Movies, Part 3 – Logan’s Run

Dance scene from Band of Outsiders

When “today” had the ring of “tomorrow”

How rooms and architecture affect mood and creativity

Stellated polyhedra – mathematical models

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