interiors

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

Cosmic dust, on tumblr

April 16, 2009

If tumblr is a bellwether—and it may not be—then the sixties & seventies are back, in style if not in substance. So many of tumblr’s weird little blogs, each of them a kind of eclectic personal bulletin board, feature this kind of rock and roll Hair: The Musical meets back-to-the-land handmade-house thing.

Categories: architecture, design, fashion, green, 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

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

April 2, 2009

The photo above shows the central living area of a rural farmhouse on the border of Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures. The house was restored by Kenji Tsuchisawa who bought it as a rundown heap when he was only 20, after seeing a photograph of a traditional Japanese farmhouse on a Tokyo magazine cover.

Categories: architecture, design, favourite, interiors, 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

Marguerite Duras’ bedroom in Neauphle, France, 1960s

February 16, 2009

There’s something compelling about this photo of the bedroom of novelist Marguerite Duras in the house she bought in Neauphle, outside Paris, in the 1960s. The thin cot bed is so peculiar, like something she might have grown up with during her impoverished colonial childhood in French Indochina.

Categories: book, design, interiors, textiles, Uncategorised

Valentine

February 14, 2009

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone.

A few more spreads from our collection of the sadly long defunct Nest Quarterly. So many magazines have died this year, but I still miss Nest the most.

Categories: architecture, art, book, design, interiors, Uncategorised

DIY: paint your linoleum floor white

February 3, 2009

When I moved into this typical 1930s apartment in Vancouver’s east side in 1999, the first thing I did was paint over the kitchen’s dingy gold linoleum flooring. The linoleum was the worst thing about that apartment.

“Raw blonde”

January 20, 2009

Supposedly raw blonde is a trend for 2009. I think that might be me, based on this definition. Warm but austere and at this point pretty pale.

This room somehow manages to be both sensual and monastic at the same time, so perhaps it represents the perfect refuge for a recession.

Categories: design, furniture, 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. ____________________________________

interiors

Donald Judd’s loft at 101 Spring Street

Cosmic dust, on tumblr

Interiors from the film Tommy, 1975

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

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

How Greeks hang things on walls

Marguerite Duras’ bedroom in Neauphle, France, 1960s

Valentine

DIY: paint your linoleum floor white

“Raw blonde”

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