June 11, 2011
Via Monocle. Thanks to Wilson Tang for pointing this out.
Twenty-nine Japanese families have found their version of happiness by creating their own idyll in a Tokyo suburb.
June 8, 2011
The green roof at the Blueberry Building, in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. These plantings grew in one year, mostly self-planted by the wind. The group (Eclipse Awards) planted the sedum and a few other things, but the garden augmented itself naturally.
May 30, 2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8JaXH0qiw
From my mother.
May 25, 2011
Spaceship condominium in Guilford, Connecticut, designed by Wil Armster. We need to see more buildings like this, especially in Vancouver, to break up the endless architectural monotony not to mention mediocrity.
April 12, 2011
In the middle of fighting a mad urban planning fiasco in Vancouver, it was heartening to see this news from another city: Seoul rips out freeways and allows the sun back onto a river.
April 6, 2011
This is a belated short note to say I am participating in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s current exhibition WE Vancouver—12 Manifestos for the City, running February 12–May 1, 2011.
April 1, 2011
Whatever happened to planters like these two? They may still be in production, but wherever they are still available, and that’s nearly nowhere, they’re civic-sized, weigh 500-1000 pounds, and are out of scale for people’s home gardens.
February 5, 2011
Storm sewer cover by Coast Salish (Musqueam) artist Susan Point and her daughter Kelly Cannell, depicting four small eggs in the centre, spinning out to tadpoles that become frogs radiating out to the edges. Point is a Vancouver-based Coast Salish artist and master carver whose work has been commissioned for the Vancouver International Airport, the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology and the Smithsonian in Washington.
January 15, 2011
The entire 16th C town of Trinidad on Cuba’s south coast is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its heritage designation, as well as the complete—and for a Vancouverite visually relieving—absence of land speculators and developers in Cuba has kept the town very close to its original condition.
January 3, 2011
This is the Cuban villa where Hemingway lived from 1939-1960 and wrote many of his best known novels. It sits high in the town of San Francisco de Paula about half an hour outside Havana, and from the patio you can actually see Havana in the distance, hence the name Finca Vigía or “Lookout Farm.” The villa was discovered by Hemingway’s wife at the time, Martha Gelhorn, who was seeking somewhere spacious for the two of them to live.
