Uncategorised

Dog days of summer, and cabins on the coast

August 31, 2011

Recent radio silence has been the result of being either too busy in the city, or too unbusy and computerless while on various islands.

Today I learned that the term dog days is very old, a translation from the latin dies caniculares.

Goodbye Jericho Wharf

August 17, 2011

1976 Greenpeace launch at Jericho Beach Wharf, with seaplane hangars behind in the Moderne style

Goodbye to another old Vancouver landmark. While the loss of the wharf is sad, the greater loss actually happened about thirty years ago: the demolition of the old beachside military hangars behind the wharf.

Iceland

August 14, 2011

Iceland’s On-going Revolution

by Deena Stryker, Monday, August 01, 2011
Reprinted from Daily Kos (without permission, apologies)

Rekjavik by pocius

An Italian radio program’s story about Iceland’s on-going revolution is a stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world.

Categories: cities, design, DIY, politics, Uncategorised

Mighty Boosh

August 7, 2011

‘Mr. Susan’ in the “Mirror World” – this scene from the BBC’s The Mighty Boosh is a pretty good introduction to this cult BBC TV show. The show, the surreal adventures of two London zookeepers’, features DIY production and costume design that owes a lot to comedian Noel Fielding, one of the show’s two actor/writers.

Categories: art, craft, design, DIY, favourite, film & TV, humour, Uncategorised, video

Playplax by Patrick Rylands

Playplax, another toy from my childhood, was designed in 1966 by the brilliant British industrial designer Patrick Rylands. It’s in the permanent collection of the V&A Museum in London.

Categories: art, design, Uncategorised

For Chris: Fast German Hip Hop

August 6, 2011

Summer yard sale, Strathcona, Vancouver. Not sure what caused me to fail to buy this. As art.

Categories: design, graphics and signage, humour, Uncategorised, Vancouver

Building around natural features

July 24, 2011

“The natural landscape is as important as the architecture,“ says Edward M. Jones, of Jones Studio in Phoenix, who built a contemporary house in Scottsdale, Arizona, for Tracy and Lou Ann O’Rourke “The boulders have been there for an eternity, and the saguaros are often very old, so you don’t move them just to build a house,“ says Jones.

Categories: architect, architecture, design, green, landscaping, Uncategorised

World’s ugliest buildings?

The Pilgrimage Church in Neviges, Germany

These were listed among the world’s ugliest buildings, aggregated from various rankings in Forbes, Virtual Tourist and Oddee.com. Quite apart from blithely ignoring the complexity of the question “what is beautiful,” which philosophy has attempted to deal with for centuries and has only made more unanswerable, this list is pretty odd.

Categories: architect, architecture, cities, design, Uncategorised, urban planning

Coast Modern Film – Fundraiser on July 28, Vancouver

July 20, 2011

If you’re in Vancouver on July 28, and are interested in the vernacular modernist architecture of our region, buy a ticket for this event. Ouno is hosting this fundraiser to benefit the completion of the film Coast Modern by my filmmaker friends Gavin Froome and Mike Bernard.

Better late than never

July 18, 2011

From my friend Alan: “The best graffiti I’ve seen in a while. Freshly applied a couple days ago.”

Categories: British Columbia, cities, design, humour, Uncategorised, Vancouver

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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. ____________________________________

Uncategorised

Dog days of summer, and cabins on the coast

Goodbye Jericho Wharf

Iceland

Mighty Boosh

Playplax by Patrick Rylands

For Chris: Fast German Hip Hop

Building around natural features

World’s ugliest buildings?

Coast Modern Film – Fundraiser on July 28, Vancouver

Better late than never

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