Uncategorised

Rocking camel by B.C. painter/author Jim Willer

July 15, 2011

I grew up with this psychedelic rocking camel, handmade in the late 60s/early 70s by B.C. artist/novelist Jim Willer. He called these “Bumpity Camels” and ours was one of a series—our cousins had one too.

Categories: art, book, British Columbia, Canadian design, craft, design, DIY, Uncategorised, Vancouver

Dry Design – converted garage

July 7, 2011

In this area of Los Angeles. two-car garages are mandated on each lot, by code. This garage was converted by Dry Design as a studio and possible living space in West L.A.

Categories: architect, architecture, design, DIY, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

Public squares & dissent – Julian Assange, Slavoj Žižek, Amy Goodman

July 4, 2011

For those who haven’t seen it, here’s the video of the discussion between Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, Julian Assange of Wikileaks, and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. It took place in London over the weekend and was produced by Frontline Club.

Categories: politics, Uncategorised, urban planning, video

Summer of love

July 1, 2011

Raccoons playing (and mating) nonchalantly right in the middle of a friend’s outdoor birthday dinner. I like to think they make a dividing line between the hockey riot and the rest of the summer.

Categories: British Columbia, landscaping, politics, Uncategorised, Vancouver

Peter Zumthor’s Serpentine Pavilion opens

June 30, 2011

Thanks to Dezeen for this video interview with Swiss architect Peter Zumthor on his pavilion at the Serpentine (a previous ouno post on Zumthor, on the occasion of being chosen to do the pavilion, is here).

Categories: architect, architecture, art, design, favourite, landscaping, Uncategorised, video

Kenneth Frampton on Aalto, Corbusier, detached houses, the suburbs &c.

June 27, 2011

The video below, produced by Slow Home Studio in Calgary, Alberta, is a short, brilliant, unrehearsed lecture by renowned architect, architectural critic and historian Kenneth Frampton on the history of the detached house in our era.

Categories: architect, architecture, book, design, politics, Uncategorised, urban planning

Berber rugs from the Beni Ouarain region

The impulse in Berber rug-making to both interrupt and also loosely maintain a pattern seems unique in traditional textiles. If not unique, then it’s hard to name a tradition that equals Berber mastery of this particular tension.

Categories: art, craft, design, furniture, textiles, Uncategorised

One more thing

June 25, 2011

“There’s not enough psychedelic stuff on TV. I want the world to be a bit weirder than it is. I hate reality, so I hate reality TV. But I love Columbo.”
— Noel Fielding (of the BBC’s The Mighty Boosh – image of Columbo from a Boosh animation below) & more tributes here.

Categories: design, humour, interiors, Uncategorised, video

“Endgame Strategy” by Pulitzer Prizewinner Chris Hedges

June 24, 2011

“We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out.”

If you think the essay below is apocalyptic raving, remember that Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer prize winner and former New York Times political journalist.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

“We are all Canucks” until we riot, apparently. Then it’s the work of a “handful.”

June 16, 2011

“Hockey’s over-the-top fandom (and the same could be said for the Olympics) seems a frantic expression of what the post-modern metropolis and its high-rise ghettos lack and even deliberately negate — a human-scale community in which individuals feel purposeful and acknowledged.”

“In the absence of any shared collective progressive principles, the BC elite longed for a new solidarity forged from of this “fighting collectivity” of Canucks fans.

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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

Rocking camel by B.C. painter/author Jim Willer

Dry Design – converted garage

Public squares & dissent – Julian Assange, Slavoj Žižek, Amy Goodman

Summer of love

Peter Zumthor’s Serpentine Pavilion opens

Berber rugs from the Beni Ouarain region

One more thing

“Endgame Strategy” by Pulitzer Prizewinner Chris Hedges

“We are all Canucks” until we riot, apparently. Then it’s the work of a “handful.”

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