Uncategorised

Geometric mural in the basement of Vancouver City Hall

March 13, 2011

[UPDATE: I was just informed by the artist’s son Guy that this mural is now threatened, after gracing the lowest floor of City Hall for over 40 years! It’s odd that the City now says it will demolish or paint over the mural, having recently asked Guy and his sister for a bio of their father, suggesting that City Hall had intended to preserve his work.

Hotel Du Lac in Tunis, Tunisia

March 12, 2011

Tunis’ Hotel du Lac, above, was apparently the inspiration for the sandcrawlers in Star Wars.

It’s interesting that this example of sci-fi brutalism isn’t very well-known and in fact I can’t even locate the name of the architect or year it was completed.

Categories: architecture, Uncategorised, urban planning

Favourite photo of Vancouver City Hall as a tent, 1886, was staged

March 5, 2011

Vancouver was incorporated 125 years ago as of April 6, 2011. We seem to be having a year of celebrations. Sesquicentennial sounds half First Nations, half some sort of lifeform. I was told recently that this famous photo, which most Vancouverites are familiar with, was actually staged, and that City Hall never rested in a tent, not even after the Great Fire.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Yikes. They want to put this thing downtown.

February 20, 2011

Above is an artist’s rendering of the new mega-casino planned for Vancouver. Those three towers jammed up against the stadium in that awkward manner are the “entertainment complex” hotel towers, where presumably you can rent by the hour.

Coast Salish storm sewer cover by Susan Point

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.

Egypt

February 4, 2011

Cairo, February 2011, from Der Spiegel.

Categories: politics, Uncategorised

Wallander

January 25, 2011

Wallander, the Swedish detective of Swedish books, TV and film, has now appeared in a BBC remake starring Kenneth Branagh. Shot in Sweden, the BBC remake has a Bergman-like mute bleakness despite the attractive minimalism of (most of) the interiors.

Categories: architecture, design, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

If you type “why” into Google, it suggests…

January 24, 2011

Oddly, I was looking for “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” but it’s disturbing that Google knew that.

Categories: book, humour, Uncategorised

Sigmund Freud’s office

January 23, 2011

Perhaps one of the world’s most famous interiors. Most photographs of this room show the same angle so it’s hard to know if they’re the same photograph or many photographs of the same thing.

Categories: art, design, favourite, furniture, interiors, textiles, Uncategorised

Tourist, Havana

January 20, 2011

No comment, other than to say I hope this person is not Canadian.

Note the Che cap.

Categories: design, humour, politics, 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. ____________________________________

Uncategorised

Geometric mural in the basement of Vancouver City Hall

Hotel Du Lac in Tunis, Tunisia

Favourite photo of Vancouver City Hall as a tent, 1886, was staged

Yikes. They want to put this thing downtown.

Coast Salish storm sewer cover by Susan Point

Egypt

Wallander

If you type “why” into Google, it suggests…

Sigmund Freud’s office

Tourist, Havana

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