Uncategorised

This room is, believe it or not, a closet.

July 24, 2009

This closet/dressing room is part of a townhouse on NYC’s West Side. The house was decorated by interior designer Samuel Botero in a mad eclectic mix of all possible ornate styles, including Egyptian Revival and Biedermeier and art deco, at his clients’ request.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

House full of holes by David Hovey

July 23, 2009

A few years ago architect/builder David Hovey designed and built this house for himself and his family in Winnetka, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Like most of Hovey’s buildings the house is constructed of relatively simple materials, including perforated steel I-beams, and all its parts are designed to be pre-fabricated and then shipped in.

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

Living with boulders

July 22, 2009

Frank Lloyd Wright built Fallingwater on a boulder-covered site, but the giant rocks beneath and around that well-known house are not nearly so graphic or madly visible as they are in these houses.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Hanging ships

July 21, 2009

Western European churches, especially those near or in shipping towns, often suspended a model ship from the ceiling as a symbol of good luck for sailors. The practice is probably most common in Denmark, but is fairly widespread.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Stalactite ceilings: the 60s, the 12th century

July 19, 2009

While looking for photos of 60s/70s stalactite and fantasy cave ceilings, I unexpectedly discovered that sculptural geometric and prism ceilings first appeared in the 12th century in Persia – probably due to increased skill with locally available gypsum plaster – and spread throughout the Islamic world and then beyond.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

RIP Julius Shulman, 1910 – 2009.

July 16, 2009

Julius Shulman, the prominent architectural photographer who helped introduce North America to modern architecture, died yesterday at age 98. Shulman had never retired. Working solidly almost up until months before his death, he produced a remarkably complete photographic archive of modern American interiors and exteriors spanning more than a 50-year period.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Valley of the Dolls, 1967

The movie version of Valley of the Dolls was based on Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 novel of ambition, drug addiction and dissipation in the mid-60s entertainment industries of LA and New York.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Traditional Japanese farmhouses: wood and straw

July 13, 2009

Thanks to photographers Molly Des Jardin (cat slide), Ethan and Kohmura Masao (Fomal Haut) for these photos of rural Japanese houses. So few materials, so harmoniously put together. Many of the photos are from an open air museum in Japan, where traditional houses from different regions have been transported and reconstructed.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Vancouver, if Tokyo doesn’t want the Nakagin Capsule Tower, let’s ship it over here.

July 10, 2009

It shouldn’t be that difficult; it comes apart. The owner residents of Tokyo’s famous Nakagin Capsule Tower have voted to demolish it and rebuild a “modern” tower on the same location, which is now a valuable property adjacent to the Ginza district.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Architecture in the movies, Part 5 – Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House

July 8, 2009

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, has probably appeared in more Hollywood films than any other notable modern house and has also been heavily used for ad and fashion shoots, music videos and television.

Categories: design, 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

This room is, believe it or not, a closet.

House full of holes by David Hovey

Living with boulders

Hanging ships

Stalactite ceilings: the 60s, the 12th century

RIP Julius Shulman, 1910 – 2009.

Valley of the Dolls, 1967

Traditional Japanese farmhouses: wood and straw

Vancouver, if Tokyo doesn’t want the Nakagin Capsule Tower, let’s ship it over here.

Architecture in the movies, Part 5 – Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House

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