When I was in India in February, I stayed with a designer friend in Mumbai. He has lived for 20 years in a beautiful heritage building that was originally built as an orphanage.
Mumbai, Vancouver, same complaints
May 18, 2012
Custom pendant lamp at Gudrun Restaurant, Steveston
May 17, 2012
Beautiful lamp commissioned by my friend Patrick Tubajon, proprietor of gorgeous Gudrun Restaurant in Steveston, BC. Steveston is a historic and still operating fishing and cannery village in the mouth of the Fraser River, just half an hour S.
Tags:
B.C.
British Columbia
Gudrun
Gudrun Restaurant
history
Jon Erik Johansen
perspex
plexi lamp
restaurant
Steveston
white
wine bar
wooden boat
Categories:
architecture,
art,
British Columbia,
Canadian design,
design,
DIY,
furniture,
interiors,
Uncategorised,
Vancouver
The Limits of Density
Low-rises in Vancouver’s S. False Creek
Quebec City, successful lo-rise/high density combination
This short essay by Richard Florida in Atlantic Cities magazine has been making the rounds.
Categories:
architect,
architecture,
British Columbia,
Canadian design,
cities,
politics,
Uncategorised,
urban planning,
Vancouver
Petulia, 1968
May 16, 2012
Petulia, starring Julie Christie, George C. Scott (who looked a little like Sean Penn then) and Richard Chamberlain, was shot and set in San Francisco in 1967. An odd film but interesting in that it’s one of the few in which the villain—if he is a villain—occupies traditional decor while our main protagonist, a divorced doctor, occupies the modern.
“I’ve been told that the tallest building in hell has an awesome view of the emerald city”
May 14, 2012
Heard those lyrics over the car radio last week. I did not know that the Emerald City was close enough to hell that you could actually see it from there, but that whole geography sounds a lot like Vancouver.
Tags:
Dorothy
Emerald City
Greenest City Initiative
highrises
L. Frank Baum
Land of Oz
real estate bubble
real estate speculation
skyscrapers
tall buildings
The end of the Age of Tall Buildings
The Secret of Oz
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Toronto
unaffordability
Vancouver
Categories:
architecture,
book,
British Columbia,
cities,
design,
politics,
Uncategorised,
urban planning,
Vancouver
Vancouver Ltd. by Don Gutstein
May 7, 2012
What follows is the Preface of Don Gutstein’s 1975 book Vancouver Ltd., a thorough—and, as it turns out, prescient—analysis of the way in which Vancouver fell into the hands of real estate developers and realtors.
Vivienne Westwood: The whole 20th C was a mistake
May 5, 2012
Via The Guardian: “A status symbol is a book… that’s status.” “Punk was just an excuse for people to run around…it was just a fashion that became a marketing opportunity.” “The whole 20th C was a mistake… throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” “Study art and you become a freedom fighter.”
More from Westwood here.
Nothing happens in good weather
May 3, 2012
Great Vancouver public art work titled “Nothing Happens in Good Weather” by the Instant Coffee collective, curated by Barbara Cole of Other Sights. Photos by Kate Armstrong and Kelly Lycan via the Goethe Institut’s Goethe Satellite.
Categories:
architecture,
art,
cities,
graphics and signage,
landscaping,
Uncategorised,
urban planning,
Vancouver
“They’d go to the opera, get inbred, poison each other, and send for someone like Poirot to sort it out.”
May 2, 2012
Students protests in Montreal, Canada, over Quebec’s plans to raise tuition fees. Photograph: Rogerio Barbosa/AFP/Getty Images
Via The Guardian’s article “Quebec student protests mark ‘Maple spring’ in Canada: A revolt against a government tuition fee hike is growing into Occupy-inspired dissent against austerity and inequality”.
Abandoned intersection near Ottawa
April 28, 2012
The Children’s Safety Village in Ottawa, Canada, closed a few years ago. Due to asbestos. via Reddit.
Pretty hard not to read this as metaphor.
