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.
Summer of love
July 1, 2011
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).
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Tags:
Adbusters
china
Chris Hedges
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corporate elite
corporate state
corporations
dying civilizations
Endgame Strategy
frugal
Fujian
gap between rich and poor
gated communities
Hakka
Inhabitat
monastic
scarcity
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war
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Categories:
design,
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“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.
The Moon
June 15, 2011
https://youtu.be/AGmPEVwqDVk
“If you are a moon and you don’t have a mirror, so you have to, if you want to see your face, you got to have a little look in the rivers.
Kinoka no Ie or “Wood-flavoured house” – alternative ecological housing in Tokyo
June 11, 2011
Via Monocle. Thanks to Wilson Tang for pointing this out.
Twenty-nine Japanese families have found their version of happiness by creating their own idyll in a Tokyo suburb.
Green roof near Vancouver’s port
June 8, 2011
The green roof at the Blueberry Building, in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. These plantings grew in one year, mostly self-planted by the wind. The group (Eclipse Awards) planted the sedum and a few other things, but the garden augmented itself naturally.
Categories:
architecture,
British Columbia,
Canadian design,
landscaping,
Uncategorised,
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