April 1, 2011
Whatever happened to planters like these two? They may still be in production, but wherever they are still available, and that’s nearly nowhere, they’re civic-sized, weigh 500-1000 pounds, and are out of scale for people’s home gardens.
March 29, 2011
In 1967 a group of citizens waged a fractious and clever fight against a massive freeway system that would have flattened much of Vancouver’s downtown core and surrounding heritage districts. The fight was led by Vancouver citizens Shirley and Mary Chan, Mike Harcourt (later mayor and then premier of the province) and many other volunteers.
“Application to the City of Vancouver to develop an abysmal chasm for purposes of facilitating public reverie, contemplation and longing.” Makes me laugh every time I look at it. By my friend & Vancouver artist Aaron Carpenter.
March 27, 2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux1ECrNDZl4g
Make a crane or many and send to:
Students Rebuild
1700 7th Avenue
STE 116 # 145
Seattle, WA 98101
The Bezos Family Foundation will donate $2 per crane to Architecture for Humanity’s Japan relief fund.
March 20, 2011
Can anyone identify this chair? Years ago, thinking I would ask a furniture making friend to reproduce it, I took its measurements but then did nothing with them. I’m passing them along in case anyone else would like to try.
March 15, 2011
Japan has had to endure far more than its share of natural and human disasters and far too much of the lethal wreckage they bring with them—as if one disaster alone wouldn’t be too much.
March 13, 2011
Another love letter to books and the reading of them. See also here and here. Above, church converted into bookstore, Maastrict, Netherlands, via BoingBoing. Below, NPR on Werner Herzog on books:
“Herzog… hands out a required-and-recommended reading list — a broad one, covering matter from the Roman poet Virgil to Ernest Hemingway to the Warren Report — about which he’s quite serious.
[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.
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.
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.
