Ouno Design

Douglas Coupland’s Canada House

April 3, 2009

The writer Douglas Coupland (“Generation X”), who has been interested in Canadiana for a long time, recently went about finding a classic 70s “builder’s special” house slated for demolition, filled it with objects constructed from the Canadian paraphernalia of his childhood, and then staged a party in it.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Black painting

From Portland Monthly Magazine. A monochromatic painting resting on a teak credenza becomes a sort of contemplative feature wall. Why is this picture so compelling to me? It’s not as if it’s that different from the thousand other midcentury modern still lifes I’ve seen in the past few years, but sometimes one variation on a theme stands out from the others.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

April 2, 2009

The photo above shows the central living area of a rural farmhouse on the border of Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures. The house was restored by Kenji Tsuchisawa who bought it as a rundown heap when he was only 20, after seeing a photograph of a traditional Japanese farmhouse on a Tokyo magazine cover.

Categories: architecture, design, favourite, interiors, Uncategorised

Traditional Japanese scarecrows

April 1, 2009

The bottom photo shows a functioning scarecrows made of indigo-dyed hemp. The original book caption reads “The bold design of this piece of shibori-dyed hemp by Seizo Ishikawa, a farmer, seems at home working as a scarecrow by a newly harvested rice field.” The birds in Japan must have been accustomed to seeing farmers in real Japanese indigo yukatas, waving their arms.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

When library scientists complain about having too many books.

This is an addendum – or antidote – to the previous wall-of-books post. Riba, a library scientist, writes

Within our home the sheer quantity of books we own inhibits our ability to display artwork.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

For bookshelf fetishists

March 29, 2009

In case you haven’t already see the entire amazing archive, it’s by Bokhyller via Preik.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

So you think you’d like to live in a church…

March 26, 2009

When I was a kid my parents had Arlo Guthrie’s record Alice’s Restaurant , a spoken folk song plus narrative set in a converted church in Massachusetts in the sixties, and I knew the full monologue off by heart.

Modern interiors and architecture in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, 1958

March 25, 2009

Jacques Tati’s 1958 film comedy Mon Oncle is a portrait of a dimwitted traditionalist’s impotent crusade against modern design, architecture and machine processes, while at the same time being a pointed critique of the utopian consumerism of modernism and the modern era.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

In the Wish I’d Designed That category

Birch/Bříza mug by Czech company whitefruits.

It’s from 2006, but seems to have been a prototype only and does not seem to be in production now, which is unfortunate.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

March 24, 2009

Ada Lovelace Day is an international blogging event instituted to draw attention to women who excel in the area of technology. Who is Ada Lovelace? From here:

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums.

Categories: design, 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. ____________________________________

Douglas Coupland’s Canada House

Black painting

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

Traditional Japanese scarecrows

When library scientists complain about having too many books.

For bookshelf fetishists

So you think you’d like to live in a church…

Modern interiors and architecture in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, 1958

In the Wish I’d Designed That category

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

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