December 25, 2008
I hope that whichever winter festival you celebrate, it is happy. Here in Vancouver we will remain buried under three unheard-of feet of snow, waiting helplessly for the thaw and staying clear of the roads, since Vancouverites don’t know how to drive in it.
December 24, 2008
In the late 1920s, the modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray designed and built a landmark piece of modernist architecture in the form of a seaside house.
December 23, 2008
Eileen Gray (1878-1976) produced some iconic pieces of early modernist design in a profession and an era hardly designed for women. Raised in Ireland, she trained in London and Paris and worked most of her life in France.
December 21, 2008
Vancouver artist Arni Haraldsson, known for his photographic studies of modernist architecture and his research on Corbusier, produced these three photographs of the house of another artist, BC Binning, in 1994.
December 20, 2008
Nanna Ditzel is considered the “first lady of Danish design,” which is one of those informative yet cringe-worthy labels that just highlights the whole problem of accidentally ghettoizing designers who happen to be women by the very act of celebrating the fact that they’re women designers.
December 19, 2008
Stefan Boublil of the NY design company The Apartment has done a holiday shopping guide for the NYT. Stefan is great because he tends to go for items that are useful, beautiful and clearly thought out.
The customary greeting of the Roman winter holiday season sounded like “Yo, Saturnalia!” (The latin word “io” is the equivalent of the prayerful “Ho” in ecclesiastical English, as in “Ho, praise to Saturn.”) Saturnalia was a carnivalesque winter festival celebrating the god Saturn’s birthday and it encompassed the winter solstice, running from December 17 – 23rd.
December 16, 2008
The multipurpose Japanese cloth known as the tenugui has had a meandering history that includes ritual, practical and decorative uses. The tenugui is a 1′ x 3′ rectangle of thin woven fabric originally used for ritual purposes (silk and hemp blend tenugui have been found dating from 200 AD), then more practically as a hand towel, bandage, or sweatband often worn around the head, most famously by samurai fighters.
December 14, 2008
Making a “drop bag” at Kakefuda, the famous Furoshiki shop in Kyoto where Mick Jagger bought a furoshiki last year. Also see How to tie up two Bottles and Furoshiki – Reusable Grocery Bag.
Furoshiki is a traditional Japanese means of wrapping presents or carrying objects in a square of cloth. It’s waste-free, it’s practical, and it’s beautiful. As an art form, furoshiki is less known outside Japan than origami, but it is just as venerable – it simply uses fabric instead of paper.
