Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland, built between 1937 and 1939 as a rural retreat, is considered one of the greatest houses of the 20th century. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who curated a major retrospective of Aalto’s work at the Barbican in London in 2007, says photographs give no real sense of Aalto’s buildings.

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Probably everyone and his/her dog has seen this NYC loft apartment by now, and possibly also blogged about it, but this is one of those places that is so hypnotizing I can’t stop looking at it.

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There’s something compelling about this photo of the bedroom of novelist Marguerite Duras in the house she bought in Neauphle, outside Paris, in the 1960s. The thin cot bed is so peculiar, like something she might have grown up with during her impoverished colonial childhood in French Indochina.

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Textile looms and computers share a common history; Babbage used punch cards in his Difference Engine after seeing a Jacquard loom at work. This carpet by Richard Hutten is called “Playing With Tradition” and it plays on the historical relationship of looms and computers by looking exactly like a digital image that has been pixel-stretched.

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Here are two quite beautiful DIY projects from the 60s, both found in The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970. Most of what you find in the book is a bit kitschy, but these two ideas seemed brilliant.

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Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen used these rugs regularly in their interiors, which is not surprising. Their unusual combination of minimalism and handmade detail, restraint and inventiveness works well with modernism’s aesthetics by both echoing the abstract geometry of the architecture and also counterbalancing that austerity with some softness.

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