conceptual design

This is the best costume for today

May 6, 2009

“This is the best thing to wear for today, you understand. Because I don’t like women in skirts, and the best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt – I think – then you have the pants under the skirt, and then you can pull the stockings up over the pants, underneath the skirt, and you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Fia Backstrom – living in your art studio

April 4, 2009

I love this art object/piece of furniture by artist Fia Backstrom, who has had a number of exhibitions in Vancouver. From the NYT article “Artful Lodgers“:

Fia Backstrom describes her apartment near the Gowanus Canal as a perpetual battle between organization and chaos.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Herb Greene’s Prairie Chicken House, by Julius Shulman

March 19, 2009

This fantastic house at the intersection of modern and 60s hippie is the Greene Residence, built in 1961 by architect Herb Greene in Norman, Oklahoma. Greene built the house for himself and his family.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Still-unsurpassed box store architecture: SITE

March 15, 2009

I first saw these amazing buildings, almost all of which have now either had their facades removed or have actually been demolished, in the November 2007 issue of Wallpaper. The BEST Products Company of Richmond, Virginia commissioned architect James Wines’ SITE (Sculpture In The Environment) to build nine commercial buildings for them in the 1970s and early 80s.

Categories: architect, architecture, design, Uncategorised

Militant Guild of Rural Tailors – Young Meagher

March 8, 2009

Young Meagher’s “Militant Guild of Rural Tailors” is apparently a fashion line that doubles as a faux-museological collection of objects and textiles purportedly belonging to a revolutionary worldwide underground cult of rural tailors reaching back into early 19th C history.

Categories: art, design, fashion, textiles, Uncategorised

Robot flower power

February 17, 2009

70s space age armchair, via backgarage, origin and name unknown. Does anyone know who or what made this? Does it actually bounce on that spring? Imagine eating breakfast in this chair.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

DIY Martin Margiela waistcoat

February 8, 2009

Martin Margiela is never entirely serious nor entirely flippant, which is part of what makes him an interesting artist. For example his site. This waistcoat how-to was produced by Maison Margiela and is courtesy The Guardian, where you can find many other odd DIY tutorials, like Jade Jagger’s punk bracelet.

Categories: design, DIY, Uncategorised

Playing with Tradition rug by Richard Hutton

February 4, 2009

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.

Categories: art, craft, design, favourite, textiles, Uncategorised

Joo Youn Paek – Pillow Wig, Self-Sustainable Chair

January 23, 2009

See all Joo Youn Paek’s inventions here. Yes, they’re functional: as art.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Shingle pillow by Anek Taanka

January 18, 2009

The textile company Anek Taanka, which means “infinite stitches,” was founded by Indian textile designer Varsha Sharma. She has said that “my challenge is to create pieces of textile that could inspire spaces to be designed around them rather than the other way around.” That’s a bold ambition but this pillow makes you think she could actually do it.

Categories: design, 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. ____________________________________

conceptual design

This is the best costume for today

Fia Backstrom – living in your art studio

Herb Greene’s Prairie Chicken House, by Julius Shulman

Still-unsurpassed box store architecture: SITE

Militant Guild of Rural Tailors – Young Meagher

Robot flower power

DIY Martin Margiela waistcoat

Playing with Tradition rug by Richard Hutton

Joo Youn Paek – Pillow Wig, Self-Sustainable Chair

Shingle pillow by Anek Taanka

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