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.
This post is a personal addendum to our earlier post about a discussion amongst readers of another design blog about whether one designer had copied or “borrowed” another designer’s idea.
A final post on great DIY furniture from Spiros Zakas’ 1979 “More Furniture in 24 Hours” book. If you want the building plans for any of these pieces, go to this Flickr set.
A third design from Spiros Zakas’ 1979 “More Furniture in 24 Hours” book. See our first post on this book. Click below to find plans for building this chair or go to our Flickr set for high res versions.
A second design from Spiros Zakas’ 1979 More Furniture in 24 Hours book. See my first post on this book. Click below to find plans for building this chair or go to my Flickr set for high res versions.
Some of these designs are actually pretty good. I’ll post some more if anyone wants them! I don’t know if that’s Spiros on the cover there, sitting on this Space Bench, or if it’s George Thomopolos, but whoever he is, he’s… groovy.
The “What’s In and What’s Out in 2009” lists are starting to appear. Not to be too protestant about it, since environmentalism in its more puritanical moment can make you want to stab yourself in the eye with a fork—a plastic fork—but these lists can get anxiety-provoking.
Art and architecture students produce creative DIY interiors on small budgets in NYC. For details see the NYT article. A wire cloud sculpture; a kitchen table made easily from a wood slab and tube legs from Home Depot; hanging wood light fixture made from ply offcuts; small space made larger via a loft bed and storage steps, with a desk surface made by resting a wood slab on two filing cabinets; spare paint used for wall decoration; spectacular chandelier made from plastic bags; kitchen cabinet made with a jigsaw and waste plywood.
These textile shop banners are common in Japan. Given how easy they are to install and how much more beautiful they are than typical signage, it seems strange that they haven’t been widely copied.
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This Blog
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
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Book in Progress: Habitat
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.
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