furniture

Gabriella Crespi

April 6, 2009

A quasi-surreal or space age ‘Polished Steel Coffee Table’ by Italian architect and designer Gabriella Crespi looks like a metal crystal formation of some kind.

Categories: architect, design, favourite, furniture, Uncategorised, women designers

Furniture makers of Middle Earth

April 5, 2009

I find this Todd Merrell Antiques magazine ad weirdly compelling. If you end up at his website (now defunct) it’s like being transported into Middle Earth or the underworld. You might have to retrieve an amulet with the help of a talking dog with eyes as big as saucers or something.

Categories: design, furniture, Uncategorised

Discuss.

Via.

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

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

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

The ladies of 20th century furniture design were offered to pose on fur rugs or ponies, which is why, we suppose, that photo was never to be.

January 20, 2009

Left to Right: George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Risom

Photo from a 1961 Playboy article on 20th C “masters of design,” who are here dressed either as accountants or architects, it’s hard to tell which, but it’s a lot of zippers.

Categories: architect, design, furniture, humour, politics, Uncategorised

Molo

January 15, 2009

Just a few blocks up the road from my studio is the workshop of Vancouver’s Molo Design. You’ve probably seen their accordioning softseating or their softwall room dividers which are now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Ray Eames’ workspace vs. Charles Eames’ workspace

There’s something compelling about Ray Eames’ desk area, papered with work and photographs. Many people seem to have a fierce aversion to clutter these days (driven no doubt by the storage furniture industry) but artists like to have materials and visual stimulation at hand in their studios and there’s some evidence that this supports the creative process.

Categories: art, design, interiors, Uncategorised

Houses like spaceships, spaceships like houses

January 11, 2009

Bathroom futurism! Excellent circular spaceship thing going on here. I’m not sure about shag rugs in the bathroom, but will boldly go where no one has gone before. Still, how on earth would you clean this room?

Categories: design, film & TV, interiors, Uncategorised, video

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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. ____________________________________

furniture

Gabriella Crespi

Furniture makers of Middle Earth

Discuss.

Fia Backstrom – living in your art studio

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

Robot flower power

The ladies of 20th century furniture design were offered to pose on fur rugs or ponies, which is why, we suppose, that photo was never to be.

Molo

Ray Eames’ workspace vs. Charles Eames’ workspace

Houses like spaceships, spaceships like houses

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