geometric

YOU HAVE BEEN HERE SOMETIME

August 14, 2009

The blog YOU HAVE BEEN HERE SOMETIME does, as its title suggests, provoke an uncanny sensation. It’s halfway between a feeling of deja vu and a renewed sense of the mysterious life of objects.

Categories: architecture, art, design, favourite, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

Fireplaces – Figs. 1 and 2

June 27, 2009

Which is correct, above, or below?:

Or alternately:

All photos from the 1973 decor book 1601 Decorating Ideas for Modern Living.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Painted houses

June 10, 2009

Modernist Vancouver house of the painter BC Binning, who painted his own interior and exterior murals. Photo by Arne Haraldsson. See here for more information on this heritage-protected house.

In my neighbourhood there’s a heritage program called True Colours wherein you can receive a pat on the back from heritage types and sometimes free paint if you agree to paint your house in the original house colours circa 1901.

When “today” had the ring of “tomorrow”

May 17, 2009

Photos are all from the 1975 edition of Inside Today’s Home by Ray and Sarah Faulkner, Holt Rinehart Winston. (The 1954, 1960 and 1968 editions of this book are all worth collecting too, if you can find them on abebooks.) The word “today” somehow sounded more optimistic then than it does now, though of course back then you did have the bomb to consider.

Categories: architect, architecture, art, craft, design, furniture, interiors, landscaping, textiles, Uncategorised

Stellated polyhedra – mathematical models

April 29, 2009

When I was about 12, my dad and I built four stellated polyhedra (star-shaped, many-sided platonic solids). Dad, a mathematician and math teacher, used the book shown below as a resource and then worked out his own dimensions and angles (you can see his notations right in the book).

Categories: art, design, DIY, favourite, graphics and signage, interiors, Uncategorised

Arabesque fridge magnets by Asao Tokolo

January 29, 2009

Japanese designer and computer scientist Asao Tokolo has devised a way to tile a pattern of arabesques in such a way that each square tile can be randomly rotated and still match up with all of its neighbours.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Dazzle painting

January 28, 2009

“Dazzle painting,” devised in Britain during WWI, was based on the theory that complex optical patterns would confuse enemy naval rangefinders by disguising a ship’s speed and direction. It employed a number of visual tricks including the painting of false bow waves on rear portions of the ship rather than the prow.

Categories: art, design, graphics and signage, Uncategorised

Brick screen wall, New Delhi, by Anagram Architects

January 21, 2009

This brick screening wall by Anagram Architects, New Delhi, is a reminder of how imaginatively brick can be used. I’m not a fan of brick, and that’s an understatement, but context is everything.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Elsbeth Kupferoth

January 16, 2009

Fantastic 1970s geometric supergraphic textile by German designer Elsbeth Kupferoth, who deserves to be much better known. Interesting short essay on her work and more photos at The Textile Blog.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Building mimics DNA, petri dishes

January 14, 2009

The new building for the BC Cancer Agency is a good addition to Broadway, one of Vancouver’s most ridiculously unattractive streets. The building’s most obvious feature is its round windows which are meant to reference the glass petri dishes used in cancer research.

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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. ____________________________________

geometric

YOU HAVE BEEN HERE SOMETIME

Fireplaces – Figs. 1 and 2

Painted houses

When “today” had the ring of “tomorrow”

Stellated polyhedra – mathematical models

Arabesque fridge magnets by Asao Tokolo

Dazzle painting

Brick screen wall, New Delhi, by Anagram Architects

Elsbeth Kupferoth

Building mimics DNA, petri dishes

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