In Every Dreamhome A Heartache

April 17, 2009

For those who aren’t familiar with the song In Every Dreamhome A Heartache, it appeared on the 1973 Roxy Music album For Your Pleasure. See here for a live performance featuring Brian Eno on keyboards, looking like a sick Ziggy Stardust, and Andy Mackay wearing some quite amazing blistered spaceman pants in green satin.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Interiors from the film Tommy, 1975

April 10, 2009

Ann Margret as Nora Walker Hobbs in Ken Russell’s 1975 film “Tommy.” This scene, not to mention the whole film, was absolutely formative for me (and apparently I’m not alone).

Categories: design, fashion, favourite, film & TV, furniture, interiors, textiles, Uncategorised, video

Yesterday’s House of Tomorrow

April 4, 2009

Obviously the House of Tomorrow wasn’t meant to be part of everyone’s tomorrow. Nice Jag. Nice unbuttoned look, too. That’s the developer, Bob, with his wife Helene in their 1960 Desert Modern-style house in Palm Springs by Palmer & Krisel, architects.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

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. ____________________________________

In Every Dreamhome A Heartache