modernism

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

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

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

Bedroom with boulder, by Albert Frey

March 20, 2009

The Frey House, Palm Springs, 1963-4. Built by Albert Frey for himself, in the Desert Modern style he established in Palm Springs.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Charlotte Perriand

March 9, 2009

The French designer and architect Charlotte Perriand (1903 – 1999) produced some very beautiful furniture and buildings, but she is probably not as well known as she should be, even despite the comprehensive retrospective show of her work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2005.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

The words we use when we think about design, 1984 to 2009

February 18, 2009

This graph shows the occurrence of the terms “decor” (blue) and “interior design” (red) in The New York Times between 1984 and 2009. What happened to the word “decor”? It fell out of usage in approximately February, 2001, maybe a result of a change in editorial style policy?

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Ray Eames’ workspace vs. Charles Eames’ workspace

January 15, 2009

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

Eileen Gray’s E-1027 house

December 24, 2008

In the late 1920s, the modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray designed and built a landmark piece of modernist architecture in the form of a seaside house.

Eileen Gray – Tubelight and E1027 Table.

December 23, 2008

Eileen Gray (1878-1976) produced some iconic pieces of early modernist design in a profession and an era hardly designed for women. Raised in Ireland, she trained in London and Paris and worked most of her life in France.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

BC Binning house, in photographic works by artist Arni Haraldsson

December 21, 2008

Vancouver artist Arni Haraldsson, known for his photographic studies of modernist architecture and his research on Corbusier, produced these three photographs of the house of another artist, BC Binning, in 1994.

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. ____________________________________

modernism

Furniture makers of Middle Earth

Yesterday’s House of Tomorrow

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

Bedroom with boulder, by Albert Frey

Charlotte Perriand

The words we use when we think about design, 1984 to 2009

Ray Eames’ workspace vs. Charles Eames’ workspace

Eileen Gray’s E-1027 house

Eileen Gray – Tubelight and E1027 Table.

BC Binning house, in photographic works by artist Arni Haraldsson

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