July 4, 2009
From Nat Shapiro’s funny, grumpy quotation collection Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.
June 23, 2009
Above, the 1970s modern two-level platform in painter Frank Stella’s loft, from the classic book Inside Today’s Home. Below, a recent photo of the renovated 1950s conversation pit in the Number 31 Hotel in Dublin.
April 3, 2009
The writer Douglas Coupland (“Generation X”), who has been interested in Canadiana for a long time, recently went about finding a classic 70s “builder’s special” house slated for demolition, filled it with objects constructed from the Canadian paraphernalia of his childhood, and then staged a party in it.
March 8, 2009
Young Meagher’s “Militant Guild of Rural Tailors” is apparently a fashion line that doubles as a faux-museological collection of objects and textiles purportedly belonging to a revolutionary worldwide underground cult of rural tailors reaching back into early 19th C history.
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.
February 10, 2009
Sometimes after seeing too many chichi, precious, and citified houses, too much shiny, overproduced design, and everything just starts to look too estranged from the materials it was made from, as an antidote I go look at pictures of handbuilt houses.
January 17, 2009
These staggered, airy midcentury modern arrangements are so much less chichi than the many fancified contemporary bookshelves you see around.
I love this simple, balanced living room belonging to Italian architect Egle Amaldi in the 1960s.
January 12, 2009
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.
November 18, 2008
Poster by Raymond Bellemare for the Canadian Graphics and Design Directorate (Graphisme et Dessin) of the Organizing Committee of the 1976 Olympic Games, Montreal
Only 32 years have passed since this fantastic official poster for the 1976 Montreal Olympics was produced, but from a 2008 vantage point it’s hard to imagine how a committee ever okayed it.
October 11, 2008
From left, Deacon Boondini, the Great Gatsby and Giovanni James of the James Gang, a neovaudevillean performance troupe in NYC in full steampunk gear.
I’m not the first to blog about this, but I couldn’t not jump into the fray.
