rural

Traditional Japanese farmhouses: wood and straw

July 13, 2009

Traditional Japanese farmhouses: wood and straw

Thanks to photographers Molly Des Jardin (cat slide), Ethan and Kohmura Masao (Fomal Haut) for these photos of rural Japanese houses. So few materials, so harmoniously put together. Many of the photos are from an open air museum in Japan, where traditional houses from different regions have been transported and reconstructed.

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Tags: architecture farmhouse farming fire pit grass house irori Japan Japanese mat ofuro plaster rice paper rural straw tatami traditional wood wooden wooden bathtub
Categories: design, Uncategorised

Traditional Japanese scarecrows

April 1, 2009

Traditional Japanese scarecrows

The bottom photo shows a functioning scarecrows made of indigo-dyed hemp. The original book caption reads “The bold design of this piece of shibori-dyed hemp by Seizo Ishikawa, a farmer, seems at home working as a scarecrow by a newly harvested rice field.” The birds in Japan must have been accustomed to seeing farmers in real Japanese indigo yukatas, waving their arms.

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Tags: agricultural birds blue blues country countryside design favorite favourite green design Indigo Japan Japanese design rural scarecrow scarecrows semicurcular target textile design textiles weaving
Categories: design, Uncategorised

Rice cake blossoms for the Japanese “Little New Year”

February 5, 2009

Rice cake blossoms for the Japanese “Little New Year”

From the National Museum: of Ethnography in Japan: “At the end of the Edo period, when the exhibited house was constructed, villagers of Akiyama mainly grew beans and such millet grains as cockspur, foxtail millet, and buckwheat.

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Tags: abundant Akiyama blossoms cherry blossoms fake flowers farmers harvest house Japan Japanese Japanese design Kawai Kanjiro Minpaku peasant rice rice paste rural traditional
Categories: design, Uncategorised

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This blog is, and always has been, ad-free. No sponsored/external content, and no, I don't want you to help me "monetize" it or improve my SEO. No solicitation emails please. Thanks for your attention to this matter.

This Blog

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 ____________________________________

Book in Progress: Habitat

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. ____________________________________

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