David A. Greene
Dave has contributed to Dwell since its inception. He's a CalArts dropout, a former art critic for The New Yorker, and a producer of comedies on TV. He lives in, and writes from, Los Angeles.
All the Names That Are Fit to Print
The Names Brand is one of those incredibly simple business ideas that's either a stroke of genius or a flash in the pan (or maybe both). Names Brand prints unornamented lists of pop-culture characters, from the obvious to the obscure, in large Helvetica type on solid-color t-shirts. That's it: From the monikers of the A-team to the Obama bunch, you can pretty much have anything you want, as long as it fits on the front of a preshrunk cotton tee.
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Pretty Loaded is an online museum of "preloaders," those animated countdowns that inform visitors that their mind-blowing web experience will be 100% loaded as soon as their pokey PC catches up to the site's state-of-the-art graphics and sound.
Modest Modern Shopping List
Next month, Chad Ludeman, president of the firm PostGreen, will move into the first completed 100K House, an infill development he and his team built in the New Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. As the name suggests, the goal of the project was to spend just $100,000 to build a modern, green, 1000-square-foot home. Ludeman and his wife, Courtney, will be the guinea pigs in an experiment they've blogged and photographed in great detail from the earliest planning phases all the way through construction. The results look promising indeed, and we'll be featuring photos of the Ludemans' home when it's ready.
Circa 1955
With all the romanticism about mid-century modernism, it's fascinating to crack open a time capsule and see how people really decorated their domestic spaces back in the mid-twentieth century: Check out this real estate listing or a house in the Hill neighborhood of St. Louis, built (and decorated) in 1955—and not lived in since.
Courtyard of Appeal
Like so many L.A. stories, the tale of the Courtyard House begins with a lucky break. One day in 2001, Thomas Robertson got a call from a friend he hadn’t seen in ages. The friend told him that his elderly aunt needed companionship in her twilight years, and that she owned an empty lot in a posh West Los Angeles neighborhood. Would Tom like to design a home they could live in together? “I thought he was joking,” Robertson recalls. And just like that, he had his first house commission.
Googie Gas
It's an understatement to say that we're living in a weird time, but when it comes to all things automotive, it's especially trippy. A few months ago, we were either lamenting or welcoming a permanent regime of punishing European-style gas prices that would change our driving habits forever.
How Small is Too Small?
The first few paragraphs of a recent New York Times article on architect Gary Chang's Hong Kong apartment read like a scene from a dystopian novel—from the Wii screen that "analyzes" Chang's movements, to the yellow-tinged light that spills through the window, simulating sunshine in the smog-choked megametropolis.
Yes We Kamm
Now that the 2010 Honda Insight has been road-tested, and the 2010 Toyota Prius redesign has been revealed, it's time to find out why these two fuel-efficient cars—with two completely different hybrid drivetrains, and from two competitive automakers—look so much alike.
Art Folks at Home
I don't know about you, but I check theselby.com, photographer Todd Selby's website, weekly to see if anyone I know, admire, despise, and/or am insanely jealous of shows up. Selby's stylish color photos of artists, filmmakers, actors, and designers in their living/work spaces diverge from similar spreads in Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar due to the fact (or maybe just the feeling) that his subjects don't decorate their digs after they've been chosen for the project. All the clutter, eclecticism, and affectation appear authentic.
Cover to Cover Design
The Book Cover Archive is exactly that; an online compendium of the best book cover art and design of the last few decades, as curated by Eric Jacobsen and Ben Pieratt of General Projects, the design firm responsible for the Readycam Flatpack camera.
