A Month of Fridays
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Diana: Solarium at the Storm King Art Center Artist William Lamson created this prismatic greenhouse out of 162 panels of sugar cooked to different temperatures. Lamson bakes the sugar until is caramelizes, closely monitoring the color. He then pours the syrup onto a pane of heated glass and as it cools he places another piece of glass on top. The glass "sandwich" is then sealed with silicone. A very cool concept using common materials in an unconventional way! The installation is part of the Light and Landscape exhibition at New York's Storm King Art Center on view until November 11th, 2012. View this video to hear Lamson explain the concept in depth. -
Kelsey: Peggy Dresser Miss Moss is the blog of South African graphic designer and internet design chronicler Diana Moss. She has very good taste, though sadly, many of the things she links to are in another hemisphere and thus unavailable to me personally. Like, for example, this excellent media cabinet she co-designed with Cape Town furniture maker Monya Eastman, who runs a company called Stokperd. The result is a simple storage piece called "Peggy," after everyone's favorite Mad Men heroine. -
Diana: Furniture by Muller Van Severen I've been on a combination-furniture kick and came across the work of Belgian design duo Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen. I love love love this armchair/chaise/lamp mashup, especially the fire-engine red of the frame and caramel leather of the seat. Here's an excerpt from their manifesto: "We are not looking for the next ‘big find’. The furniture exists because of a logical necessity. A table with a table-leg turning into a cantilever lamp, an open cabinet where one of the shelves becomes a table, or a series of lamps that are no more than a socket, a cover and a cord. The surprise comes from the combination of colors, materials, functions and—especially—the commonness." -
Tammy: Like Paper With the new Modern Market Online site launch just a couple of days away, I've been on even more of a quest than usual for well-designed and awe-inspiring products. This week I came across German designers Miriam Aust and Sebastian Amelung's Like Paper lights. Made out of slewed concrete, these pendants take on the form of folded paper, and each takes an organically distinctive mold. -
Cortney: How to Construct Rietveld Furniture I've recently entered a DIY-inspired phase right now. I see something cool and I begin analyzing exactly how I could make one for myself. So it doesn't surprise me that the book How to Construct Rietveld Furniture promptly made it onto my svpply wishlist. -
Julia: Pantone Tarts I came across these Pantone tarts the other day and thought they were wonderful. What a fun and clever idea! I am inspired to make some of my own. -
Jaime: Cabin Porn If you, like me, foster a fantasy of building a little place in the woods (or on a river, or by the beach...), what you want is Free Cabin Porn. This encompassing blog proffers photos of all manner of cabins, yurts, lean-tos, bungalows, earthen huts, and lookouts for your inspiration and delectation. But be forewarned: once you start looking, it's hard to stop. -
Kelsey: Doug Johnston Brooklyn designer Caitlin Mociun introduced me to the work of Doug Johnston at Terrific magazine's Deck The Halls holiday pop-up shop this past December. I was so enamored I bought one of his coiled cord baskets for my mother! The process is the same whether it results in an amorphous, sculptural vessel or something more practical, like a shallow basket with handles. Johnston uses braided cotton cord and sews it in coils with colored thread on an industrial zig-zag sewing machine, free-verse style with no molds. He's starting to get a bit more attention these days, so I'd advise hitting his webshop while the price tags are still mostly under $100. -
Aaron: Fashion it So Combining two of my strongest interests—fashion and Star Trek: The Next Generation—Fashion It So gives us a blow-by-blow of the intergalactic style of the 24th century. I can't get enough of this site, which is by turns hilarious, lewd, and deeply committed to sorting out precisely why Wesley Crusher owns all those sparkly vests. -
Diana: Jamie Livingston's Polaroid of the Day The idea of life as art and performance isn't the newest idea on the block, but it's surely one of the most captivating, playing into our voyeuristic desires and giving a glimpse into the private side of a person. This series of Polaroids was taken by photographer Jamie Livingston starting with a 1979 shot of his girlfriend and ending with a 1997 image of him on his deathbed. Something tells me that a .jpg of the day wouldn't be as powerful—long live analog. -
Tammy: B&W Look Back on Odd Times Way before the days of massive digitally manipulated images in pursuit of a good laugh and top spot on icanhascheezburger.com, strange moments were actually captured on film. Fear not, the photo blog Black and White WTF has compiled these—sometimes hilarious, sometimes way too weird—gems for your viewing pleasure. -
Tammy: Color Berlin Need a dose of high-saturated color, architecture, and design all at once? Check out self-taught, Berlin-based photographer Matthias Heiderich's slew of photographic collections from around Germany. Need even more? Also visit Heiderich's Behance portfolio. -
Amanda: Tiger & Turtle Magic Mountain in Dusiburg, Germany I love the look of this zinc-and-steel walkable rollercoaster-like structure in Duisburg, which just opened to the public this week. Designed by architects Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth and illuminated by hundreds of LED lights, the structure is situated on the top of a park overlooking a park in the Ruhr District. We need one of these in the States, stat. -
Kelsey: New York's Lost Subways For anyone living in New York and using the city's 842 miles of MTA track to commute every day, the prospect of abandoned subway stations is a relishing one. Urban decay! Underground! Beneath our very feet! This handy map (and accompanying WNYC broadcast) illustrates those very ghost platforms, a never-quite-realized neural pathway of train lines that reveals "how the city’s transit ambitions have been both realized and thwarted." While most are strictly off-limits to the rail-riding public, and only glimpsed by urban spelunkers skirting the law, I know of at least one you can see as an upstanding citizen: the old City Hall station, whose tilework you can spot if you stay on the 6 train between its downtown and uptown trajectory. -
Kelsey: Snarkitecture in Miami To commemorate the now-demolished Orange Bowl, Brooklyn firm Snarkitecture has re-created the stadium's enormous orange lettering and installed them in seemingly haphazard fashion (though of course we know better) around the east plaza of the Marlins Ballpark. The connection? One half of Snarkitecture, artist Daniel Arsham, grew up in Miami. He met future design partner, architect Alex Mustonen, while attending The Cooper Union in New York. (A special thanks to Noah Kalina for shooting the photo). -
Kelsey: Storybook Posters Chicago-based graphic designers Brandt Brinkerhoff and Katherine "KK" Walker (both have day jobs at big-time branding agency VSA Partners) have designed a series of four typographic posters based on children's books. One passage is selected from each–"Behave yourself and never mind the rest" from Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, for example—and printed in a boldly colored font over complete original text and illustrations, often etchings, from the first edition of the book. -
Kelsey: Found Architecture Photo Series German photographer Marcus Bock's Found Architecture documents the imprint of demolished buildings on their still-standing neighbors. The differing rooflines make a strong visual impact, almost more so than if the disappeared building were still standing. Such are the effects of nostalgia, I suppose. -
Kelsey: William Lee at AmDC William Lee is the Brooklyn designer behind this seductively simple chair which is designed to look like an abstract piece of straight lines and planes, but actually conforms to the body's shape. (Also: neon!) It's sold locally at Voos Furniture but you can see his work in person (and Lee himself) tonight at the American Design Club's latest exhibition, "Threat". The show opens tonight at Present Company in Williamsburg at 29 Wythe Street and should be chockablock with the coalition's usual cheeky designs. -
Kelsey: Coming Attraction: Frank Lloyd Wright Biopic "Taliesin" Now that Robert Moses is getting his due on the silver screen, it's high time for a Frank Lloyd Wright night at the cinema. Aside from the Ken Burns documentary of 2008, Wright has never been the focus of a feature film—until now, as Bruce Beresford (best known for Driving Miss Daisy!) signs on to direct a film centered on Taliesin, Wright's rural retreat in Spring Green, Wisconsin. As you well know, the personal life of America's most famous architect was not without its drama, especially the period portrayed by the mini-biopic: when, in 1914, the Prairie-style hillside compound was burned down by a disgruntled house servant with the architect's mistress-turned-wife and her two children inside. Fear not, the whole leaving-his-wife-and-eight-children part doesn't get overshadowed by Wright's illustrious career or later personal tragedy; the director tells Hollywood Reporter that the script, written by Nicholas Meyer, "doesn’t whitewash him into some sort of saint." -
Diana: Betonbabe I came across this blog by Viviane Hülsmeier that features lost architecture, urbanism projects, design and occasionally music and film—"lost" meaning works that have not existed on the internet before. It's an interesting way to think about how we manage information—that if something isn't readily accessible on the internet, it might become lost to future generations. -
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Jordan: Heck Yes Gene KellyIt's a site dedicated entirely to pictures, clips, and gifs of the best damn tap dancer there ever was. Period. Perfecto. Scroll through and smile. -
Amanda: 1968 Romanian Labor safety postersThis week I've been enjoying this brief collection of posters, found on the always-reliable-for-awesome-internet-fodder A Journey Round My Skull. -
Alexis: Alain Delorme's Totems SeriesI was caught by these hilarious and amazingly absurd images of photographer Alain Delorme's Totems series. Taken in the streets of Shanghai, these shots depict the unbelievable piles of "stuff" carried by bicycle commuters through the city. They are manufactured scenes that are colorful and graphic, and are a fun spin on the tradition of typological work from photographers like the Bechers. -
Aaron: Bustler.netEvery two seconds some new design competition is announced. A massive museum in Rio, a new embassy in Athens, the new library at the University of Chicago. Nothing better than watching tony architecture firms do battle, but to be honest, I can never keep up with who wins, who is a finalist and if the damn things are ever actually built. Enter Bustler. I just stumbled across it today and is it ever the spot to keep track of who wins what commission. Start keeping score at home, sports fans! -
Michele: America in Color from 1939-1943 Walker Evans's stark, iconic black-and-white images of the Great Depression were displaced ever so slightly in my heart this week by this soaring collection of rare, in-living-color photographs from the same time. Shot under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (and exhibited by the Library of Congress in 2006), these are vital, affecting glimpses of America as revealing and relevant in 2010 as they were more than a half-century ago. -
Jaime: Feral HousesI can't stop looking at these images of 'feral houses' in Detroit, which I spotted on the blog Sweet Juniper. The dilapidated buildings, choked with lush greenery, are just a handful of the city's thousands of abandoned buildings. As the blog puts it, these feral houses are "reverting to a wild state, as from domestication, a word derived itself from domesticus (the Latin for belonging to the domus, or house). Now these houses are feralis. They belong only to the dead." -
Aaron: My Friday Find this week is this picture of scores and scores of tulips in bloom in Holland. Wow! Thanks to Heather Mourer of One Home in Denver for passing the picture on. -
Tammy: Bright Future With a vibrant approach on rethinking educational space, Supermachine Studio has taken Bangkok University—Thailand's oldest public college—by storm, spreading creativity and innovation throughout. The recent completion of the BU Branding Unit takes a splash of color on the walls to the next level. Having a slight obsession with bold colors in interior spaces, I simply can't wait to see what Supermachine Studio has on deck next. -
Jordan: Forty Fords Because one Ford is never enough, illustrator Steve Murray has drawn an in-character Harrison face for each of his forty films (the latest being the insane-sounding Cowboys and Aliens). Can you name 'em all? via @kottke. -
Tammy: Invasion of the Little People Watch your big city steps: London-based artist Slinkachu's street art installation/photography project, "The Little People," infuses mini figurines with life-size objects throughout city streets. Behind Slinkachu's project is the notion that city residents should be more aware of their surroundings, and with these humorous installations to look for, why not?
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