Friday Finds 06.01.12

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.

Aaron: The New Yorker's Page Turner

No surprise that the New Yorker's book blog is top notch, but now that we're a couple weeks into the Page Turner's short life it's looking damned indispensable. Poems, criticism, big ideas on big novels, hell it's got it all. Keeping up with the weekly print edition just got a whole lot harder.

Jaime: Kirk Brandenberger, Tourism Director and Fiddle Player Extraordinaire

Last week I journeyed out to Keokuk, Iowa, (a small city located where Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois meet) to produce a video about the winner of our recent Dwell and Sub-Zero "Rethinking Preservation" contest: the Burnham and Root–designed Keokuk Union Depot. While there I met many wonderful Iowans, but a highlight of the trip was hearing Kirk Brandenberger, a fiddle player who also serves as Keokuk's Tourism Director, play a few songs in the railroad depot. The acoustics were awesome, and Kirk is a very sweet and talented guy. We're planning to work a few of his songs into the video, which will post on dwell.com in September–stay tuned! And in the meantime, I've got his 1988 bluegrass album "Fiddler on the Hoof" on repeat.

Diana: Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei Serpentine Pavilion Opens

Each year, a new architect or team designs the Serpentine Gallery's Summer Pavilion in London's Kensington Gardens. This year, the privilege went to HdeM and Ai Weiwei. The trio treated their project like an archaeological site, unearthing remnants of the foundations from structures past and incorporating them with their new structure. It just opened and a few photographs by Iwan Baan are available to peruse on Designboom.