These are a mix of glass and lucite, past and present. The bottom 3 pieces are from the 70s and all of the pieces at top are contemporary. Transparency puts furniture into the realm of the future or the imaginary, even when it also automatically harks back to the 1970s. Which may be the same thing. The 70s also had that thing for kaleidoscopic and candyshop colour, iconoclasm, disco and visual pleasure. And conveniently mirrored table tops. Above, XXX tables by Glas Italia, released this year. See this Arren Williams article. Below, glass and lucite by Italian company Sawaya Moroni, who are present-day masters of this too. Example further below are vintage.

Two photos above are by Klick Interiors.

Above, French 70s lucite desk from here. Below, Electrified Plexiglas and Mirrored Glass Low Table by Ron Ferri, circa 1970’s USA. Mirror, Lucite. From Todd Merrill

Below, unknown chair.

Not a rhetorical question. This is a hodgepodge sample, for sure, and spans decades, but all of it seems to partake of some form or other of adventurousness. It’s possible I’m projecting, and that my view of Australia is entirely filtered through my childhood fixation on that girl in National Geographic who crossed the outback on camels. But I doubt it. Above are from the National Archives of Australia appearing in the Heide Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit Modern Times: the untold story of modernism in Australia. Top: ‘A modernist vision of Australia: Grant and Mary Featherston’s wing sound chairs were a feature of the Australian Pavilion, designed by architect James Maccormick with exhibits selected by Robin Boyd, at Expo 67 in Montreal, 1967′ and ‘View of the elevated restaurant, Centenary Pool, Brisbane’ by James Birrell. Most images below are from desire to inspire, the half-Australian blog. House directly below is the Wheatsheaf House. House in woods below by Drew Heath; room with screen, photo by Lucas Allen; geometric bedroom by Greg Natale; provenance of last 3 photos is lost, please advise; last photo is room by Marion Hall Best, considered the mother of modern Australian interior design.

Utopian soviet architecture, futuristic and sci-fi, photographed by Frederic Chaubin, editor of French magazine Citizen K. Interview and photos from Ping Mag. The architect who designed the building below was influenced by a sketch of an imaginary city drawn by a Russian artist. “Roads Ministry” (Tbilisi, Georgia, 1975). For more information on the others, see Ping.

From the Canadian Design Resource. Late 70s Quebec vase from the Sial company.

These photos of The Dome Show, an exhibition by art collective Intermedia at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1970, are all from the web archive Ruins In Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. (See another post on this absolutely amazing site here.) The Dome Show was an experimental art show involving architecture, sculpture, performance, music, improvised happenings, a giant public dinner party, bonfires, public home movie nights and many other things over the months of its exhibition. Above, Installing the Dome Show at the VAG.

From the site: “The unifying structure of the Dome Show was Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. Each Intermedia member who was interested was invited to build domes individually or communally for the exhibition. Before the exhibition installation Intermedia members constructed their domes in a variety of public spaces, including the Maplewood Mud Flats, at 4th and Arbutus, Kitsilano Beach, in front of the Bentall Center in Downtown Vancouver, and outside of the Vancouver planetarium.”

Buckminster’s geodesic dome was obviously at the height of its popularity then. Now, forty years later, there seems to be a revival of interest in its utopian promise or its grooviness or its sheer architectural difference or what, exactly? It reappears during times of environmental crisis, war, or general turmoil? Or when staid protestantism makes you want to flee to a stately hippie pleasure dome? Whatever it is, I like looking at these structures and I’m grateful to Ruins in Process for the documentation. The website is particularly valuable not just because of the beards and the fashions, but because it covers a period of art that for all its notoriety is actually not all that well known, not just because it was pre-internet, but also perhaps because of the tendency of the work to be temporary, performative, process-based and dependent upon happenings, and in so many other ways difficult to document. Also, as Carole Itter says in her interview on the site, if you were present at a happening and were documenting, it meant you weren’t in the moment, and that wasn’t cool. Her comments on the role of women in Intermedia are also pretty interesting.

Above, an art insert in the Vancouver weekly The Georgia Straight. Below, construction of a dome in the Mudflats, Vancouver.

Above and below, dancers in a dome near the Burrard Street Bridge.

Above, meeting of Intermedia on Beatty Street. Below, “100 flutes” performance in aluminum dome.

Above,”Bingo,” an event at City Feast, a city-wide public dinner to close The Dome Show. Below, End of the Dome Show – burning of a dome out in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery, on the night of City Feast at the close of the show. A bonfire on one of Vancouver’s main arteries could so not happen now.

The house above at centre, a lowly style known as a Vancouver Special, is shown here prior to its renovation about six years ago by Vancouver architects Pechet and Robb. This renovation was one of the earliest of a current spate of Vancouver Special overhauls, and it’s probably still the most famous. See Canadian Architect magazine and also here. As the previous post explains, the Vancouver Special is a generic, mass-produced contractor’s house design unique to Vancouver. A great number of these houses were built between about 1965 and 1985 until finally the City of Vancouver began to actively suppress them. Now, thanks to their lower prices and the fact that their simple shapes lend them to easy modernization, they are undergoing a revival. Their boxy shape makes them feel surprisingly large, especially when interior walls are removed. You can see from the interior shots below how easily the exteriors and interiors can be switched over from cheesy 70s suburban to something almost midcentury modern. The Pechet and Robb house has an almost Scandinavian modern feel – you’d have to be familiar with Vancouver Specials to know how different this feels from the original. The bottom photo shows the garage. Photos are from pechetandrobb.com, where there is also a description of the renovation. See also more photos of this house on Flickr.

PS. As you’ll see in the next post, it seems to be almost standard practice with Vancouver Special exterior makeovers to go with a combination of dark charcoal-grey paint with unpainted Douglas fir wood facing. It may have been Pechet and Robb who started that trend with this much-publicized house.