Dear Vancouver architects and business owners, let’s re-visit the enlightened 1970s collaboration between the Best Products company, based in Virginia, and the artist-architect James Wines and his group SITE (Sculpture In The Environment). We could use some of their joint risk-taking and artistic innovation around here. What the videos below show evidence of, but don’t elaborate on, is the fact that the owners of the Best Products company were a highly educated, innovative, aesthetically adventurous family deeply interested in art. Quite apart from hiring James Wines, who is also a sculptor, and giving him an enormous amount of artistic freedom, over the years the Lewis family also amassed an amazing art collection by actually allowing artists to trade store goods for art. You can read about the Lewis family and Best Products here. In one of those funny mutual blog tag-team moments, a million monkeys typing responded to my previous post on James Wines and SITE and added this excellent little video on James Wines, which I’d never seen before, as well as the interesting fact that SITE also produced “Highway 86″ in Vancouver’s 1986 World’s Fair, which for some reason I didn’t know either. Watch the rest of the video here: Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. Thanks for the videos and the photo of Highway 86, millionmonkeys.
This gets points for adventurousness and imagination and magic, if not success. It’s another image from The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970.
The Cave Room (above), the Projection Room, and the Xanadu Room (below) are from “The Bloomingdale’s Book of Home Decorating,” 1973, by Barbara D’Arcy. D’arcy was famous for her wild display rooms actually constructed inside the Bloomingdales store in New York in the 1960s and 70s. All her rooms had the classic 60s emphasis on lounging, pleasure, boldness, and an appeal to the senses that bordered on the psychedelic or the mind-altering – they were an Experience. But there was also a DIY component to D’Arcy’s approach. Many of the room elements were not expensive to build or buy, and that’s because most of her displays were directed at the “Saturday Generation” demographic, which she describes (in a tone that’s only funny because it’s so of its time) in a way that makes it sound a lot like the readership of Apartment Therapy or the current DIY movement in general, to which many of us probably belong:
The Saturday Generation. That’s what we call them at Bloomingdale’s, but they’re everywhere – all over the country, all over the world. We call them the Saturday Generation because they fill our stores on Saturdays. They’re young, they’re vital, they’re hardworking. And Saturday is about the only day they have to shop.
Maybe you’re a member of The Saturday Generation. If so, we know you… Some of you are just starting out in your profession. You may have a roommate, you may be newly married, you may live in a bachelor pad. You’re informed, you’ve got taste (usually more taste than money, right?) and as far as today is concerned, you’re with it. (Click below for more…)
See also a nice post on this book from buildmeanest, which we first read as “build a mean nest.” Which also works, especially in this case.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay about the strange, hybrid, and surprisingly impure histories of objects and buildings. It is skewed toward the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, it's the same upside-down as right-side-up, it refers to both zeros and ones, and it is pronounced uno. My name is Lindsay and I'm open to your complaints, disagreement or general crankiness. Free free to comment or email. This is an anti-intellectualism-free zone and around here we don't try to dampen critique by calling it negativity or whining. We call it thought!
