Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland, built between 1937 and 1939 as a rural retreat, is considered one of the greatest houses of the 20th century. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who curated a major retrospective of Aalto’s work at the Barbican in London in 2007, has said that photographs give no real sense of Aalto’s buildings. Short of flying to Finland, though, photos are what we have at this moment. Flickr photos are by  08 ROTCH simoneau, Frans Drewniak (drz image), Siren Fay, Andrew Paul Carr, bttgcm, Ashley Wendell, David Gross and Ettubrutae. For further reading on this amazing house, there’s an excellent article on Aalto and Ban’s curation of his work at designbuild or look at Phaidon’s Villa Mairea Aid. The house shows evidence of Aalto’s various interests in Japanese design, in sustainable architecture, and in simple, natural materials used in an experimental way. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater was also an influence, and you can see that here, but while I appreciate Fallingwater, I love Villa Mairea.

Click below for more photos.

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Probably everyone and his/her dog has seen this NYC loft apartment by now, and possibly also blogged about it, but this is one of those places that is so hypnotizing I can’t stop looking at it. It’s on the top floor of a former industrial building on Broadway in NYC and not surprisingly it belongs to an architect couple. It is filled with Jean Prouvé and Hans Wegner furniture among other beautiful things, but it’s the beautiful diamond-patterned Berber rug and the striped pillows that make it. There’s something about these minimalist, monochomatic stripes and geometries that produce a mesmerized quasi-autistic trance, while at the same time they are also pleasingly reminiscent of the traditional striped textiles of both Sweden and Greece. Modernism’s long-standing relationship with simple agrarian-based weaving is not surprising. Without the wood and textiles this would just be another cool – even cold – white loft.

Via OWI.

Textile looms and computers share a common history; Babbage used punch cards in his Difference Engine after seeing a Jacquard loom at work. This carpet by Richard Hutten is called “Playing With Tradition” and it plays on the historical relationship of looms and computers by looking exactly like a digital image that has been pixel-stretched. Hutten has designed furniture and other products for Droog and Sawaya and Moroni, among others, and this rug was designed for I+I’s Strawberry Fields project. Some of the other pieces in that project are below, and at least two of them make use of computer imagery or computerized loom capabilities. This came to us down the winding path of blprnt (our resident digital expert and man about the studio, whose mom is also a weaver) via quasimondo via today and tomorrow.

Here are two quite beautiful DIY projects from the 60s, both found in The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970. Most of what we found in there was quite kitschy, but these two ideas seemed particularly striking. The instructions are a little minimal, but a pair of fairly handy people could probably figure them out. Caption for the white relief wall treatment above: ”Cover a wall with lattice molding. Between two 1×2s, space as many strips of lath as you need and nail them in place. Cut a diagonal strip at top and a circle in the middle. Nail and cement the lath to the wall, but slightly offset the sections. Paint the entire surface in flat white.”

This lamp is attractive, and with the new LED Christmas light strings, it would be easy to make without threat of burning the rice paper. These lampshades are cheap to buy, but the effect when they’re strung together is more than the sum of its parts. “Paper lampshades come in a multitude of shapes and sizes – here we have a cylinder, an oblate spheroid, and globes in three sizes. This cheap but glamorous installation was made by sewing the shades together with wire wrapped around the wood frames. Illumination is provided by a Christmas tree light string carrying small frosted bulbs of low wattage.”

Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen used these rugs regularly, which is not surprising given their unusual melding of minimalism and handmade detail, restraint and inventiveness. The Berber people – women, actually – of the Atlas and Rif Mountains of Morocco produce these amazing talismanic and practical carpets with designs that seem to highlight the relationship between form and nothingness, with their graphic patterns often disappearing or unravelling. The names of dialects, places and tribes in the region also highlight the strange, shifting interplay of foreground and background – the name of one tribe translates as “people from between somewhere and nowhere.” There’s something strangely moving about this willingness to give up a degree of control, both in terms of craft and philosophy, and to defy order while also maintaining it.

Rugs from the Beni Ourain people of the Middle Atlas Mountains and Azila in the Rif Mountains are among the most prized. Corbusier commissioned custom Berber rugs from these regions for his buildings.

An Italian dealer posted these photos on his beautiful website last year, but sadly it seems the site has been taken down. For excellent info on Berber rugs, see the Berber Arts website as well as the essay below.

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