Seemingly impossible, but true. Similar to the way the statement “Arnold Schwarzenegger is Governor of California” is true. The Canadian Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai is to be designed by Cirque du Soleil’s in-house designer. This is someone without architectural training or larger architectural insight beyond interior stage set design – and kitschy set design at that. Not surprisingly, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada is underimpressed by this decision, and a multitude of others feel the same way. Just look at this thing! Read the whole Globe and Mail article here. This Harper Conservative government – which in its rightwingery, its bold, uninformed appropriation of responsibilities it is ill-equipped for, and its generally arbitrary approach to power is starting to look Sarah Palinish – doesn’t know anything about architecture, but it knows what it likes. Tra la! The design and arts sector in Canada is increasingly under siege by this type of government interference and stupidity, and it can either lie down and wait for its supplies to run out, or it can prepare for a big fight. From the Globe:

“A fully engaged architect might have referred in the design to the pavilion site located within an old industrial district on the Pudong side of the Huangpu River. But urban context matters not at all to creators of theatrics. Treating space as a stage set – one that comes with a VIP lounge affording views on the interior courtyard – is how the Cirque approaches architecture. That’s okay when you’re designing tents, but it’s hardly the way to communicate deep architectural insight.”

When your decor is a romantic deal-breaker: a female visitor fled upon seeing this NYC lawyer’s sheets. My sister, by the way, had those exact sheets. When she was 12. Via the NYT where there’s also a really gratifying condemnation of Klimt posters.

Seen in the lobby of the Hotel Monaco, Washington, DC. We gathered here for a drink, and I couldn’t get past this United Nations of design in the corner. Sorry about the photo, which exhibits that unique iPhone lack of any photographic excellence whatsoever.

Ignoring the problems of hosting the Olympics, which are serious and many (and as a Vancouverite I’m speaking from experience), let’s just compare the graphic design from two different Canadian Olympics. The Montreal graphics were uniformly brilliant. It’s considered bad form to criticize the Vancouver 2010 graphics because of the tragic death of the head designer at a young age, but I don’t know, this is not a 2010 Olympics-promotion blog. Pax all those people who like the Vancouver 2010 Olympics graphic identity – and the corresponding new 2010-related City of Vancouver signage – but to me they all look very strongly like the unfortunate love-child of feminine hygiene packaging and corporate clip art designed by committee. Messy, busy, commercial, and they look like the bad Illustrator photo-traced layers they are. Vancouver, how many more design failures will you tolerate? Of course, a city that will build a dried-blood-coloured main library in the shape of the gladiatorial coliseum in Rome (and I can hardly believe I’m describing reality in that sentence: a library in the form of a blood-sport arena!) is capable of large-scale mistakes. See a longer post on the beautiful Montreal Olympics graphics on this blog, and more Vancouver 2010 Olympics graphics on the CDR. For the politically-incorrect 2010 Olympic logo debacle, see the CBC. [Update Feb 13: Douglas Coupland had this to say in conversation with the New York Times:

NYT: I see there is controversy over the design of the official Olympics logo, which is based on the Inuit stone marker known as an Inukshuk.
DC: Inuit culture is north of here, in the Canadian Arctic, and it has nothing to do with the lives of anyone in British Columbia. If you want to use the First Nations motifs for your logography, use the ones that are actually from here. A lot of people are kind of cheesed off.

I voted against these Olympics and am extremely annoyed by their crippling social and financial costs, their corporate profiteering and their draconian trouncing of free speech, but if they’d had good graphic design, I could have put politics aside and given them credit for that at least. Instead, Vancouver has been handed what it perhaps deserves, weak design that wouldn’t even make the qualifying round for a design Olympics if there were such a thing.

Feminine hygiene packaging. That’s what this is.

This is Karim Rashid’s new “Bite Me” Chair, a garish blobject in the shape of a bubblegum-pink molar. There was a pretty unanimous chorus of dislike and disapproval of this chair on the CDR (Canadian Design Resource) blog in May, and Rashid – the master of plasticky furniture that looks carelessly cheap when it’s made and then ages badly – totally deserved it. Lately I’ve let this blog’s Monday Cringe List feature lapse, but the Bite Me Chair has forced a revival. Not only is the chair bad enough on its own – and that’s not even taking into account its arch, attention-seeking name – but thanks to one of one of the CDR’s commenters I see that it is also suspiciously like Wendell Castle’s 1968 fibreglas Molar Chair, shown below. I suspect it’s not the only piece of Wendell Castle furniture that Rashid has, well, paid homage to. Wendell Castle occasionally falls into the gimmick furniture camp too, but somehow he never quite tips over into unapologetic, crass grossitude the way Rashid loves to. Castle’s work has more solidity and authority, even when it’s really weird, but Rashid just doesn’t seem to understand this. If you’re going to reference 60s biomorphism, do it well, for heaven’s sake. Castle didn’t have to be troubled in the late 60s/early 70s by the problem of plastic’s unsustainability, because it wasn’t a known issue, but Rashid… what decade does he think he’s in? Some of Rashid’s new chairs are apparently recyclable but that doesn’t make them environmentally superior to no chair at all. Wendell Castle is still designing, so if we’re going to have plastic blobjects at all, let’s have Castle make them. And even then, let’s edit.

Above, Wendell Castle in 1973 with his Molar side chairs. More work from Castle below, from the 60s to the present. He’s 77 now and was nevertheless listed in a 10 to watch list this year.

Above, Wendell Castle at his Scotsville, New York, studio, with his 2007 Black Widow chair. Photo by Ben Hoffman, via artinfo. Wow, does he look good at 77. Above that, his Enclosed Reclining Environment, 1969, photo by Eva Heyd from the NYT, Courtesy of R 20th Century, New York. Top photo, plastic lights via the NYT. Below, a bench from 2007.

Below, a rare molar sofa. And see here for a closeup of the red chair.

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I’d really like to see a decor makeover show for converted churches, because it’s not easy to make a church liveable, and there are many church-dwellers who could use a hand (I include myself). And not the makeover shows we’re used to, most of which make interiors worse, not better. Locationworks, which lists English properties available for rent to TV and movie shoots, provides a large collection of photos of churches that have been converted into living spaces. The spaces are not styled for magazines – they’re just photographed as is, sometimes even with unmade beds – but I found it really instructive to be able to so many spaces all together. The mistakes are almost more instructive than the successes. It’s obvious that there are some stubborn problems that almost everyone comes up against: the cavernous moody spaces, the lack of natural divisions for kitchen or bedroom or living areas, lack of storage, and the simple fact that anything you put in a church gets way, way too much competition from the architecture. Church walls are usually punctuated by arched windows or alcoves, making the addition of storage or the division of space difficult without butchering the existing features, and the curve or slant of the ceiling makes it hard to add banks of storage along walls without things looking really awkward and out of place. Then, if you try to make everything match the architecture and its era, including the furniture, you get some fairly eccentric results (below), but if you choose the opposite option and plonk modern furniture, it can look as if you’re just camping out temporarily in a giant cave (above). Some churches present more of a challenge than others. Based on looking at locationworks, the rule seems to be that the smaller, simpler, more rustic, barn-like or poverty-stricken the church, the easier it will be to live in it. Larger churches often require vertical division into either two or three stories, depending on height. Conclusions based on all these photos? It’s better to avoid black leather furniture, glass dining tables, frosted glass, black metal and all of the other 80s loft cliches. It just doesn’t seem to work. But then neither do many other styles.

Above, a former Suffolk chapel with eccentric, custom-built art-deco storage and furniture. Below, a church in London where churchiness becomes pretty impossible to avoid, so they just went with it with a …. harlequin theme? And they seem to have commissioned a bed with a gothic arch. This is a church in which I’d probably have added another floor, to split it up a bit and try to defeat the gothic Rocky Horror/Hunchback of Notre Dame effect.

Below, a beautiful building in S.E. London, but done up in a sort of 80s loft style.

Then we have this 18th century church in Lincolnshire, with a rather surprising interior, reminiscent of a hotel in Colonial Indochina?:

Lastly, the church below is a case in point that the smaller, older, woodier the church, the easier it is to achieve a liveable, pleasing effect, even when the space is split vertically:

Part 2: converted churches in England, Belgium, Australia.