The Göbekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey, about 20 miles from the Syrian border and not far from Mesopotamia, was found by a Kurdish shepherd. It turns out to be 11,500 years old, thousands of years older than any other known human temple building, and apparently it is radically altering archeology’s understanding of the origins of human civilization. Via here. They say many more temples in the complex have been detected using radar but have not yet been excavated. What is the function or meaning of that simple, interesting diagonal, and what is that lizard dog?
Most people have probably seen this video, but I thought it was worth seeing again. Dave Eggers won the 2008 TED Prize for his education and literacy work with kids, and in this entertaining acceptance speech he provides a history of the project. He’s the founder of the fantastically successful Once Upon A School which develops free drop-in tutoring centres for kids. The centres are entirely manned by volunteers – writers (including Eggers), professors, grad students, and others with flexible schedules. Quite apart from the genius of the overarching idea, Eggers also intuitively understands the role design plays in making kids and teenagers actually want to drop in for one-on-one tutoring after school. The spaces are wildly imaginative and hilarious without looking childish. In fact they must – and do – appeal to adults as well, because they are all multipurpose centres with a retail front, adult office space and kids’ tutoring area. For example, at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, Eggers’ publishing concern McSweeney’s Quarterly operates out of the back; there’s a functioning “Pirate Supply Store” in the front, and the kids’ tutoring area is in between.
There’s nothing about this project that isn’t just total genius. Below is the facade of 826 Valencia, decorated with a mural by graphic novelist Chris Ware depicting the history of language, speech, writing and publishing. Exterior photo by David Hilowitz; sandwich board photo by Dan Rochman.
Above is the Pirate Supply Store, built to feel like the inside of a ship. Photo by Willy Volk from the Flickr Creative Commons. The shop is beautiful but funny, full of elegant-looking gags: for example, as you stand and read a framed list of ways to play practical jokes on pirates, a wooden hatch opens overhead and covers you in string mop heads. Below, a visitor to the store awaits his measure of lard in exchange for which he has bartered a lock of his hair. Kids who’d just finished a workshop rushed out to witness the transaction. Photos by rgr.jnr on Flickr. Eggers and co. were forced to dream up the store component because the building rental contract stipulated there must be retail activity – hence, of course, a pirate supply store, which just happens to be a retail success in itself. Every centre has its own shop: in New York it’s the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company. All profits from the stores go to support the tutoring centres, whose extra projects include publication of the childrens’ writing and field trips. The further advantage of the shopfront is that the centres are easily accessible and embedded in the neighbourhoods they serve. To date tens of thousands of kids have been given chances they would otherwise never have had. It’s not surprising that the idea has taken off across the country. When Eggers jokingly wrote “You shall know our velocity,” he wasn’t kidding.
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.
Add a ladle every night
To every ladle, add a light
101 Nights is an art installation by Vancouver writer and broadcaster Bill Richardson, and it ended tonight on the winter solstice. Bill produced it inside the shopfront windows of his old Edwardian house in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. I’ve walked past this every night for months now. Bill collected 101 steel ladles from thrift and other sources, and each night for 101 nights he hung a ladle from the ceiling and lit a candle in its bowl. Tonight, on the solstice, the ladles total 101 and the whole neighbourhood was invited in to light a candle and make a wish.
101 Nights was so beautiful that I predict the neighbourhood will want to see it again next year, but lighting all the candles nightly was such a phenomenal amount of work that no one will blame Bill if he never does it again. I suggested that he hire a proper lamplighter, with a dark hood and a long taper and candle snuff, to come and light the candles every night. Maybe the figure of the lamplighter comes to mind because there’s an almost Dickensian feeling about the evenings at this time of year, here at the 49th parallel when it’s dusk at 4:30 pm. But it’s also that there’s not a little of the Dickensian in our neighbourhood, so close to ground zero of poverty in Vancouver, and the ladles are somehow a strange reminder of the ever-present soup kitchens nearby.
The word “ouno” is Japanese, which is partly why I chose it (that, and the fact that it’s an ambigram – see upcoming post). Before I ruined the Google Image search for “ouno” by clogging it with my own photos, these two images showed up, both from Japan. I can find out nothing about the temple above and am hoping someone familiar with temples can identify it. Below is an antique sword element: ”Ouno sukashi. Works made by the group of tsuba kou from a village of Ouno in Owari prefecture is generally called Ouno tsuba. Style is in common with Kayanayama tsuba and is powerful and uncouthly shaped.” Alternate spelling is Ohno, which on a bad day in the Ouno studio, seems appropriate. And on a bad day, “uncouthly shaped” is also appropriate, but I don’t find this design uncouth. Please, Japanese readers, school me on this word. (I know all about the manga characters.)
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!
