It’s too early for Christmas, I realize. But this art object has such a pleasing geometry you could actually leave this tree out all year, minus the Christmas decorations. And I mention it know because if you want one for Christmas, you probably have to order it now if you’re outside the USA. It’s called the PossibiliTree. At Christmas if you wanted that Christmas tree smell, it would be simple to get a few boughs and tie them to these branches. I really hesitate to encourage people to buy things on this blog, because I’m anti-consumerist and DIY, but this is one of those objects that’s so well made, so well-conceived, and so environmentally friendly that I think people should have one. It has a midcentury modern feel, and I seem to remember that one of the Eames playing cards had an image of something like this, which is maybe partly why I like it so much. There are different sizes; this is the smaller one which can stand on a table as well as sit on the floor. The largest one is suspended from a hook in the ceiling – very easy to do. (There are only a few suspended trees left.) There are different colours too – walnut, birch and cherry. The tree arrives in a mailing tube and you assemble it yourself, which is apparently not difficult. If you don’t like chopping down a tree every Christmas, this seems like a great idea, so much better than a synthetic tree. It’s made on this continent, too, out of local hardwood trees. You can order these from Possibilitree.
This post is sort of a follow-up to a previous post with a similar thesis: that the 60s and 70s aren’t dead, they’re alive and well and living on tumblr. These photos of geodesic dome interiors and exteriors are just a small selection from randomfriendly, nomadicway, julesandnicho, standardgrey and cerebralmuseum. Curious fact: Buckminster Fuller was not the inventor of these structures. The first geodesic dome was built 30 years earlier “by Walther Bauersfeld, chief engineer of the Carl Zeiss optical company, for a planetarium to house his new planetarium projector,” according to Wikipedia. However it was Fuller’s utopian PR for his domes that fed these 60s and 60s-style experimentations. Welcome to the pleasure dome – though I’m sure these are not what that song is referring to.
The above by standardgrey really made me laugh, even despite an allergy to lolspeak (click on photo to see other amusing judgments passed on this thing). So many of these glass domes were eventually painted for privacy and shade, but this one takes defeating the purpose to a new level. The 1976 dome fire below, “Buckminster’s blaze,” is via standardgrey via mcslo and is originally from the Montreal City Archive. See some funny remarks about this, and about domes in general, here. PS. check out this Buckminster Fuller collapsing table.
Linda and John Meyers of Wary Meyers Decorative Arts assemble these mod, chic, distinctly 1960s and 70s interiors almost entirely from furniture and objects they find in thrift and vintage sales. They’ve produced some great interior design projects for clients but shown here is their own house in Portland, Maine, which is by now quite well-known. I’m showing it rather than their other excellent projects because here they’re free to be the wildest and the most purely 60s. Their entertaining new blog documents their peripatetic treasure-hunt in what amounts to a decor road movie (photos at bottom are from the blog). There’s something really unerring about their creative re-use and re-work of the past, their re-introduction of the 60s with its emphasis on pleasure and experience and its occasional psychedelia, and just generally their sense of adventure and adept historical juxtaposition. Much of their material is actually early modernist to midcentury modernist but the ultimate effect is the specific risk-taking quality of the post-50s era. I wish there were more members of this particular design army but it’s gratifying to see that their work is getting plenty of recognition. See the article in the NYT (or click below to read the text).
Above, “Linda walking toward disappointment.” Below, their post says “This worn old Le Corbusier Basculant chair was at a middle school’s sale on Saturday amidst piles of shin guards and Harry Potter books.” Further below, Gerald Thurston lamp. Photo at bottom is just captioned “dreamhouse.”
From Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part, or Band of Outsiders. Not design except in the larger sense, but it’s in the favourites category thanks to my friends Maxwell and Hadley who made about thirty of us learn this sequence for an art event a couple of years ago. We were calling it The Madison but apparently it’s not a faithful rendition of that dance. It’s better. Longer cut here.
I’m mesmerized by this door photo by Anna Dorfman-Stark, whose Door Sixteen is one of my favourite blogs. This amazing doorway is in New York City, and I’m probably going to think of it as “door sixteen” from now on. Anna is a book cover designer, so I’m not surprised she loves these doors – double doors always look like a bookcover to me. These are reminiscent of my all-time favourite book covers – the Die Farbe cover below, and the beautiful Brian Wildsmith illustrations of my childhood (click below to see more examples by Wildsmith). More people with solid slab doors should try something like this! Thanks to Anna for permission to use this photo (and to d.sharp for the photo of the “die farbe” book). You might also want to take a look at Anna’s excellent Flickr stream. See another photo of this door here.
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!
