If you’re in Vancouver and are interested in Arthur Erickson’s ties with Japan (and by extension Japan’s influence on west coast modernism), it’s worth ordering tickets for this event now. It will sell out. It’s not cheap, but there’s a good deal for students. The event is co-presented by Coast Modern, the upcoming film about modern architecture on the west coast from Vancouver to LA, by filmmakers Gavin Froome and Michael Bernard. The event is November 25, 7 pm at The Vancouver International Film Centre. For tickets and more information contact Cheryl Cooper at the Arthur Erickson Conservancy and see the writeup on the Coast Modern blog. For full information on the talk and Professor Sabatino, click below for more.
These stills were shot during the filming of Coast Modern, a documentary film about West Coast modern house architecture, spanning from LA to Vancouver, by Vancouver filmmakers Gavin Froome and Mike Bernard. The film “speaks with the architects and their patrons and asks if Modernism’s time has finally come or did it never really go away.” It is currently in the editing phase and is set to be completed this coming fall. The filmmakers talked with an impressive number of well-known architects and designers up and down the coast, and based on the preview the film has a great feel – entertaining and informative. You can follow the film’s progress on their blog, watch the preview trailer below, and there’s a set of stills on Flickr. I’m hoping the film will spark increased appreciation of modern architecture in Vancouver before the current spate of house demolitions proceeds any further. Photos here are: the Stinson Beach House, top; DJ Greyboy’s Opdahl House by architect Edward Killingsworth; Barbara Bestor’s LA House; the filmmakers talking with Julius Shulman; and the Etenza House where the idea for the Case Study project was hatched. I’ll post more information on the film and its events closer to the release date. All photos posted here by permission from the filmmakers.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay on design. Its main interest is in the unexpectedly hybrid history of objects and buildings - cultural borrowing, the surprising impurity of design traditions long-considered pure, and just generally the miscegenation of everything. Its orientation is to the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the possibly lost promise of the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and creative 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, is the same upside-down as right-side-up, refers to both zeros and ones, and is pronounced uno. This site is open to complaints, nerdy critique and dissent. Without complaint and critique, design of housing, towns and cities won't get any better in North America. We do after all spend our entire lives in the built environment, which influences our thoughts, feelings and behaviour, so it might as well be a lot better than it is. Dear Canada and the USA, quit letting developers run this show.
