My grandfather landed in France on D-Day when he was 35 years old. He was a Canadian officer on loan to a British regiment, so he landed with the British, not the Canadians. The British were running out of officers and preferred to promote Canadians than lower-class Brits to higher ranks, a practice my democratic-minded grandfather didn’t have much respect for. He despised war and never spoke about it, apart from making remarks about the British class system, and that’s why it was such a weird surprise to find all of these war souvenirs after he died. It may be that he’d forgotten they were in the house. While emptying out his place before it was sold, we found an old trunk in a damp gardening room at the bottom of a pile of old luggage. It was locked and musty-smelling, and my father, exhausted after days of cleaning up what was mostly junk, wanted to throw it into the garbage bin without opening it. I thought the trunk looked different than the disused luggage it had been buried under, so I pulled it aside and broke the lock with a screwdriver. And packed neatly inside were all my grandfather’s WWII field maps (about 60 of them on beautiful rag paper, covered in red tactical notations), tactical aerial photos of locations in Normandy, Belgium and Holland, his army hat, all of his letters home from the war, all of my grandmother’s letters to him (those are in much worse shape since he’d kept them in his pocket in the trenches), and some war souvenirs. The packing was so tidy it was probably the work of my grandmother, who died in 1963.

Since under army censorship he was forbidden to write to my grandmother about locations or events, the letters are full of the strange details of trench life. Often he wrote about the number of days that he’d been in the field without taking his clothes or boots off. There’s something in that detail that is more evocative of war than some of the more horrifying details that appeared in later letters, when the censorship had become more lax or disorganized. Even so, he never mentioned the killing and you can plainly see that he was trying to protect her. In the field they were so short of materials that one of his letters was written on a scrap of paper that he said had come from the pocket of a dead German soldier. He wrote that he was writing the letter at dusk while sitting on a box in on a field, rushing to finish it  before a runner came for the mail. At the time he was also receiving and responding to her letters, one of which had contained a request from my 8-year-old father asking for a German “stel [sic] helmet” as a souvenir. My grandfather never wrote anything vicious about the young German enemy soldiers, whom I think he pitied as the Allies brutally pushed them back through France (“I don’t how Jerry can stand it”), but he did write back saying that he couldn’t bring a steel helmet back because he couldn’t “stand the sight of the things.” Shown here are two of the first letters he wrote after the D-Day landing, followed by an aerial photo of Banneville in Normandy (which his regiment liberated), and some Vancouver papers announcing the end of the war, probably saved by my grandmother. Her own brother, my great-uncle, was killed soon after D-Day in Louvigny, France and buried there. He was posthumously decorated for bravery, and I always wondered if this exacerbated the survivor’s guilt my grandfather must have felt. The boots above would have been my grandfather’s training boots from Canada; the filthy uniform he’d worn in the trenches would have been disposed of in Holland, before he left the war for England and then Vancouver. The last photo shows the trunk with its clasp pried off. Please note these photos are for family purposes mainly so please don’t reproduce without permission. Thank you. If you’re interested in these materials for research historical purposes, please contact me.

Vancouver curator Scott Watson’s essay Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos and Squats is part of the impressive and totally compelling Vancouver Art in the Sixties website project. It’s a well-organized archive of Vancouver’s 1960s art production and it’s far too large a topic for one post. What I found immediately interesting though was Watson’s historical contextualization of residential architecture and interior aesthetics in the 60s, especially its turn away from modernist minimalism and toward more baroque historical styles. He suggests that the Edwardian bric-a-brac and Art Nouveau styles that were adopted by Vancouver’s arts and hippie communities in the 60s were a reaction against the City of Vancouver’s move to demolish the crumbling inner-city Edwardian houses, which housed its art and social protest, and replace them with corporate architectural brutalism and strata-controlled condos. This was no doubt replayed in cities all across North America. Watson’s essay is particularly interesting in light of the current revival of Edwardian/Victorian granny chic in interior design and craft. It seems to me this is revival without any politics, but I could be wrong. In many cases it seems the farthest thing from radical, however you understand that word, but it could also be an echo of a similar problem in urban planning. Photo above by Michael de Courcy shows a screening on December 31, 1969 of a collaborative video at Vancouver’s Intermedia art centre.

The following are excerpts from Watson’s essay (click the link at top for the whole text).

“At the advent of what we now call postmodernism, the doomed Edwardian building inventory that provided bohemia’s living, studio and event spaces also provided an aesthetic opposed to Brutalism, the heavy concrete fortress style of public buildings that had arisen in response to the riots and demonstrations of the 60s. Late Victorian and Edwardian furniture and bric-a-brac furnished communal houses. In these spaces Art Nouveau was revived and deployed to advertise concerts and events. Rejection of the “brutality of the new” was, in essence, a very real concern about the disappearance of places to live, eat, congregate, exhibit and perform. In defnse of a crumbling inventory of modest, poorly built pioneer-era wooden and brick structures, the art community of the day rejected not only the Brutalist idioms of the 1960s and 1970s, but the gentler suburban modernism of the 1940s and 1950s. Or to be more precise, the authoritarian, normalizing, “design for living” modernism, with its unarticulated suppression of libidinal circulation, was an anathema for the generation of the 1960s and 1970s. The hippie movement as appropriated by fashion and popular music adopted Edwardian and Art Nouveau as its style of protest and renunciation of consumer/spectacle society.” [This excerpt was the last paragraph of several excerpts below. Click for more.]

Art Nouveau-influenced Doors poster by Bob Masse, Vancouver, 1967. Below, Bob Masse, William Tell & the Marksmen Great White Light, Vancouver, 1960s.

Will your home be next? Poster by Don Gutstein, poster, Vancouver, 1975

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2thewalls is the closest thing on the internet to the much-missed and now cult-status Nest: Quarterly of Interiors. Finding 2thewalls is a bit like falling down the rabbit hole, and not just because reading it feels like deciphering text printed on a zebra crossing. Like Nest, 2thewalls is concerned with the way people actually live in architecture, and, also similar to Nest, 2thewalls somehow illuminates reality’s tendency to take on an almost Alice in Wonderland quality. In design, reality really is stranger than fiction, and both publications get this across not just through unconventional subject matter and design, but also by providing interesting historical context in such a way that it overturns our more banal assumptions about where objects and styles come from. I find it a welcome refuge from the massive decontextualization of styles and objects that most decor magazines and blogs (tumblr! I’m talking to you!) are guilty of, something that I think flattens our experience of the design around us and converts it into an exhausting avalanche of commodities. 2thewalls always makes me think, and it has the additional knack of somehow digging up things that I’ve once loved but have then lost or forgotten. A long time ago I cut out these two photos (above and below) from a vintage garage-sale copy of Architectural Digest: a blue fold-out writing desk in the shape of a hippo, and an old wooden staircase out of a folk tale, but I lost them and never saw them again until they resurfaced on 2thewalls. I’m showing this work only because it’s a favourite of mine, but there is so much more there to look at on 2thewalls. All of the work shown here  is by Atelier Lalanne, and you really should go to 2thewalls to read the original accompanying text. Photos here, all except for the last two, are courtesy of 2thewalls and were taken from the February 1981 issue of AD, and are by Marc Lacroix. 2thewalls is a project of New York designer Keehnan Konyha.

The table by Francois-Xavier Lalanne, above, is easily disassembled into 5 round bistro tables. Below, Francois-Xavier (inset) and Claude Lalanne. The two pieces at bottom – a frog that opens into a chair and a necklace that seems to have been made in ancient Greece – both sold recently at auction. A comprehensive book on Atelier Lalanne work is Claude & Francois-Xavier Lalanne and see also Claude & Francois-Xavier Lalanne: Fragments.

Museum designed and built as if by archeological time. The Ningbo Historic Museum was designed by Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio. Photos by Iwan Baan, via archdaily.

Young Meagher’s Militant Guild of Rural Tailors seems to be a fashion line doubling as a museological collection of historical objects and textiles supposedly belonging to a revolutionary worldwide underground cult of rural tailors reaching back into early 19th C history. You can lose several hours if you fall into the web orbit of this extremely thoroughgoing narrative fantasy and its imaginary steampunkish realm. The combination of extremely high-quality tailoring (unfortunately only for men) and handcrafted fantasy props is, not surprisingly, very big in Japan, one of MGRT’s biggest markets. “Audiences” seems a more appropriate term than “markets,” because even though these clothes are commodities, they also seem part of a larger performance. The fact that these objects are presented as props and artifacts rather than as mere products seems to be a part of a rebellion against cheap meaninglessness of the commodity market and a hopeful alliance with quality and historical meaning, so that the company’s symbol – the hybrid brass knuckle scissors above – cleverly comes off as insignia rather than as a logo. As for the styles themselves, they seem to point to the American Civil War and more broadly to the 19th C in general, which seems to be a popular nostalgia at the moment and has ties to the eclectic antiquey references of steampunk. These photos are all from the Young Meagher website (be prepared for bleak, howling wind and antique train soundtracks) and their Flickr pool, which goes by the name Rural Tailor Research. Captions to photos below are from the Flickr pool. Thanks to B.C.M. for the tip.

Tailors Crown crafted from traditional scissor-parts taken from initiated tailors in exchange for the Brass Knuckle Guildsman’s Shears shown above and presented in clandestine annual ceremonies to bestow honor on the single guild member from across the international network thought to have most advanced the art of rural tailoring. The crown would be displayed in secret in the winner’s atelier for a year before it was then awarded to the next honoree (similar to the Stanley Cup).

Novice’s Veil Masks like this (and those below) were required to be worn by candidates seeking initiation in order to prevent nepotism influencing selection. Would-be guild tailors were referred to as “Fresh Faces” by the inner guild which refered to the practice adopted by candidate of decorating their masks in order to show a little bit more of the tailorwise dexterity during their application regimine. This reproduction and those below were created for GenArt during New York Fashion Week.

Reproduction Silk Hanger garment hanger covered in silk re-used from vintage neck-ties used by guild members to display new designs for consideration during the ceremony described above. Hangers like this would be hung from scissors which had been “stabbed” into the wall of a guildhall to present garments by rural tailors competing for the Tailor’s Crown. Created by L. J. Maher (AKA Meagher)

Commisioned from by Barney’s New York for use in holiday windows. Hand-cut silkscreened words from Handle’s Messiah printed onto strips of lambs-suede and hand-stitched through a fiberglass form. Hand sewn ostrich feather wings with cowhide banding brass snap-clipped to copper wing armatures. Hand=hammered shoulder and neck cladding leading to antique violin peg-head finial.

This post is a personal addendum to our earlier post about a discussion amongst readers of another design blog about whether one designer had copied or “borrowed” another designer’s idea. We certainly didn’t mean to imply that the second designer copied the first, because those things are impossible to know, and he may well not have, and in any case his design diverged significantly from hers. Anyway, here’s a trivial case from our own experience, and it’s just one among many. It’s about army blanket pillows, which we had thought were our exclusive idea but which of course were not.

We hadn’t seen the others until ours began to get some press, and then we realized other people were making them too. Who came first? Do others think we’re copycats, or are they copycats, or is affordable army surplus just in the air, like the warfare version of Depression-Era Chic? It’s nearly impossible to know, and anyway the very idea of pure originality is suspect. Design is a fertile field of rampant cross-pollination, and we hope it remains a fertile field rather than a minefield of intellectual property rights. In any case, as they say, there’s nothing new under the sun. Click below to follow our design process. The photograph at very top is from here – we think the pillows pictured are probably by Red Barn. Directly above, one of our favourite photos, bench pillows from Italian Elle Decor, Summer 2004. Below, pillows by us.

PS You can make your own army blanket pillows. We’ll post a DIY soon. In the meantime, check out your local army surplus for blankets or look here. Our story about why we decided to make these pillows, below.

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