Everyone always leaves.
The Unhappy Hipsters blog features Dwell Magazine photos with the captions they were crying out for. Because it’s lonely in the modern world.
Even in your company I feel so alone.
Dwell has a sense of humour; this is their Twitter reply.
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.
See a previous post for more information on this famous modernist house by Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray. There has been a lot of concern about the house’s survival, but as these recent photos by my Danish internet friend Vibeke Jakobsen show, it’s safely undergoing restoration. The house looks so much better – compare these to the photos in the previous post. The house is a major historical site and an important piece of architecture, but despite its fame in architectural circles, it’s a lot less publicly known than it should be. Is that because the architect was a woman? According to Patricia O’Reilly, who has written about the house, it’s undergoing “a €800,000 re-vamp with architect Gattier remaining close to Eileen Gray’s original concept, such as the black and white tiles; inbuilt furniture and footsteps cut out of stone staircase leading to roof terrace. But it has to be said that the focus of attention is on LeCorbusier’s murals and they seem to be the reason for this re-furbishment.” Le Corbusier was fascinated by the house, painted murals on it against Gray’s will, and died swimming just offshore from it – that’s why you see his memorial stone here, and there is a nearby promenade named after him. Thanks, Vibeke, for letting me post these photos here! The architecture nerds will be very happy.
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
I’ve liked this building from childhood, but somehow I managed to see it with fresh eyes recently – I was late for an art event there, it was dusk, I was tired, the entry was deserted and somehow I suddenly noticed how ridiculously beautiful it is. It houses the Museum of Vancouver and the H.R. MacMillan Planetarium, famous in part for the Led Zep and Pink Floyd laser light shows which everyone steadfastly refuses to attend with me. I’ve been trying to get someone to go with me for years. The building’s shape probably references both flying saucers and the finely woven hats of the Salish First Nations on whose traditional lands Vancouver squats. The architect is George Hamilton and the building was completed in 1968; the stainless steel crab fountain (turned off for maintenance when I took these photos) is by sculptor George Norris. Click photos for more information.
and these shots by ChimayBleue on Flickr:
Julius Shulman, the prominent architectural photographer who helped introduce North America to modern architecture, died yesterday at age 98. Shulman had never retired. Working solidly almost up until months before his death, he produced a remarkably complete photographic archive of modern American interiors and exteriors spanning more than a 50-year period. Despite the fact that not everyone might recognize his name, his photographs have been seen by tens of millions of people. See also related post here, and obituaries in the New York Times and LA Times.
