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.
Terunobu Fujimori has been called the world’s only “surreal architect.” This is obviously not true, but there is a fantastical quality about his work that isn’t typical among architects, even when they’re trying for the new, the strange or the sci-fi. Fujimori is interesting because his is a down-to-earth fantasy, using simple, elemental materials that highlight the relationship of architecture to the ground from which its materials come. He’s not a traditionalist even despite the fact that you feel you can see all of Japanese architectural history in his work, both high and low, from traditional peasant houses to folk tales to the fortresses in Ran or Rashomon. For more about him see also pushpull. Fujimori curated a celebrated exhibition in the Japanese pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture that’s worth looking at here. Photos are from Flickr and designboom. Immediately above and below, Fujimori’s Coal House, sheathed in satiny black charred wood that is a traditional method of fiinishing and preserving wood but that also somehow suggests the fires that destroyed so many of Japan’s wooden castles and houses.
Above, Nemunoki Art Museum by Terunobu Fujimori and Yoshio Uchika. Below, his Leek House, with a lattice roof with chives growing from it.
The building below with the dead trunks growing through and the look of a medieval Japanese wooden fortress is the Akino Fuku Museum.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay on design. Its meandering & intermittent thesis is the unexpectedly hybrid history of objects and buildings: the sheer level of cultural borrowing involved, the hidden impurity of design traditions long-considered pure, and just generally the wildly profligate miscegenation of everything. Its taste runs 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 a built environment whose structures unconsciously influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviour, so they might as well be a lot better than they are. Dear Canada and the USA, quit letting developers run this show.
