More from Vancouver Art in the Sixties. This electronic sound work is called Floating Mushroom, by Dennis Vance, September 30, 1969. Photo by Michael de Courcy. Nice piece and nice pea coat. From the site:

“Floating Mushroom” was a floating steel form containing sound-generating equipment that responded to movement on the shore. This intervention took place at Lost Lagoon in Vancouver. L-R: Ian Ridgeway, Gerry Gilbert, Galen Ridgeway, Heidi Ridgeway, Kita Ridgeway, Dallas Selman, Dennis Vance, Glenn Toppings.

Photo essay of post-war Yugoslavian monuments and architecture by Belgian artist Jan Kempenaers, from the Crown Gallery site. “Spomenik” means monument, and all of these structures were meant to commemorate WWII losses and point to progress and a generally utopian future. Thanks to the turmoil of subsequent wars in the former Yugoslavia, these brutalist monuments have fallen into disrepair. More information on Kempenaers here.

Selwyn Pullan is Vancouver’s most prolific architectural photographer of midcentury modern houses and buildings. He’s 86 now, and recently a collection of his photographs has been shown at the West Vancouver Museum (which make sense, since so much of Vancouver’s modern housing is located in that municipality across the harbour), and at the Charles H. Scott gallery. It’s titled Positioning the New. I grew up in Vancouver and it was strangely fascinating to see all of these familiar modern buildings collected together, and to realize that all of these familiar iconic photographs were actually produced by the same person. See stories on Pullan in Canadian Architect, the Vancouver Sun and the Charles H. Scott site (or click below for the Canadian Architect and Vancouver Sun articles, both worth reading). From the Sun article:

As a body of work, his photos of Vancouver’s modern architectural movement are a one-of-a-kind treasure trove, the primary photographic history of the heyday of Vancouver modernism. ”Without question, he is about the most important architectural photographer we’ve had in this part of the world,” says heritage expert Don Luxton. ”He had a great eye for determining the character of buildings. They really capture the essence of the era. Many, many, many of his photographs were published in magazines of the era — his style really characterized what was happening in the modern movement.”

(more…)

If tumblr is a bellwether – and it may not be but it’s fun to speculate – then the sixties & seventies are back. In style, if not in substance. So many of tumblr’s weird little blogs, each of them a kind of eclectic personal bulletin board, feature this kind of rock and roll Hair: The Musical meets back-to-the-land handmade-house thing. More than a bulletin board, actually, since each one also exists as a sort of complete photo essay and a sustained non-verbal argument. In this case it’s an argument for a simpler yet groovier style of living, and you get a feeling there may actually be a politics behind the aesthetics. Thanks to the way tumblr makes it simple to re-post an image from someone else’s tumblr blog in your own tumblr stream, while providing you with a link back to theirs, each tumblr collection instantly leads you on to many others with a similar world view. I’m not sure how I first came upon cosmic_dust, possibly it was here, but it led to alaskaneyes and self_romance which led to endless numbers of strange little worlds. These images are a tiny sample from the superb cosmic_dust.

From the Taschen bio of Shulman:

American photographer Julius Shulman’s images of Californian architecture have burned themselves into the retina of the 20th century. A book on modern architecture without Shulman is inconceivable. Some of his architectural photographs, like the iconic shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s or Pierre Koenig’s remarkable structures, have been published countless times. The brilliance of buildings like those by Charles Eames, as well as those of his close friend, Richard Neutra, was first brought to light by Shulman’s photography.

The clarity of his work demanded that architectural photography had to be considered as an independent art form. Each Shulman image unites perception and understanding for the buildings and their place in the landscape. The precise compositions reveal not just the architectural ideas behind a building’s surface, but also the visions and hopes of an entire age. A sense of humanity is always present in his work, even when the human figure is absent from the actual photographs.

Today, a great many of the buildings documented by Shulman have disappeared or been crudely converted, but the thirst for his pioneering images is stronger than ever before.

All of these images are in Shulman’s indispensable 3-book series Modernism Rediscovered and are also sold as prints by Taschen. See also our last post on Shulman here and here. Please note that these photos are of the prints, so they are imperfect. Please buy the books! There’s also a good abridged paperback version of  Modernism Rediscovered. Thanks to lushpad for indirectly inspiring this post.