Dear Stella Artois and iTunes,
There are 30-plus million of us Canadians. Did you think there was a chance that none of us would notice your commercial appropriation of one of our most popular non-commercial national symbols? Why not just put the Canadian flag in your campaign? Yes, we know, Burton Kramer’s 1974 logo for the CBC is a pretty excellent piece of typographic and geometric design, but you know what? There’s hardly a Canadian over the age of 12 who doesn’t recognize this object and harbour a fair amount of nostalgic affection for it, so maybe you will consider removing it from your advertising repertoire. Maybe go steal the NBC peacock or something.
Yours sincerely,
Canada.
Photo credits: CBC logo photos and video are via the Canadian Design Resource, and see the CDR’s article on the appropriation here. Even balder appropriation of the logo in the Stella ad’s designer’s own artwork here. iTunes photo by laurenlgmarch.
Photos are all from the 1975 edition of Inside Today’s Home by Ray and Sarah Faulkner, Holt Rinehart Winston. (The 1954, 1960 and 1968 editions of this book are all worth collecting too, if you can find them on abebooks.) The word ”today” somehow sounded more optimistic then than it does now, though of course back then you did have the bomb to consider. The book’s collection of photos is pretty eclectic but it’s all held together by a romance with the idea of the new. Authors Ray Faulkner, Professor of Art and Architecture at Stanford and Sarah Faulkner, a trained interior designer, wanted the book to function as both an academic text and as a coffee table book, so it’s an interesting mix of both DIY and historical information. Most of the photos are black and white, but there’s also a small selection of good colour plates. The bathroom above is by Charles Gwathmey; the airy stucco pool house and pony wall below are by architect Charles Moore.
Japanese-influenced bedroom and open plan house, above, are by architect Paul Rudolph. If you click on the photo directly above there’s a great story in the comments by a member of the Paul Rudolph Foundation.
“Zome” solar houses by the Zomeworks Corporation, which is still in operation. One hopes it will revisit the solar house idea. “Zomes” opened during the day to admit sun, and closed at night to retain heat.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay about the strange, hybrid, and surprisingly impure histories of objects and buildings. It is skewed toward the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and 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, it's the same upside-down as right-side-up, it refers to both zeros and ones, and it is pronounced uno. My name is Lindsay and I'm open to your complaints, disagreement or general crankiness. Free free to comment or email. This is an anti-intellectualism-free zone and around here we don't try to dampen critique by calling it negativity or whining. We call it thought!
