This is a Japanese tradition we desperately need to adopt in North America – re-using textiles to wrap presents. It’s an art form, but it’s worth learning because it dispenses with all the annoying and wasteful tape and paper and ribbon, it’s a fun skill to learn (for kids too), and it’s an educational conversation piece – you might have to explain to the recipient what it is, but that’s probably worthwhile. Christmas is a forest disaster when you combine its Christmas trees and its paper usage. Any textile will work – just use some old fabric, recycle some scarves, or buy scarves/shawls from thrift and then watch some furoshiki tying videos. Any size of cloth will do – for the larger bags/wrapping you should look for the 40″ size of scarf shawl. In Japan, furoshiki were traditionally used as practical carrying bags as well as ceremonial wrapping. For the more utilitarian uses, people would carry a furoshiki cloth around with them, just in case, and tie it into a tote bag as the need arose. This habit will become very useful here once plastic bags are banned, and that’s soon (see the videos below to see how to tie a quick tote bag). Last year’s post on this topic is here and instructional furoshiki videos are here and here. Video directly below is great – Mick Jagger bought a furoshiki at this shop – but I hate the part where they walk away from the furoshiki shop with their purchases in glossy cardboard envelopes and paper bags! Photos here are all Creative Commons licensed on Flickr, by kirainet and vaneea.

And advanced:

The Chen House in North Taiwan, design and constructed by Finnish architect Marco Casagrande and Taiwanese architect Frank Chen, was built for an older couple who wanted to retire to the country and grow bamboo and cherry trees – on a flood plain also beset by hurricanes and earthquakes. The house is a light structure constructed almost entirely of mahogany on simple concrete posts. Casagrande quotes Brecht: Last night I saw a terrible strorm in a dream. It ripped off the scaffoldings and crushed the iron joints. Though what was made of wood, bent, and stayed still. Some of Casagrande’s earlier work is as much art as architecture, and has dealt specifically with the destruction of buildings by time, by the elements, by social and economic change, or all of the above (see project at bottom). The Chen House, too, is built to withstand the elements but also with its inevitable destruction in mind – as a future ruin. The style of the house dates from a period when Taiwan was under Japanese rule and houses were built in a more traditional Japanese style. More recently most houses in Taiwan have been made of brick imported from China’s Fujian Province, but Casagrande and Chen wanted to return to the earlier method. Wood better withstands earthquakes; water from flooding passes beneath the low stilts; and by opening windows to promote cross-draft, a hurricane passes through the building more safely than if the building were to try to resist it. The house is situated in Sanjhih, Taipei County, in the Datun Mountains.

Below, Casagrande’s “Land(e)scape” project in Finland (co-produced with Sami Rintala), more commonly known as the “walking barns,” dealt with the abandonment of traditional Finnish farm buildings after people drifted to the city and agricultural practices changed. Casagrande and Rintala constructed barn houses which, now functionless in their environment, somehow seem able to get up on stilt legs and walk somewhere else – the city, perhaps – but which are ultimately animated only by fire.

Click below for an article on the house by Catherine Slessor in Architectural Review, reprinted from Casagrande:

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The photo above shows the central living area of a rural farmhouse on the border of Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures. The house was restored by Kenji Tsuchisawa who bought it as a rundown heap when he was only 20, after seeing a photograph of a traditional Japanese farmhouse on a Tokyo magazine cover. He bought the house before realizing it was situated just one village away from the house in the magazine. Many Japanese traditional farmhouses have now been restored and modernized, but the layout of these houses is so clever in terms of use of space and comfort that when they are updated, the original layout is often retained. It’s a house model being studied by North American and European architects aiming to produce smaller but more functional houses. Traditional Japanese houses are not large, but they seem larger than they are thanks to their well-thought-out layout, and their serene, warm version of minimalism makes them comfortable and functional. The use of natural materials and repeated colours makes the rooms feel balanced, and so does the fact that most objects have a real function. Decorative elements exist, but not to excess. When they are modernized, the main alteration is usually the replacement of the original exterior doors and windows, and trading the sliding shoji screen doors and windows for more sturdily framed glass doors, windows and skylights to let in more light and keep out the weather.

Both photos above show the traditional indoor fire pit known as an irori, which sometimes sits on a raised seating platform, though in the photo above the irori has been traded for a more efficient (and safer) wood stove. The beautiful half-frosting on the glass screen doors in the photo above provides some privacy from the fairly public courtyard for people seated inside. Photos are from a book I think is really worth buying: Japan Country Living: Spirit, Tradition, Style, by Amy Sylvester Katoh, photographs by Shin Kimura, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, Japan, 1993. Kimura’s work has also appeared in Met Home and Paris Vogue.

Above is a checkerboard textile of indigo-dyed hemp by Hiroyuki Shindo, on the verandah of his thatched house. It provides privacy (it appears opaque from outside, see here) and yet admits light and the view. Below, a functional modern kitchen produced by making only minor changes to the original.

The “What’s In and What’s Out in 2009″ lists are starting to appear. Not to be too protestant about it, since environmentalism in its more puritanical moment can make you want to stab yourself in the eye with a fork – a plastic fork – but these lists can get anxiety-provoking. Where is all our old stuff supposed to go? Do they seriously think we’re going to repaint the whole place again? If decor is just like fashion, which the shelter magazines would like to suggest, then interior design styles are going to have a 3-year lifespan, max, much shorter if you’re trying for cool. The words “cash grab” come to mind, esp. on the part of the paint companies. But actually, no doubt thanks to the economic downturn and signs of ecological collapse, quite a few of the trend lists have gone sort of lo-fi. Apartment Therapy’s list is as usual relatively DIY, low footprint, re-use and recycle, and pro-vintage. Other lists here and here and here. One blogger said “I always dread these lists, because without fail, they make me feel like the girl in the back of the classroom who eats her hair.” Her facetious list is here. Photo of one trend, the midcentury modern Eames lounge recovered in bright fabric (an Afghani suzani), from AT.  Below, AT’s feature on making your own DIY wallpaper using photocopies, featuring artist Jenny Holzer’s hallway at left and a papered file cabinet at right.

What’s in, in short? DIY, crafts, buying from Etsy, repair, refurbishing and repurposing, and thrifting.

Making a “drop bag” at Kakefuda, the famous Furoshiki shop in Kyoto where Mick Jagger bought a furoshiki last year. Also see How to tie up two Bottles and Furoshiki – Reusable Grocery Bag.

More here and here and here.

This compelling structure is an example of biomimetic architecture – architecture that mimics biological structures and/or functions. It is part of a project called Metabolic Media whose structures model the molecular structures and energy metabolism in living cells. It’s a design collaboration between Nobel scientist Sir John. E. Walker, who won the Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work on cell metabolism and ATP, and designer Rachel Wingfield, a Research Fellow at Central Saint Martin’s in London and a member of the very cool Loop.ph Design Research Studio. The piece was commissioned for an exhibition at the ICA called Nobel Textiles in which textile designers were teamed up with Nobel scientists. Metabolic Media’s energy-producing “textile,” which can easily be wrapped around large or small architectural structures, is not only environmentally promising, it’s visually interesting. Below: autonomous structures powered by the sun:

One of the exciting developments of [Metabolic Media] has been the outcome of a collaboration with Risø DTU, the National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy in Denmark. We have been working with printed, organic solar cells based on the work by Dr. Frederik Krebs, Senior Researcher and Torben Damgaard Nielsen, Innovation Pilot. Large tensile surfaces and building facades could be used to harness the sun’s energy and turn it into electrical energy using flexible printed photovoltaics (solar cells)… Woven and modular architectural structures provide a lightweight solution for growing food plants in small spaces without soil [via] geotextile structures and solar cells designed to charge the batteries of a fueling pump system that feeds and monitors the network of plants by misting the roots with nutrient rich solution.