Spaceship condominium in Guilford, Connecticut, designed by Wil Armster. We need to see more buildings like this, especially in Vancouver, to break up the endless architectural monotony not to mention mediocrity. What we could really use is more small developers and more interesting small developments. We could do with fewer megadevelopers producing non-green, endlessly tall, utterly unlivable and bloody boring towers with their dark, windy streetscapes.

I realize this blog is getting repetitive on this topic. And it’s only going to get worse.

Via 1so50. More photos on Flickr.

Living room on wheels designed by Italian designer Mario Bellini in 1972 as a collaboration for Citroen and Pirelli. It’s a combination conversation pit/sleeping area. It was introduced to the US later that year in a show at MoMA - Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.

We’re so bloody sombre now.

Via daddytypes, via Kar-a-Sutra stats and photos at Mario Bellini’s studio site [mariobellini.com, found via iso50]

These are a mix of glass and lucite, past and present. The bottom 3 pieces are from the 70s and all of the pieces at top are contemporary. Transparency puts furniture into the realm of the future or the imaginary, even when it also automatically harks back to the 1970s. Which may be the same thing. The 70s also had that thing for kaleidoscopic and candyshop colour, iconoclasm, disco and visual pleasure. And conveniently mirrored table tops. Above, XXX tables by Glas Italia, released this year. See this Arren Williams article. Below, glass and lucite by Italian company Sawaya Moroni, who are present-day masters of this too. Example further below are vintage.

Two photos above are by Klick Interiors.

Above, French 70s lucite desk from here. Below, Electrified Plexiglas and Mirrored Glass Low Table by Ron Ferri, circa 1970′s USA. Mirror, Lucite. From Todd Merrill

Below, unknown chair.

Rita Pavone.

Thanks, Keith.

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These photos of The Dome Show, an exhibition by art collective Intermedia at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1970, are all from the web archive Ruins In Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. (See another post on this absolutely amazing site here.) The Dome Show was an experimental art show involving architecture, sculpture, performance, music, improvised happenings, a giant public dinner party, bonfires, public home movie nights and many other things over the months of its exhibition. Above, Installing the Dome Show at the VAG.

From the site: “The unifying structure of the Dome Show was Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. Each Intermedia member who was interested was invited to build domes individually or communally for the exhibition. Before the exhibition installation Intermedia members constructed their domes in a variety of public spaces, including the Maplewood Mud Flats, at 4th and Arbutus, Kitsilano Beach, in front of the Bentall Center in Downtown Vancouver, and outside of the Vancouver planetarium.”

Buckminster’s geodesic dome was obviously at the height of its popularity then. Now, forty years later, there seems to be a revival of interest in its utopian promise or its grooviness or its sheer architectural difference or what, exactly? It reappears during times of environmental crisis, war, or general turmoil? Or when staid protestantism makes you want to flee to a stately hippie pleasure dome? The critique of Buckminster Fuller’s dome as a product of the military industrial complex is only one element in its contradictory history. Wherever the appeal of the dome derives from, I’m grateful to Ruins in Process for the documentation. The website is particularly valuable not just because of the beards and the fashions, but because it d0cuments a period of art that for all its notoriety is actually not all that well known, not just because it was pre-internet, but also perhaps because of the tendency of the work to be temporary, performative, process-based and dependent upon happenings, and in so many other ways difficult to document. Also, as Carole Itter says in her interview on the site, if you were present at a happening and were documenting, it meant you weren’t in the moment, and that wasn’t cool. Her comments on the role of women in Intermedia are also pretty interesting.

Above, an art insert in the Vancouver weekly The Georgia Straight. Below, construction of a dome in the Mudflats, Vancouver.

Above and below, dancers in a dome near the Burrard Street Bridge.

Above, meeting of Intermedia on Beatty Street. Below, “100 flutes” performance in aluminum dome.

Above,”Bingo,” an event at City Feast, a city-wide public dinner to close The Dome Show. Below, End of the Dome Show – burning of a dome out in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery, on the night of City Feast at the close of the show. A bonfire on one of Vancouver’s main arteries could so not happen now.

Ignoring the problems of hosting the Olympics, which are serious and many (and as a Vancouverite I’m speaking from experience), let’s just compare the graphic design from two different Canadian Olympics. The Montreal graphics were uniformly brilliant. It’s considered bad form to criticize the Vancouver 2010 graphics because of the tragic death of the head designer at a young age, but I don’t know, this is not a 2010 Olympics-promotion blog. Pax all those people who like the Vancouver 2010 Olympics graphic identity – and the corresponding new 2010-related City of Vancouver signage – but to me they all look very strongly like the unfortunate love-child of feminine hygiene packaging and corporate clip art designed by committee. Messy, busy, commercial, and they look like the bad Illustrator photo-traced layers they are. Vancouver, how many more design failures will you tolerate? Of course, a city that will build a main library that looks exactly like the gladiatorial coliseum in Rome in the colour of dried blood (and I can hardly believe I’m describing reality in that sentence: a library in the form of a blood-sport arena!) is capable of large-scale mistakes. See a longer post on the beautiful Montreal Olympics graphics on this blog, and more Vancouver 2010 Olympics graphics on the Canadian Design Resource. For the politically-incorrect 2010 Olympic logo debacle, see the CBC. [Update Feb 13: Douglas Coupland had this to say in conversation with the New York Times:

NYT: I see there is controversy over the design of the official Olympics logo, which is based on the Inuit stone marker known as an Inukshuk.
DC: Inuit culture is north of here, in the Canadian Arctic, and it has nothing to do with the lives of anyone in British Columbia. If you want to use the First Nations motifs for your logography, use the ones that are actually from here. A lot of people are kind of cheesed off.

I voted against these Olympic games in a city plebiscite. Now that they are nearly here I am extremely annoyed by their crippling social and financial costs, their corporate profiteering and their draconian trouncing of free speech. However if they’d had a beautiful design presence in the City, I could have put politics aside and given them credit for that at least. Instead, Vancouver has been handed what it perhaps deserves, weak design that wouldn’t even make the qualifying round for a design Olympics, if there were such a thing.

Feminine hygiene packaging. That’s what this is. Both the busy design above and the dreadful Welcome to Vancouver signs below. Weak by any standard.

To see Olympic design actually done well, see Munich and Mexico City. If you want good Olympic design, look only between 1968 and 1976 in cities starting with M.