Entries Tagged 'Architecture & Design' ↓

This just in…

Thanks to Sarah Weinman I was alerted to this story.

Man finds woman living in wardrobe

A Japanese man puzzled by food mysteriously disappearing from his refrigerator got a shock when he discovered a woman had been living in his home for months without permission, police said today.

The 57-year-old man who lives alone - or so he thought - in the western city of Fukuoka installed a security camera and called the police when he saw images of someone walking around his home while he was out.

“We searched the house in the man’s presence. We found the woman in the closet,” said a local police spokesman.

The woman, named as 58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa, was found in a flat storage space only just big enough for a person to squeeze into lying down.

She had sneaked a mattress and several plastic bottles into the cubby hole, police said, adding that the women had been arrested.

“She told police that she had nowhere to live,” the spokesman said.

“She seems to have lived there for about a year, but not all the time.”

It is unclear how she managed to enter the home undetected. Police suspect she might have been closet-hopping, moving from house to house.

Can’t you just see this as one of those enigmatic Japanese films?

Now if she gets kicked out of the house, if she has this unit strapped to her she is ready for anything. Its expressly designed for the user to be able to comfortably accommodate any surface.

From Architechnophilia, wearable architecture…wearing your chair.

And like how this seems to float…more images at Dezeen.

Finally, a coffee shop:

Rome mayor aims to tear down Richard Meier museum

Alemanno, who this week became the first right-wing politician elected Rome mayor since Mussolini’s time, is among those critics who thought the classical Ara Pacis should never have been housed in such a modern structure.

One critic compared it to a giant petrol station, while another called it “an indecent cesspit”, when it was unveiled in 2006.

Alemanno, who ran on a security platform targeting illegal immigrants, said the Ara Pacis was not the only architectural project by his left-leaning predecessors he planned to review.

“We’re committed to looking at the constructions carried out in the historic centre, but the top emergencies are others,” he said.

Now, in general new architecture gets pilloried unfairly from time to time, and when I first read this article, familiar with the architect but neither the structure nor the mayor, the familiar hackles rose to defend the artiste against the philistines and then I took a look at the structure. Have you seen this thing? And to place this 70s sort of coffee table architecture into sublime classical Rome? It looks like a typical high school. I just might fly down there and help out. Here it is.

Solar Eclipse at the Antarctic

Jument Lighthouse in France from DeputyDog’s Collection of Lighthouses

Casa Battio Staircase from OObject’s Collection of Spiral Staircases

I’ll be in Barcelona in a few days, and may in fact, ascend this wonder.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous: from EarthTimes the Japanese Boob Pudding

The package:

Opened:

From the land of intricate etiquette, cherry blossoms, budo, living treasures, sand gardens and ikebana. Of course.

Dezeen reports on this remarkable building planned for New York City by UNStudio.

This bookshelf available from bouf.com

And more book storage from WebUrbanist

Dr. Seuss as cabinet maker?

1. Touchless screen at Vimeo via MotionDesign

Shades of Minority Report.

2. From Dezeen.com

3. And two good ideas deserve a bad:

If you dislike this as much as I do, see my semi-rant at Your House is a Garage.

RoastedBlend has a great roundup of creative barcodes and barcode related art:

1. I ran across this blog some time ago but for some reason I forgot about it but what fun. Check out Stuff White People Like. Here is an example:

One of the more interesting things about White people is that they love singing comedians.

This style of humor involves a person or group singing a song but rather than singing about something serious, it has funny lyrics. It’s not any more complicated than that, but white people can’t get enough of it. Weird Al Yankovich, Tenacious D, Sarah Silverman (sometimes),
Flight of the Conchords, Dennis Leary, and Adam Sandler are all excellent examples of the genre.

It’s a pretty good idea because when you have jokes that aren’t that great and music that isn’t that great, you can mix them together and create something that will entertain white people.

or

Water seems like a fairly simple concept. You turn on the tap, put glass underneath, and drink. Sadly, it is not this simple for white people.

On the whole, they are unable to put a glass under a tap and just drink. In fact, this is such a strange concept that the city of New York had to launch a rather large PR campaign to show white people that it was possible to actually drink the water that comes out of the tap!

2. And courtesy of Daily Dose of Architecture is this picture which is part of a series of Tokyo buildings photographed by viggio.

3. And there is Elliot Spitzer. Now I was originally going to avoid spending precious brain cells contemplating the fortunes of a man I would not let through my front door but there have been a couple of interesting views of this thing. I had previously defended the slithery Larry Craig on the entrapment aspect of things but I never quite put the boots to him for the hypocrasy.

What gets me about these scandals is not that people engage in these activities but that they have so badly mismanaged their own lives. As Melissa Hughes suggested in this weekend’s Globe and Mail in an aptly titled article Duh, What were they thinking maybe our leaders are just stupid. Perhaps they really aren’t as smart as everyone thought.

And then there was David Brooks at the New York Times who chronicles the rise of typical alpha gorilla charmers suddenly facing a middle age crisis of the inner soul and being unable to attend to it gracefully because they lack the skills. The whole article is worth reading; but here, a few choice words therein:

I don’t know if you’ve seen a successful politician or business tycoon get drunk and make a pass at a woman. It’s like watching a St. Bernard try to French kiss. It’s all overbearing, slobbering, desperate wanting. There’s no self-control, no dignity.

These Type A men are just not equipped to have normal relationships. All their lives they’ve been a walking Asperger’s Convention, the kings of the emotionally avoidant. Because of disuse, their sensitivity synapses are still performing at preschool levels.

Ultimately though one wonders why it is most often those campaigning on platforms of law and order, or moral hygiene, that end up in these disturbing situations. Not only because they appear to be doing exactly what they are publicly fighting against but also it indicates a massive lack of accountability. Whether or not they personally felt that way, many people voted them in on those ideas, and handed over controls of funding, and paid their salaries expressly because they represented something. Spitzer’s apology was pathetic; he said that the incident “violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong”; there is no acknowledgment of the crime against his constituency. He likes to think it is a private matter. It’s not.

The upside of these events is that maybe the right wing law and order types will start making the laws a little more humane because they seem to be the ones having the trouble staying on the straight and narrow.

1. From Urban-ism…

2. From DesignSpotter

3. From Australian Consolidated Products:

I wonder if this was a factor in that unfortunate incident this week where the woman wouldn’t come out of the bathroom for two years?

4. Enough sitting around..

5. Now for a few things that really shouldn’t glow but do; the things you can do with jellyfish genes:

or

6. Back to the source (or least a close relation):

This is an image courtesy of another interesting post by deputy dog. Go see for more views of this astounding housing development in Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico.

And now here we have one out of a collection of videos featuring a man who makes instruments out of vegetables and plays them. Below is Angels We Have Heard on High played on a broccoli ocarina. Its quite lovely. (I have to credit GrowABrain for unearthing this treasure).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GabHGlGm14&rel=1]

Funny how a sentence can change your perception of a picture. Here is a outdoor sculpture at Versaille.

Classic male nude.

Now here is this from a book review of The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg. “Shortly before Louis XIV died in 1715, a new ordinance decreed that feces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week.”

You can imagine the arguments that took place after that among the cleanup staff.

“Hey, I just cleaned up in here!” or

“No that can’t be more than three days old.”

Now, I am going to have to read the book to know more, and I am pretty damn curious about this, but was this some sort of accepted public activity? Was it common perhaps in mid conversation to drop em, squat and drop em, and just continue on as though nothing was out of the ordinary? Haven’t been to the place but the structure looks as though it consists of many long hallways, in other words, few corners to discretely duck around.

And what about before the decree?

We approach these magnificent structures with reverence and now there looms the image of the official opening, the chosen few entering, a few perhaps having eaten the wrong thing that day, stopping and undoing the belt, relieving themselves while all the while going “this is really nice, this is really something.”