Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By John Thackara In Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville (below) there is almost no set. Buildings in the town are represented by a series of white outlines on the floor. Dogville was a to-the-limit exercise in what von Trier calls ‘pure cinema’ — a commitment to use only real locations, and no [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By John Thackara A huge urban master plan in southen France gets serious about nature as a project. In Bordeaux 55,000 (above) the city of Bordeaux (CUB) has invited five multidisciplinary teams to develop projects, during a a six month “competitive dialogue”, that will explore ‘how best to transform 55,000 hectares [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By Alexandra Lange From Little Blue and Little Yellow , by Leo Lionni (1959). On October 29 Michael Bierut posted his essay “Style: An Inventory,” written for the 2012 SVA Senior Library , a project by Julia Hoffmann and Joe Marianek. Joe Marianek also asked me to write an essay for one of the library books, [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By John Thackara The Baltic Sea. Photo: NASA The map below is of the Baltic Sea. Over the last hundred years its ecosystems have been poisoned almost to death by outputs from a multitude of industries and farming activities in the nine countries that surround it. These deadly flows are shown [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By Mark Lamster Edwin Land demonstrates the Polaroid instant photo to the world, in February 1947. I first came across a Polaroid camera, what I now know as a Model 95, in my grandparents’ attic sometime in the mid 1970s. I must have been about seven. It was a tremendously appealing [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By Rick Poynor John Stezaker, Tabula Rasa II , collage, 1983. Rubell Collection, Miami The question that inevitably returns with John Stezaker ’s collages is: how does he manage to gain so much traction and resonance from such limited means? Usually one of his pieces will consist of just two found photographs, or a film [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By Rick Poynor The Museum of Innocence at the corner of Çukurcuma Street and Dalgiç Street, Istanbul A while back, I wrote here about The Museum of Innocence created in Istanbul by the Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk . This small, beautifully realized, vertical display, which occupies a burgundy-hued house in [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By Rick Poynor Ramones Los Angeles fan club mail-out, USA, 1977. Source:  Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli) For a musical and social movement that snarled in the face of authority and wasn’t averse to spitting at its friends, punk has received a great many shelf inches in the last 30 years respectfully [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory –  By Rob Walker The digital does not annihilate the analog. It glorifies it. Paper books and vinyl records were once quotidian; today they are objects to defend, romanticize, venerate. Or consider this example: the humble business card. As a genre of object, it is “ doomed,” one technology observer asserted not [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By John Thackara Photo taken by the author at Instituto Inhotim , Brazil. People the world over are divided between radically different conceptions of their future: resource-intensive production on the one side, versus regenerative land-based enterprises, and mosaics of micro-enterprises, on the other. Our dilemma is that although industrial and agribusiness development breeds [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – Rob Walker Speculative sound performance by Disquiet Junto, logo/poster by Oliver Munday Ever spend much time listening to retail? Me neither. By which I actually mean: Me, too. The truth is we all spend time in retail/service environments, without spending a conscious second thinking about the sound around us. Some of that [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By John Thackara Above: for CRIT, Mumbai may look a mess — but the city enjoys ‘high transactional capacities’ The big Audi that collected us from Istanbul airport contained nearly as many electronic control units (ECUs) as the new Airbus A380. The Audi, and similar high-end cars, will soon run on 200 [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By John Thackara The unique social and ecological nature of regional watersheds was the focus of a mesmerizing presentation by Stephen Lansing at last month’s poptech conference in Iceland. His key point: Bali’s subak water management system is a “coupled social-ecological system”. Balinese farmers have been growing rice in terraces since [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory –  By Rob Walker From Styleblaster It’s no news at this point to say that technology is transforming photography in unpredictable ways. By now, in fact, it’s hard enough just to try to keep track of every new variation on how this is happening. So here are two recent examples of technology [...]

Used bookstore, Nice, France, 2012 1. Dysfunctional clutter Anything can become clutter, including books. I took this picture a few weeks ago in a used bookstore in Nice, in the south of France. I was looking for old French paperbacks and I had seen one or two possibilities in some rotating racks on the street, so I went inside. [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory –  By Rob Walker Museum Tower of Dallas , rendered I admit that when I first read about the trouble in Dallas, I was wryly and perhaps inappropriately amused: an under-construction 42-story condo’s glass exterior is reflecting so much sunlight into a neighboring museum and its sculpture garden that it’s “threatening artworks in [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By John Thackara This jequitiba tree in Brazil moves hundreds of gallons of water up into its canopy every day. It does so without pumps, without electricity, and without recourse to the concrete reservoirs and sewage treatment plants on which most modern cities depend. The jequitiba is a joyous marvel [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By Mark Lamster Room 300, home of the art & architecture collection, of the NYPL. Photo: Norman McGrath The future is now, the saying goes, and for those of us who live and work in the world of letters, that maxim rings especially true. Tablets and e-readers and the overwheming availability [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By Mark Lamster Anenberg Court. Photo by Michael Moran Back in 1923, while his gallery in suburban Merion was still a work in progress, Albert Barnes wrote to his architect, Paul Cret, suggesting that he booby trap the place against the “eunuchs, morons, boobs, professional exploiters, general counterfeits” and various other [...]

Reposted from Design Observer: Observatory – By John Thackara Photograph by Tim Mitchell You probably need to be naked to read this book with a clear conscience. This reader, for one, felt like stripping off as the revelations piled up: it took 700 gallons of fresh water to make my cotton t-shirt; it’s partly down to me that [...]