The best part of Maria Popova’s Brainpickings blog is, for us, the glimpses she gives us into new books. With extensive pictures and well-selected quotes, she immediately and completely draws you in to the world of the book she’s featuring. This picture from the book Nomad by Jeroen Toirkens particularly spoke to us, as it reveals the life of people who must always be prepared to be on the move. A teepee with solar-panels and satellite dish in Mongolia somehow resonates with our obsession with portable rooms (both inside and out), and reminds us the many other ways of living that are going on right at this moment… read more…
(Video link here.) Our friend Maureen Rolla sent us this email; it is so expressive, it became a post:
“I am writing to tell you about a person and documentary that you should know about – it is called “Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio” – about an amazing architect, thinker, dreamer who ran a program called the Rural Studio at Auburn University in which architecture students designed and built homes, churches, and other structures for the residents of the very poor Hale County, Alabama. It is perhaps the best statement about the transformative power of architecture on regular human beings lives that I’ve ever seen (as opposed to big name, star power architecture that pretty much only benefits the star architect…) The students use some ordinary materials (hay bales, tires) in innovative ways to create some simple yet soaring projects. The film is available on Netflix (disk only, unfortunately). Unfortunately Mockbee died in 2001, only in his early 60s.”
We found a trailer for Citizen Architect (above) that makes us hungry to see the film. Check out this moving interview with Mockbee read more…
“How-To Work Better” by Swiss artists Fischli & Weiss has long been one of our favorite manifestos: the reminder we need daily. We’d seen it all over the internet, and posted it as a sign long ago. We hadn’t realized that it was, in fact, an installation, painted on the wall of an office building in Zurich.
Imagine if, instead of advertising, bill-boards featured signs like this…or if building owners just took it upon themselves to paint (or stencil) their buildings a little differently…
We rely on the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture - current stories told through powerful photography – for a periodic reality check. The latest of the desperate famine situation on the Horn of Africa, centering around Somalia. As we find ourselves focused on HOME here, we were struck by images of makeshift shelters made out of sticks, rags, little else, there. They are at once valiant, imaginative, beautiful and tragic. read more…
We are slightly obsessed with the idea of using Lego’s to make functional objects that we can really use; it’s kind of a mindgame we play with ourselves that we hope to put into action one day, since you can now buy as much of any color Lego as you want at Lego stores across the country. We are inspired by two recent finds: London-based designer Sebastian Bergne‘s Lego greenhouse, that has live plants and vegetables growing within.. read more…
Recently in a wordless post called simply Casa Malaparte, Atelier featured some elegant, elemental tables made by placing a flat surface-on-pillars-or-stones; they reminded us of our favorite Le Corbusier table, a slab of concrete on a concrete block base. It sent us rooting through our file of slab-and-pillar tables, a great formula for oddly chic d-i-y tables. Pillars can mean many things, like the oil drum-and-wood-slab-table we clipped from Style Files some time back: read more…
Don’t forget to enter our Mystery Tree Contest. Just tell us what you think it is in the Comments section below for a chance to win a signed copy of Sally’s award-winning cookbook The Improvisational Cook. To check out the wonderfully imaginative entries that have come in so far, scroll down to the bottom of the original post. The contest ends Tuesday June 14th; we’ll announce the winner on Wednesday.
We found this on Roy Arden’s great blog Under the Sun, and have no idea what it is. So we thought we’d make it into a contest. Tell us what you think this Mystery Tree Structure is in the Comments box below. Fiction and fantasy are fine. The best one gets a prize: a signed copy of Sally’s The Improvisational Cook. Contest ends Tuesday, June 14th.
For the past few years, we’ve been learning about how beautiful concrete blocks can be as a building material. The latest “lesson” came with a visit to the late Alexander Calder’s home in Connecticut for a birthday party for his daughter, who is a friend of ours. An artist who worked in a wide variety of materials, Calder built several buildings on the property over the years, out of ordinary cinder block. The austerity and simplicity of the architecture, coupled with abundant windows and elegant roof lines (and the fact of Calder having made incredible artworks in them) make the block buildings compelling. They fly in the face of the the notion that cinder block structures are generally nothing but ugly. So we walked around in the twilight and took some photos…
Our friend Charlie Allenson had a big birthday a few days ago, and we had big plans to give him a shout out that day and find ourselves, THE DAY AFTER, having been swept away by..everything. Damn. Charlie’s at the jazz festival in New Orleans so we thought we’d publish some of the very cool photos he sent us when he was in Vietnam recently. They are right up our alley of totally, seriously, charmingly improvised LIFE that seems to happen everywhere there, like the floating villages of Ha Long Bay. This house, above, appears to be floating on oil drums and styrefoam block. There is no supermarket; a market boat makes regultrips to each floating house.
We’ve just returned from a visit to Helvetia, West Virginia where two dear friends had passed away within a couple of weeks of each other. Both lived long amazingly rich lives that touched a great many people. We came home tired, thoughtful, amazed, sad, inspired…and slowly started back to work on ‘the improvised life’. As often happens, we stumbled on something that resonated deeply with what we’d been thinking about: Candy Chang’s public art project Before I Die. Chang found a derelict building in New Orleans, painted its sides with chalkboard paint and stenciled the question “Before I die I want to____________” ; she left spaces for people to fill in with chalk. Says Chang:
“It’s a question that has changed me in the last year, and I believe the design of our public spaces can better reflect what’s important to us as residents and as human beings. The responses and stories from passersby while we were installing it have already hit me hard in the heart.” read more…
Charles McFarlane, a Junior at the Rudolf Steiner school, is an avid scholar of 20th Century American social and military history. He recently sent us images he’s collected from his research that he thought would resonate with ‘the improvised life’. In an email he wrote:
“Necessity is often the mother of invention. This is no more apparent than in the situation of war. War is often said to be 90% boredom and 10% sheer terror. During the long stretches of boredom soldiers have often tried to improve their situations, to make their lives more bearable.
…In my study of historical photographs I am constantly on the look out for the odd and strange things in history that make you think “what was that person’s train of thought?” I think you can see that in the photos I sent you.” read more…
The Interventionist’s Toolkit, Mimi Zeiger’s long and illuminating essay in Design Observer, tracks the effect the recession has had on inspiring frugal, improvisational strategies for urban spaces around the world. When there’s no money for traditional architecture projects,” Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism” take root. We’ve excerpted the sections of Zeiger’s piece that are chock full of examples, with links to explore.
“These days vacant lots offer sites for urban farming, mini-golf, and dumpster pools. Trash recycles into a speculative housing prototype (see the Tiny Pallet House). Whether it’s The Living’s Amphibious Architecture or Mark Shepard’s Serendipitor, the built environment speaks through mobile devices. Retail spaces hit by the recession are fodder for reinvention, as the art organization No Longer Empty transforms unleased storefronts into temporary galleries. Even the street itself is reclaimed. REBAR’s annual initiative, Park(ing) Day, urges global participants to use a pranksters wit to turn parking spaces into pocket parks, one quarter at a time. (If you don’t feel like reading much, just click on the links, or scroll down for our favorites…) read more…
This is the front door of some friends who live in Brooklyn. They didn’t any ‘real’ house numbers when they moved into the house, so they made these artful numbers out of thin masking tape. Because the doorway is somewhat protected, the impromptu numbers have survived wind, rain, sleet and recently even a tornedo. Now they like them so much, they’re gonna leave them: odd and beautiful in the midst of landmark perfection read more…
. To check out the wonderfully imaginative entries that have come in so far, scroll down to the bottom of 
