Until our recent vacation, we hadn’t been to the beach for so long that we’d forgotten what wonders lay there: raw materials free for the playing with…
…Our friend James brought a ball with him, then hunted for the perfect piece of driftwood, for a pick-up game of stickball
(and we realized that we never really thought about that form of rough-and-tumble baseball born of improvisation: Don’t have a bat? Use a stick!)… read more…
A quick glance of these paired photos on Emma’s blog made us unconsciously splice the two ideas together: ‘salvaged wood bedside or sofa side table’, we thought…fine idea. There is so much great salvaged wood around these days, that can be easily cut and stacked askew to great effect…
Related posts: Blog Find: Daniel Hales ‘Serendipity Rising’
We came across this coupling of essential quotes when we were poking around John Zernings blog about Garden Trellises and Architectural Space Frames.
“Applied to architecture and structure, the former is primarily an aesthetic position; the latter is a principle of economy.” wrote Zerning. We find both immensely useful, and made a sign to remind us…”
You might wonder how we ever came across Zerning’s site in the first place, living in the city as we do, with no garden, or even a terrace. We were following the trail of some images that have been flying around the blogs, of a beautiful architecture of wires… read more…
We wish every cardboard box we come across to look like this, which is, actually, an artwork by Hreinn Fridfinnsson. Being barbarians, we’d like to copy Fridfinnsson’s idea for our closet boxes…or, as an unexpected spin on a gift box: it would look ordinary and rather humdrum on the outside, but when the giftee pulls back the flaps…a big surprise!
…a cardboard box + flourescent paper + bookbinding material = a complete change of view.
We’re sending this post to our friend Vicki Lynn who LOVES pink – a sort of virtual gift – until we can give her a real one.
Happy Birthday, Vicki Beth Lynn!
Via LNKNG
Related posts: Cardboard, Crates + Chairs as Building Materials
Andrea Zittel’s Investigative Living
Clipped-Together Shelving Pt.2: Cardboard Boxes
Couturier de Cardboard: Matthew Sporzynski
Halloween Inspiration: Cardboard Box as Empire State Building
Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules
When we read that Centre Pompidou in Paris was offering a Cardboard Carton Workshop, we wanted to beam ourselves there, a la Star Trek, to see what more we could add to our overflowing file and minds about this wonderfully versatile material. We were stunned by a photo of an archway made of cardboard sheets combined in layers and compressed; it flies in the face of the usual ways of building with cardboard, of using the flat sides as walls. It is the work of Tadashi Kawamata who is known for the spare structures he builds out of humble materials – pine boards, cardboard, packing materials, chairs – in unlikely places. They seem impromptu (though they take a great deal of work and planning), and speak of temporariness and informality; they somehow question the spaces and structures we take for granted. Now wonder his workshop has lines around the block.
When we saw pictures of Kawamata’s art at the Pompidou’s site, we realized we had seen his work before and had a vivid unattributed memory of it: of beautiful, odd, slapped together-looking nests and houses perched high up in the ancient tress of Madison Square Park, in the center of New York City. They made us LOOK with wonder and, for a moment, imagine ourselves hiding out in one of them but we never stopped to find out who had made them. Now we know, and are inspired by a central theme of Kawamata’s art: read more…
We couldn’t live without the occasional hot bath to cool-out our over-worked selves. Instead of buying expensive, wonderfully-packaged bath salts, “spa crystals” and oils, we came up with a simple formula for doctoring baths that involves no effort at all, is cheap, and allows us to calibrate really pure fragrances to our mood.
We just dump a couple of cups or so of epsom salts into a hot tub; then we add a few drops of an essential oil distilled from flowers, herbs or other botanicals like lavender or rose geranium: voila, instant aromatherapy.
Epsom salts are an old-fashioned, tried-and-true remedy for stressful living, sore muscles, detoxifying (great at the first sign of a cold). You can buy them read more…
Pamela Hovland‘s Comment in response to our recent wallpaper post is an amazing report from MOMA of a wallpaper installation that is so wonderfully described, hilarious and thoughtful, that we had to publish it here. And just as we were despairing of not being able to find any image like it on MOMA’s website, Pamela sent us one by email: blurry but completely expressive…
“I stopped by MoMA today, for a quick dose of inspiration. The Matisse show is on view so it is quite crowded — it takes all one’s attention just to negotiate the hallways. As a result, I don’t think many people stopped to look closely at a wallpaper “installation” between two galleries. The wallpaper is a temporary construction made simply by repeating a photograph numerous times in a grid. The image is a tightly cropped view of a man’s bare bottom (I’m trying to be polite) with his crack (I can’t think of another word here) in the center of the composition. It’s not a particularly photogenic specimen; upon closer analysis you see the dimples and blemishes of some anonymous middle aged guy’s rear end. In this presentation, however, the image takes on a kind of architectural quality – a kind of industrial building block, I guess. The imperfections are lost as the sum of the parts takes precedence.
Makes me want to create wallpaper at home out of some crazy image fragment I have lying around. Not a body part though… it’s been done!
Now that I think about it, this installation is a bit like your Lego post AND the wallpaper post — conflated!” read more…
While surfing around this morning, we stumbled on an interior by photographer Ditte Isager and was struck by the wallpaper, loosely tacked rather than glued, for a whole other, delightfully un-done look. For us, it’s a swell alternative to the often-fussy permanence of wallpaper (and the difficulty of taking it off the wall when we change our minds). We went to Isager’s website to check out her work and found more lovely examples of paper wall coverings… read more…
When we were in Santa Cruz recently, a friend dragged us to a giant shopping mall. In no time, our senses were overwhelmed by TOO MUCH: stuff for sale, Cinnabon and Starbuck’s smells, piped music, people. Stumbling on the new Lego store made it all worth while. We loved its giant wall of help-yourself bins of Legos: we could buy the exact amount of whatever color(s) we wanted. Since we naturally seem to lean toward the monochromatic, we started imagining all the things we would devise with white Legos (maybe with one orange one stuck in to mess it up a little), or maybe these hot green ones… read more…
Whenever we need a business card to introduce ‘the improvised life’ or ourselves (with address and phone), we peel off a printed-at-our-local-copy-shop sticker and stick it onto…something. Pamela Hovland dreamed up the idea one day when we were trying to figure out an alt-business card that would say what ‘the improvised life’ is in a flash, and get people curious enough to go to the site. We began to imagine things that would be cool made into cards, like the oddly-printed discards and tests that printers routinely put in the recycling bin, or cereal boxes…or leather, bits of fabric, thin sheets of metal, used subway cards. Our favorite so far is the ribbon we bought at Hyman Hendler in the garment district, that we originally bought to make the ribbon on the Surprise Box. read more…
A picture of a chair made out of orange-and-white-striped wooden safety barriers that we saw on The Selby led us to discovering Tom Sachs. He’s an artist who makes elaborate recreations of modern icons: masterpieces of engineering and design of one kind or another, from Knoll office furniture to Prada to NASA (like this hilarious video). The all-seams-showing recreations are made out of ordinary stuff like phone books and Foamcoare welded together with duct tape or a glue gun. As it is clear from The Selby’s pictures of Sach’s living/studio space, the work of this imaginative inventor/artist holds ideas for our own more modest creations…
Although we don’t know what it says, we’re crazy about Sach’s bedspread, and the idea of writing on our own…
….not to mention the wonderful chair… read more…
This wondrous chair was posted on Atelier a while back, unattributed. (We searched its roots using TinEye, but didn’t come up with anything). This strangely elegant little sculpture of a chair made us imagine going to the lumber yard – even an art supply store would have this wood – and getting out a hammer and nails to follow the path of this design; it is so beautifully clear and forthright.
(If anyone knows who made this chair, please send us an email…)
We are so happy to have discovered Serendipity Rising, architect Daniel Hale’s blog that is mostly about the evolution of his home in Napa Valley, which seems to be a sort of laboratory for his ideas. The guy loves soft metals like zinc and lead which he cuts and hammers in unusual ways; he transforms salvaged woods and ‘finds’ by applying modern lines and layers of techniques into an eclectic take, like this incredible flight of stairs: “I layered black over brown and ran a strip of lead sheeting up the middle”. What he does to his own house is freer than the “client” work we’ve seen, as he follows his ideas for his own pleasure. “Tickle” is a recent post – a sort of poem-story (edited here) – about his violent and fearless transformation of an old piano, which had been left in the winery he turned into his studio: read more…
Lately, we’ve been seeing planks and bits of salvaged wood being used in bold geometric patterns to enclose bathtubs, and kitchen islands, make headboards and floors… Pieced together like a puzzle, with a good eye, “rustic” changes curiously to modern. read more…
A couple of weeks ago, we started posting about Lydia Wills’ former studio apartment in New York City; the 600-square-foot space had so much going on, we had to make it a series…
Here’s her renovated kitchen which, when she moved in, was the most generic of New York City apartment galley kitchens (there’s a gratifying “before” after the jump). A few years ago she ripped it out and rethought the original space. The question: How to create a pleasurable, efficient kitchen without moving any walls or spending a fortune?… read more…
