Good signage not only does its job, but it can change your experience of a place.  The sign above, by Martin Wong, was part of a public art project called Traffic Signs for Hearing Impaired. 

Here’s a great interview with Mies Hora, about sign and symbol obsession.

Technorati Tags: artist, Mies Hora, public art, signage

One show we are looking forward to this summer is MOMA’s Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling (July 20-October 20). 

From MOMA’s web-site: This exhibition will offer the most thorough examination of both the historical and contemporary significance of factory-produced architectures to date. With increasing concern about issues such as sustainability and the swelling global population, prefabrication has again taken center stage as a prime solution to a host of pressing needs. The prefabricated structure has long served as a central precept in the history of modern architecture, and it continues to spur innovative manufacturing and imaginative design. The relationship between the drawing board and the finished product has never been more dynamic, but the potential of prefabrication has not yet come to full fruition. The exhibition will examine this phenomenon through historical documents, full-scale reassemblies, and films that trace the roots of prefabrication in the work of architects including Frank Lloyd Wright, Jean Prouvé, and Richard Rogers, corporations such as Lustron, and the imaginative systems of other influential figures, including Thomas Edison and R. Buckminster Fuller. 

This contextual component of the exhibition will provide the foundation for a handful of full-scale commissions to be built in MoMA’s vacant west lot. Here, contemporary practitioners and corporations will continue MoMA’s rich history of full-scale architectural projects, having the unprecedented opportunity to deploy both commercially viable domestic creations as well as entirely new, speculative prototypes. The fabrication and delivery of these projects will be documented in a special online exhibition, which will underline prefabrication’s importance as a matter of process over product. Furthermore, the delivery and assembly of these projects will function as a real-time urban event that will be visible to the general public from the city streets. 

[photo: Kieran Timberlake Architects. Cellophane House, as designed for MoMA’s Home Deliveryexhibition. Front view. © 2008 Kieran Timberlake Architects] 

Here are a few more collections from the natural world that remind us that hunting and gathering [see below] should not be discouraged, in moderation, and needn’t be expensive. Sometimes, identifying our special interests and collection predilections can discipline our spending/hoarding habits.   

[photo credits: Kim Carey, Edinburgh University Library Special Collections Division, Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service] 

[photo by Robert Wright, New York Times] 

Technorati Tags: brooklyn flea, flea markets, hoarding, hunters and gatherers, interiors

Good news. While you are waiting impatiently for true spring, here is a guilty pleasure that’s good for you: BROOKLYN MODERN, edited by Diana Lind, looks at 18 stunning renovations in Brooklyn. 

Technorati Tags: bookshelf, brooklyn, modern, renovations

1. If it Be Your Will, Leonard Cohen 

2. Typical, Laura Marling

3. My Shadow, Lavender Diamond

4. Stitching Leggings, Kate Nash 

5. Breathe Me, Sia 

6. Dancing Daze, Avett Brothers

7. Wig in a Box, the Polyphonic Spree (Hedwig Soundtrack) 

8. The Don, The View (click on “the don”)

Technorati Tags: bob dylan, design, Inspiration, kate nash, laura marling, lavender diamond, mix tape, music

Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colors gave way to an excitement about color as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol’s “I want to be a machine;” the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella’s “Straight out of the can; it can’t get better than that.” Color Chartis the first major exhibition devoted to this pivotal transformation, featuring work by some forty artists ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter to Sherrie Levine and Damien Hirst.[Photos: Jim Lambrie, Dan Flavin] 

In the morning, we’ll puff the cushions back up and reposition our favorite pillows, and maybe a throw.

The first two pillows are the work of Galbraith and Paul; you can find them, as well as these other good-looking  pillows here and more options here.

Technorati Tags: fabric, galbraith and paul, Maxine Snider Inc., pillows, sofas

Technorati Tags: , bard, FURNITURE, Maxine Snider Inc., shaker design

One of the reasons that collections often look drool-worthy: repetition. The element of repetition is alluring, and no one knows better than a collector how much fun it is to line up a collection into compulsive rows.The collector’s table is a beautiful piece for the prideful collector. We can see any number of objects–like and unlike–fitting inside.Rows and multiples:

photos: courtesy of  bricolagelife

Technorati Tags: collector's table, FURNITURE, repetition, snider inc