ideas + images

curated by sierra gonzalez 

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Brown, Tim FraserManetone, Pantone chips.

A reproduction of Édouard Manet’s ‘Bar at the Folies Bergere’ made entirely of old Pantone chips. Over 5,000 unused chips were painstakingly colour matched and and stuck down over four long nights, and acted as centre piece for a boozey party in our design studio.

[via SwissMiss]

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Architecture School

http://www.sundancechannel.com/architecture-school/

To call Architecture School a cross between Project Runway and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is somewhat of a disservice, but at first glance that’s what it may sound like: aspiring architects compete to design and then build an a house for a New Orleans family.  Rather than the one-offs and conceptual designs that emerge from Runway, Architecture School ends with a finished product destined for real-life use; instead of the sprawling and truly extreme houses on Makeover, the house must be affordable, efficient, and sustainable.  And unlike most scripted “reality” shows, the series is actually a fly-on-the-wall documentary of the pre-existing URBANBUILD program at Tulane University, which has already partnered with senior architecture students to design and build two affordable houses in New Orleans.  Archinect has a behind-the-scenes interview of the producers that really shows the thoughtfulness behind the project, which premiered last Wednesday on the Sundance channel (you can also catch it on Hulu and iTunes).

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I think there’s a lot of confusion about what architects do… Does it mean you make pretty spaces? Does it mean, you put some nice gables up there and that’s what it is to be an architect? Well, no. It’s supposed to be about the health and safety and welfare of people, and how well this building you’re in - your house or office or school - helps you live or work or learn there.

Brandy Brooks, executive director of Community Design Resource Center of Boston, a design non-profit and partner of Public Architecture. Founded by John Peterson in 2002, Public Architecture hopes to bring design for social impact into mainstream architectural practice and education [A blueprint for good | BG]

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Home Magazine a Victim of Housing Woes [WSJ]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121928216121158909.html

The housing crisis has moved to the magazine rack.

Are the failures of House and Garden, Home, Blueprint, and other shelter magazines the result of a bleak housing economy or the failure to keep in touch with consumers’ changing tastes in design and home decor? Critics of shelter magazine Dwell argue that the publication has moved away from its Fruit Bowl Manifesto (“We want to demonstrate that a modern house is a comfortable one”) and become a showcase for unattainable and impractical trophy homes, yet its circulation keeps growing. Here’s an earlier report from the LA Times on the same topic, but blaming the oversaturation of design coverage—and the subsequently tight competition for advertising dollars—for the magazines’ decline.

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Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt), Magnetic Movie, 2007. Filmed at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley. [via The Moment, NYT]

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One telling anecdote in my research into innovation history is this striking observation: inventors, creators, and leaders, the people who earned fame for the work other people call innovative rarely used that word themselves. Instead their vocabularies leaned heavily on words like problem, experiment, solve, exploration, change, risk and prototype. Powerful words. Words that are either verbs, or imply a set of actions. And more to the point, they care less about being innovative than they do about making things. Making good things.

Author Scott Berkun, Why Innovation Is Overrated

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Thomas Hawk Versus Rent-a-Cops

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2008/08/14/thomas-hawk-versus-rent-a-cops/

This is one of the more balanced and less sensationalist write-ups of last week’s incident at the SFMoMA, where security guards asked a photographer to leave after taking possibly harrassing photos of a staff member in the museum’s atrium.  The situation raised online debates on photographers’ rights for professionals and amateurs, online reputations and codes of conduct, and museum policies on blogging, visitor relations, and photography.

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RISD president John Maeda describes how Philip Johnson’s Glass House relates to his theories on simplicity.

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Dragulescu, Alex. Spam Architecture, computer-generated 3-D model series. Dragulescu’s projects focus on computational models and information visualizations using data from blog entries, video games, and other sources. Spam Architecture used the patterns, keywords, and rhythms of spam e-mail to create 3-D models like the one above.

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Jan Ctvrtnik, Droog Aalto. Glass, 2007. Ctvrtnik won Droog’s Climate Competition, which called for entries designed around a “climate” theme. This glass vase shows how a Finnish lake, the inspiration for the original Aalto vase by Alvar Aalto, could change over time due to global warming.

I realised that climate changes are visualised mostly by numbers and scientific measurements. In order to show changes, it is good to have a reference point.’ And so the Aalto vase became that reference point with its shape originating from the shape of a Finnish lake. The ‘Droog’ part of the title can be translated as ‘Dry’, obviously relating to global warming.

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[via Treehugger]

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