Welcome to the New York city apartment of Graham Hill, a Canadian-born architect committed to bringing sustainability into the mainstream. His apartment does more with less. It has a footprint of only 420 square feet. Yet it’s elegantly-designed and completely functional. What initially looks like a simple studio unfolds into much more, a Soho apartment that features no less than eight rooms — a bedroom, guest room, kitchen, office and the rest. We’ll let Graham, the founder of treehugger.com, take you on the grand tour, and we’ll leave you to wonder what a designer could do with this Parisian apartment measuring only 17 square feet.…
As a new-ish parent, I’ve been inundated with alphabet books from well-meaning friends and family, and I am most grateful for them all. But I’m especially glad for a set that uses images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to illustrate each letter. My daughter gets lost in the paintings, prints, etchings, etc., and you know what? So do I. It’s that rare meeting of adult high art and kid formatting that keeps us both engaged.
The above video, while not strictly for children, could certainly work as well. A concept of the Argentine group Ombu Architecture and graphic designer Federico Gonzalez, “The ABC of Architects” is a vintage flipbook tribute to the last 100 years or so in international architecture, set to a jaunty, golden-age-of-radio score by Eugene C. Rose and George Ruble (which you can download for free here).
With the kind of quaint globe-hopping (but without the passé racism) of a Tintin comic, “The ABC of Architects” skips through its list of twenty-six revered names from almost as many countries–from Finish Alvar Aalto to Iraqi-British Zaha Hadid. There are many names I don’t know and many familiar favorites. I can imagine this appealing to preschoolers or serious students, and for some of the same reasons. While the creators express grief at having to leave out so many artists, “The ABC of Architects” is nothing less than joyous and inspiring.
It comes as no surprise that the man who created the title sequences for The Man with the Golden Arm, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Vertigo can tell you a thing or two about graphic design. He can even tell his established colleagues a thing or two about graphic design, as seen in the clip above. The man, of course, is Saul Bass, and this footage of him comes from a long-form interview conducted by designer and educator Archie Boston.
In 1986, Boston paid a visit to Bass’ studio for a project called 20 Outstanding Los Angeles Designers, shooting a conversation that touched on many subjects, including the eminence’s main piece of advice for graphic design students. “Learn to draw,” Bass pronounces.
“If you don’t, you’re going to live your life getting around that and trying to compensate for that.” Design, as observers of the discipline say, ultimately comes down to communication. According to Bass, aspiring designers fail to master drawing, one of communication’s most basic but richest forms, at their peril.
The clip just above goes deeper than giving practical advice, getting down to the very raison d’être of the graphic designer. Bass puts it unambiguously: “Aesthetics are your problem and mine. Nobody else’s. The fact of the matter is, I want everything we do — that I do personally, that our office does — to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks that it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” Explore our related content section below to get an extensive idea of the fruits of Bass’ unbending desire to create beauty. You may or may not find, say, his reimagined American Bell office lady uniforms beautiful, but you can’t deny that they come from a mind wholly dedicated to aesthetics — and one that cared not just about the how of creation, but the why as well.
The Creators Project, a collaboration between Intel and Vice Magazine, produces behind-the-scenes short films with contemporary artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Calling itself “a global celebration of art and technology,” the three-year-old project offers perhaps the best way to keep up with incredible advances in visual and audio technology in the arts. The project also sponsors new work (from, for example, visual artists Mick Rock and Barney Clay and musicians J. Spaceman and Karen O) and hosts global events and meet-ups.
I personally check in with the project’s YouTube channel on a semi-daily basis, and I never fail to find something captivating, whether an introduction to a new artist or new work from an old favorite (if you prefer Vimeo, they’ve got you covered there too). Most recently I’ve discovered the astonishing work of a performance artist/photographer from Beijing, Li Wei, whose work involves Buster Keaton-style stunts—or, more precisely, Kung Fu-film high-wire action—captured on camera in vertigo-inducing images of impossibility. In the short film above, Li Wei walks us through his process and his philosophy, which begins with the unsettling notion, “We are all controlled by someone else. Our thoughts and actions are controlled by unseen forces.” His work is a high-tech attempt to outwit one of those forces for brief moments, rendered timeless by photography and the magic of Photoshop.
In the video below, a former aerospace engineer for NASA, James Powderly, now occupies strange territory between design and engineering. Inspired by another corporate engineering dropout, Powderley left aerospace engineering for a residency at New York art and technology center Eyebeam to refine his visual aesthetic, which he’s taken all over the world.
Finally, in the short video below, The Creators Project visited MinSuk Cho, founder of futuristic Seoul architecture firm Mass Studies. Cho describes the vision and purpose of Mass Studies over a mind-blowing series of images of architectural designs from worlds you’ve never seen before but (if you’re like me) always hoped existed somewhere.
http://vimeo.com/44749711
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is one of the grand European museums. Home to many of the Dutch masters (Rembrandt’s Night Watch, which seems to glow from its center, and Vermeer’s Milkmaid, to name just a few), the museum is located on the city’s Museumplein, surrounded by the smaller Vincent Van Gogh museum and modern Stedelijk.
All those masterpieces are now available for close-up view online at the Rijksmuseum’s digitized collection. Users can explore the entire collection, which is handily sorted by artist, subject, style and even by events in Dutch history. The new digital archive has all the same great learning potential as any other online collection. It’s searchable, as is the museum’s library.
But the Dutch are a whimsical people, so it seems right that, in digitizing its collection, the museum went a step further than further. Not only can users create their own online galleries from selected works in the museum’s collection, they can download Rijksmuseum artwork for free to decorate new products. (Note: users will need to create a free account to get started.)
By visiting the museum’s Rijksstudio, art lovers can create their own “sets” of Rijksmuseum works. Sets can include images of just flowers (think of the luscious roses and tulips in Dutch still life paintings of the 1600s), faces appearing in portraits, or paintings of Amsterdam itself through the ages. Just select a work of art and drop it into your own image collection. Then use these selected images to create your own personalized products. From tattoos to wallpaper to scooters (yes, scooters) to smart phone skins. Unusual yet everyday items of all shapes and sizes can now bear the image of gorgeous art. The art is free and the object could be as simple as a T‑shirt.
All of this can be done with the blessings and support of the museum, which provides links to sites that offer various forms of printing on demand.
What better way to make the collection accessible to the public? Some might say it is sacrilege to put Rembrandt’s face on the side of a van; the Rijksmuseum encourages it. None of the artists are alive anyway to claim copyright infringement, now are they?
“Unique” is an overused word, so much so that it appears in overqualified redundancies like “completely” or “very unique.” But, what the hell, I’m going to go ahead and call Dan Philips very unique. Philips, who has worked in army intelligence, and as a dance instructor and antiques dealer, seems to have finally found his calling at age 64: building custom houses out of up to 80 percent salvaged and recycled materials—from construction castoffs like old doors and odd-shaped beams to cattle bones, wine bottles, and license plates. In the TED talk above, Philips, a very witty and engaging speaker with a slight build and bushy handlebar mustache, walks an audience through some of his idiosyncratic designs, remarking on details like eggshells as decorative buttons, salvaged vintage appliances, his own low-tech solutions for laundry chutes and bathtubs, and a surprisingly tasteful “Budweiser House.”
If any of this sounds a bit quirk-for-quirk’s sake, it’s not (entirely). Philips is a man with a serious purpose. As a New York Times profile put it, he is “fervently committed to his vision of building for low-income people,” especially poor, single mothers (Philips’ father abandoned his family when he was 17). A self-taught plumber, carpenter, and electrician, his vision—articulated through his Huntsville, TX company Phoenix Commotion—includes housing that is not only structurally sound, but also architecturally beautiful. “I think mobile homes are a blight on the planet,” he says. “Attractive, affordable housing is possible and I’m out to prove it.” While many of his buyers defaulted on their mortgages during the recent crises, and some of his houses have been “gentrified”—sold to upper middle-class families attracted by the design features and energy efficiency—Philips is still pleased that his construction represents the reality of sustainable design with recycled materials and a building philosophy that transcends the endless vistas of bland nouveau colonials, ranch homes, and shoddy tract housing that seems to stretch across every suburban landscape.
Click here for a slideshow of several of Philips’ creations.
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