Buckminster Fuller Documented His Life Every 15 Minutes, from 1920 Until 1983

in Architecture, Design, History | December 26th, 2018

If you’ve heard of Buckminster Fuller, you’ve almost certainly heard the word “Dymaxion.” Despite its strong pre-Space Age redolence, the term has somehow remained compelling into the 21st century. But what does it mean? When Fuller, a self-described “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist,” first invented a house meant practically to reinvent domestic living, Chicago’s Marshall Field and Company department store put a model on display. The company “wanted a catchy label, so it hired a consultant, who fashioned ‘dymaxion’ out of bits of ‘dynamic,’ ‘maximum,’ and ‘ion,’ ” writes The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert in a piece on Fuller’s legacy. “Fuller was so taken with the word, which had no known meaning, that he adopted it as a sort of brand name.” After the Dymaxion House came the Dymaxion Vehicle, the Dymaxion Map, and even the two-hour-a-day Dymaxion Sleep Plan.

“As a child, Fuller had assembled scrapbooks of letters and newspaper articles on subjects that interested him,” Kolbert writes. “When, later, he decided to keep a more systematic record of his life, including everything from his correspondence to his dry-cleaning bills, it became the Dymaxion Chronofile.” The Dymaxion Chronofile now resides in the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford University, a place that has merited the attention of no less a guide to the fascinating corners of the world than Atlas Obscura.

“The files go back to when he was four-years-old, but he only seriously started the archive in 1917,” writes that site’s Allison C. Meier. “From then until his death in 1983 he collected everything from each day, with ingoing and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, models, and even the mundane ephemera like dry cleaning bills.” Fuller added to the Dymaxion Chronofile not just every day but, from the year 1920 until his death in 1983, every fifteen minutes.

In 1962 Fuller described the Dymaxion Chronofile as what would happen “if somebody kept a very accurate record of a human being, going through the era from the Gay ’90s, from a very different kind of world through the turn of the century — as far into the twentieth century as you might live.” Using himself as the case subject for the project (as he did for many projects, which led him to nickname himself “Guinea Pig B”) meant that “I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record.” Open Culture’s own Ted Mills has written elsewhere about the rigors of storing and maintaining that record in archive form over the decades since Fuller’s death, and now, as with so much Fuller did, the Dymaxion Chronofile stands as both a compelling oddity and proof of real, if askew, prescience. After all, how many of us have taken to documenting our own lives online with nearly equal intensity — and how many of us do it even more often than every fifteen minutes?

Buckminster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Innovation that Revolutionized Map Design (1943)

Watch the Making of the Dymaxion Globe: A 3‑D Rendering of Buckminster Fuller’s Revolutionary Map

A Harrowing Test Drive of Buckminster Fuller’s 1933 Dymaxion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

Better Living Through Buckminster Fuller’s Utopian Designs: Revisit the Dymaxion Car, House, and Map

Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Researchers Recreate the Sounds Worshippers Heard in the Mosque of Cordoba Over 1,200 Years Ago

in Architecture, History, Technology | December 21st, 2018

As we know from conversations in subway tunnels or singing in the shower, different kinds of spaces and building materials alter the quality of a sound. It’s a subject near and dear to architects, musicians, and composers. The relationship between space and sound also centrally occupies the field of “Acoustic Archeology.” But here, an unusual problem presents itself. How can we know how music, voice, and environmental sound behaves in spaces that no longer exist?

More specifically, writes EurekAltert!, the question that faced researchers at the University of Seville was “how did words or the rain sound inside the Mosque of Cordoba in the time of Abd al-Rahman I?” The founder of an Iberian Muslim dynasty began construction on the Mosque of Cordoba in the 780s. In the hundreds of years since, it underwent several expansions and, later, major renovations after it became the Cathedral of Cordoba in the 13th century.

The architecture of the 8th century building is lost to history, and so, it would seem, is its careful sound design. “Unlike fragments of tools or shards of pottery,” Atlas Obscura’s Jessica Leigh Hester notes, “sounds don’t lodge themselves in the soil.” Archeo-acousticians do not have recourse to the material artifacts archeologists rely on in their reconstructions of the past. But, given the technological developments in reverb simulation and audio software, these scientists can nonetheless approximate the sounds of ancient spaces.

In this case, University of Seville’s Rafael Suárez and his collaborators in the research group “Architecture, Heritage and Sustainability” collected impulse responses—recordings of reverberation—from the current cathedral. “From there, they used software to reconstruct the internal architecture of the mosque during four different phases of construction and renovation.… Next, they produced auralizations, or sound files replicating what worshippers would have heard.”

To hear what late-8th century Spanish Muslims would have, “researchers used software to model how the architecture would change the same snippet of a recorded salat, or daily prayer. In the first configuration, the prayer sounds full-bodied and sonorous; in the model that reflects the mosque’s last renovation, the same prayer echoes as though it was recited deep inside a cave.” All of those renovations, in other words, destroyed the sonic engineering of the mosque.

As the authors write in a paper recently published in Applied Acoustics, “the enlargement interventions failed to take the functional aspect of the mosque and gave the highest priority to mainly the aesthetic aspect.” In the simulation of the mosque as it sounded in the 780s, sound was intelligible all over the building. Later construction added what the researchers call “acoustic shadow zones” where little can be heard but echo.

Unlike Hagia Sofia, the Byzantine cathedral-turned-mosque, which retained its basic design over the course of almost 1500 years, and thus its basic sound design, the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba was so altered architecturally that a “significant deterioration of the acoustic conditions” resulted, the authors claim. The mosque’s many remaining visual elements would be familiar to 8th century attendees, writes Hester, including “gilt calligraphy and intricate tiles… and hundreds of columns—made from jasper, onyx, marble, and other stones salvaged from Roman ruins.” But the “acoustic landscape” of the space would be unrecognizable.

The specific sounds of a space are essential to making “a place feel like itself.” Something to consider the next time you’re planning a major home renovation.

via Atlas Obscura

The Same Song Sung in 15 Places: A Wonderful Case Study of How Landscape & Architecture Shape the Sounds of Music

David Byrne: How Architecture Helped Music Evolve

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Discover Isotype, the 1920s Attempt to Create a Universal Language with Stylish Icons & Graphic Design

in Design, History | December 21st, 2018

How long has mankind dreamed of an international language? The first answer that comes to mind, of course, dates that dream to the time of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. If you don’t happen to believe that humanity was made to speak a variety of mutually incomprehensible tongues as punishment for daring to build a tower tall enough to reach heaven, maybe you’d prefer a date somewhere around the much later development of Esperanto, the best-known language invented specifically to attain universality, in the late 19th century. But look ahead a few decades past that and you find an intriguing example of a language created to unite the world without using words at all: International System Of Typographic Picture Education, or Isotype.

“Nearly a century before infographics and data visualization became the cultural ubiquity they are today,” writes Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova, “the pioneering Austrian sociologist, philosopher of science, social reformer, and curator Otto Neurath (December 10, 1882–December 22, 1945), together with his not-yet-wife Marie, invented ISOTYPE — the visionary pictogram language that furnished the vocabulary of modern infographics.”

First known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, Isotype’s initial development began in 1926 at Vienna’s Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (or Social and Economic Museum), of which Neurath was the founding director. There he began to assemble something like a design studio team, with the mission of creating a set of pictorial symbols that could render dense social, scientific technological, biological, and historical information legible at a glance.

Neurath’s most important early collaborator on Isotype was surely the woodcut artist Gerd Arntz, at whose site you can see the more than 4000 pictograms he created to symbolize “key data from industry, demographics, politics and economy.” Arntz designed them all in accordance with Neurat’s belief that even then the long “virtually illiterate” proletariat “needed knowledge of the world around them. This knowledge should not be shrined in opaque scientific language, but directly illustrated in straightforward images and a clear structure, also for people who could not, or hardly, read. Another outspoken goal of this method of visual statistics was to overcome barriers of language and culture, and to be universally understood.”

By the mid-1930s, writes The Atlantic’s Steven Heller in an article on the book Isotype: Design and Contexts 1925–1971, “with the Nazi march into Austria, Neurath fled Vienna for Holland. He met his future wife Marie Reidemeister there and after the German bombing of Rotterdam the pair escaped to England, where they were interned on the Isle of Man. Following their release they established the Isotype Institute in Oxford. From this base they continued to develop their unique strategy, which influenced designers worldwide.” Today, even those who have never laid eyes on Isotype itself have extensively “read” the visual languages it has influenced: Gizmodo’s Alissa Walker points to the standardized icons created in the 70s by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the American Institute of Graphic Arts as well as today’s emoji — probably not exactly what Neurath had in mind as the language of Utopia back when he was co-founding the Vienna Circle, but nevertheless a distant cousin of Isotype in “its own adorable way.”

via Brain Pickings

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Say What You Really Mean with Downloadable Cindy Sherman Emoticons

The Hobo Code: An Introduction to the Hieroglyphic Language of Early 1900s Train-Hoppers

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch a Playthrough of the Oldest Board Game in the World, the Sumerian Royal Game of Ur, Circa 2500 BC

in Games, History, Museums | December 20th, 2018

They may not surprise the average market analyst, but the gaming industry’s figures tell a pretty compelling story. Newzoo estimates that “2.3 billion gamers across the globe will spend $137. 9 billion on games in 2018.” VentureBeat reports that mobile games account for over 50 percent of the total. Currently, “about 91 percent of the global market is digital, meaning that $125.3 billion worth of games flows through digitally connected channels as opposed to physical retail.”

That’s a lot of virtual dough floating around in virtual worlds. But this vast and rapid growth in digital gaming does not mean physical games are going away anytime soon—and that includes cards, board games, and other tabletop games, a market that has “surged as players have grown jaded with the digital screens they toil over during the work day,” wrote Joon Ian Wong in 2016.

Venture capital is flowing into board game development. Tabletop bars and cafes are popping up all over the world, encouraging people to mingle over Scrabble and Cards Against Humanity. It seems the time is just right to revive the oldest playable board game in the world. If someone hasn’t already launched a Kickstarter to bankroll a new Royal Game of Ur, I suspect we’ll see one any day now. At least four-and-a-half-thousand years old, according to British Museum Curator Irving Finkel, the Royal Game of Ur was probably invented by the Sumerians. And it seems like it might still be a blast, and a considerable challenge, to play.

“You might think it’s so old that it’s irretrievable to us, that we’ve got no idea what it was like playing, what the rules were like,” Finkel says in the video at the top, “but all sorts of evidence has come to light so that we know how this game was played.” He promises, in no uncertain terms, to wipe the floor with YouTuber Tom Scott in a Royal Game of Ur showdown, and Scott, who has never played the game before, seems at a decided disadvantage. But watch their contest to see how the game is played and whether Finkel makes good on his threat. Along the way, he liberally shares his knowledge.

For a shorter course on the Royal Game of Ur, see Finkel’s video above. It takes him a couple minutes to get around to introducing his subject, the discovery and deciphering of the “world’s oldest rule book.” A consummate ancient history detective, Finkel describes how he decoded an ancient tablet that explained a game, but which game, no one knew. So, the dedicated curator tried the rules on every mysterious ancient game he could find, till he landed on the “game of twenty squares” from Mesopotamia. “It fitted perfectly,” he says with relish. See the original board, pieces, and dice from about 2500 BC, and learn how Finkel had been searching for its rules of play since he was 9 years old.

For more of Finkel’s passionate public scholarship, see him demonstrate how to write in cuneiform and read about how his work on cuneiform tablets led to him discovering the oldest reference to the Noah’s Ark myth.

Hear the “Seikilos Epitaph,” the Oldest Complete Song in the World: An Inspiring Tune from 100 BC

The British Museum Is Now Open To Everyone: Take a Virtual Tour and See 4,737 Artifacts, Including the Rosetta Stone

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Meet the Hurdy Gurdy, the Hand-Cranked Medieval Instrument with 80 Moving Parts

in History, Music | December 19th, 2018

Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” may be the creepiest song ever written about an obscure medieval instrument (made all the more so by its use in David Fincher’s Zodiac), but the Hurdy Gurdy did not give his recording its ominous sound. Those droning notes come from an Indian tanpura. Yet they evoke the title instrument, an ingenious musical invention “set up primarily for the purpose of making drones,” Case Western Reserve’s College of Art and Sciences explains. “In the Middle Ages, it was known in Latin as the organistrum and the symphonia, and in French as the vielle à roue (the vielle with the wheel).”

With a sound produced by a “rosined wooden wheel, turned by a crank” that set “a number of strings in continuous droning vibration,” the hurdy gurdy can, it’s true, give off a bit of a folk horror vibe. From its very early, maybe 10th or 11th century origins in liturgical music, hurdy gurdy expert Jim Kendros tells us in the video above, the instrument became associated with European folk music, shrinking from a beast played by two people to more portable dimensions, about the size of a large guitar and resembling a hand-cranked violin with keys for playing melodies on certain strings.

Though it grew smaller and more maneuverable, however, the instrument grew no less complicated. Kendros calls it “the equivalent of a medieval spaceship,” with its more than 80 moving parts.

The hurdy gurdy, or “wheel fiddle,” played in the TED Talk above by Caroline Phillips looks less like a fiddle, or a spaceship, and more like a medieval keytar—just one of the many shapes the instrument could take. All of them, however, had one important feature in common: the hurdy gurdy is “the only musical instrument that uses a crank to turn a wheel to rub strings like the bow of a violin to produce music.” Historically, it was used in medieval dance music “because of the uniqueness of the melody combined with the acoustic boom box” of its large body. Try not to shake your body, or to shiver, when Phillips plays a haunting, droning Basque folk song.

The Hurdy Gurdy spread all over Europe, from Britain to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Hungary, and Sweden, where stringed-instrument enthusiasts The Stringdom caught up with virtuoso Hurdy Gurdy player Johannes Geworkian Hellman. He tells us how the hurdy gurdy and its droning sonic cousin, the bagpipes, set off “an early folk revival” as composers took inspiration from peasant music. The interest from medieval upper classes meant better luthiers and higher-quality hurdy gurdies. Now modern interest in the Hurdy Gurdy is growing. While it may take two to three years to handcraft one, “a lot of new instruments are getting made,” says Hellman.

Should you doubt that the 1000-year old hurdy gurdy can still sound hip, listen to Hellman play an electrified version in his hurdy gurdy/accordion duo, Symbio, or hurdy gurdy/dulcimer two-piece, Maija & Johannes. He coaxes from the instrument such a range of rhythms and timbres that it’s easy to see why it was so immensely popular for so long. Yet for all its musical appeal, it is a complex machine, difficult to tune and subject to any number of mechanical problems. Not for the casual amateur, the instrument still requires a dedicated Hurdy Gurdy man or woman to make it sing—a much more common sight than in Donovan’s day but an exceedingly rare one compared to the many centuries of the hurdy gurdy’s heyday. See more hurdy gurdies at the Vintage News.

Visit an Online Collection of 61,761 Musical Instruments from Across the World

Watch a Musician Improvise on a 500-Year-Old Music Instrument, The Carillon

New Order’s “Blue Monday” Played with Obsolete 1930s Instruments

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Honored by the Library of Congress (1898)

in Film, History | December 19th, 2018

In 1896, Thomas Edison produced The Kiss. One of the first films ever commercially screened, it adapts the then-popular musical The Widow Jones — or at least it adapts about twenty seconds of it, a kiss that happens in the very last scene. Two years later came the equally short but differently groundbreaking Something Good – Negro Kiss, a version of The Kiss starring black actors instead of white ones. Only now, thanks in part to the efforts of University of Southern California archivist Dino Everett and University of Chicago Cinema and Media Studies professor Allyson Nadia Field, has it received proper recognition as the first such kiss on film.

“To uncover the origins of Everett’s footage, Field relied on inventory and distribution catalogs, tracing the film to Chicago,” writes UChicago News’ Jack Wang. “This was where William Selig —a vaudeville performer turned film producer — had shot it on his knockoff of a Lumière Cinématographe. That camera produced the telltale perforation marks which had tipped Everett off to the print’s age.”

With support from the Museum of Modern Art, writes Hyperallergic’s Jasmine Weber, “Field not only identified the filmmaker, but the performers: Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown. Suttle is dressed in a dapper suit and bowtie, while Brown dons an ornate dress — costumes that Field says were typical of minstrel performers.”

“What makes this film so remarkable is that if you look at films from this period that feature African-Americans, first of all, most of them are white actors in blackface,” says Field in the NPR segment above. “They are caricatures. They’re certainly racist. They feature racist tropes like watermelon-eating contests and things like that. The American screen was incredibly hostile to African-Americans for much of its history,” but Something Good — Negro Kiss “refutes those kind of caricatures and asserts an image of humanity and of love.”

That image has received quite a response on the internet as the clip has circulated in the week since its induction into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry alongside the likes of The Shining, Monterey Pop, Brokeback Mountain, The Lady from Shanghai, and Jurassic Park. One lawyer-slash-critic even brought this piece of early cinema together with a piece of current cinema, mashing it up with the score of Barry Jenkins’ just-released James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk. Selig, Suttle, and Brown must have known full well that they were making something new. But did they know they were also making history?

via Quartz

African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle (A Free Course from Stanford)

Massive New Database Will Finally Allow Us to Identify Enslaved Peoples and Their Descendants in the Americas

Download Digitized Copies of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civil Rights Guide to Traveling Safely in the U.S. (1936–66)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Pristine Footage Lets You Revisit Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Brothers

in Film, History | December 17th, 2018

Pioneering filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière, the inventors of the projected motion picture, held their first private screening in Paris in March of 1895. The streets of the French capital would go on to provide the brothers with plenty of life in motion for their new technology to capture in the years thereafter, and you can watch eight such real scenes compiled in the video above. With its startling clarity — and its more recently corrected motion and added sound — this selection of pieces of Lumière footage offers a rich six-minute cinematic time-travel experience to the City of Light between the years of 1896 and 1900.

Guy Jones, the uploader of the video on Youtube, provides the following guide to the locations:

Notre-Dame Cathedral (1896)

Alma Bridge (1900)

Avenue des Champs-Élysées (1899)

Place de la Concorde (1897)

Passing of a fire brigade (1897)

Tuileries Garden (1896)

Moving walkway at the Paris Exposition (1900)

The Eiffel Tower from the Rives de la Seine à Paris (1897)

These places have continued to provide generation after generation of filmmakers with locations for their urban cinematic visions. (The Eiffel Tower now provides an immediate visual shorthand for the city, though it certainly wouldn’t have in this Lumière footage, when it was less than ten years old.) That goes for French filmmakers as well as those of many other nationalities: even the Coen Brothers used Tuileries Garden for their short film Tuileries, previously featured here on Open Culture.

Or at least they used the subway station underneath Tuileries Garden, which wouldn’t open until 1900, the same year as the Paris Métro itself — and the year of the Paris Exposition, also known as the Exposition Universelle, which gave Parisians the chance to ride the moving sidewalk seen in the second-to-last Lumière segment.

Anyone familiar with the Paris of the 21st century will be quick to observe the differences between the city now and the city 120 years ago. But a Parisian of the 1890s might well have said they were the ones who lived in a city made unrecognizable to earlier generations, given Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s complete revision of the central city commissioned by Napoléon III and carried out between 1853 and 1870. For good or for ill, it’s just as much Haussmann’s Paris today as it was Haussmann’s Paris in the 1890s, and criticisms that the city has remained frozen in time aren’t without merit. But to see what has most dramatically changed about modern Paris — that is, what has changed about how people see and interact with modern Paris — we must turn to cinema. Might I suggest the work of Éric Rohmer?

via Boing Boing

Immaculately Restored Film Lets You Revisit Life in New York City in 1911

The Oldest Known Footage of London (1890–1920) Features the City’s Great Landmarks

Time Travel Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remarkably High-Quality 1940s Video

Berlin Street Scenes Beautifully Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Dramatic Footage of San Francisco Right Before & After the Massively Devastating Earthquake of 1906

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

in Art, History | December 13th, 2018

Has any Japanese woodblock print — or for that matter, any piece of Japanese art — endured as well across place and time as The Great Wave off Kanagawa? Even those of us who have never known its name, let alone those of us unsure of who made it and when, can bring it to mind it with some clarity, as sure a sign as any (along with the numerous parodies) that it taps into something deep within all of us. But though the artist behind it, 18th- and 19th-century ukiyo‑e painter Katsushika Hokusai, was undoubtedly a master of his tradition, even he didn’t conjure up The Great Wave off Kanagawa in the form we know it on the first try.

In fact, he’d been producing different versions of it for nearly forty years. On Twitter Tarin tkasasagi recently posted four versions of the Great Wave that Hokusai painted over that period. Here you see them arranged from top to bottom: the first from 1792, when he was 33; the second from 1803, when he was 44; the third from 1805, when he was 46; and the famous fourth from 1831, when he was 72.

Each time, Hokusai de-emphasizes the human presence and emphasizes the natural elements, bringing out drama from the water itself rather than from the people who regard or navigate it. In each version, too, the colors grow bolder and the lines stronger.

The skill level of a working artist — especially an artist working as hard as Hokusai — almost inevitably increases over time, and that must have something to do with these changes, though it also looks like the process of an artistic personality settling into its subject matter. “From the time I was six, I was in the habit of sketching things I saw around me,” says Hokusai himself in a widely circulated quotation. “Around the age of 50, I began to work in earnest, producing numerous designs. It was not until my 70th year, however, that I produced anything of significance.”

In the artist’s telling, only at the age of 73, after the final Great Wave, did he begin to grasp “the underlying structure of birds and animals, insects and fish, and the way trees and plants grow. Thus if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive.” The fact that he didn’t make it to 100 will forever keep enthusiasts wondering what magnificence an even older Hokusai might have achieved, but even so, the body of work he managed to produce in his 88 years contains works that, like the ultimate form of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, outlived him and will outlive all of us.

via Ted Gioia

Enter a Digital Archive of 213,000+ Beautiful Japanese Woodblock Prints

Download 2,500 Beautiful Woodblock Prints and Drawings by Japanese Masters (1600–1915)

Download Classic Japanese Wave and Ripple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japanese Artists from 1903

Download Hundreds of 19th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints by Masters of the Tradition

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Buckminster Fuller Documented His Life Every 15 Minutes, from 1920 Until 1983

Researchers Recreate the Sounds Worshippers Heard in the Mosque of Cordoba Over 1,200 Years Ago

Discover Isotype, the 1920s Attempt to Create a Universal Language with Stylish Icons & Graphic Design

Watch a Playthrough of the Oldest Board Game in the World, the Sumerian Royal Game of Ur, Circa 2500 BC

Meet the Hurdy Gurdy, the Hand-Cranked Medieval Instrument with 80 Moving Parts

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Honored by the Library of Congress (1898)

Pristine Footage Lets You Revisit Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Brothers

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search