An Architectural Tour of Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconic Desert Home and Studio

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By some esti­ma­tions, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Tal­iesin West home-stu­dio com­plex took shape in 1941. But even then, the Ari­zona Repub­lic pre­scient­ly not­ed that “it may be years before it is con­sid­ered fin­ished.” The Tal­iesin West you can see in the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above is unlike­ly to change dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the next few…

Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

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One of the very first fea­ture-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis took a dar­ing visu­al approach for its time, incor­po­rat­ing Bauhaus and Futur­ist influ­ences in thrilling­ly designed sets and cos­tumes. Lang’s visu­al lan­guage res­onat­ed strong­ly in lat­er decades. The film’s rather stun­ning alchem­i­cal-elec­tric trans­fer­ence of a woman’s phys­i­cal traits onto the body…

Every Wes Anderson Movie, Explained by Wes Anderson

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That Wes Ander­son is per­haps the most assid­u­ous mak­er of short films today becomes clear when you look close­ly at his recent work. The four adap­ta­tions of “The Won­der­ful World of Hen­ry Sug­ar” and three oth­er Roald Dahl sto­ries he made for Net­flix were pre­sent­ed as a sin­gle anthol­o­gy film; his slight­ly ear­li­er fea­ture

The History of the World in One Beautiful, 5‑Foot-Long Chart (1931)

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In the image above, we see an impres­sive pre-inter­net macro-info­graph­ic called a “His­tom­ap.” Its cre­ator John B. Sparks (who lat­er cre­at­ed “his­tom­aps” of reli­gion and evo­lu­tion) pub­lished the graph­ic in 1931 with Rand McNal­ly. The five-foot-long chart—purportedly cov­er­ing 4,000 years of “world” history—is, in fact, an exam­ple of an ear­ly illus­tra­tion trend called…

How the BIC Cristal Ballpoint Pen Became the Most Successful Product in History

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb1PrONDHhk

If you want to see a tour de force of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy and design, there’s no need to vis­it a Sil­i­con Val­ley show­room. Just feel around your desk for a few moments, and soon­er or lat­er you’ll lay a hand on it: the BIC Cristal ball­point pen, which is described in the…