Blogging about the prefab home is nothing new.  I have recently been thinking about this means of building in terms of the economic climate and decided to revisit some sites and recharge my batteries in the name of hope.  The images above are from Adam Kalkin’s website, Architecture and Hygiene.  Kalkin is an architect with a love for the shipping container and he has received a fair amount of press in his day.  Two different homes are represented above.  There is the Quik House (be sure to watch the video), and the Old Lady House; both are built from shipping containers and both are environmentally friendly, and economically stimulating.  He has a number of links to other project examples in his oeuvre.

Taking this route to fulfill your domestic dreams is not going to jump start the housing industry, but it is emblematic of a person who understands a fusion of beauty, practicality and independence.

Floris Hovers designs and makes these fantastic minimal toy cars out of tubular steel and nylon wheels.  This Dutch designer has a furniture studio as well, but created the first of his Archetoys line when making something for his cousin to play with.  Check out the feature in I.D. Magazine on him here.

Pipilotti Rist Installation, "Pour Your Body Out"-Moma Photo: Frederick Charles

Jerry Saltz reviews the Pipilotti Rist Installation at the Moma with an interesting take on femenizing the institution.  When I first saw the piece and noticed the ring shaped couch in the middle of the piece, which replaced the gargantuan Barnett Newman obelisk which used to tower there, I chuckled a bit.  The Newman had been banished to the far corner of the outside courtyard, dwarfed by the city architecture.  Once an upright monument to masculinity, it had been replaced with a soft, cushy, round ring where we could all nap and swim.  I welcomed this change in that mezzanine though I worry in Saltz’s comparison of Rist to Richard Serra. Yes, Rist is to soft and moist what Serra is to hard and dry…. tropes which perpetuate the same tired cliches.

The Accurate by Mr Jones Watches

I found a great site for the watch enthusiast called “Watchismo”.  You can shop either by vintage or mod categories and there are some really nice pieces.  I particularly love the Mr. Jones watch called “The Accurate”.

Michael Cannell’s article in the New York Times, “Design Loves a Depression” is very optimistic and I must say that I am too. While reading this, I could not help but think of Gerrit Rietveld’s “Crate Furniture” designed in 1934.  This depression inspired design allowed the individual to make the chair themselves out of a discarded wooden crate.  I have made several of these and they are durable, comfortable ( considering ) and beautiful.  Perhaps these new economic conditions will generate some great things.

This new documentary by Gary Hustwit looks great! Here is the website for the movie.

I found these mint condition beauties in an antiques store

So, it appears that I may have too many chairs accumulating in my life due to an unhealthy obsession with buying them at every turn.  If I could apply a little psychology to this whole situation, ( this of course being the most non-scientific example ) the chair functions as a stand-in for the human subject.  Photographers of modernist achitecture would often carefully place chairs in the setting for a sense of scale.  This allowed the elimination of the actual person in the image and permitted the viewer to really get a sense of the space that was being photographed.  These chairs for me are not so much objects as intelligent, beautiful, “entities” that populate my space.  Now why would we want fewer of those things?

Harry Bertoia

Above and below I am featuring the Harry Bertoia Side Chair in Chrome.  This was designed in 1952 by Bertoia for Knoll and is still in production today.  These pieces  have an incredibly light aesthetic paired with a sturdy framework which defies the expectations when you sit down. It seemed Bertoia was more of a sculptor than a designer when you start to look at his body of work and this makes sense when you sit in one of these chairs.  Consider this: The furniture designer starts out with function and form in mind and essentially has a head start in how the physicality of the object is handled.  The starting point is prescribed in that the furniture designer says, “I will design a chair”.  The function of the chair is to seat an individual and from this  basis the designer moves forward.  A sculptor possesses the responsibility of elevating functionless to worthiness.  The sculptor’s basis for work is functionlessness and he is forced to first determin how this unknown object will first establish the connection with the viewer, how it will behave in space, and how the viewer’s body and the object will alter the space in which they both occupy and so on.  I believe that this extra step in the process gives the sculptor a more intimate understanding of the object/viewer interacion.  Bertoia’s chairs both challenge gravity and space in their light openness which contradicts their strong support, comfort and confidence when you sit down in them.  They are truly beautiful things.