London-based designer Kenyon Yeh has developed a wonderful premise for hacking Ikea furniture (one of our favorite past-times): He buys standard Ikea flat-pack furniture and throws away the instruction book; then he assembles it the way he wants, adding new elements like an old English chair leg he cast in resin…It seems to us like their are HUGE possibilities for improvising here. Said Yeh (using some mighty weird language):
“The process is liberating and brings a limitless attitude of possibility creating unique furniture instead of doing such a thing that made by forces”
The Selby has run a really nice story-with-few-words about Andrew Field, chef of Rockaway Taco, in Rockaway Beach, Queens – right by the beach – who loves surfing and keeps bees on his roof (we are always heartened when we discover a New York City beekeeper; it reminds us that nature is here, even in the midst of the city…”build a hive and they will come!…)
We’ve been pondering what makes Todd Selby’s work so compelling. He’s not a great photographer in the usual sense; individual photos are not terribly well-composed or exposed or beautiful. But, man, does that guy have an eye for a story, which he always manages to tell in a compelling way, with lots of photos. He makes sure to choose interesting people in their very personal spaces, honing in on the details and surroundings, so you get a sense of where this person is living and what their life is like, some of what they see when they go about their day. Like this little detail that speaks volumes: read more…
We came across this coupling of essential quotes when we were poking around John Zernings blog about Garden Trellises and Architectural Space Frames.
“Applied to architecture and structure, the former is primarily an aesthetic position; the latter is a principle of economy.” wrote Zerning. We find both immensely useful, and made a sign to remind us…”
You might wonder how we ever came across Zerning’s site in the first place, living in the city as we do, with no garden, or even a terrace. We were following the trail of some images that have been flying around the blogs, of a beautiful architecture of wires… read more…
A few weeks ago, we wrote about the artist Tom Sachs, whose amazing studio was featured in The Selby. When Todd Selby asked Sachs “What are the ten rules of your studio?” Number Ten was: “creativity is the enemy”. It is also the subject of an artwork Sachs created. Then, a reader wrote us an email that said: “I’d love follow up on why ‘creativity is the enemy’”. Good idea.
We figure the answer lies partly in the title of Sach’s artwork-sign:”Self-Fullfilling Prophecies”…It seems to warn of the danger of trying TOO hard, of being self-consciously creative and arty, rather than just…being…Maybe creativity is the enemy because it threatens the status quo, takes energy, takes us into various kinds of chaos and unknowing. Whew…We didn’t realize how Sach’s sign would make us think!
While we were mulling, we stumbled on New Liberal Arts, a free “book full of ideas” masterminded by Snarkmarket‘s Tim Carmody, and a collaboration of many. Aaron MCleran,”Generative Media Artist” wrote a section about Creativity, which we thought was SWELL even though we weren’t sure what “generative”* means. We’ve excerpted it here (underscores, ours):
“…creativity should be studied as a kind of martial art. You should train to be a ninja of creativity. read more…
When we read that Centre Pompidou in Paris was offering a Cardboard Carton Workshop, we wanted to beam ourselves there, a la Star Trek, to see what more we could add to our overflowing file and minds about this wonderfully versatile material. We were stunned by a photo of an archway made of cardboard sheets combined in layers and compressed; it flies in the face of the usual ways of building with cardboard, of using the flat sides as walls. It is the work of Tadashi Kawamata who is known for the spare structures he builds out of humble materials – pine boards, cardboard, packing materials, chairs – in unlikely places. They seem impromptu (though they take a great deal of work and planning), and speak of temporariness and informality; they somehow question the spaces and structures we take for granted. Now wonder his workshop has lines around the block.
When we saw pictures of Kawamata’s art at the Pompidou’s site, we realized we had seen his work before and had a vivid unattributed memory of it: of beautiful, odd, slapped together-looking nests and houses perched high up in the ancient tress of Madison Square Park, in the center of New York City. They made us LOOK with wonder and, for a moment, imagine ourselves hiding out in one of them but we never stopped to find out who had made them. Now we know, and are inspired by a central theme of Kawamata’s art: read more…
One of our favorite books about improvising is Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch. It’s one of those enduring books that you can open randomly and find something useful or compelling…like this, which we found just now:
“…Sometimes we damn the limits, but without them art is not possible. They provide us with something to work with and against. In practicing our craft we surrender, to a great extent, to letting the materials dictate the design…”
Among the many jacket quotes praising the book is one by Keith Jarrett, the jazz pianist known for his astonishing improvisational work the Koln Concert. In four sentences, he totally nails what improvising is:
“You are called to an important meeting, the subject of which you are not told. It is of utmost importance that you ‘Be Yourself’. The meeting starts immediately and your clothes are in the laundry and you have no time to wash up or shave. Is this a ‘serious’ situation? Then so is improvisation…”
And that is what The Koln Concert was. In the video, Jarrett describes the impossible circumstances that made for a stunning creation.
That’s what Free Play is about.
We view them as an essential part of our toolBox.
(You can listen to samples of The Koln Concert, and/or buy it as an MP3, here.)
Half awake this morning, a quote on O’Reilly Radar caught our eye: “Harness the power of being an idiot”. That’s for US, for sure!
So we followed the link to PeteSearch, the blog of Pete Warden. He is a programmer, software engineer (including years at Apple), graphics researcher and serious technology guy (he’s developed an interesting search module for Firefox). He tells the story of running into someone he went to school with at a conference, and remembering his abysmal academic career:
“I learn by trying to build something, there’s no other way I can discover the devils-in-the-details. Unfortunately that’s an incredibly inefficient way to gain knowledge. I basically wander around stepping on every rake in the grass, while the A Students memorize someone else’s route and carefully pick their way across the lawn without incident. My only saving graces are that every now and again I discover a better path, and faced with a completely new lawn I have an instinct for where the rakes are… my successes have all come when I’ve just gone ahead and just did something instead of studying it. It’s the only way to discover something new and unexpected, and even the failures build judgment.”
Boy, do we relate to Warden’s unkempt “try it and see” approach, falling into brambles, getting lost, then found. We love his declaration of POWER inherent in mistakes, which, invariably teach us a lot and often point to an unexpected path.
We find something incredibly compelling about Marjin Van der Poll‘s Do hit chair: hammering a chair out of a metal cube with all one’s strength, testing it out, and then pounding and hammering and testing over and over until it takes shape. The cube is smashed full force with a hammer, until it becomes… something else, a solution.
“Do hit… is an interpretation of a chair by Italian designer Enzo Mari, the ‘sof-sof chair’. Its complex looking frame to me seemed a result of good craftsmanship but as it turned out it was one of the first examples of spot welding in the furniture industry. This contradiction between craftsmanship and mass production became the concept for the chair. Do hit started as a small copper model which I beat into a tiny chair with the pointed part of a hobby hammer. The cube would be easy to produce industrially and would be moulded into a chair using a hammer. Repetition of the beating only strengthened the concept…
The Do hit can either be shaped by its owner or by me. I have shaped many Do hits and look for an expressive object with large folds which I then polish to make them stand out. Each Do hit therefore is different as I can only create the global shape of seat and backrest and have to react to the detailed form taken on by the metal as it is being shaped. This is a great challenge every time.”
Of course, we followed the trail back to Enzo’s Mari inspiring chair, designed in 1971 read more…
A picture of a chair made out of orange-and-white-striped wooden safety barriers that we saw on The Selby led us to discovering Tom Sachs. He’s an artist who makes elaborate recreations of modern icons: masterpieces of engineering and design of one kind or another, from Knoll office furniture to Prada to NASA (like this hilarious video). The all-seams-showing recreations are made out of ordinary stuff like phone books and Foamcoare welded together with duct tape or a glue gun. As it is clear from The Selby’s pictures of Sach’s living/studio space, the work of this imaginative inventor/artist holds ideas for our own more modest creations…
Although we don’t know what it says, we’re crazy about Sach’s bedspread, and the idea of writing on our own…
The photo shows one of her half-done billboard paintings on the kitchen table, in a living space that is clearly in action, work and living woven together. Even though Zittel could try discipline herself to work in her studio – a shipping container fifty feet from the house – she doesn’t. She works where it feels best, and things happens organically…
“When I was twenty and studying art in undergrad, I house sat for my parents one summer and built my entire senior show in their kitchen. I remember the feeling or horror one day when cutting out a shape with the jigsaw and accidentally making a slice into the tabletop that my mother had hand stained when I was an infant. Three decades later and I’m still making most of my work in the kitchen…”
We wonder how many BIG THINGS in the world were figured out at the kitchen table?
(In the background, you can also see the cardboard shelving we were so taken with…stuff beginning to be stored in it.)
We are so happy to have discovered Serendipity Rising, architect Daniel Hale’s blog that is mostly about the evolution of his home in Napa Valley, which seems to be a sort of laboratory for his ideas. The guy loves soft metals like zinc and lead which he cuts and hammers in unusual ways; he transforms salvaged woods and ‘finds’ by applying modern lines and layers of techniques into an eclectic take, like this incredible flight of stairs: “I layered black over brown and ran a strip of lead sheeting up the middle”. What he does to his own house is freer than the “client” work we’ve seen, as he follows his ideas for his own pleasure. “Tickle” is a recent post – a sort of poem-story (edited here) – about his violent and fearless transformation of an old piano, which had been left in the winery he turned into his studio: read more…
Joaquin Baldwin‘s beautiful little animated film is a reminder of how the creative process often works – in completely unexpected ways. We also love Baldwin’s story about how the film came to be:
“This film was inspired while driving back from a trip to Palm Springs, when my partner said that it must take them forever to plant and grow so many windmills. I wrote down the title The Windmill Farmer for an idea to explore later, and about a year later I started developing it into a character and story. This film took 4 months to complete from the first boards until the final mix.”
You never know where a simple idea might lead…
(Watching with the sound off is a completely different experience, which we recommend.)
We got an email from Manny Howard this morning about an improvised save for water-logged digital appliances (and a great general approach to take when the #$%!! is hitting the fan). We know Manny to be prone to minor disasters from his book My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm and love him for it, because he so forthrightly throws himself into things (as, it seems, do his kids):
“kids doused my iPhone with water the day before a 5-day work trip to southern France.
In a panic I called up my buddy Norman Vanamee (my best bud who I always turn to him for automotive clunker advice)…
…So the screen’s all mottled in some places, faded completely in others, the apps keep switching without my input. it shuts off and then comes back on occasionally. clearly digital cardiac arrest.
I asked Norm: So, do I go to apple store buy new phone in case this one dies while i’m on the road in France?
We love David Galbraith’s post about his search for EXACTLY where the World Wide Web got started. He spoke to visionary computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee who wrote the original proposal and early coding for “the global hypertext product that would allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext document”. If you enlarge the photo, above, you’ll see a tiny notation scribbled at the top of the proposal: “Vague but exciting”. That was in 1989, over twenty years ago.
It all took place in ordinary-looking surroundings at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. What’s curious and strangely charming is Berners Lee’s acute memory of the color of the linoleum on each floor of the building, which was not so ordinary after all… read more…
In 1996, when I was about to take an extended trip to Italy, Fred Plotkin’s Italy for the Gourmet Traveler was my guide. Plotkin, who had been traveling in Italy since 1973, forged the guide from years of passionate traveling, living and eating there – over 700 pages crammed with personal notations and insider views on wonderful restaurants, trattorias, coffee bars, farms, cooking schools, festivals, and markets. He is at his best with small towns and off-the-beaten path places, like the Mushroom Market in Trentino…
“In season this is the place to buy freshly picked mushrooms. If you have any fears, you can look for the police officer who is the designated mycologist on duty. This piazza also has orderly stands selling cheese, meats, fruits, vegetables, beans, honeys, and flowers.”
In Plotkin’s guide, you will find essential bits of history and architecture and opera, as well as terrific, insightful writing. His chapter on Napoli begins:
“Fasten your seat belts! One can stand absolutely still in Napoli and feel like a spinning top.”
The guide has been so good and so reliable that it has gone through several printings; an updated edition was just published by Kyle Books. Like its predecessors, it suffers from only one problem: it is heavy, a 3-pound brick of solid information, particularly daunting in these times of overweight-luggage fees. Unwilling to travel Italy without Fred’s book, I improvised a solution (and figured out how to hack a guidebook): read more…
. In four sentences, he totally nails what improvising is:
.)
was my guide. 
