Best new blog in 2010 already? Star Wars Modern is pretty great. (via AFC and greg.org)
“Architecture and footwear are similar in that the construction houses people and carries people. If you think about a high-heeled United Nude shoe, it carries a human being (the wearer) and houses part of her person (the foot). Because of the smaller scale, a shoe is more mobile, while most architecture remains stationary.” – Rem D. Koolhaas, shoe designer and architect and nephew of the creator of the greatest building this decade. His “porn toe” shoes are my obsession, much more comfortable then they look. He adds, “women’s footwear you can make a lot of women happy with your products, whereas in traditional architecture you are working with one client for several years. I guess making many women happy is part of the reason I’ve become a shoe designer—and it’s part of the fun that sets shoe design apart from architecture.” Perhaps that also explains Zaha Hadid’s collaboration with the Brazilian plastic shoe house Melissa. Silver in size 41, please.
101 year old Oscar Niemeyer has returned to work just weeks after surgery for gallstones and an intestinal tumour. What is your excuse?
“Rather than some authentic, uncomplicated, unplanned response to ordinary people’s desires, London’s suburbia was the product of both planning and speculation, heavily mediated, and marketed using an impressive degree of subterfuge.” – Owen Hatherley visits the “Suburbia” exhibition at the London Transport Museum… “The exhibition alludes to the fact that London’s private transport companies were the sponsors and often the creators of suburbia, extending their lines into open country, promoting the glories of the countryside, and then developing it out of existence.”
The winners of LIVE FOREVER The Michael Jackson Monument Competition. I’d like to go to Foreverland…
“In April, I gave 13 UW graduate students a simple challenge: make an exhibit that gets strangers to talk to each other. 10 weeks, $300, and a whole lot of post-it notes later, they succeeded.” – Nina Simon at Museum 2.0. More on bathroom wall annotation and going places alone.
Behold the romantic promise of glass bottom floors: Skydeck Chicago. Not the sort of person who would ever go on cruises or stay in resorts, but I always looked at photos of that hotel in Bora Bora longingly
Allison Arieff looks at the ideas of inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner Steven M. Johnson. I like the “treadarounds.” He’s a prefab visionary, “a sort of R. Crumb meets R. Buckminster Fuller.”
MPs plan to let artists take over empty shops to prevent ghost towns (via.)
The Stoke-On-Trent school system purchased a retired 36-seat commuter plane. Now they are converting it into a working classroom elementary school students. It is “the UK’s first aircraft based classroom for primary school pupils.
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A collection of interesting ideas curated by
Joanne McNeil. About ➚
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