House of Mirrors by Harumi Yukutake

Back in 2009, during Japan’s biggest open-air art festival, called Echigo-Tsumari , artist Harumi Yukutake constructed a magical-looking house covered with thousands of round mirrors. After walking along a narrow path surrounded by grass on both sides, visitors would come upon this house that seemed to merge with its surroundings, making the border between reality and unreality unclear.

Each mirror was unique because it was hand cut by the artist. According to Guardian , the house, called Restructure, “had no back wall, just a space opening onto a view of the fields, reflected endlessly in the thousands of mirrors that lined the inside walls.”

http://yukutske.net/index.htm

via http://m.mymodernmet.com/

EAMES: The Architect and the Painter

EAMES: The Architect and the Painter is a documentary film that chronicles the lives of prolific American designers, Charles and Ray Eames. 

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life — from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age — has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: The Architect and the Painter is the first film dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work.

via core77 + laughing squid

image via Eames Office, LLC

herman miller | eames

at netflix

to purchase the dvd go here:
http://firstrunfeatures.com/eamesdvd.html

Farmland World

::Farmland World::

The nature of farming is forever changed. 

Farming is a practice that by it’s own nature unites humans, technology and animals in productive combinations. Hybrids and various mutant bio-mechanical mixtures—Caterpillar combines, John Deere tractors, etc.—began transforming the rural landscape of America beginning in the early 20th century by subjugating the pastoral ideal to the ingenuity of human invention. From utilitarian machinery, to show piece display, both farm animals and machines express a range of complex personalities. Which poses the question: can these overlaps and mutable identities expand to contend with the various crises the farm industry is facing today?

Farmland World is a chain of agro-tourist resorts sprinkled across the American Midwestern countryside. Part theme park and part working farm, guests arrive to the resort via train and stay as part of 1-day, 3-day or 5-day experience packages. Capitalizing on both recent investments in high-speed rail infrastructure and the plentiful subsidies for farming, the network of resorts combines crowd-sourced farm labor with eco-tainment. Guests perform daily chores as self-imposed distractions from the toil of their daily lives. Among the countless activities offered, guests can choose to ride the Animal Farmatures, the dual natured farm implements that complete traditional farm tasks while performing grand rural-techno spectacles. When its time to leave for home, guests climb back into the train, weary and satisfied from their labors as they marvel at the passing landscape they helped transform.

Year: 2011
Location: Middle America
Team: Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer with Kitty Bayer and Hugh Swiatek

Design With Company

via BLDG BLOG + Animal Architecture

 

Kevin Appel

Kevin Appel

via booooooom

Architectural Digest Visits Willem de Kooning (1982)

In the early 1960s Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning and his wife, Elaine, also an artist, decided to move to East Hampton, New York, where they had on occasion been weekend guests of Jackson Pollock. Near an unfinished painting in the studio, Elaine and Willem de Kooning relax in rocking chairs.

The unpretentious exterior of the studio/home blends effortlessly into the countryside.

Eames chairs provide seating in the living room, and pre-Columbian figures fill the shelves. The paper unicorn on the left is by Willem’s daughter, Lisa, an art student, as is the sculpture of a mother and child next to the large piece of rock crystal.

Another view of the studio reveals the wall of glass, with its north light.

The easel on the left, holding a work in progress, is propped up by two oil cans, a “temporary” measure unchanged since 1963.

De Kooning’s paints, brushes, and canvases in the studio.

The studio interior glows in the night.

 

Architectural Digest

Text by Joan Tyor Carlson/Photography by Jaime Ardiles-Arce

Published January 1982

Read more

 

Tokujin Yoshioka

Tokujin Yoshioka

via Sachiko + Memory + Venus

Anti-Flat: Paintings by Gerry Judah

Artist Gerry Judah‘s paintings are massively and aggressively three-dimensional, piling up, away, and out from the canvas to form linked cities, ruins, and debris-encrusted bridges, like reefs. 

They are perhaps what a tectonic collaboration between Lebbeus Woods and Jackson Pollock might produce: blasted and collapsing landscapes so covered in white it’s as if nuclear winter has set in.

See the full gallery on Posterous

As the short film included below makes clear, Judah embeds entire architectural models in each piece, affixing small constellations of buildings to the canvas before beginning a kind of archaeological onslaught: layering paint on top of paint, raining strata down for days to seal the landscape in place and make it ready for wall-mounting. 

Gerry Judah

via BLDG BLOG

ISS Eye: Earth’s Tallest Man-Made Structure from Space

via dailygalaxy.com

The 828 meter, 160-story Burj Khalifa skyscraper towers above downtown Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. in an image taken earlier this year by GeoEye 1, the highest resolution satellite in operation. The skyscraper is the tallest structure ever built, taking six years, 39,000 tons of reinforced steel, 330,000 cubic metres of concrete and 22 million man-hours to complete. GeoEye 1 orbits 684 kilometres above the Earth’s surface providing images exclusively for Google Earth and Google Maps applications.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/index.html

Matthias Heiderich

http://www.flickr.com/photos/weirdandwired/5206793250/

Matthias Heiderich

Flickr

WeirdandWired Netlabel

Previous posts featuring Matthias

Charles Eames playing with The Toy

Charles Eames spinning new toy of colored cardboard sections which are easily joined by a child to form odd shapes.

Location:	US
Date taken:	August 1950
Photographer:	Peter Stackpole

via Reference Library | LIFE