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Tastemakers >> Badgley Mischka
Still seriously loving the Kentucky home of Mark Badgley and James Mischka, as photographed for Elle Decor.
This photo above always gets me, I like pretty much every element… the color-coordinated cookbooks + hanging pots and pans + white subway tile + high-contrast countertop + brass drawer hardware.
Lots of my favorite things for a dining room– built-in bookshelves, cozy size, dark walls… Interesting that the books on the bookshelves provide almost the only color throughout the house.
Notice that the house has almost no color (other than the books on the bookshelves)– they make great use of contrasting whites and black and warm it up with lots of wood tones and shades of leather. Also no patterns other than plaid! Sounds like it would be severe but it’s not!
Love this bedroom.
The walls of most of the rooms Sherwin Williams Modern Gray, according to the article in Elle Decor.
Badgley is actually a serious horse-person, so they fully refurbished the barn and riding ring for his two show-horses, Brando and Cooper, so named “because they are so good-looking.” Ha!
[original Elle Decor article online here]
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Obsession: Theo Jansen.
You MUST watch this video. It’s very short, and it will add a lot of wonderment to your day. I’m enthralled.
Theo Jansen explores the boundaries between art and engineering, creating these “kinetic sculptures.”
These “animals” move. Or I should say, they walk. They’re wind-powered. It’s amazing. They look like a cross between an exoskeleton and an erector set, which is basically what they are, and then they start moving and they become so anthropomorphic, you wonder if they’re alive in some way.
Many of his creatures are so “evolved” that they are now capable of “living” on the beaches on their won– the wind powers their “walking,” and they have sensors that tell them to stop and turn around when they hit either water or dry sand, keeping them permanently on the wet sand.
They even have sensors that tell them when a storm is coming, and their “brain” tells them to start pounding a stake into the ground so they don’t fall over in the storm.
Can you imagine having a brain that dreamed up stuff like this?
In the video above, you see the “rhinoceros”-like sculpture walking.
If you want to learn even more about Jansen and his work, click here for a ten minute video presentation by Jansen that shows more animals walking and an explanation of how they work.
It’s also extremely interesting to hear how he talks about the animals– he doesn’t discuss them as art, or really as machines or product prototypes either– he talks about them as though they are animals that he is looking after, and he doesn’t seem to feel any need to explain the “purpose” of them, which I think is an amazing insight into the brain of someone this creative.
I think that science and art are going to continue to merge in this way, in the minds of people like Jansen who are capable of seeing their relation to each other, and have a desire to explore their intersection without the desire to make a practical product or advancement in technology. While in art, it seems sometimes that “we’ve seen it all,” and there’s nothing new under the sun, science is continually evolving and pushing boundaries in material ways, and through the integration of science and art, art could do the same.
via Uppercase
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I Love Maps >> I’M DYING THIS IS SO AMAZING
THIS IS A REAL MAP. I saw this and thought someone had painted something pretty on top of an old map.
Not so, which means this might be the most amazing map I’ve ever seen.
In the early 1940s, the Army Corps of Engineers commissioned a guy named Harold Fisk to make a map of the various courses the Mississippi River has taken over time. He showed each course in a different color, to show when and how they happened. This is the result.
Just goes to show, the representation of practical information can be executed in a way that is also aesthetically pleasing.
I feel like I could look at these forever. I’ve searched and searched and I’m pretty sure you can’t buy any prints (original or reproduced) of this, but I wish you could*! I would frame a whole bunch and hang them on my wall!
(*If anyone can find any originals and would like to give them to me, it would be like the coolest gift eveerrrr, just sayin)
Rivers are constantly in flux, as they erode banks and make deeper curves (or “meanders”), until the meanders become so meandering that the two sides of the curve almost touch. At this point, the river cuts off the curve and so that it has a straight path again, and it leaves an oxbow lake behind.
Here’s a detail:
When all the pages, each showing a different section, of his study are fit together, they form this long continuous path of the Mississippi. I can’t get the image to load any larger, but it looks really cool when it’s shown as the same width as the pages above.
THE ALLUVIAL VALLEY OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI RIVER
Harold Fisk, 1944
via Pixels & Arrows
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Spike Jonze: “How They Get There”
An amazing short by Spike Jonze of only 2 minutes and 26 seconds.
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Treehouses
Love these incredible treehouses…
Aren’t they the fulfillment of all your childhood tree house daydreams?
Maybe my favorite interior shot from the book– love that the tree is coming through the wall, the cozy built-in nook, the bookshelf, the totally simple cushion and pillows…
Click the jump for more treehouses….
Another great looking built-in sofa… those pillows and the cushion in the simple ticking stripe look perfectly casual and comfortable.
A super posh one!! It has a chandelier!
Love the awning windows on this one, and the gingham pillows.
All images from the book Exceptional Treehouses.
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Wonderment for your Monday
Loving this project…
French journalist, environmentalist, and photographer Yann Arthus Bertrand started an image bank called Altitude Agency, for which he commissioned and assembled over 500,000 aerial photographs of the earth.
Then, alongside UNESCO World Heritage, he gathered the most beautiful images into a project called The Earth From Above (la Terre vue de ciel).
This one is a shot of an underwater plant that is only visible
when a certain tide changes the water level in the Loire River.
These images were put into a book with the same name, and they were additionally shown in numerous free exhibits, in which the images were printed on giant posters and hung in public places like on the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. I love that the public got to see them…
A wonderful reminder of how incredibly beautiful our world is…
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LustList >> Wrapped Up in a Book(shelf) – Pt. II
More of one of my favorite things– bookshelves wrapping over things… doorways, sofas, etc.
Portsea Place on Beach Studios
Now this is interesting — this is the same room that I posted in the last post on this subject, but now the walls are this olivey green-brown! They are white in the other one! Totally changes the room. By Courtney Giles.
Paris apartment of photographer Marie-Pierre Morel by architect Francoise Muracciole
Pol Theis’s Manhattan loft
love the ladders above and below..
Part I here.
