Mini-golf

Design collective La Bolleur have produced this beautiful minigolf course. Mocoloco report it is on its way to Milan next. Great work.

Tactile

Just found these extraordinary tactile maps by Inuit travellers. The wood carvings are representations of the East Greenland coastline, designed to be used at night or in low visibility.

(via)

Liz

Usually revisiting the music of my youth is not at all appealing. But a Spotify subscription has proved too tempting when it is so easy to search for half-forgotten sounds. In the case of The Cocteau Twins I have had their albums on the iPod - but not all of them, and not the EPs. So it was a joy to hear Those Eyes, That Mouth again, and listen to her newer collaborations with Yann Tiersen.

Liz Fraser still has the most extraordinary voice, and a visit to elizabethfraser.com reveals she is recording again - great news.

Hitchcock

This clever imagining of Hitchcock film posters is by Matt Needle. Bold and memorable work, (almost) to rival Saul Bass.

Clones

Brilliantly inventive work by artist Peter Funch. At first it's difficult to work out what he has done, but fairly quickly we can tell that there is some clever image manipulation. It offers a perceptive critique of city life by aggregating common themes, through which a typology of urban activity emerges.

Cartooning

Although he became famous (to me at least) through the LOLcats cartoons - his alleged 'discovery' of a 1920s source for the internet meme - Adam Koford has provided a constant stream of surreal, self-deprecating, sideways humour on Twitter. Always a joy. But here he is in illustrating action, mesmerising with penstrokes on a series of YouTube videos. Takes me back to the days of Vision On...

And find him on Twitter here.

Plans

For a long time it has seemed poor to feature interesting architecture in the media whilst assuming that the public would be 'confused' by floorplans.

So it was a pleasant surprise to find that Wallpaper has been publishing interactive drawings for some time, allowing you to alternate between an orthogonal drawing and photographs of the building concerned. It makes for an easier understanding of the project, whether you're an architect or not. Well done everyone.

Layering

Manhattan Transformations provides a visualisation of urban development on Manhattan Island. The highlight is the layered map, with the original settlements and farm patterns. It is limited in scale and scope, which is a shame as there is some interesting research within.

Games

Think of street games, and images of hopscotch and kerb-ball spring to mind. Using large-scale light projections and interactive techniques, KMA are bringing a new type of street game to cities across Europe.

My reservation is that it seems simply to project onto a plain surface. More innovative would be to use augmented reality techniques. In this version, real elements of the streetscape would be activated by interacting with sensors and projectors. In so doing, it would supplement the function of, say, a parkbench so that it became part of a winning move in a game, or a handrail as a defence.

Link here to UK events, but see earlier post on building projections.

Crutch

It seems a shame that a tabletop has two sides, but only one ever gets used. The ability to use both sides of a tabletop opens up many possibilities: the sides could have differing laminates, one could be wipeable, one could be 'Sunday best', and so on. A clever concept, called 'Crutch' uses a standard 'leg' and staps to create a stable surface. It should also be possible to use non-regular shapes, I guess.

Design by NicolaFromBern.

Update: Another variation on the theme here.

Wes

Just spotted this graphic project for Wes Anderson's Film Festival this year. Some of it is a little self-consciously whimsical (much like his films, actually), but there are some really fun ideas in there. Find it referred to at Behance, here.

GUI

A breathtaking yet gimmick-free re-imagining of the computer user interface by R Clayton Miller, all lovingly explained in this video. It's long, but worth watching in full for a glimpse of what we can hope is our mouseless future. Fingers at the ready - all of them.

(via)

Projection

OM Ungers remixed in a simply jawdropping architectural projection. It's surely what pixellated cubic postmodernism was invented for.

(via)

Bump

Our bodies don't change shape quickly - usually. So a dress that accommodates the relatively rapid change in body shape driven by pregnancy seems like an interesting design challenge. Marisol Rodriguez has designed a range of dresses called 'Skin' which allow the wearer to expand by having slits and pleats. Colour is revealed as the outer skin opens.

(via)

Post-war

As a former resident of a GKC building (albeit for just under a week, aged 0), I was sad to learn this Civic Trust Award winning building had been demolished. Add to this that I spent four years living in an Edinburgh towerblock has led to an affection for post-war Scottish architecture. Nice to see ILike provide a link to Historic Scotland's PDF guide to the genre.

The image here is of Langlee Housing Estate, Galashiels by Wheeler and Sproson from 1967 - crisp primary forms with asymmetric facade compositions which could be mistaken for something more recent.

Emptiness

Architectural representations of a particularly spare kind in the work of Khedoori, quoted in butdoesitfloat. Like Rossi's work, there is latent the invitation to populate the space, as though people will begin to give purpose to their chilly emptiness.

Sketch

Sketching has always seemed to me as much about slowing down my thinking as representing an idea. The question posed by a new computer interface posted here is whether it helps us think slowly and creatively in the same way as a pencil and paper. The demonstration of 'ILoveSketch' is obviously designed to show off its NURBS capabilities, featuring an excessively curvy building. Impressive, as long as it can do square things just as well.

(via)

Chairs

So many chairs, so little money. My favourite of many, the Lola, is featured in the beautiful joint detail shown here.

(via)

The Auteurs

Lovefilm is my rental service of choice, having supplied me with nearly 400 films over the last 5 years. New to the scene (to me at least) is The Auteurs, which focuses on the obscure and the cult, streamed online. Each is £3.00, though there seems to be only a limited selection of about 20 movies at any given time. It certainly seems worth a try - if only for those moments when there is nothing on TV, but there is an urgent need for some quality viewing.

It can be found here.

Inside

A gripping five minutes from the mind of Trevor Sands, directing a short film called 'Inside'. Recommended.