Icons: The Albinsons

Albi and Don Albinson.  Image courtesy Bruce "Albi" Albinson.

Below, a vintage ad for Albinson's stacking chair.

Part 7 of a series of photos I will be posting (via Knoll) leading up to Fathers Day, which takes a more intimate look at the life of these design icons.

Special thanks to Elizabeth Mallory and Sarah McLellan.

RAW Gallery of Architecture & Design presents: Y_WG: The Quiet Influence

RAW Gallery of Architecture & Design presents Y_WG: The Quiet Influence. Curated by Craig Alun Smith, the exhibition (and forthcoming book) features an important collection of contemporary design by both emerging and established designers from the city of Winnipeg.

Excerpts from the curatorial essay:

Why Winnipeg? What is it about this place that fosters such a strong cultural community to flourish? How can a small Canadian city of only 700,000 inhabitants produce the likes of Neil Young, Marshall McLuhan, Gabrielle Roy, Lenny Breau, Guy Maddin, The Guess Who, Weakerthans, Carol Shields and Tyler Brûlé. The typical, “mytho-poetic” answer is that it has something to do with isolation and separation, a city on the vast open prairie landscape, alone at the centre of a cold continent. The myth tells of the remoteness and long harsh winters forcing the city’s inhabitants to band together for warmth and safety and somehow in this communal attachment, a great collective cultural conciseness is born. But that’s the myth, the one we tell because we don’t really know the truth. Could it be that the truth has just as much to do with broader interconnectivity? Winnipeg has always been a transportation hub, the gateway to the west. It has never truly been isolated. It is a city with a transient population; people come and go, we work and live in other cities but still call Winnipeg home, always maintaining a connection. Do these invisible connections allow the city to spread a tentacle like network out into the world connecting the city's cultural innovators to ex-pats and counterparts in major world centres? If it were simply a case of isolation creating great artists then Davis Inlet, Prince Rupert or Flin Flon would be the cultural capital of Canada.
......
Each generation of Winnipeg’s designers is forced to create its own path, to navigate on its own, to invent and reinvent itself over and over in order to move forward. We continually innovate, we continually create our own design language anew because with so few reference points to benchmark ourselves against we can not tell if we are failing or succeeding, Failure becomes irrelevant. We are always creating something new, our design vernacular continually shifts and we invent new languages based on our environment and understanding of place in the world. Winnipeg will always be on the periphery of the design world but this may be the advantage. Designers from established design centres such as Germany, Italy or Holland may have rich creative and cultural history on which to draw but this richness also forces them to design to specific languages in order to comply. German design and its functional, minimalist, Bauhaus-inspired aesthetic, Italian design, a balance between classical elegance and modern creativity, and Dutch design with its experimental, innovative, quirky, and humorous vocabulary – these are all national design identities but they are also limiting to some extent by the pressure to adhere to a specific design language. Canadian Designers and more specifically Winnipeg designers, have no such confinements. We can take inspiration from the outside world. We can take our inspiration from anywhere, and we do, because we have to, we have few reference points on the prairies. 

RAW Gallery of Architecture & Design is located at 290 McDermott Avenue.  The exhibition runs until February 16th.

Curated designers:
Roan Barrion
Ilana Ben-Ari
Michael Erdmann
Thomas Fougere 
Matthew Kroeker
Craig Alun Smith
Nils Vik

Competition winners:
Eduardo Aquino
Matt Barnlund
Ben Borley
Daniel Ellingsen
Stephen Grimmer
Evan Marnoch
Crystal Nykoluk
Zach Pauls
Claudine Perrott
Sean Radford
Renee Struthers

Many thanks to Jacqueline Young for these photos.

Icons: Domus pays tribute to Gae Aulenti

It is truly something special when one icon pays tribute to another. In this case, Gio Ponti's Domus pays a loving tribute to the late Gae Aulenti, one of Italy's most influential architects and designers of the past century:

From the many times her work graced the pages of Domus, we've chosen to republish two projects Aulenti designed for Olivetti in the 1960s. Beyond the virtuous association of the names Aulenti-Olivetti, the pieces republished today are especially enriched by a vivid photographic survey, where the interiors in Paris and Buenos Aires reveal a smiling, charming Gae Aulenti, exactly how we wish to remember her.

The article "The new Olivetti show-room in Paris" was originally published in Domus 452 / July 1967
The article "The new Olivetti shop in Buenos Aires" was originally published in Domus 466 / September 1968

My favorite feature is the design of the door handles in the Buenos Aires showroom. Each handle is a sculpted brass hemisphere, and when the doors close, the sphere completes.

See the full story with the project details here.

Icons/Creative Spaces: Irving Harper at Home: by Herman Miller

From Herman Miller's wonderful Why Design series, Irving Harper (formerly of George Nelson Associates) explains his passion for paper sculpting.

Classic Spaces: 1960: Hans G. Conrad: Braun: Frankfurt

Amazing vintage photos of Braun's Frankfurt office, circa 1960, taken by by Braun's exhibition designer/photographer/graphic designer Hans G. Conrad.

Via ReneSpitz

Bones Brigade's Rodney Mullen speaks at TED

Speaking on how context shapes creative content, Rodney Mullen has joined the illustrious ranks of TED presenters, which has included Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, educator Salman Khan, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners[5]. TED's current curator is the British former computer journalist and magazine publisher Chris Anderson.

From pedestrian:

Rodney Mullen, skater, human Inception token, stopped by the TED-xUSC event in Southern California last month to discuss how communities enrich the individual, skateboarding as a valid mode of expression, and why creative struggles can induce invention (in his case combining flatland with street skating). Then he attempts to explain what a darkslide is to guys who invent health algorithms. LOL. Generous, intelligent and very well articulated. 

From an article by Andrew Sayer at Push:

It's crazy that an eccentric skateboarder can now stand amongst these elite minds and not seem out of place in the least. Rodney deserves the praise.  "What do skateboarding and innovation have in common? More than you might think. A successful entrepreneur and innovator, Rodney Mullen is widely considered the most influential street skater in history, inventing most of the tricks used today. By the time he was 23, Mullen had already set new milestones for skateboarding winning 35 out of 36 freestyle competitions. He studied engineering at the University of Florida before co-founding World Industries, the largest skate company of the 90's, which was acquired for more than $20m. He continues to skate, innovate, and design some 30 years after he won his first world championship at the age of 11. Mullen spends his spare time thinking about open source communities, hacking the urban terrain, and transforming the mundane into something new. He'll be featured in the upcoming documentary, "The Bones Brigade: An Autobiography."

I Shot The Serif

Shoot the serif is a type nerd’s afternoon distraction.

Love it!

Via the worldsbestever.

Icons: Santa x John + Marilyn Neuhart

Marilyn Newhart recounts the story behind their giant Christmas card:

I had the bright idea to make a giant card for Christmas 1969. John was not noticeably enthusiastic but he went along with the idea, so I drew the Santa, cut some screens and John did the type. It took both of us to pull the squeegee because of the large amount of ink required for a poster of this size. That didn’t work very well, so I got behind John and held on to his belt while he gave a mighty pull. That made him even more unhappy. John rigged a clothesline to hang the wet sheets on. The fumes really built up after a bit so John opened the garage door, causing the sheets to blow into each other and get smudged. By this time he was openly hostile, and kept saying “Why didn’t you think of that?” We started with 150 sheets, a number that rapidly dwindled to our final edition of about 75. We were divorced at least six times during the process, which was normal for this type of project.

Via okgreat.

Have a great holidays everyone!

RB

Design Q+A with Charles Eames

A 1972 short film that expresses Charles Eames' approach to the design process. The questions and answers were the conceptual basis of the exhibition 'Qu'est ce que le design?' at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais de Louvre in 1972.

Timeless.

Via Porch Modern's facebook.

Girls Making Gun Sounds

For more well designed absurdity check out Girls Making Gun Sounds.

Via the world's best ever.

Interact: Welcome to Pine Point

"Imagine your home town never grew old. Would it be so bad?"

Click here for a beautifully produced, amazing interactive documentary that examines a town lost, but its memories never forgotten.

From NFB:

Some towns thrive and some towns fall to ruin, but a town that gets flattened to the ground and erased from the map altogether? That’s both highly unusual and exactly what happened to Pine Point, a Northwest Territories town that is the subject of a neat interactive project about memory and belonging recently launched on NFB/interactive, the Film Board’s interactive site.

The project, titled Welcome to Pine Point, was created by The Goggles (Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons), a Vancouver-based duo best known for its creative direction work at Adbusters magazine. Since its launch, the project has attracted much positive attention. Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland called it “totally brilliant”, “so thoughtful and so powerful”, while its score, penned by the Besnard Lakes received enthusiastic reviews.

Via lifetime and the globe and mail, thanks Mike for the link.

Help Japan Poster by Zac Neulieb

Incredible. $22.50 printed on semi-gloss photo paper, 100% donated. Buy it here.

via swiss miss.

Watch: A Preview of Gary Hustwit's Urbanized

A preview of the upcoming 3rd film, from the design trilogy that includes Helvetica and Objectified.

Watch: Live The Language

See the world and learn the lingo, in these beautiful commercials for EF Language Schools.
Directed by Gustav Johansson (gustavjohansson.com) 
D.P: Niklas Johansson, fsf (niklasjohansson.com)
Typography: Albin Holmqvist (albinholmqvist.com)
Music: Magnus Lidehäll (twitter.com/​magnusthemagnus)
Produced at Camp David (campdavidfilm.com)
Via charlie & lee