WO.ONDR°

Moss Table Adds a Micro-Landscape to Your Living Room | Inhabitat

I want.

hongjun zhou and lu xiong: hermit mountains skyscraper

Like nothing I’ve seen before.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann /via today and tomorrow

Nicolas Moulin /via VULGARE

Daniel Arsham /via VULGARE

Joanna Newsom / Does Not Suffice

Joanna Newsom. Quite likely among my favourite albums for the year. Very atypical song structures, it seems like this woman just sings and sings and the music changes its mood and intensity according to what and when she’s singing. Awesome.

Summer Wars. Caught this excellent excellent anime yesterday. Love how the imaginative and poignant plot weaves heavily localised culture and context into a futuristic ubiquitous virtual dimension. The boundless limits of the ‘virtual world’ is rendered in a spectacular display of technical extravaganza, an eye feast.

Submerged town in Venezuela reemerged after severe drought.

Effing Typeface by Alex Merto. Made me laugh. /via Fubiz™

Found Functions | Fubiz™

Maths meets photography meets nature. Brilliant.

American mathematician and photographer Nikki Graziano who combines in his photographs the shapes and configurations describing them as equations.

Graphic Design by Andreas Hidber /via Looks like good design

map office: harmoney

The ‘harmoney’ project by map office explores how social values can be reflected in monetary designs. The concept of the project is based on the idea of ‘har’ which stands for human accelerated region. It is an hierarchical index of the various aspects of society and the importance they carry to the country. […] The project provides an alternative to the conventional capitalist views in which we graphically give value to money.

Added to my wantlist: Molecover - Cover for moleskine. /via Design Milk

Bathers, Yibin, Sichuan by Nadav Kander (Prix Pictet 2009 Winner) /via Prix Pictet

Graphic Design / Infographic by Michael Henderson /via the Behance Network

Beach House / Silver Soul

More dreaminess.

Beach House / 10 Mile Stereo

Pitchfork:

[…] the song shifts from its deliberate opening bars to its rushing and noisy main section that’s as close as Beach House have come to true shoegaze. The gorgeous racket is affixed to a song about feeling dead inside after another failed relationship: “Limbs parallel/ We stood so long, we fell.”

Dreamy.

katsuhiro miyamoto architects: residence renovation in osaka

So intriguing. Can only be the Japanese.

4of7 architecture: pediatric clinic, east africa

Love low-fi architecture, love low-fi rendering.

YWFT Typeface Selection on the Behance Network

Metrobowl by Frederick Roije /via designboom

Painting by Paco Pomet /via BOOOOOOOM!

Illustration by Zarik Ahuir /via Behance Network

Cities, Roads & Factories - Illustration by Loulou & Tummie /via the Behance Network

lifebetweenbuildings:

Hua Qiang Bei Road
Work AC
/via ArchDaily

I’ve been hoping to see something like that. Looks exciting.

Graphic Design Portfolio by Jessica Walsh / via Looks like good design

Owen Pallett / Lewis Takes Action

Pitchfork:

The most immediate track here, “Lewis Takes Action”, has Pallett singing grand, anthemic hooks, but the parts you’re most likely to wind up humming are the stately brass and woodwind figures between them— the amount of care and pleasure in these arrangements is extremely generous.

ecar / cammmpo:

Ningbo Historic Museum / Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio | ArchDaily

Fucking stunning. Fucking refreshing departure from all the glass and steel. This renews my hope for architecture of today.

Tree House | Fubiz™

Curious Tree House by Robert Harvey Oshatz. I’m not too sure about the form, but it’s good to see architecture that is not blindly in fashion. Wonderful setting though.

Architecture Office by Selgas Cano Architects. Why don’t our offices look like this? #5 /via 2modern

Amazing short film Drift by Mustard Cuffins composed of digital stills using stop motion animation technique, giving the city spaces a kind of ghostly dreamlike feel. /via Changethethought

“I drift, half awake, half asleep.
Moving through the city I recall
but have never been to.”

Jacket+Bookmark /via swissmiss

Bungoma Housing Project by Samantha Kollmeyer + Kit Kollmeyer /via ArchDaily

There’s something really nice and low-fi about this rendering as opposed to the hyper-realistic ones screaming and shouting for attention that we see all too often these days.

Gigantic Mexican Megacrystals Created by Climate Change | Inhabitat

Incredible photo of the day.

The White Balance Lens Cap. I want. / via swissmiss

The White Balance Lens Cap leaves you no excuse for not properly white-balancing every situation you encounter. Simply flip your camera into custom White Balance mode, snap a photo with your White Balance Lens Cap on, and your camera creates a perfect profile of the actual lighting in front of you. Best of all, unlike a gray card, the White Balance Cap takes no extra room in your gear bag. Just replace your existing lens cap with this one and you’ll always be able to white balance with no additional equipment.

Pointing Finger Bookmark. I want. /via swissmiss

Floating Mega Arcology for Boston’s Harbor /via Inhabitat

No amount of LEED standards, green spaces or fancy terms - “arcology” i.e. architecture + ecology - will justify this out-of-context, out-of-proportion monstrous eyesore.

Vampire Weekend / Run

Vampire Weekend starts my 2010 in music.

‘Hunger’ by Lex Drewinski, 1999. Very clever. /via designboom

I had the luck and opportunity to visit this private residence in 2005 - thanks to my design tutor who happens to have authored various books on the late Sri Lankan Architect Geoffrey Bawa - widely regardly as one of the architect’s best works and a pilgrimage of sorts for Architects working in the tropics.

It’s not hard to understand why. Located in a fairly busy district in Colombo, entering the threshold of the house via richly ornamental double-doors presents a whole world of difference and experience. Seemingly simple, Bawa’s famed intricate courtyards are best demonstrated in this small but highly sophisticated house.

Living rooms i.e. the communal spaces are on the first level, surrounding and flowing into the main courtyard which frames a gorgeous frangipani tree (if I am not mistaken) in a lushly landscaped garden. Walking through the spaces, we were surprised by a series of other small courtyards, creating endless vistas and visual interests within a tiny space. Outdoor and indoor spaces are seamless, the outsides flowing into the insides and vice versa.

Which is why the following comment on my flickr photo page came as a great shock:

This house has already been demolished…what we have is just nice memories that i will greatly cherished.

Googling, expectedly, reveals little except a few dated articles pleading the halt to demolish this masterpiece to make way for a, carpark (!?!?!). If this is true, it would be of such a great loss not only to Bawa’s legacy but also as an emblem of tropical architecture. / Flickr Photo Sets 1 / 2

Qube Calendar by Qube Studio. I want one! /via the Behance Network

Amazing painting (note the water) by Alyssa Monks / via Looks Like Good Design

Montage by Architect Daniel Meridor

LEBBEUS WOODS:

Daniel Meridor’s montages place us somewhere between hope and despair. Paused in time, we cannot be sure whether events are moving from a troubled world towards a more harmonious, serene one or the other way around. Or, whether he is depicting a world in which progress and decay, as well as technology and nature, coexist in a fragile, uncertain balance.

My new walnut wood iPhone case from Vers has been quite the conversation-starter. I’m not sure if it’s due to its sheer bulk or that it stands out from the drones of polycarbonates. Understandably, it’s not veneer but solid wood, hence sturdiness at the expense of slimness.

And it’s not without design flaws too. The camera hole is misaligned so I get an unintentional vignette, but only on two corners. And a critical one: no access to volume control and silent switch, though I could partially work around with a jailbroken device.

Despite the shortfalls, I find myself growing to like it. There’s nothing like having hand-crafted wood in your pocket that the mass-produced plastics could match. Besides, it does satisfy that treehugger ego a bit.

Alphabet City by Scott Teplin