Design Tools

I picked this up at my local art supply shop. It's perfect. 7 bucks.

Pork Pie Hatters

Upon walking home tonight I passed a relative new comer to my neighborhood.

Pork Pie Hatters are just around the corner from me. I aspire to be cool enough to pull a hat off.




It's important to have local specialty shops. It is what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood.

from: www.porkpiehatters.com

Jean Prouve

Jean Prouvé is one of the greatest French designers of the 20th century. Working as a craftsman, designer, manufacturer, architect, teacher and engineer, his career spanned over sixty years. With remarkable elegance and economy of means, he designed prefabricated houses, building components and façades, as well as furniture for the home, office and school.
From his early days, Prouvé was apprenticed as an artist blacksmith, hammering and shaping red-hot wrought iron. He progressed to running a studio and then established his own factory at Maxéville, just outside Nancy, where he worked until 1953. Driven by the constant quest for innovation in process and use of materials, his bold, reduced forms were inspired by the sparse aesthetic of aircraft and automobile design. Prouvé believed in the power of design to make a better world. He fought for the French Résistance, ran his factory on socialist principles, and saw design as a moral issue.
Born in 1901, Prouvé came from an artistic home. His father, Victor Prouvé, a painter and sculptor, was a founding member of the Art Nouveau School of Nancy. While longing to be an engineer, financial constraints meant that at the age of 15 Prouvé was apprenticed to the artisan blacksmith Emile Robert in Paris and then with the firm of Szabo. In 1923 after his military service, Prouvé set up his own workshop in Nancy and took on commissions for ornamental and wrought-iron work, such as grilles, hand-rails and balconies. Aware of the limitations of these materials and methods and keen to embrace the modern movement, Prouvé started to work with new materials and processes: steel, aluminium and arc welding. In 1926, Prouvé installed Nancy’s first electric welding machine and by 1930, he was using a metal-folding machine to make his designs. In 1931 he founded Atelier Jean Prouvé and increasingly aware of avant-garde architects such as Le Corbusier and Robert Mallet-Stevens, Prouvé began to make metal furniture.
Prouvé designed sturdy but light-weight furniture from his earliest experiments in folded steel in the late 1920s. It became a core part of his business. By 1934 he had a commission for 800 pieces of office furniture for the headquarters of the Paris power company CPDE. This made Prouvé a serious contender in the market for mass-produced furniture. He avoided the domestic market, in favour of the public sector — local authorities and government bodies — in the growing areas of health, education and administration. It reflected a social ideal but, with its larger orders, also offered the economies of scale. One secondary school in Metz ordered 1000 items, including beds, chairs and desks. These successes led the company, in 1936, to produce a catalogue of standard models for hospitals, schools and offices.
The potential for mass production inspired Prouvé to develop and patent industrial products using folded sheet metal for the construction of buildings. These included movable partitioning, metal doors and lift cages. His ideas came to summation in 1937 in the Maison du Peuple, a social centre and covered market in one of Paris’ more radical suburbs.
The outbreak of World War II brought restrictions on the use of electricity and raw materials. Prouvé’s factory adapted, by producing a range of products responding to the crisis. His patent Pyrobal stoves could run on any fuel and he worked on emergency generators, bicycle frames and wooden furniture.
Prouvé was an active member of the French Résistance and after the liberation of France he was briefly appointed Mayor of Nancy. The war years and the age of austerity that followed marked a period of enforced experiment. Prouvé worked with wood when steel was in short supply, and by 1947 furniture accounted for a third of his business.
In 1947, Prouvé moved his operations to Maxéville, just outside Nancy and by 1953, the factory had over 200 employees. With its own design studio, Prouvé could combine research, prototype development and production on one site. It was at Maxéville that Prouvé set about fulfilling his ambitious plan to alter the building process from a craft-based practice to that of a mechanised industry. He not only produced houses, prefabricated huts, doors, windows, roof elements and façade panels but also set up a production line for furniture based on his own designs. At the same time he was continuously upgrading the machine-tools as well as the working procedures and conditions on the factory floor. As an employer Prouvé was equally conscientious providing his employees with supplementary insurance and paid holidays.
Prouvé created an atmosphere of community at Maxéville where worker participation was encouraged and research into new procedures and design were central. It was in this creative environment that the prefabricated refugee houses of 1945 and the flat-packed, tropical houses for Niger and the Republic of Congo in 1949 and 1950 were developed.
Prouvé lost control of the factory he established at Maxéville when his financial backer, Aluminium Français, took over in 1953. The loss was a huge emotional setback for Prouvé who had called himself ‘a factory man’, but it encouraged a new and fruitful phase in his creative development. Prouvé built himself a house using components salvaged from the factory. This unique house brought an end to the experimental phase in his career. From then on he stopped being a manufacturer and instead established a new business, Construction Jean Prouvé, that turned him into a designer.
It allowed him to realise some of his more elegant and technically ambitious projects, moving away from making components to designing more complex buildings. He was commissioned to design a pavilion on the banks of the river Seine, to celebrate the centenary of aluminium. He also designed an innovative spa building in Evian, and worked on housing, youth centres and schools that reflected his social values. It was also a period of creative collaborations with designers such as Charlotte Perriand. In 1952, they were commissioned to design the furniture for the student rooms at the Maison de la Tunisie and Maison du Mexique at the Cité Universitaire.
Construction Jean Prouvé was eventually taken over by CIMT, a maker of components for railway lines. Under Prouvé’s direction it became the leading manufacturer of light-weight curtain wall façades. When Prouvé left the business in 1966 he started a technical consultancy advising architecture on cladding design. This led to his work on the curtain wall façades of the Tour Nobel building in Paris’ La Défense and the development of the grid frame constructions used for petrol stations. In 1971 Prouvé chaired the architectural jury that chose Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers to design the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Prouvé’s approach to design and making was systematic. Both the design process and the look of his design were of equal interest to him. He produced flow charts for the factory at Maxéville. These showed exactly how materials and elements moved from one machine to another and how one procedure followed another, from the stocking of sheet metal, rubber and neoprene sections, right up to the product’s dispatch. Tools and materials were categorised by the making process: cutting, punching, bending, plating, stamping and welding. Also his frame-by-frame photographic documentation of each experimental building project allowed him to refine the product and its construction.
The same precision was applied later to his teaching. In 1957 Prouvé was asked to give weekly lectures at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métier in Paris. Always packed to capacity, Prouvé illustrated his ideas with a succession of drawings on the blackboard and argued that the root of creativity came from the practice of theories and not academic knowledge alone. Almost a thousand pages of his lecture notes survive.
Prouvé provided a forensic analysis of the design process. He traced the history of industrial production explaining the causes and effects of the technical evolution on machines and products, moving from the railways, to aircraft and the car industry. His teaching reflected his own experience and his conviction that industrial creation does not unfold in great leaps but through gradual modifications and careful adaptations.
Prouvé has become a legendary figure since his death in 1984. Many of his landmark buildings are now national monuments and his furniture and architectural elements, façades and buildings are sought by collectors.
His work, however, is not so easily categorised. He designed furniture and he also made it. He helped architects to realise their designs by designing and fabricating the façade systems that made them possible. He was certainly an architect, even though he never qualified. He was an entrepreneur and an enlightened factory owner.
Delighting in all things technical, Prouvé was tirelessly driven by the desire to find solutions through trial and testing. Always the team player, his lack of ego has won him huge support with many architects and designers working today. Richard Rogers and Norman Foster as well as Jean Nouvel see in his work intelligence and an understanding of the potential of materials as both construction and form that opened the way for high tech architecture with its structurally candid expression.
© Design Museum
from: http://designmuseum.org/design/jean-prouve

American Masters on PBS

December 20th, 2011
Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter

From 1941 to 1978, this husband-and-wife team brought unique talents to their partnership. He was an architect by training, she was a painter and sculptor. Together they are considered America’s most important and influential designers, whose work helped, literally, shape the second half of the 20th century and remains culturally vital and commercially popular today. They are, perhaps, best remembered for their mid-century modern furniture, built from novel materials like molded plywood, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, bent metal wire and aluminum – offering consumers beautiful, functional, yet inexpensive products. Revered for their designs and fascinating as individuals, Charles and Ray have risen to iconic status in American culture. But their influence on significant events and movements in American life – from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age – has been less widely understood. Charles and Ray Eames are now profiled as part of American Masters. A film by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey. Narrated by James Franco.

Watch the full program on the American Masters Web site. www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/charles-ray-eames-the-architect-and-the-painter/watch-the-full-documentary-film/1950/

AMERICAN MASTERS is made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding for American Masters is provided by Rosalind P. Walter, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Rolf and Elizabeth Rosenthal, Cheryl and Philip Milstein Family, Jack Rudin, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, Michael & Helen Schaffer Foundation, and public television viewers.

Vera Meat Christmas

I know I've posted about Vera Meat before, but I got my girlfriend done at birthday and Christmas from there this year. I love her stuff. The Hipo Shark and Scissor Hand are amazing.

Run From Fear, Fun From Rear

BRUCE NAUMAN

FORT WAYNE, INDIANA 1941

I think that the point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the same edge where poetry and art occur. (B. Nauman)

Nauman was born on December 6, 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He studied mathematics and music, then art, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and took a degree in Fine Arts at the University of California, Davis (1960-66). In 1964 he gave up painting to dedicate himself to sculpture, performance and cinema collaborations with William Allan and Robert Nelson. He grew interested in Samuel Beckett’s works, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and the musical experimentations of John Cage, Philip Glass, La Monte Young, Meredith Monk. Between 1966 and 1970 he made several videos, in which he used his body to explore the potentials of art and the role of the artist, and to investigate psychological states and behavioural codes. His production ranges from fibreglass sculptures or neon tubes to photography and drawing. He never developed a specific style, though, since he considered art as an activity or an action and not as a product. Nauman used irony and puns to reveal the ambiguous nature of language and to examine the way human beings communicate of fail to communicate. After his solo exhibition at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery of Los Angeles in 1966, he started a collaboration with gallery managers Leo Castelli in New York and Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf (1968). In 1968 he was invited to Documenta 4 in Kassel and, having received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he stayed in New York for a year. In 1972 he held his first solo show in a museum, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and by the Whitney Museum of American Art of New York. In 1979 he moved to a ranch near Galisteo, New Mexico, where he raised horses. The artist’s research until the mid-1980s was focused on psychological and physical conditions, and earned him several prizes and a new travelling exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis (1993-95). In 2001 he executed the installation Mapping the Studio, inspired by the daily life at his studio, while Setting a Good Corner took its cue from the everyday life at the ranch. After winning the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennial in 1999, in 2004 he received the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture. That same year for London’s Tate Modern he executed Raw Materials in which 22 spoken texts taken from existing works become a means to mould the acoustic space of the Turbine Hall. 29 historic works by Nauman have recently been restored thanks to the Preservation Program of the Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) of New York.

From: www.museomadre.it/bio_show.cfm?id=66

Lost Weekend NYC and Michael Halsband

Lost Weekend NYC in collaboration with Payal Arts International presents Michael Halsband: Surf. Opening reception will be held at Lost Weekend NYC on Thursday December 15th, 2011 from 6-9pm. This exhibition of photography captures the surfing communities of Southern California, Hawaii and Australia. Prints hang alongside Halsband's award winning surf documentary Surf Movie: reels 1-14 (2003). In The Surf Book (2004), Halsband's epic comprehensive survey of surf culture, he states:

"I grew up in Manhattan and, for as long as I can remember, I dreamed of being a surfer. I got my first taste when I was twelve years old, when my family was on vacation in South America. After years of coming close, I finally decided to start surfing full on. Little did I know that one day being a professional photographer would help bring me deep into the heart of surf culture and history. During the past four years, I have been accepted into this microcosm in a way that makes me feel as I have been surfing my whole life. The figure that made this possible is the legendary Joel Tudor. The adventure I have been on with him has exposed me to some of the people who have been crucial to the evolving technology and culture of surfing. I have sat, listened to, and photographed these individuals as they opened up with Joel in ways that they never would have with anyone else. There is a mutual respect between Joel and these individuals that is both deep and loving.”

Michael Halsband is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts. His photographic work includes iconic portraits of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, The School of American Ballet, and sex industry workers. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the world and has appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Interview, ARTnews, GQ, Vogue, Life, and Self, among other publications. Payal Arts International in New York City represents Michael Halsband. Connections, an exhibition of twenty gelatin silver prints of 8x10 portraits by Michael Halsband is simultaneously on view at The Mandarin's Tea Room in SoHo, New York.

Christmas Antlers

I made these antlers out of a head band, some wire hangars, and some thin galvanized wire. Holiday headdress complete.

School House Electric Origins

Schoolhouse Electric & Supply Co. from Schoolhouse Electric & Supply Co on Vimeo.

Vasque Sundowner

I am an Eagle Scout and a NOLS Grad. I've owned two pairs of hiking boots in my life. I still have both.

The first pair was made by a company called Scarpa, in Italy. They are crampon compatible and completely indestructible.

The second is a pair of Vasque Sundowners. Vasque is part of Red Wing. With all the hulabaloo about Red Wing, heritage, LL Bean and the like, I'm surprised I haven't heard more about Sundowners.

They are Gore Tex, sturdy enough to put a pack on, and comfortable enough to wear everyday, I do.