Category archive: architecture

February 20, 2017

Bambinooo By Cucula: Enzo Mari X Refugee Colabo

In late 2013, some designers in Berlin teamed up to help refugees who'd fled war in Northern Africa get settled and productive in their new home. Legally restricted from working as wage-earning employees, the refugees and designers formed Cucula,...
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January 19, 2017

Assemble Also Does Adventure Playgrounds

Baltic Street Adventure Playground, image: Assemble You may know Assemble from their winning the Turner Prize. Or from their The Brutalist Playground made out of foam. But did you know they also make adventure playgrounds? In 2014 the architecture...
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The Brutalist Playground Open At Vitra Design Museum

The Brutalist Playground installation shot from S1 Artspace, photo:alan bull In 2015 artist Simon Terrill and the architecture collective known as Assemble was commissioned to make "The Brutalist Playground," an exhibition/installation of lost, Brutalist playgrounds made out of foam,...
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December 7, 2016

Isamu Noguchi Mega-Playscape Pilgrimage

Speaking of amazing Japanese playgrounds, there is nothing that tops Moerenuma, the vast, last project by Isamu Noguchi, the 400-acre park in Sapporo which was only completed in 2005, after his death. Moerenuma gets 750,000-850,000 visitors a year, but...
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January 1, 2016

Mid-Century Kids Sofa & Table By Sim Bruce Richards

Sim Bruce Richards was a San Diego modern architect who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright, and who designed this sweet kid-sized sofa and table, probably in the fifties? The table has a "milk-retaining edge," but given the unmarred finish,...
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August 3, 2015

Anthony Caro Sculptowers

Anthony Caro, Child's Tower Room, 1983-84, image: anthonycaro.org Relentlessly experimental British sculptor Anthony Caro was interested to make a sculpture that was also architecture, and a sculpture that had no inside or outside. And so in 1983-4, he made...
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June 11, 2015

Pourquoi Pas? Make A Barbapapa House

Barbapapa, the iconic and friendly French Jabba The Hutt, lives with all his ancillary characters in some kind of Pierre Cardin-lookin' bubblehouse. Which you can buy, but why would you, when you can make your own Barbapapa house out...
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April 20, 2015

Housing Bubble, Or La Bulle Pirate

It's 1970, you're 23, living in a studio in the suburbs of Geneva with your wife, your applications for larger apartments are thrown in the garbage because of a citywide housing crisis, and your kid's on the way. What...
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March 29, 2015

Herman Miller Hugs Self For Repainting Noguchi Playground

I'm glad it finally got built, and that it's being taken care of, and I'm a fan of Isamu Noguchi no matter what, but I've kind of lost interest in his Atlanta playground as a playground. It just doesn't...
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March 24, 2015

Les Carrats Kids Furniture By Georges Candilis & Anja Blomstedt

I'd kind of given up hope, but one of my favorite design/inspiration blogs an ambitious project collapsing is back in the swing again. It's great. And one of Andrew's new finds: kids resort furniture by the French architect Georges...
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March 21, 2015

It Buys A Village

Here is a real estate project that must happen. 1. First is the utterly amazing yet apocalyptic story in the NY Times about kids shopping for their families' seven- and eight-figure real estate. The headline, "When the 13-Year-Old Picks a...
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March 9, 2015

Plywood Kids Pod By Mihaly Slocombe

Dezeen has pics of a sweet new bedroom addition Melbourne-based architects Mihaly Slocombe made to a low-slung, rammed earth house they built eight years ago in a retired couple's vineyard. Called the Kid Pod, it's "for future grandchildren," which,...
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February 18, 2015

Arman Dollhouse

The French artist Arman first received critical attention in the late 1950s for his Accumulations and Poubelle works, in which he stuffed plexiglass vitrines with as many identical objects or garbage as he could fit, respectively. Violins, mussel shells,...
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December 16, 2014

OG Craig Ellwood Bunk Beds

In 1955-7, Jerrold Lomax, working at Craig Ellwood's architecture firm, designed basically the greatest Southern California modernist beach house ever: the 2BR, 1,350-sq ft Hunt House in Malibu. Ellwood's firm also designed the amazing bunk beds seen above, in...
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December 12, 2014

Labours Of Love And Plywood Floors At Wilton House

Sometimes one cannot improve on the copy one is presented with, and so one just runs with it:Few boys get to play with their model train set surrounded by exquisite hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, but that was the backdrop for...
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December 5, 2014

We Were Promised Unisex Unitards

Parents Magazine, July 1970, via alexandra lange for saturatedspace As part of her tireless mission to lead our culture out of the Pink & Purple Is For Girls wilderness, Alexandra Lange has written an essay on the historical shifts...
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December 2, 2014

Tiny Female Architect Count At Tiny Modernism

Archinect is running a giveaway for Tiny Modernism, the architecture-themed onesie sublabel of Alex & Kaori Walter's Belly Sesame kids clothing collection. To win, all you need to do is, by Dec. 8, "tell us which dream combination of...
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October 22, 2014

Snohetta Dollhouse, For SFMOMA

The Norwegians-in-Brooklyn architecutre firm Snohetta are doing the new SFMOMA building. So when the museum leaned on them to donate work to a fundraising auction last year, they put up a dollhouse. It is an insane, psychedelic wunderkammer of...
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September 24, 2014

Richard Neutra Bunkbeds Are Back In Stock

Kids! They just keep growing up. The bunkbeds Richard Neutra designed in 1959 for the Singleton House in Bel-Air, which got ripped out by Vidal Sassoon's upgrade-mad wife, and sold in 2009, have apparently been outgrown, and are heading...
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July 24, 2014

Williamsburg Needs This Sleek Preschool

This gorgeous glass & wood preschool by Christoff : Finio is proposed for the corner of Driggs Ave & Fillmore Place, the only landmarked block in Williamsburg. Fortunately, the scale and design are nice, and the site is a...
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May 22, 2014

Goodnight Moderne: 1930 Ideal Home Exhibition Nursery

The Ideal Home Exhibition was an annual home tour run in the UK by the Daily Mail. In 1930, their concept for an ideal nursery included a Fritz Lang nanny sitting in a chunky, moderne-style chair, with fake Warren...
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April 18, 2014

WHOA, Edward Durell Stone Kids Furniture Exists

Architect Edward Durell Stone designed MoMA, the Kennedy Center, and the house next door to us on the Upper East Side, but I had no idea he ever designed kids furniture. Yet here some is. In 1969 Stone built...
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April 14, 2014

Peter Pearce Curved Space Diamond Structure, aka The Hakone Soap Bubble Castle

A couple of months of Throwback Thursdays ago Johnson Trading Gallery posted these photos to their Instagram. It's a wacked out biomorphic geodesic Habitrail of a jungle gym playground pod whatzit structure they bought on eBay. [And apparently flipped...
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February 13, 2014

Modern Primitives Baby Chair By Aranda\Lasch

Looking around Johnson Trading Gallery for something slightly less utilitarian than $20,000 plywood bookcase sculptures, I found this: the Modern Primitives Baby Chair by Aranda\Lasch. The New York-based architecture practice produced the Modern Primitives series in collaboration with Fendi...
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December 27, 2013

War-Ravaged England Builds Giant Dollhouse For Queen

Sometimes England is so weird. Like the time the whole place was devastated and dejected and injured and dead in the wake of World War I, and Princess Marie-Louise thought building a huge dollhouse for Queen Mary filled with...
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December 26, 2013

The Bank, By Superflex And The Residents Of Sharjah, UAE

It's Things I Really Want To Post Before The End Of The Year Week here at DT, starting with The Bank. The Danish artist collective Superflex contributed one of the most thoughtful installations for this year's Sharjah Art Biennial....
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October 16, 2013

Susie's Pavilion, Or Rory Hyde's Folly Playhouse

Designing a house for your parents used to be a going-solo architect's rite of passage. Now post-architects build playhouses at their parents for their kids. At least that's my theory about young alt-architect Australian Rory Hyde, whose new book...
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October 11, 2013

[St]architects Make Elaborate Dollhouses For KIDS Fundraiser

KIDS, a British charity helping disabled kids and their families, has rallied 20 architects and such to make dollhouses to be auctioned at a fundraising gala next month. The inspiration for the project is "The Queen's Dolls' House," an...
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August 27, 2013

MAK Daddy Types

So I knew that MAK in Vienna was doing a DIY exhibition, the first ever, as far as I could tell, based on Victor Papanek & James Hennessey's groundbreaking DIY bibles, Nomadic Furniture, but I admit, I'd lost track...
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August 6, 2013

Brooklyn OSB Nusery Hive By Openshop

While searching around for OSB kid furniture I came across this loft renovation that Openshop did in 2006. The architects stuck the master bedroom and a nursery into a big OSB form they called a hive. To soften things...
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August 2, 2013

Ikea Cardboard Market Stand Exists

Doesn't it seem weird that Ikea hasn't had cardboard furniture and playthings all along? I mean, think about it. Anyway, they have it now. It's in the new catalogue. One market stand, so your kid can pretend he has...
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August 1, 2013

That Cradle In That Modern Farmhouse In The Italian Alps

Did you guys see that in the NYTimes? Well, here it is! I'm going to guess that it's just for playtime, and that if they want the kid to actually sleep, they'd get a window blind. Or maybe everyone just...
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July 23, 2013

Bozart Boom: Three Kaleidoscope Dollhouses For Sale Out There

Dust off your credit scores and fire up the pre-approved mortgages, because the Bozart Kaleidoscope dollhouse market is ROARING BACK, people. Not that anything's reaching the crazy speculative heights of the pre-2008 doll real estate bubble, of course. But there...
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July 19, 2013

Mountain-Dwelling Japanese Have One Word For Kids Sled. And Box.

I don't know why, I guess it's because I didn't watch enough [any] Grizzly Adams when I was a boy, but I just assumed that in the olden times in the mountains of Japan, when the snow fell thick...
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May 21, 2013

The Lozziwurm Is Open

Rejoice, Western Hemispherians! Yvan Pestalozzi's Lozziwurm playground structure is open for business at the Carnegie. Go check it out, or maybe wait a little longer, until the amazing-looking playground design exhibition opens in June. Just sayin'. A Playful Worm...
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April 26, 2013

Playgoda On The Playa

Holy smokes, I had no idea that Gregg Fleishman, the plywood architect artist behind the Playgoda series of slot-together playground structures, is in the Burning Man business. This will be the third year Fleishman and his collaborators are building...
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April 18, 2013

Library/Stairway/Home Theater/Slide By Moon Hoon

There is a LOT to love about this awesome space at the energetic center of architect Moon Hoon's Panorama House, built in Chungbuk, South Korea. I mean, it's a family room, a stairway, a library, a home theater [with...
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March 24, 2013

Dan Graham Pavilions For Kids

The artist Dan Graham is probably best known for his mirror & glass pavilions, walk-through minimalist-style sculptures where your views and reflections shift with every step. They can be fun enough for the kids on their own, but it turns...
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March 11, 2013

Robert Bliss's Cradle For A Young Viking Or Viqueen

Except for some chairs he made while studying at Black Mountain College, modernist architect Robert Bliss, didn't really get into designing furniture until after he retired as dean of the University of Utah's architecture school, in 1986. In 1990...
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March 4, 2013

The Radiant High Chair

Wow, kudos to architectural historian/mom Victoria Solan for working Le Corbusier into this helluva thinkpiece about of one of the world's greatest high chairs, the Ikea Antilop:As a formal composition, IKEA's $25 Antilop high chair hews to a Corbusian...
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February 27, 2013

2 Reasons We Don't Live In A Paul Rudolph House

I just realized I don't hate Buzzfeed-style web listicles after all; I just haven't seen enough ones I really like. 15 Mid-Century Modern Dream Homes That Will Kill Your Children [projectophile via @langealexandra]...
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February 21, 2013

Western Hemisphere/Pittsburgh Finally Getting A Lozziwurm

A press release announces that the Carnegie Museum of Art is installing a Lozziwurm in a new "pocket park" in front of the museum, in advance of two potentially awesome, upcoming shows: the 2013 incarnation of the venerable Carnegie...
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December 12, 2012

Pequenitos In Portugal, Portugal Dos Pequenitos

I'm sorry, did I miss an entire day? I've been trying to wrap my head around the amazing photographs that DT photomaster DT sent along with some offhand comment like, "Hey, playhouse with toy Moorish cannons?" and "thought you...
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November 25, 2012

Modernists' Kids Had The Best Nurseries

In the wake of MoMA's Century Of the Child exhibition, Paul Makovsky at Metropolis Magazine has assembled an awesome collection of images and childhood stories from the offspring of mid-century modernist designers. There's György & Juliet Kepes' daughter Julie,...
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November 20, 2012

Turniture II: Rocking Plywood Playhouse/Bar By Lester Walker

Speaking of plans for cutting circles out of plywood in 1970, this popped up a few weeks ago on retronaut, and then I lost track of it. It's called Turniture II, a 4-in-1 convertible outdoor furniture project by architect...
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November 8, 2012

Artists' Kids Always Have The Best Rooftop Treehouses

As if the guy who built an inflatable pipe organ as big as a football field could imagine any less. Sculptor Tim Hawkinson and his daughter started designing a treehouse when she was about 5. Now that she's 9,...
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October 31, 2012

Trick Or Treat Freakout: Poeme Electronique

Hopefully, you all live in places where local officials have arbitrarily rescheduled Halloween, so you can fire up the porch speakers & projectors like DT reader Mike, and freak the neighborhood kids the hell out with Le Corbusier &...
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October 19, 2012

Century Of The Child Playground Symposium Livestream, Yo

Whoa, I can't believe it's about to start. As part of the exhibition, Century of The Child, MoMA curator Juliet Kinchin is hosting Child in the City of Play, a symposium exploring urbanism, play, and child development, starting at...
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October 12, 2012

Boy On The Wall, Hammarkullen, Gothenburg, By Jens S. Jensen

Today in Century of The Child News: Swedish photographer Jens S. Jensen tells the story of taking the great picture that the MoMA curators decided to use to establish the identity of the exhibition, the 1973 shot of a kid...
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September 3, 2012

George Nakashima And His Family Moved To New Hope In 1943.

You'd think that as a parent, I'd be less surprised by now at the constant discoveries of the extent of my own ignorance. And yet. Last night, while surfing through the archive of the War Relocation Authority's nearly 7,000 photos...
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