Hasta La Ideas

Manchester architects Arca have completed a beach café on the promenade in Morecambe, UK. (more…)

Keren Richter‘s illustrations of creepy-cute mod girls and ethereal dreamscapes have graced many gallery walls, advertisements and products. In fact she’s such a hit Vans asked her to design another shoe for their spring collection, following the success of her first pair last fall.

The Wellesley skate shoe comes in two colorways, purple or pink, and features an illustration inspired by Keren’s San Francisco youth on the canvas exterior and a brightly colored mosaic print lining inspired by Islamic textiles and stained glass. Also launching with her shoe is a spring tote bag boasting the same durable canvas and whimsical design as the Wellesley. Keep an eye out for Keren later in the month, as she tours the country promoting her designs at various Vans stores.

Officially launching 1 February 2009, the Wellesley shoe and tote will be available at Vans stores, Vans online, or at Journeys, Zappos and Nordstrom for $55.

–> ><((((º> {your going to be see this dog a lot, he has really amazing taste}

In 2007, a little film called Helvetica debuted at the South by Southwest Film Festival. This year, director Gary Hustwit will return to SXSW for the world premiere of Objectified, his new feature-length documentary about “our relationship to manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them.” Hustwit and several of the film’s cast members will be on hand for post-screening Q&As and a special panel discussion at the Interactive Festival the day after the film’s premiere (the SXSW film festival line-up will be announced early next week). Not bound for Austin in March? Fear not, oodles of Objectified screenings are being planned nationwide. Tickets go on sale Monday at noon for those in San Francisco (April 21) and Chicago (April 28).

Previously on UnBeige:

Short stories, novels, art criticism, book reviews, an odd little roman à clef written from the perspective of Lee Krasner: the writerly talents of John Updike knew no bounds. Architectural Digest is remembering the literary legend, who died on Tuesday at the age of 76, through a series of articles that he contributed to the magazine over the years. Now featured on the AD website are four of Updike’s “Guest Speaker” pieces, in which he remembers the towns and houses in which he—and the characters he created—lived. “Architecture confines and defines us,” wrote Updike in “Fictional Houses,” published in the January 1985 issue of AD. “Our human world speaks to us, most massively, in its buildings, and a fiction writer cannot make his characters move until he has some imaginative grasp of their environment.”

Nearly 30 years later I can still feel the thrill of power with which, in my first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, I set characters roaming the corridors of an immense imaginary mansion I had based upon an institutional building for the poor and homeless, which had stood at the end of the street where my family had lived in Pennsylvania, but that I had never once, as a child, dared enter. Now, as an author, I climbed even to the cupola, and chased a parakeet down long halls, “channels of wood and plaster” where a crossing made “four staring corners sharp as knives.”

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