The New York Times ran a slideshow of homes built by Dan Phillips. Mr. Phillips creates houses from salvaged materials ranging from branches to corks to wine bottles to picture frames. These are apparently low-income homes somewhere in Huntsville, TX but they look phenomenal. (Thanks for the tip, Molly.)
Vanilla Bicycles, a custom hand-built bicycle framebuilder, is known for doing everything right. They have raised the bar with Vanilla-branded pit boots for the cyclocross aficionado. Well played.
Contemporary auctions for design objects have been fetching prices that rival great artworks. These pieces are typically sitting on the same auction block. Where can one draw the line between a utilitarian design object and an artistic expression? Probably in the production quantity. Limited edition pieces by sought-after designers have the singularity of fine art, although the purpose of limited edition design objects can typically be attributed to bumping up a price tag.
There’s a good synopsis of five design-as-art movements at ARTINFO. They touch upon The Wiener Werkstätte, The Bauhaus, American Studio, Memphis, and Functional Art.
Some representative pieces:
Another cultural/counter-cultural zeitgeist collaboration: the Italian bicycle manufacturer Bianchi and the Swedish high-end fashion house Acne teamed up to produce some track bikes in great colorways with some typography from deep in the archives.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
