“Shelf-Pod” Home by Kazuya Morita
Designated “Shelf-Pod,” this 557-square-foot house in Osaka Prefecture, Japan, created by Kazuya Morita Architecture Studio, is an innovative, simplistic, and elegant living space built (and revolving) around a specific concept: being capable of efficiently housing 10 tons of books and incorporating that as a major and stunning design element. It is a book-lover’s paradise. Shelf-Pod was commissioned by a young historian with an extensive collection of books on Islamic history. As Morita explains, “…we designed a lattice structure made from 25mm-thick laminated pine boards which serve as bookshelves. The dimensions of each shelf are as follows: 360mm height, 300mm width, and 300mm depth. All of the architectural elements in this space (stairs, windows, desks, chairs, etc.) have been designed on the basis of this shelf scale, with the aim of achieving geometrical harmony…”
Tags: bookshelves, contemporary architecture, minimalist, modern simplicity
Tiniest, Sweetest House
This 12x12ft (144 square feet) cabin is the Innermost House, and is located in the mountains of Northern California. Comprising a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a study, and a sleeping loft, it has no electricity; the owners, Diana Lorence and her husband, do all their cooking and heating with the fireplace, and use candles to light it. As Diana writes in her guest post over on the Tiny House Blog, [The Innermost House] faces directly south beneath an open porch that shelters our front door. A hill rises to the north behind us and the forest lies all around. The house encloses five distinct rooms: to the east is a living room eleven feet deep by seven feet wide by twelve feet high; to the west the house is divided into kitchen, study, and bathroom, each approximately five feet wide by three feet deep, with a sleeping loft above the three of them, accessible by a wooden ladder we store against the wall.
We do not have electricity or power of other kind, so we warm the cabin and cook our food and heat our water for bathing all over the fire.
It’s absolutely beautiful in my opinion.
Tags: cabins, contemporary architecture, dream houses, environmentalism, modern simplicity
Pictures from Pyongyang
These images of Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea, taken by London-based photographer Charlie Crane and published in 2007, are beautiful but also unsettling. Staged, perfect scenes are displayed: empty train stations and restaurants utterly devoid of life, sterile and pristine; a single representative child, store clerk, or hospital employee standing blandly posed in the midst of these surroundings with completely neutral expressions. Food is set out on a restaurant table for people who aren’t there. These places feel vacated but at the same time inviting.
Tags: artifice, contemporary architecture, eerie, north korea, photojournalism
TRON: Legacy {Fashion}
You know what I’m looking forward to in the future? Aside from a cure for cancer, and personal jet-packs, and all that? Slick, form-fitting fashion like that in TRON: Legacy.
Tags: black and white, contemporary architecture, cyber aesthetic, futuristic, interior design, sci-fi
798 Art Zone in Beijing
When I went on my recent trip to China (that’s where I’ve been these last two weeks), I visited this amazing art district in Beijing called 798 Space or 798 Art Zone. Though I liked many other places in Beijing, it was my favorite, and even though 798 seems to be a pretty popular tourist site, it seems different somehow from anywhere else in the city. It’s so nice and quiet there, the aesthetic being minimalist and modern but really interesting, quirky, and quite beautiful, and the art is creative and right down my alley. I loved how we could just walk unobtrusively, stealthily into any lofty, white gallery and check out the art as we liked and go around; there weren’t many people around. It was like a giant First Friday, a fantasy one for me.
798 used to be an industrial area that many artists have since converted into an inspiring contemporary art community with loads of studios, galleries, and cafes. The military factory buildings built in the ’50s in a unique, Bauhaus-influenced architectural style, redesigned and reclaimed by the artists in the ’90s and 2000s, now house works of art and provocative exhibits. Their former status as factories and industrial buildings, in their modern incarnation, serves to give them a beautiful, original, rather than sterile quality. I’ve never seen such spacious and minimalistically majestic indie art galleries and studios. I loved it.
Found on Flickr; not my image.
Not my image
Not my image
A postcard and bookmark I picked up there.There was this amazing installation, “Tears” by Luan Jiaqi, in one of the exhibits. I now regret not taking a picture of it. Even though there were “No photos” signs all over the place, everyone seemed to be taking pictures, anyway. I sadly can’t find any of it on the Internet. If anybody knows what the hell I’m talking about and has pictures of this installation, please let me know. My description would only sound crummy and probably not give you any real idea of what it looks like. The closest comparison that I can draw is to the work of Jin Young Yu; it was a group of expressive, white faces hanging from the ceiling/floating in space, with “tears” streaming down.
It’s kind of ironic that I do this blogging thing, because I don’t feel that any of the art or images I like really need to be explained, or can be. Maybe that’s why I’m liking Tumblr so much.
Tags: 798, beijing, contemporary architecture, pop surrealism, weird sculptures
Kouichi Kimura’s “House of Vision”
I love this house designed by Kouichi Kimura in 2008, located near Shiga, Japan. It’s so elegant, and I wish I could live in a house just like this. Someone pointed out that it’s a bit “aseptic”-feeling, but in a good way, like they’d feel safe there, and I totally understand their meaning. I think it’s partly due to how sparingly furnished the house is in the pictures, but it really does give an impression of just spacious emptiness. I think it’s beautiful, though. Minimalist yet luxurious at the same time, utterly modern and sleek, interesting all around. It’s one of my dream homes.
Tags: black and white, contemporary architecture, dream houses, kouichi kimura, minimalist
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