Wary Meyers Baxter Library Installations

Our first round of installations for the Old Baxter Library/Via Advertising Agency is finally all together in one spot on our website. Including this fountain pen & ink seating group, which would look equally cool with oil wells, pastry bags, or shampoo bottles- whatever your company's reception area needs, we can do it.

Click!

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Children's Spaces

All kinds of awesomeness from Molly and Norman McGrath's incredible 1978 book on interiors for kids, Children's Spaces- 50 Architects and Designers Create Environments for the Young.

Without a doubt the best book ever published about children's design.

Just looking at it makes me want to have another one.

previous blog posts : Kids' Stuff, Fletcher's room

and just for context, more of the Bretteville-Simon house in Los Angeles- the cover star and home of the giant movable foam-block furniture (pic 6 and 7)

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High School

Taped to a pole in my high school cafeteria, 1976.

(via my older brother)

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Alexander Calder constellations

Some constellation wall sculptures by Alexander Calder. I scanned these from the book Calder's Universe, meaning to relate them to the Zolo toys, but amongst the Ettore Sottsass buzz I completely forgot. Anyway, aren't these awesome? My thought was how fun would it be to do this with the Zolos? They already have holes drilled in them, so all you'd need is wire (or a thin dowel), and velcro (to keep it in place on a wall), and you'd end up with something like a "Memphis splat". And a way of actually utilizing the Zolos instead of keeping them sequestered away until the age of non-choking-hazard/non-banging-them-on-the-table comes around.
For that matter you could do this with any wooden toy- the Calder above the fireplace somewhat resembles one of those wooden Pinnochio figures, or a Kay Bojesen soldier. Although if you'd do this on a child's wall I guess it should remain in the abstract.



Also, the Breuer's Constellation (middle photo) makes me want to build an orrery, even a strange Sci-Fi one, like a Star Wars orrery, with two suns, Alderaan, Endor, Death Star....




and below, from Portfolio Magazine, 1950:

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Sottseuss

Speaking of Ettore Sottsass, and kid's stuff, there's no kid thing more Memphissed-out than these wooden Zolo toys from 1985. We found them all ( there are about 50 pieces) in their original wooden case at a church sale. Chipped, splintered, and enticingly dangerous, they're probably not so safe to give to our son, so we'll happily use them as surreal Sottsossian objets until ...
actually these may be just a grown-up toy after all.

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Happy Valentine's Day!

... and be sure to click over to You Have Been Here Sometime and read our short guest post about Ettore Sottsass, his Superbox, and all things boxy and striped.

But If you're too lazy, here's our guest post:

"I'm fairly sure if Sottsass hadn't designed it, still to this day, no one would have."

I've asked some interior designers, writers, & artists to guest post on YHBHS this week. I simply could not be more excited that Wary Meyers are writing today's post!!!

Their perspective on interiors is like no other. Their gorgeous coffee table book  "Tossed & Found" explains what to do with all your pool noodles and pastry bags, who knew?

And their  blog has given me so much joy, that it's just ridiculous to talk further about. (take a look at their current installation if you don't believe me...) Thanks Wary Meyers, and Happy Valentine's day to all!

Sottsass's boxes from Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. MoMA's fantastic 1972 book of the exhibition which unleashed the juggernaut of the Italian radicals.

WARY MEYERS' guest post.......

"Probably the first Ettore Sottsass' work I ever saw was something Memphis, which is all so mind-blowingly crazy that it's almost too difficult to process, at first. Of course after looking at it for a bit (or longer) eventually you wonder, "what mad genius thought of this??"

What I like about Sottsass is exactly that madcappery- designing with carefree optimism. A few years before the introduction of Memphis, he designed the SUPERBOX which is a wardrobe, and my favorite Sottsass. Hard-edged, candy-striped, and on a pedestal , it seems like a simple enough modern reworking of a free-standing wardrobe, but it's monolithic and fun, like a Donald Judd at the circus. Straightforward enough, but I'm fairly sure if Sottsass hadn't designed it, still to this day no one would have.

I've always been a fan of boxes as a design element, which probably stems from a youth of blocks, Lego, and D&D graph paper. The Superbox, in all its wardrobe forms, is the ultimate box - a beautiful graphic element made three-dimensional and useful.

Sottsass on top of his Superbox,

from a 1974 Oui magazine article on the new domestic landscape.

Possibly (probably) related: Milton Glaser's giant type "stations" at The Big Kitchen, in the World Trade Center concourse, 1977.

A mixture of Sottsass and Glaser for a more customized wardrobe idea, but actually sketched for a typography project we're working on right now.

photo and drawing via Wary Meyers

A random photo of a garage in Europe, the striped tool chest looking very Sottsassed, which I'm sure is unintentional and probably based more on kilometer blocks or European traffic graphics (if anything); but a testament to Sottsass's design that I look at this and think how awesome the tool chest is. But to put this all in an Italian design perspective I think the same way with Superstudio furniture and anything with grids.

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From the flea market today

Vintage La Mondiale goat fur apres-ski boots, vintage Obermeyer during-ski sweater, an awesome set of Japanese Jepcor enamelware, an English wooden wine rack kit with Milton Glaseresque typography, and a litte wooden pig with bright pink eyes.

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Kids' Stuff

Pages from the 1979 book "Kids' Stuff" by Linda Foa and Geri Brin. 

Besides "Children's Spaces" by Norman McGrath (later) this is our favorite book about kids' design. If you judged Kids' Stuff by its crazy cover you'd probably never open it, but inside it's like a kid's version of High Tech, the 70's industrial-style home design sourcebook, with hundreds brilliantly designed things, like chairs, tables, lamps, storage, drawer pulls, tents, ropes... all photographed either on seamless, on a Superstudio-esque grid, or in the cool NYC apartments of the authors and their friends. One of my favorites is the table from Scandinavian Design (above), used as a changing table, and "actually billed as a writing desk by the manufacturer".  The book's acknowledgements mention a heavy thanks to designer Joe D'Urso and design author Barbara Plumb, and it shows. Also it's a sourcebook itself, so it tells you what everything is, how much it cost, and where it was available. Everything that is except the incidental decor in the kids' rooms, notably this girl's ball-bearing based, plastic sphere-encased, self-levelling desk lamp (below). 

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Master of Puppets

Vintage Bil Baird Marionette Theatre posters from a church thrift shop in Southport Ct.
I love how Baird drew his posters, and the old New York phone exchange.
Added to Fletcher's walls, and his growing collection of things inscribed, but not to him :(





Much more on the great Bil Baird here, here, and here.

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