Tokyo’s Reverse Destiny lofts
|New York-based Japanese artist Shusaku Arakawa designed this small apartment block in 2005 in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka in conjunction with his poet partner, Madeline Gins. According to the SushiLog: ‘Painted in eye-catching blue, pink, red, yellow and other bright colors, the building resembles the indoor playgrounds that attract toddlers at fast-food restaurants. Inside, each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out’.
‘You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall. Even worse, there’s no closet space; residents will have to find a way to live there, since the apartment offers only a few solutions. “You’ll learn to figure it out,” says Arakawa. Ten minutes of stumbling around is enough to send even the healthiest young person over the edge. Arakawa says that’s precisely the point. “[The apartment] makes you alert and awakens instincts, so you’ll live better, longer and even forever,” says the artist’.
Tagged: awesome architecture, cool architecture, Shusaku Arakawa, Tokyo's Reverse Destiny lofts
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Also by CASPER JOHANSSON
The proof that birds compose tunes
Gizmodo ran this story recently that they suggest is proof that birds are secretly composers: ‘A normal person sees these birds perched on electrical wires and worries about getting crapped on. Jarbas Agnelli looks at them and sees musical notes. Maybe he’s smarter than the rest of us because the melody is utterly oh-so-sweet-that-I-could-doze-off-right-now’.
This November the hottest fashion accessory will be the moustache cufflinks designed by Arbitrage exclusively for Movember. Movember Founder, Adam Garone, worked with Arbitrage designer, Alan Chan, to create the capsule collection of four links, which are rhodium finished. The cufflinks retail for US$65, and for every pair sold, Arbitrage will donate $20 to the Movember charity. We have them for sale in the Lost At E Minor online store.
Hanoch Piven at New York’s Society of Illustrators
Hanoch Piven, multiple award-winning illustrator, will lead a hands-on collage workshop for professional illustrators who want to free their inner child. Piven’s workshop will focus on the idea of playing intuitively with objects, maximizing trial-and-error and taking advantage of serendipity, which are all very useful tools to explore any creative medium. Piven is known for using ordinary objects to create striking celebrity portraits for such clients as Time, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times and Random House. The workshop takes place on Tuesday, November 10, between 6:30 – 8:30pm, and will be produced by Fernanda Cohen.
YOU'RE SAYING (2)
qB said | 3 July, 2009
Instead of quoting Sushi & Sensibility, I think you meant the Newsweek article they copied and pasted from.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Murray Lightburn, frontman for Canadian indie group, The Dears, gave us the rundown for our sister site, My Secret Playlist, on the tunes that are currently on high rotation on his inner-ear iPod. He started with the Air song, Mike Mills [listen below]: ‘I’ve been working from my home studio and have a few tracks that I play in it because I am very familiar with how they sound. Mike Mills, aside from being a well-composed track, sounds really good. When the strings come in towards the end, I am wishing that I had written it’. Read the rest of The Dears’ Secret Playlist, along with Playlists by Girl Talk, Cocoon and Weezer, among many ohers.
The sound New Zealand band The Brunettes make is Hallmark card pop — naïve sincerity mixed with low-fi, casual kitsch. Says chief songwriter, Jonathan Bree: ‘You’ll find us somewhere between US punk and just before classic 60s romps’. And so we will.
There’s been an interesting trend recently in print and advertising work in particular away from the perfect symmetry and airbrushed cleanliness of vector art and back towards a looser form of hand-drawn illustration. I see it everywhere, from the middle pages of highbrow pop culture publications to the style sections of local broadsheets. And yet, it’s unexpected, especially so soon after the wave of vector art which swamped the print world just a few years back. Read more
This is the mob scene that was outside the Ugg Boot store on Mercer Street, Soho, yesterday as I made my way through the harping hustle and flow of the downtown post-Christmas shopping crowds. And it’s a pretty familiar sight during winter in New York, with long queues invariably gathered along this stretch of road, waiting impatiently for their own little piece of Down Under warmth. Having never worn Ugg boots, I can’t attest for their ability to keep out the icy chill of a 3pm breeze. But surely the well worn feet of a stampede of New Yorkers can’t be wrong? Read more
In Japan, when one makes squeezing gestures with both hands at chest level, one is gesturing that one wants candy — soft, round, bouncy candy. At least, that’s what this commercial would have us believe.
I recently bought a 1960 Oyster Perpetual Datejust and I love it. Read more
This website hosts a nice collection of quirky, sometimes mind-boggling, sculptures from around the world. There’s a certain Dali-esque feel to a lot of them – those surreal, dreamy hallucinations turned into a warped reality. I’ve always been a sucker for art that really catches you out for a few seconds, and these certainly do that.
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Check out Mike Stimpson’s Lego reinterpretations of classic photographs. Stimpson’s version of Malcolm Browne’s iconic 1963 photograph of the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc is particularly twisted. Read more
Our celebrity-saturated culture makes many of us irrationally hateful of the faces we see on our TV screens and magazine pages. Good thing there’s Celebrity PunchOut to let off some of that steam.
With the recession still biting, it may be time to whip out the glue and the cardboard and make your next pair of cool kicks. Don’t know how they’d manage in the rain though? Read more
Forget battery powered vehicles. Cars made from ice are the future of transportation: no pollution, no honking horns, no painful rap music blasting out of souped up stereos. And if they melt, they melt. You just swim the rest of the way down the slipstream.
Wolfmother. Rock n roll. Mystical lyrics. Heavy riffs. They have a new album out, Cosmic Egg, and we have five copies to giveaway, along with their debut album. To enter, tell us your favorite Wolfmother song and the city you live in. Yo! Two fingered salute. Read more
Sovereign Beck create modern silk ties for the classic man — both understated and provocative, classic and cutting edge. We have them for sale in the Lost At E Minor store. Read more
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Hal said | 7 April, 2009
Sounds like the Oak Grove Apartments.