Simian Design

These are my delicious links for January 4th through January 6th:

• Parkour Flip Book. – Oh My God. That's amazing. Just stunning. Utterly fantastic.
• Bridge House – Designed by Max Pritchard
• FARK Headlines of the Year – I didn't expect this. The Top 20 headliens of 2009 from FARK are way brilliant. If newspapers had the balls to have headlines like this I'd buy way more newspapers.
• Greatest.Lego.Set.Ever. – GOD I WANT THIS. The Lego Millennium Falcon is nearly 3 feet long; it costs $499 and it is made of over 5,000 pieces! The Millennium Falcon has been listed as the biggest Lego set ever sold.

These are my delicious links for December 2nd:

• Decandence, Sleaze and Excess; all in one shoe. – the Jeffery-West shoe collection—the work of childhood friends Mark Jeffery and Guy West—fall somewhere between a swanky gentlemen's club and Sweeney Todd's closet. Blood-red leather linings and handmade soles, inscribed with "Decadence, Sleaze and Excess,“ ooze with the kind of luxe horror that arguably only Brits can successfully pull off.
• The Unearthly Beauty of Antelope Canyon – The Navajo call it ‘the place where water runs through rocks’ and that is literally true. One of the most unearthly places on the planet, take a look at the astounding Antelope Canyon.
  The peculiar formation of a slot canyon can make for an eerie experience and certainly the Antelope Canyon, on the lands of the LeChee people of the Navajo Nation is one of the stranger places you might choose to visit if your budget doesn’t quite run to a space shuttle. The shuttle, though, never lands on alien planets – you can get the experience for very little here on the third rock from the sun. And it is the sun that makes this canyon extra special.
• Sietch Nevada – I like this. MATSYS took the idea of a Sietch from Dune, and created this project, Sietch Nevada, that projects waterbanking as the fundamental factor in future urban infrastructure in the American Southwest. Sietch Nevada is an urban prototype that makes the storage, use, and collection of water essential to the form and performance of urban life. Inverting the stereotypical Southwest urban patterns of dispersed programs open to the sky, the Sietch is a dense, underground community.
• Spiral Staircases are cool. – I love spiral staircases. They easily are the focal point of a room, presenting graceful lines to the inside of a house. And they make a room feel ultra-important. Here are a collection of famous and fantastic staircases.

These are my delicious links for November 20th:

• The Muppet Show's 10 Weirdest Moments – I love the Muppet Show. It's brilliance. Here are it's 10 oddest and weirdest moments.
• Library Porn – A collection of beautiful libraries. Really beautiful places.

These are my delicious links for September 8th:

• 8-Story Antigravity Forest Facade Takes Root – Patrick Blancs gardens have grown massive in scale. One inside a Portuguese shopping mall is larger than four tennis courts, and there's one in Kuwait that's almost as big. But Blanc's recently completed facade for the Athenaeum hotel in London (shown) could be his most high-profile project yet. Looming over Green Park, it's an eight-story antigravity forest composed of 12,000 plants.

  But plants for this vertical landscape must be chosen with care. Because the walls are so high, conditions vary widely. The shade at ground level is perfect for rare Asian nettles; on the brighter upper stories, plants that usually cling to windblown cliff faces brave the blustery British breezes.

These are my delicious links for July 29th through July 31st:

• Feral Homes – James Griffioen has a haunting collection of photos of homes and buildings being overtaken by vegetation in Detroit. I can't imagine walking the streets with these buildings, must be surreal.
• Photos of Chicago from the top of a Crane. – Ken Derry, crane operator for McHugh, has taken some amazing pictures of the Trump Tower during its construction.
• 202 Star Wars T-Shirts – A grand list of 202 Star Wars Shirts. Not ranked, just a missive listing.
• I'm pretty sure I stopped growing up in my teens and have been faking ever since. – One of the best XKCD's I've seen in a while.

These are my delicious links for June 30th through July 1st:

• Ceiling Porn – These are just some stunning photos of some amazing ceilings. Yup, ceilings.
• Bursting Soap Bubbles. – Amazing photos of bubbles being popped, mid-pop. Fantastic timing and speed on these photos.

These are my delicious links for March 24th through March 26th:

• Alpine Hut – Gorgeous 6×11 Alpine hut by OFIS Architects. The hut is situated in a small Alpine village, part of Triglav national park in Slovenia, with very strict rules of construction and architectural design. The client bought the site together with existing construction permit for the generic project. Demand was not to change construction permit but change the elements of the house to suit his family, sustainable factor and open the windows toward the views.
• Rebuilding Spotlight's Index on OS X (Manually) | Walt-O-Matic – My spotlight recently got hosed, this is a good reference on how to fix that.
• Letter from an AIG Official; The Other Side of the Story. – The resignation letter of an AIG executive explaining his point of view on the bonus furor. The proverbial other side of the story.
• Fuck That. – Russian teens have now new fun. They dare trains.
  This is needed to be done fast, because if one is appearing before the train too long before and machinist could see him and start breaking, so they run on the rails just before the train so he couldn’t start breaking and fell down on the rails, then the train moves above the person at his maximum speed, just a few inches from his head and back.
• Top 10 Time-Lapse Videos Show Nature at Work | Wired Science from Wired.com – When a phenomenon happens very slowly, viewing accelerated footage helps scientists take a step back and see the big picture: At higher speeds, things that we regard as fixed take motion — even the dullest scenes spring to life.
  Here are Wired Science's picks of the best time-lapse videos of nature at work.
• Travel photography: The Wave – Los Angeles Times – The Wave is a red-rock stunner on the border of Arizona and Utah, made of 190-million-year-old sand dunes that have turned to rock. L.A. Times photographer Spencer Weiner captured the swirling drama of this little-known formation that's accessible only on foot via a three-mile hike and highly regulated. (To apply for a permit, go to the Bureau of Land Management's Arizona Web page.)

The Wilkinson Residence, designed by Robert Harvey Oshatz, is in Portland Oregon. It’s gorgeous, and breathtaking. It also is awful. This sort of high-profile, self-indulgent  project, which I LOVE, is what architects are drawn too. And why most houses look like they do; there is no money there.  I mean this took some serious cash.

Plus can you imagine the upkeep of this house? Already you can see issues with some dripping and mold it looks like in some of the photos.

But at the same time, this is EXACTLY the type of Space-Age Bachelor Pad I’d want when I hit the lotto. It really is gorgeous. I just wish we had elements of this in normal, day-to-day architecture. If we had stuff like this that the majority of people lived in, how could we not, as a society, have jet-packs? It’s simply demand it, wouldn’t it?

These are my delicious links for March 11th through March 12th:

• "I Look Straight into Linus' Weasel Eyes…" – Charlie Brown, as done by Frank Miller. brilliant.
• Ski Dump Bathroom. – Now THATS a bathroom. And of course when we're talking about wacky bathrooms, we're talking about one nation, right? Right. A Japanese coffee company, Goeorgia Max Coffee, modified the bathrooms of ski areas around Japan to promote their coffee energy drinks. This is definitely a high-octane bathroom.
• edith zimmerman plays with her food. – Edith has some fantastic photos of her food sculptures. The mantis and tangerine are really good.
• Approximate Conversion from Points to Pixels – I was being lazy this morning, and needed a quick way to convert some points into the appropriate EM size. Viola'. This chart helps out immensely.
• New York Architecture Images- black and white new york – Amazing collection of images of early New York. From 1894 on, just a real solid trip down history.
• 100 Free Useful Applications for Mac, Part I | Tools – A nice list, maybe a bit over-the-top, of useful Mac Tools. Some are obvious (Quicksilver, etc,) but there are some hidden gems in there.
• Floorplans of Sit-Com Houses. – By the same guy that brought us the Trilogy Meter, we are treated with another brilliant piece of charting and infographics. This time he's laid out, painstakingly I might add, the floor plans of many sit-com houses.
• Vintage air raid defense posters – In 1938, the Japanese Red Cross worked with government authorities to create a series of posters to teach the public about the new Anti-Aircraft Defense Law, which was enacted in seeming anticipation of air strikes following the outbreak of the Japan-China War (1937-1945). Among other things, the new law required citizens to take protective measures against gas attacks and prepare for disinfection, evacuation and relief.

  These AWESOME posters are the result.

These are my delicious links for March 10th:

• You only can live here if you have a Really Nice Ride. – Tokyo's stunning levels of overcrowding pose one of the most severe architectural constraints around–it's one of the reason that it's become home to lots of amazing architecture and product design. In that vein, two design firms have solved a problem you might not have even guessed existed, by creating apartment complexes aimed specifically at giving motorcycle fetishists a safe place to park—and show off—their rides.
• Periodic Table of Typefaces – Now this is cool. I'd totally buy a poster of this. It combines two great memes into one package full of awesome. Plus it has Futura and Helvetica as the top two elements, which is proper.