Salt Spring Island Cabin by Olson Kundig Architects
Set on an island north of the San Juans, the exterior metal skin of this single room cabin will be allowed to weather naturally. Inside, wood-finished surfaces create a cozy refuge. A large, weathered steel panel slides across a window wall, securing the space when the owner is away.
Salt Spring Island Cabin, British Columbia, Canada, by Olson Kundig Architects, Photography by Tim Bies
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-joel
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Built-In Beauty: 14 Floor-to-Ceiling Home Bookcases [Pics]
Sometimes the most impressive designs are almost accidental. There are some amazing bookcase designs out there, but forget them all for a moment. Instead, consider the beauty of bookshelves populated with your favorite volumes … there is a case to be made, if you will, for simply letting these stand on their own and evolve visually as you fill them up. (Above, Left to Right & Top to Bottom: John Barman, Eric Staudenmaier, Bill Kingston & Lili Abir Regen).
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Writer In Residence
[Images: Christian Richters].
Reestablishing myself here on a desktop computer that had been sitting inside a storage unit for the past 15 months, I’ve been having a good time going through old bookmarks: rediscovering what I saved way back in 2008 and 2009, and seeing whether or not I’m still interested in the stories. Articles about mining the ocean floor, about the state of California selling landmarks to raise cash, and about design competitions that came and went sit beside pages for various architecture offices and now-outdated technology reviews.
Among these old links, though, is a house I still absolutely adore, and one that many of you will probably have already seen on other blogs, but is still worth posting: the Casa Kike, a private residence in Costa Rica by Gianni Botsford Architects, seen here in photographs by Christian Richters.
[Image: Christian Richters].
The house is an “intimate double pavilion for a writer in Costa Rica,” with a budget that topped out at just over $100,000. From the architect’s own description:
Slow Box
[Image: Shin Egashira, an architect and instructor at the AA in London—and co-author of the amazing pamphlet I mentioned back in April, the Alternative Guide to Portland—has a number of projects that I’d like to write about here, but I’ll limit myself to one project: Slow Box After Image, produced in 2000 in Japan.
[Image: 
[Images: Before Object, After Image: Koshirakura Landscape, 1996-2006, “can flip from a horizontal position (when it is in transit or being used as a darkroom) to a vertical fixed position, which allows one to sit inside and see the inverted image.”
An edge over which it is impossible to look
[Image: The Ladybower bellmouth at full drain, photographed by Flickr user the PDF). While the entirety of the paper is worth reading, I want to highlight a specific moment, wherein Crompton introduces us to the colossal western bellmouth drain of the Ladybower reservoir in Derbyshire, England.
His description of this “inverted infrastructural monument,” as InfraNet Lab described it in their own post about Crompton’s paper—adding that spillways like this “maintain two states: (1) in use they disappear and are minimally obscured by flowing water, (2) not in use they are sculptural oddities hovering ambiguously above the water line”—is spine-tingling.
[Image: The Ladybower bellmouth, photographed by John Fielding, via Read more on An edge over which it is impossible to look…
Dream-Sector Physics and Inception Space
[Image: A still from Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan, courtesy of Inception. Being a longtime fan of Nolan’s work, going back to his debut feature, Following, which I first saw at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1999 (and which, oddly enough, starred emerging architect Alex Haw, now of Cloud fame), I have to say that I am very much looking forward to seeing this movie.
Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times describes it as “Hollywood’s first existential heist movie,” offering us a preview of some of the film’s sets and spaces in the process.
[Images: A rotating hall and fight scene from Inception by Christopher Nolan, courtesy of Read more on Dream-Sector Physics and Inception Space…