Category: Architecture & Design

Yarn artist Liisa Hietanen makes human embroidered figures

Post author By Wells Baum
Post date June 3, 2020

Knitting is a popular hobby in Finland. But 30-year-old artist Liisa Hietnanen takes the practice to a whole new level.

She uses wool to create life-size crocheted sculptures of the neighbors in her village.

“The slow handcraft techniques work as a counterforce to the accelerating pace in different areas of life,” says the
artist, who uses photographs and face-to-face meetings to help create these fiber people.

“To me the more important values in my works are not likeness or resemblance.

“The works are rather about encountering someone very concretely, seeing the other for real and getting to know them slowly. I see these as relevant values and balancing actions especially in contrast to quick stirs and thin encounters in social media.”

Check out more of Hietanen’s creative vision below.

Tags art, culture, design, life, Photography

Architecture & Design Health Nature Travel

Beautiful apples from around the world

Post author By Wells Baum
Post date May 7, 2020

William Mullan is a photographer who specializes in taking pictures of rare apples from around the world.

The golden Knobbed Russet, the star-shaped api etoile, hard red Black Oxford apple — these are just a few of the varieties that appear in Mullan’s 200-page photo-book, Odd Apples.

Writes Atlas Obscura on how Mullan’s fascination with apples came to be:

Mullan was born in the United States, but grew up in the United Kingdom, where a teenage encounter with an Egremont Russet led to his love of apples. Its spicy, persimmon-like flavor “just blew my mind,” he says. But many of the apples he’s photographed were born in North America, including such romantic cultivars as the Black Oxford and Hidden Rose.
“There’s just this sense of infinity with [apples] that I love,” Mullan says. While he imagines he’ll move on to other subjects in the future, for now, he’s still entranced by apples.

Even better, during his exhibits, he slices the apples open and passes the edibles around for his audience to enjoy.

You can follow Mullan’s work on Instagram.

Tags apple, art, Nature, Photography

Architecture & Design

Rejected designs for the Eiffel Tower

Post author By Wells Baum
Post date May 5, 2020

In the 1880s, French designers Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier mocked up what would become the Eiffel Tower. You can even see the size comparison to other landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty.

Thankfully, someone held on to the 14 other rejected designs. Number 3 seems to come closest to the final design, with embellished trusses added to the lower tier.

It’s hard to imagine Paris without the iconic Eiffel Tower today. However, engineer Gustave Eiffel never built the structure with the intention of keeping it up.

The city wanted to tear it down after the Exposition Universelle of 1889. But the same community of artists who criticized the Eiffel Tower’s initial design ended up mobilizing to save it.

Maurice Koechlin's first drawing of the Eiffel Tower #art #travel #paris #france — Maurice Koechlin’s first drawing of the Eiffel Tower

Rejected designs for the Eiffel Tower #art #travel #paris #france #history — Rejected designs for the Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower as it stands today, a timeless design

Tags Architecture, design, Eiffel Tower, history, Paris

Architecture & Design Nature

Waves in progress

Post author By Wells Baum
Post date April 28, 2020

Here’s something you can look at for hours: looping waves in progress.

Created using visual effect software Houdini by Polish motion designer who goes by the name 00.032, according to her dribble page, the piece takes after Matthieu Lehanneur’s original physical work of the same vein.

The French designer Lehanneur constructed a furniture collection called Ocean Memories that depicts three-dimensional ocean currents frozen into stone and bronze sculptures.

Lehanneur and 00.032 demonstrate both static and motion-centric representations of the Earth’s ocean.

Waves, a symbol of natural energy, have been a fascination with artists such as Hokusai for centuries.

Tags art, design, Matthieu Lehanneur, Ocean, video

Architecture & Design Culture & Society

Time travel back to New York City, 1911

Post author By Wells Baum
Post date April 22, 2020

In 1911, Swedish film company Svenska Biografteatern recorded its trip to New York.

Fortunately, the footage survived and most recently was speed-corrected (slowed down) and reproduced with the ambient audio of street sounds of car horns, horses, and police whistles to give us a sense of the environment back then.