DESIGNSIGH

An Aesthetic Loft

Fifi — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 14:49:30 +0000

This is Deborah Marland and David Backus’s airy-four story house located in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The house is clean and contemporary. Actually Ms. Marland has lived in this house since the early 1970’s, when he moved there with his mother.

They used to living in Manhattan on 15th Street between Second and Third Avenues, but there was a fire and they had to find a new place to live. So that they were drawn to Park slope, where Ms. Marland’s mother had a colleague, who had bought a wreck of a house there just for $5,000.

Later a fellow teacher told them about a brownstone for sale on his block. Eventually mother and daughter bought the house for $39, 000. It had been divided into four flours. Ms. Marland took the top two floors and her mother lived on the parlor and garden floors until her death in 1992.

“Deborah had the place filled with Victorian furniture,” said Mr. Backus, 54, an assistant director on TV commercials. (“I am the guy who yells: “Quiet please. Roll camera.’ ”)

The couple put their dream of modernizing the brownstone on hold when they bought an old saltbox in Orient, N.Y., as a weekend house in 1987, the year they were married. They had a 15-year mortgage on the saltbox and decided they would wait until it was paid off to renovate the Brooklyn house, said Ms. Marland, 56.

Like all renovations, it cost more than they expected. They could have built a brand-new house for what we spent — it was that type of expensive.

To economize during construction, the couple and their daughters — Taylor, now 18, and Marland, now 15 — camped out in the downstairs apartment.

They moved into their new old home in May 2005. When it came time to furnish their now-pristine rooms, they had to look for bargains. Ms. Marland found the B&B Italia sofa and Donghia dining table at sample sales.

Loft Living Guys

Fifi — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:30:49 +0000

From left: Ruby Young, Ian Roberts, Jeff Brown, Alex Herring and Christina Sedan, who is visiting. The four live in a loft on McKibben Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Mark Reigelman, center, 25, a designer from Cleveland, lives in a Bushwick loft with his cousin Cortney Elias, an 18-year-old cosmetology student, and Chris Neuman, 25, who designs graphics for video games.

Mr. Reigelman, left, said of his apartment “It was like a blank canvas”!

Mr. Reigelman has great skills in sculpture and industrial design. He and his original roommate built three bedrooms and a loft office, one room stacked on top of another, creating two rooms on either side of the space. As a result they created a perfect spacious home with a lot creative air and pure sound.

The Clock Tower building in the South Bronx.

Albert Senavitis is a nice guy, who uses the space in his Bushwick loft to screen movies, create art installations with friends and even shoot films.

But if he feels safe in the neighborhood, he said, “In this part of Bushwick, definitely; other parts, not so much.” Last spring, he was mugged while walking to a friend’s house in a far corner of the neighborhood.

In addition to a roommate, Mr. Senavitis shares the loft with a rambunctious cat.

Toscana by Kalle Gustafsson

Fifi — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 11:35:28 +0000

This photo-session is taken in Toscana, Italy by the Swidish photographer Kalle Gustafsson. The photographer has a quite remarkable collection of work on fashion, advertising, beauty and travel. I really love the color treatments. Enjoy it…!

The model is extremely sexy and hot. It’s a pity because i couldn’t find her name during my research.

The Toscana region is famous for its natural food, sun and pure mineral water, almost in every holiday villa.

Kalle is Born in Lund, Sweden, in 1980 and studied film in Sidney, Australia, and photography in Paris.
He spent 2 years as an assistant in Sweden. Kalle has a strong presence and a keen eye for form.

Jackie Kennedy by Kalle Gustafsson

Fifi — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 09:30:10 +0000

Due to my great feeling for Kalle Gustafsson, I decided to post another astonishing photo-session created by him. And this is just about Jackie Kennedy, her true retro style and may be a little bit more of what she had been!

Alka Seltzer

Fifi — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:03:00 +0000

Alka Paparazzi

Alka Prison

Alka Bear

Alka Magician

Alka Mafia

Advertising Agency: CLM BBDO, Paris, France
Creative Director: Gilles Fichteberg, Jean-François Sacco
Art Director: Paul Kreitmann
Copywriter: Alexis Benoit
Creative Supervisor: Edouard Perarnaud,Martin Darfeuille
Illustrator: Paul Kreitmann
Art Buyer: Sylvie Etchemaite
3D Design: PH-Print

N House, Oita

Fifi — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:46:22 +0000

This a wonderful home for two plus a dog. The house is comprised of three shells of progressive size nested inside one another. The outermost shell covers the entire premises, creating a covered, semi-indoor garden. Second shell encloses a limited space inside the covered outdoor space. Third shell creates a smaller interior space.

The architect wants to create an architecture that is not about space nor about form, but simply about expressing the riches of what are `between` houses and streets.

Three nested shells eventually mean infinite nesting because the whole world is made up of infinite nesting. And here are only three of them that are given barely visible shape.

The city and the house are no different from one another in the essence, but are just different approaches to a continuum of a single subject, or different expressions of the same thing- an undulation of a primordial space where humans dwell.

This is a presentation of an ultimate house in which everything from the origins of the world to a specific house is conceived together under a single method.

Architects: Sou Fujimoto Architects
Location: Oita, Japan

Holiday House On The Rigi

Fifi — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:28:27 +0000

This spectacular villa is situated at snow-hills in Switzerland. The building was arranged on the periphery of the property so that the distance to the neighboring houses was as large as possible and so that the option of constructing another building could be left open.

The concrete cellar anchors the building in the sloping terrain and houses the entrance area and the technical servicing, on top of which is the wooden volume of the building which appears something like a ship. This floor juts out to a great extent towards the east so that a covered, protected entrance is created.

The concrete chimney of the open fireplace rises like a mast out of the cellar, and together with a concrete wall forms the bracing backbone behind which the two single-flight staircases connect the 3 storeys.

On the ground floor is a large living room spread over two different levels and with different ceiling heights.

The deliberately low area containing the kitchen in fact creates a spatial feeling like that generated in the low parlors in mountain huts.

The 5-meter long fixed-glazed panorama window, which frames the breathtaking view like a picture, nevertheless introduces a contemporary modernity. The polygonal plan form makes a differentiated spatial division possible and gives the open fireplace its particular status at the widest spot in the room.

Esker House

Fifi — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:08:55 +0000

Esker House is a self-contained residential unit placed on top of an existing house from the 1960s.
The project has been developed as a parasite which started from adopting the structure of the host and gradually differentiated into its own unique organization and morphology.
The project is formed by a series of steel and timber frames that deform to recreate the smooth hillsides of the surrounding dolomites. This partly accessible roof scape also determines the spatial character inside- the spaces are enfolded by an angular and dynamic series of planes creating new and ever-changing perspectives and spatial constellations.

The unique stratified morphology and construction system started off from projecting each step of the external staircase as a modular that then was proliferated as frames. These frames enable the subsequent deformation and softening of the overall geometry.

The interior spaces are the reflection of the exterior geometry with folded planes accentuating the flow through the open split-level plan.

The interior is designed as a transgression from the Cartesian orthogonal layout (determined in part by the structure below and functional requirements) towards the softer fluid morphology of the roofscape.

Through its specific openings the building frames the surrounding mountains and receives sunlight when the corresponding zones are mostly used.

Afrobeat

Fifi — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:17:52 +0000

”Fela”! Is a new Broadway musical about the Nigerian bandleader Fela Anikulapo Kuti who died of AIDS in 1997.

”The Fela Kutiproject dropped from the sky” said Bill T. Jones the show’s director. It’s all about creativity, transgression, rebellion, sensuality, history, race and power. To the power of Music!

Mr. Jones, left, in a rehearsal with Sahr Ngaujah, who plays the title role.

The show was co-written by Jim Lewis, far left, and took six years to develop. The story revolves around the central tragedy of Mr. Kuti’s life, when 1,000 soldiers stormed his compound in Lagos in 1977 and threw his mother, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, (played by Abena Koomsen) a prominent activist, from her window; she later died from her injuries.

“Fela!” opens on Sept. 4 for a two-and-a-half-week engagement at 37 Arts, 450 West 37th Street.

Carl Maston House

Fifi — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:30:43 +0000

MidCentArc has posted a group of photos of a spectacular mid-century house in Los Angeles. It appears that it was(is?) the personal residence of architect Carl Maston, built in 1947. It’s a fantastic mid-century example, and fans, be forewarned of extreme longing and envy ahead.