Life Sans Bldgs

smithsonianmag:

The Secret Language of Cattle Branding

To the untrained eye, cattle brands, those unique markings seared into animals’ hides with a hot iron, might just seem like idiosyncratic logos or trademarks designed to clearly and simply indicate ownership. However, unlike the graphic logos and trademarked images of popular commercial brands, they must comply with a rigorous set of standards and are developed using a specific language ruled by its own unique syntax and morphology.Livestock branding dates back to 2700 BC, evidenced by Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ancient Romans are said to have used hot iron brands as an element of magic. But brands are most famously associated with the cowboys and cattle drives of the Old West, when brands were used to identify a cow’s owner, protect cattle from rustlers (cattle thieves), and to separate them when it came time to drive to market (or rail yards or stock yards).

At its most basic, a cattle brand is composed of a few simple letters and numbers, possibly in combination with a basic shape or symbols like a line, circle, heart, arc, or diamond. But these characters can also be embellished with serif-like flourishes to create myriad “pyroglyphics.” For example, such serifs might include extraneous “wings” or “feet” added to a letter or number. Each character can also be rotated or reversed. Every addition and variation results in a unique character that is named accordingly. The letters with “wings” for example, are described as “flying” while those with “feet” are, you guessed it, “walking.” An upside-down characters is “crazy” while a 90-degree rotation makes a character “lazy.” These colorful designations aren’t just cute nicknames used to identify the characters, but are actually a part of the name, a spoken part of the brand language, which like most western languages is read from left to right, top to bottom and, perhaps unique to brands, outside to inside. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

A rendering of Ted Mosby’s apartment from the television series “How I Met Your Mother”. DeviantARTist nikneuk has created beautiful floor plans of many famous television apartments. 

Looking at these, I’m reminded that in most sitcoms we (the audience) are often watching the characters through their own television sets.

(via nikneuk on deviantART)

dinosaurspen:

From the Retronaut description:

1967: The General Electric Exoskeleton

“The G.E. Hardiman I. Hardiman is a name derived from “Human Augmentation Research and Development Investigation.” and Man from MANipulator.”

Look on my works ye mighty, and despair!

(Giant Styrofoam Head Found : NPR)

You haven’t read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There until you’ve read it in the original chess. 

(The 64-Square Grid Design of ‘Through the Looking Glass’ | Design Decoded)

Sculptor Josef Hartwig designed this chess set while teaching at the Bauhaus in 1924. It embodied the school’s tenets that an object must be practical, durable, inexpensive and beautiful. Hartwig’s design reduced the pieces to the most basic components of artistic construction: line, square and circle. Though they are incredibly abstract, each well-crafted piece, originally sculpted from pear wood, has been designed to describe its movement on the board. The bishop, for example, is a simple X, denoting its diagonal movement. Every aspect of the Bauhaus set was given consideration, even the packaging designed by Hartwig’s colleague Joost Schmidt. It truly is, in the Bauhaus tradition, a union of art and craft. The pieces are stripped of any symbolic meaning and reduced to pure form. Their designations –bishop, knight, king– become irrelevant. All that matters was movement, which is made tangible as the identifying characteristic of each piece.

(When Modern Art Met the Classic Chess Set | Design Decoded)

ARM, National Museum of Australia, Canberra (2001)

ARM do some incredibly witty and provocative work. The Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is part of the National Museum of Australia, which includes several other citations/samples/forgeries of recognizable buildings by Daniel Libeskind, Charles Moore, and others. It’s a brazen project that raises a lot of compelling issues about authenticity and authorship in architecture, and is cited as a prominent example of “Radical Postmodernism” as defined in the May 2011 issue of AD, edited by F.A.T. and Charles Jencks.

James Polshek remixes Paul Rudolph’s iconic section-perspective of the A&A.

studiox-nyc:

Click to zoom in on this gorgeous visualization of Kowloon’s Walled City, demolished twenty years ago this month. The illustration is from an article from the South China Morning Post, which includes a short history of the place and more stories from people who used to live there:

It was once thought to be the most densely populated place on earth, with 35,000 people crammed into a few tiny apartment blocks and more than 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, all constructed without contributions from a single architect.

It’s like a nightmare urban version of Where’s Waldo.

Ghosts.

(Haunting photographs show historical events erupting into the present day)

Sometimes the sign is just a picture of food.

The Staunton set was designed by architect Nathan Cook, who looked at a variety of popular chess sets and distilled their common traits while also, more importantly, looking at the city around him. Victorian London’s Neoclassical architecture had been influenced by a renewed interest in the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome, which captured the popular imagination after the rediscovery of Pompeii in the 18th century. The work of architects like Christopher Wren, William Chambers, John Soane, and many others inspired the column-like, tripartite division of king, queen, and bishop. A row of Staunton pawns evokes Italianate balustrades enclosing of stairways and balconies. And the knight, the most intricate and distinct piece of any chess set, is unique in that it’s the only piece that is not an abstracted representation of a designation; it’s a realistically carved horse head. The Staunton Knight was likely inspired by a sculpture on the east pediment of the Parthenon depicting horses drawing the chariot of Selene, the Moon Goddess.

(The Architectural Origins of the Chess Set | Design Decoded)

(Now You Know the History of G.I. Joe. And Knowing Is Half The Battle. | Design Decoded)

The minivan turns 30 this year. If it were a person, it might be shopping for a minivan of its own to haul the kids to soccer practice and take family vacations to Myrtle Beach. But it also might stare at itself in the mirror, check for a receding hairline, and ask some serious question like “How did I get here?” and “What am I doing with my life?”

(The Minivan Turns 30 | Design Decoded)

3D printing is making it drastically easier to produce infinite identical copies of anything, for better or worse, for humanitarian or for destructive purposes. A replica of Michelangelo’s David can be made at home just as easily as an assault rifle. While the relatively new technology of 3D printing is proving popular with designers, fabricators and the general public, it hasn’t yet reached the ubiquity of the home printer. But it will. A recent trip to the Makerbot store, a 3D printing boutique in Manhattan, has absolutely convinced that “desktop” 3D printing is poised to change the world. I saw nine-year-old kids using basic CAD software to make their own toys. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision a near-future where toys are downloaded like books or songs or movies. Print-on-demand custom lego bricks or minifigs are the kinds of things I would have dreamt about as a child if I could have even imagined the possibility. It’s only a matter of time until desktop fabrication is as common as desktop publishing. 

(3D Printing From the Renaissance to Today - Life Without Buildings)