Wallpaper* City Guides add New Destinations

Wallpaper* City Guides have added 10 new destinations: Delhi, Hamburg, Kuala Lumpur, Kyoto, Marseille, Montreal, Moscow, Reykjavik, Seoul, and Venice. The guides present a tightly edited, discreetly packaged list of the best a location has to offer the design conscious traveller.

Whether you are staying for 48 hours or five days, visiting for business or a vacation, the editors have done the hard work for you, from finding the best restaurants, bars and hotels (including which rooms to request) to the most extraordinary stores and sites, and the most enticing architecture and design. Wallpaper* City Guides enable you to come away from your trip, however brief, with a real taste of the city’s landscape and the satisfaction you’ve seen all that you should.

Wallpaper* City Guide, Published by Phaidon. Buy them here: Amazon

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera Photographs and Video

William Eggleston’s great achievement in photography can be described in a straightforward way: he captures everyday moments and transforms them into indelible images. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 presents a comprehensive selection from nearly fifty years of image-making.

Born in 1939 in Sumner, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta region, Eggleston showed an early interest in cameras and audio technology. While studying at various colleges in the South, he purchased his first camera and came across a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment (1952). In the early 1960s, Eggleston married and moved to Memphis, where he has lived ever since. He first worked in black-and-white, but by the end of the decade began photographing primarily in color. Internationally acclaimed and widely traveled, Eggleston has spent the past four decades photographing all around the world, conveying intuitive responses to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and moods as specific expressions of local color. Psychologically complex and casually refined, bordering on kitsch and never conventionally beautiful, these photographs speak principally to the expanse of Eggleston’s imagination and have had a pervasive influence on all aspects of visual culture. By not censoring, rarely editing, and always photographing, Eggleston convinces us of the idea of the democratic camera.

Exhibition: William Eggleston: Democratic Camera Photographs and Video, 1961—2008, Whitney Museum, November 7 - January 25, 2009

The Eggleston Artistic Trust is dedicated to the representation and preservation of the work of William Eggleston. 

Recommended reading: William Eggleston’s Guide

Icon: Easter Island Moai Kavakava Sold for $614,500

The modern home is the perfect venue for displaying tribal art. A recent auction of the collection of Frieda and Milton Rosenthal, at Sotheby’s yielded a very rare and significant sculpture.

This Wooden figure from Easter Island (one of the most remote islands in Polynesia, some 2000 miles from the nearest landmass) representing emaciated, sometimes almost skeletal, men locally called Moai Kavakava are named after moai for the monumental monolithic human figures found on Easter Island and the word kavakava meaning “ribs”. Little is known about their cultural context.

Moai Kavakava are said to represent spirits or ghosts (Aku Aku) as well as deceased ancestors. German Expressionist Max Ernst, was inspired by these figures and their rituals and they can also be found in the collections of the French surrealist André Breton.

Moai Kava Kava, Sold at auction, $ 614,500 USD, at Sotheby’s New York, USA

Alila Villas Uluwatu and Hotel in Bali

While Designing Alila Villas Uluwatu, the architects wanted to create more than the usual stereotypical ideas of Bali, creating a design that worked with the dry Balinese Savannah vegetation and gently sloping site, not against it. The 14.4 hectare development offers three-bedroom contemporary Balinese villas for sale, as well as a hotel for those on holiday in Bali.

Alila Villas Uluwatu, Bali, Indonesia, by WOHA
via: Contemporist

Collages by Alejandro Chavetta

We love these images that recall the work of the influential photographer and designer, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in the 1920’s.

Collages, by Alejandro Chavetta

Field of Light at Eden Project by Bruce Munro

Bruce Munro’s iconic Field of Light sculpture is now installed at the Eden Project in Cornwall. The piece can now be seen on the sloping grass roof of the visitors centre, called the Link building, between the famous Rainforest and Mediterranean Biomes, and will remain there until Spring 2009. The sculpture first came to widespread public attention when a scaled-down version was exhibited in the Pirelli Garden at the V&A in 2004.
Bruce Munro and five assistants worked over three days to install Field of Light at the Eden Project. It is made of 6,000 acrylic stems, through which fibre optic cables run, each crowned with a clear glass sphere.

Field of Light, by Bruce Munro, through Spring 2009, at the Eden Project, Cornwall, UK
via: dezeen

Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933

When Alexander “Sandy” Calder (1898–1976), arrived in Paris in 1926, he aspired to be a painter; when he left in 1933, he had evolved into the artist we know today: an international figure and defining force in twentieth-century sculpture. In these seven years Calder’s fluid, animating drawn line transformed from two dimensions to three, from ink and paint to wire, and his radical innovations included openform wire caricature portraits, a bestiary of wire animals, his beloved and critically important miniature Circus (1926–31), abstract and figurative sculptures, and his paradigm-shifting “mobiles.”

Exhibition: Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933, at the Whitney Museum October 16, 2008 - February 15, 2009

Goldfish Sculpture by Yoshimasa Tsuchiya

Goldfish, a polychrome woodcarving about 24cm long

Goldfish, by Yoshimasa Tsuchiya

Guarded Thoughts, New Work by Ron Arad

Friedman Benda Gallery, will unveil the new work of Ron Arad. This new body of work, the artist’s most ambitious to date, propels Arad into previously unexplored sculptural dimension. In a departure both in scale and material sophistication, the artist uses his signature vocabulary of volumetric forms to unexpected and mesmerizing visual effect.

Exhibition: New work by designer Ron Arad, November 7th - December 20th, at the Friedmann Benda Gallery, New York, USA
via: dezeen

Travel: Night at the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s The Shining

In 1980, Stanley Kubrick came to the Timberline Lodge to film one of the all-time great horror classics, The Shining. In the film, Jack Torrance (Nicholson) gets a job as the custodian of the Overlook Hotel, in the mountains of Colorado. The place is closed down during winter, Torrance and his family will be the only occupants of the hotel for a long while. When the snow storms block the Torrance family in the hotel, Jack’s son Danny, who has some clairvoyance and telepathy powers, discovers that the hotel is haunted and that the spirits are slowly driving Jack crazy. When Jack meets the ghost of Mr. Grady, the former custodian of the hotel who murdered his wife and his two daughters, things begin to get really nasty.
The hotel in the film is actually called the Timberline Lodge and is located near Mt. Hood in Oregon, USA. For one night only, the hotel is hosting a 1920s era ball, in honour of the scene in the movie.

A Celebration of The Shining at the Timberline Lodge, Mt. Hood, Oregon, USA, October 31, 2008, at Come Play With Us

Spaces and Storytelling in Kubrick’s The Shining