In the 1970s, legendary furniture designer Enzo Mari pioneered the idea of “autoprogettazione”, roughly translated, “self design”, projects that he hoped would empower people to create with their own hands. With “ecolo” he applied the idea to plastic bottles…
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When we stumbled on thisimage by photographer Jill Burrow, we thought, ‘Ah yes. We’d love to sleep surrounded by flowers, especially now, after months of guarded and circumscribed living.’ Looking closely, we found permission to do it…
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Designer Seung Jin Yang’s whimsical furniture appears to be made of the kind of twistable balloons used to entertain kids. OMG, we thought, could we make furniture out of balloons?
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Tokujin Yoshioka created a simple, easy-to-make face shield held in place with ordinary eyewear. It gives an added measure of protection against Covid-19.
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We’ve read a lot theories for the toilet paper hoarding that has marked the Coronavirus pandemic. We have a few of our own + viable alternatives.
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When we found hand sanitizers sold out everywhere, we did some research to find ways to achieve what commercial hand-sanitizers would, along with a few other strategies for killing that nasty coronavirus.
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We were knocked out by selections from poet Mary Ruefle’s beautiful ”erasure books”, poetry made by whiting out words in old books. We also discovered Wite-Out is a potent, paint-like art material.
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Years ago painters left behind some sanding sponges they used to achieve a perfect finish in the high gloss surfaces. Something made me pick one up to try sanding an ugly heating pipe coated in green enamel. The ease-of-transformation was a revelation. I’ve been using that perfect sponge ever since for all sorts of fixes and projects around my house.
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Over the years, I’ve learned that making linen room dividers, tablecloths, napkins and slipcovers does NOT have to involve sewing…
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Whenever we look at designer Paola Navone’s homes, we come away with a zillion ideas that we could actually do, without a ton of dough. Here are our favorite steal-able ideas.
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Many of the design suggestions in Remodelista’s “Expert Advice…for Creating the Illusion of Space” are indeed effective. Not this one. So we figured out some solutions…
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“This is what thought looks like” begins Dennis Overbye’s article about Jessica Wynne’s remarkable photographs of mathematician’s blackboards, that reminded us of Steiner and Cy Twombly…
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Kraft paper is so wildly useful that if I had the room in my city apartment, I’d keep a roll on a wall to have easy access when the mood/need hits.
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Years ago we figured out a technique that no shoemaker seems to know: how to remove the rough blims and tears that stick up on the scraped toes prevents a truly satisfying, long-lasting shine.
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After I started working with gold, melting, rolling, forging the 22-karat coins I bought years ago, I started to see other forms of treasure, including Karin van der Molen’s beautiful sculpture…
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In the images from The Art of Collage and Assemblage on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it was the ordinariness of many of the materials used that we found both moving and inspiring…
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If you are daunted by the prospect of creating a website for yourself or a project, check out Carrd, a free platform for building simple, stylish responsive one-page sites, fast.
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In my top floor space, the scorching temperatures have been pushing me to find non-electric ways of cooling the place down to mitigate air conditioner use. I turned to the material that seemed most likely to provide insulation: foam core leftover from the many life-size prototypes I’ve built …
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How swell to see Improvised Life mentioned in New York Magazine’s ’31 Low Lift Home Improvements for Under $100′ for our decoding of Donald Judd furniture. We got a lot of ideas for jazzing up our space….
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Yoko Ono’s 1966 lovely “Mend Piece” is a participatory installation that, like many Ono works, comes with instructions designed to resonate personally, meaningfully, expansively…
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