Weekend / Stuff

 

Ikebana, Amy Donaldson, Hal Fromhold and David Stewart

I went to the Peter Shire open house last weekend and bought a dustpan.

and some ceramics

George Nelson (with Isamu Noguchi and Bucky) and Irving Harper (right)

From George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design, Nelson reminisced about that 1947 evening in his office:

"And there was one night when the ball clock got developed, which was one of the really funny evenings. [Isamu] Noguchi came by, and Bucky Fuller came by. I’d been seeing a lot of Bucky those days, and here was Irving and here was I, and Noguchi, who can't keep his hands off anything, you know – it is a marvelous, itchy thing he's got – he saw we were working on clocks and he started making doodles. Then Bucky sort of brushed Isamu aside. He said, 'This is a good way to do a clock,' and he made some utterly absurd thing. Everybody was taking a crack at this ... pushing each other aside and making scribbles.

At some point we left – we were suddenly all tired, and we'd had a little bit too much to drink – and the next morning I came back, and here was this roll [of drafting paper], and Irving and I looked at it, and somewhere in this roll there was the ball clock. I don't know to this day who cooked it up. I know it wasn't me. It might have been Irving, but he didn’t think so ... [We] both guessed that Isamu had probably done it because [he] has a genius for doing two stupid things and making something extraordinary ... out of the combination ... [Or] it could have been an additive thing, but, anyway, we never knew. So we did the ball clock, which was, in its piddling way, a sort of all-time best-seller for Howard [Miller, because] suddenly it was decided by Mrs. America that this was the clock to put in your kitchen. Why [the] kitchen, I don’t know. But every ad that showed a kitchen for years after that had a ball clock in it."

Metal

Tunsi Girard