Esoteric Survey

Eva Zeisel Space dividers Dansk and Trude Petri   Bucky and Creative Playthings

For years I've had a childhood memory of playing in a space age bubble. I asked my mom and she had no idea what I was talking about. My deep digging on the web never provided any leads. I remembered it was in Rohr Park in Chula Vista, which also had a mini railroad. Last week, after talking to a friend who also had memories of the bubble, I decided to do another search. It paid off.   Source: Chula Vista Star News This is the one I played on. It was constructed in 1978.  It went by many names, such as Soap Bubble Castle, Bubble Maze, Curved Space Diamond System, or Curved Space Labyrinth. The Lexan plastic structure is a "nature-based, large scale, sculptural system that maps the geometry of a diamond crystal at approximately 16 billion times its actual size".  Peter Jon Pearce created the Curved Space Diamond System to demonstrate built environments patterned after natural structures. Much along the same lines as the  Metabolism ...

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 Hammer museum Black Mountain College (BMC) was an experimental school located in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It opened in 1933 and was owned by the faculty. Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Buckminister Fuller, Robert Motherwell, Charles Olson, and Xanti Schawinsky is just a partial list of the faculty. Ruth Asawa, Kenneth Noland, John Chamberlain, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg were all associated with the school. BMC closed in 1957. Source:  Western Regional Archives, States Archives of North Carolina Josef Albers painting and a desk he designed for the college Anni Albers Josef Albers Buckminster Fuller Buckminster Fuller Source: State Archives of North Carolina Emerson Woelffer Ilya Bolotowsky Robert Rauschenberg Ingeborg Svarc Lauterstein and  Rauschenberg at BMC. I bet at lot of good times were had there.  Source:  S...

Eames display at the  Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan It was great to finally get to see the John Wills fiberglass shell in person. It's the sole surviving example of the first two Eames fiberglass shells ever made. This is pre-Zenith Plastics. The shell sits is on the original   trashcan  base used by boat builder Wills in his shop.  Learn more about this important prototype, here . Herman Miller production mold.  Eames screen and Nathan Lerner chair. More about the Lerner chair, here . Hey, what's that up there? The recently acquired Eames-designed World's Fair kiosk is proudly on display.  Mathematica will be installed close by. It's scheduled to be on permanent display beginning sometime in 2016.   I was able to take a peek at it behind the scenes and it's pretty great. I'd like to thank Kristen Gallerneaux, Curator of Communications and Information Technology and Marc G...