neighbourliness or service interventions

Courtesy of Kottke’s Quick Links, I am pouring over this list of one hundred and one small civil- and civic-engineering hacks that one could apply to any community to improve it. Just a few select ideas that could be pitched to municipal-councils or could shame city governments into action:

66. Turn snow piles into sidewalk ice bars
79. Host a movie out-of-doors
98. Map your public produce—stray fruits and vegetables that go unharvested
13. Guerrilla gardening revolution
71. Become a tour guide and showcase your neighbourhood

What do you think? Was there one idea (or a hatful) that resonated with you that you will try? Surely all of us can try a little urban exploration, at minimum.

wintertuin ou hôtel particulier

Thanks to Messy Nessy Chic for piquing my curiosity with this divinely art nouveau glimpse of the Hôtel Hannon in Brussels, a Hôtel Particulier being a grand, detached townhouse in French. A wealth and successful petro-chemical engineer named Édouard Hannon in 1902 commissioned an architect friend to design him a home in the city. The house was transformed into a showcase for some of the finest art of the period, with fine frescos and mosaics, stained-glass from the Tiffany tradition and Émile Gallé, who contributed lamps, vases and other bric-a-brac. Tragically, the family only were able to reside there a couple of years and the mansion was left to decay, until having purchased the property, the borough opened house as a museum in 1989 after extensive restoration.

industrial arts

Back in 1935 surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp plied his craft in a purely commercial venture at the gadget fair Concours Lépine in Paris—a sort of invention-convention for debuting new household appliances—with his Rotoreliefs.
These kinetic works of art designed to rotate on a turntable and propagate optical illusions unfortunately missed the target audience at the fair, who were naturally more interested in the latest slicers and dicers than record albums that didn’t have any audio content. Duchamp was not disheartened by this entrepreneurial set-back and continued honing his trade in collaboration with other artists. Be sure to check out the whole curated article at Hyperallergic for more Rotoreliefs in action and short film Duchamp made with fellow surrealist Man Ray.

mindfulness

Robert Coleman Elementary of Baltimore, Maryland has replaced traditional discipline measures with after school meditative sessions. In the two years that this programme has been piloted in partnership with a local holistic healing centre, no students have been suspended or expelled, though one might venture that attendance at detention has grown.

sequin

Talented and prolific insect and arthropod photographer Nicky Bay shares a gallery of the unlikely Mirror Spider, native to the Australian continent. The lustery patches that cover their abdomens owe their character to the same biological compound that gives fish scales their shine, and as Bay documents, can grow or shrink in size or shift position to give the spider more camouflage, nearly disappearing behind the reflective surface entirely.  Discover more of his amazing work at the link above.