lignes géométriques et ondoyantes

Born on this day in Davos in 1889 (†1943), artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp honed her skills across multiple disciplines including sculpture, dance, interior design and textiles becoming one of the most important and influential forces in concrete and abstract art, and informed the Dadaist movement, a co-signatory of the Züricher manifesto.
Her weaving and textile work from 1916 were acknowledged as some of the pioneering constructivist exemplars of the age, along with Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich and brought performative dance and cabaret to the shared philosophical front and was also the first artist to reference polka-dots. Confidants including Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp, and Sonia and Robert Delauney, Taeuber-Arp exhibited successfully in Strasbourg before founding a Constructivist review and led their recampment of their artists’ freehold to Grasse in Vichy France during Nazi occupation, expiring tragically pre-maturely due to carbon-monoxide poisoning from an ill-fitting stove pipe. Taeuber-Arp has previously been the subject of many retrospectives, appearing on the 50 CHF note from 1995 to 2016 and was honoured with a Google doodle.

7x7

economies of ale: after a decade of steep declines, UK pub numbers are seeing a slight uptick charted

parkverbotszone: plans for the future IKEA am Westbahnhof in Vienna is being designed for a post-auto world

women hold up half the sky: Liang Jun, the tractor driving figure, iconically featured on the one yuan bill, has passed away, aged ninety

best in show: winners and honourable-mentions of the Ocean Art Photography competition

the id, the super-ego, and the psyche: the strange, singular encounter between Salvador Dalí and Sigmund Freud

triangle man, triangle man: celebrating thirty years of They Might Be Giants’ (a reference to Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills) seminal album Flood

there and back again: a remembrance of Christopher Tolkien (*1925 – †2020), executor of his father’s literary estate and map-maker of Middle Earth

fox-cull

In order to distance the media empire and its paracosms from the toxic propagandizing subsidiary masquerading as a news outlet, Disney’s studio mergers (themselves the product of a string of prior consolidations beginning in 1933) will be known henceforth as Twentieth Century and Searchlight Pictures.

railbanked or atchison, topeka and santa fe

At its height, the rail network of the United States was somewhere approaching half a million kilometres, with now over half that infrastructure abandoned, superannuated. Maps Mania takes us on a whistle-stop tour on the extensive out-of-service (that is—railbanked, see also) routes. There are a lot of resources to explore here in addition to the interactive maps that give the history of the lines, accompanying blog with lots of images and other depots for departing on virtual journeys.

garage mahal

Via the inestimable Things Magazine, we are treated to a delightful post-holiday holdover in the carefully juried collection of the finest submissions of confectionary architecture (see also) competing for top honours in the annual McGingerbread Hell Awards. McMansions in miniature (previously) are timid and amateurish transgressions of all the aspects of good design, mass-produced with a clashing of styles, ornament and elements meant to signal wealth and refinement. .