{design} – Page 264 – { feuilleton }

Endangered insects postage stamps

Adonis Blue Butterfly.

Beautiful stamps for the second in a Royal Mail series intended to bring attention to endangered species. These will be issued on Tuesday and are designed by Andrew Ross using photography from the Natural History Museum. The Independent notes the irony of the Royal Mail printing these even as they’re building a new distribution depot at West Thurrock which will destroy natural habitats. Invertebrate Conservation Trust Buglife had tried and failed to prevent the development.

top: Silver-spotted Skipper, Red Barbed Ant, Stag Beetle.
centre: Noble Chafer Beetle, Barberry Carpet Moth, Purbeck Mason Wasp.
bottom: Southern Damselfly, Field Cricket, Hazel Pot Beetle.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Robert Lang’s origami insects
• James Bond postage stamps
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
• Please Mr. Postman
• Insect Lab

Atelier Elvira

Atelier Elvira (1897-98).

Seeing as there’s been a run of Art Nouveau-related posts here it’s worth mentioning a location that’s familiar to students of the Jugendstil but less well-known to the world at large. August Endell’s Atelier Elvira was a Munich studio building whose exterior decoration of a very stylised dragon creature manages to be even more exaggerated than similar work by Antoni Gaudí. Munich was the centre of German arts and crafts and produced much home-grown Art Nouveau but this eruption of bizarre plasterwork in an otherwise mundane street was still surprising. The façade was painted green, as in the tinted photo above, and the dragon painted different colours each year, yellow, red and so on.

The ironwork street entrance.

Needless to say, not everyone looked upon this kind of challenging décor favourably. In 1937 the Nazi Oberbürgermeister complained about the “hideous façade disrupting the character of the rest of the street” and had the dragon design chipped off the wall. Allied bombs did for the rest a few years later so these pictures are all that we have left.

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New coins

The coins of the realm receive a very welcome makeover following a design competition by the Royal Mint. The winning design by Matthew Dent is a surprisingly contemporary choice for such a staid institution. Although the Royal Arms shield is very traditional, the act of breaking it into pieces across the smaller coins is a clever move which makes the individual coins seem strikingly contemporary when only a small part of the design is visible. I’m looking forward to seeing these once they go into circulation.

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Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams

Globe terrestre.

More exposition mania. The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 would have been more grand/fabulous/excessive (delete as appropriate) if architect Louis Bonnier had been given free reign. The building above was intended to stand before the Palais du Trocadéro and house a huge globe which visitors could peruse from surrounding galleries. Bonnier also designed a series of kiosks (below) for different exhibitors which look more like over-sized Art Nouveau ornaments than pieces of architecture.

Three of these pictures are scanned from a book; the only site I found with examples of Bonnier’s work was this one which unfortunately spoils the pictures with enormous watermarks.