Currency secrets

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A 250 guilder note.

Robert Deodaat Emile Oxenaar, aka “Ootje”, was responsible for the design of the Netherlands’ guilders before they were swept aside by Euro blandness in 2002. In an interview with Creative Review he describes how he managed to hide secret references and little jokes in the designs, successfully evading the magnifying-glass scrutiny of the nation’s banking officials. Great designs they are as well, the audacity of a lighthouse on its side would never pass the watchdogs at the Royal Mint if someone tried that here.

Via Design Observer.

Perfume: the art of scent

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I’ve yet to see Tom Tykwer’s film of Patrick Süskind’s novel, Perfume—The Story of a Murderer, and remain reluctant to do so; it’s a rule in cinema that good books make bad films and vice versa. Perfume is a good book and a favourite of mine which makes the prospect of film adaptation even more worrying. (As an aside, Tykwer dispels the persistent rumour that Stanley Kubrick dismissed Perfume as an unfilmable novel.)

Reservations apart, I’ve been listening to the tremendous soundtrack all week after a recommendation from a friend (hi Philip!). The music is credited to Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek and the director, and features the near unprecedented involvement of conductor Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra that rarely stoops to the level of the film soundtrack. This prompted speculation about the distinct challenge Süskind’s book presents to a designer: how best to represent the entwined strands of Grenouille’s career as a perfumier and a murderer of young women?

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Radical architects and their magazines

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Such Cheek! Those Were the Days, Architects
by Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times, February 8th, 2007

IF YOU ARE revolted by today’s slick and fashion-obsessed architecture scene, hurry over to ‘Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines‘ at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. You’ll feel even worse.

Organized by the architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, the show examines the world of those small magazines from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s, when the field of architecture was still marked by a playful intellectual and political independence. It’s packed with gorgeous cover images, from copulating robots to an elephant attacking the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan to a skyscraper made of Swiss cheese. Often thrown together on a shoestring budget, the magazines have an intoxicating freshness that should send a shudder down the spine of those who’ve spent the last decade bathed in the glow of the computer screen.

But this is not an exercise in nostalgia. It’s a piercing critique, intended or not, of the smoothness of our contemporary design culture. These magazine covers map out an era when architecture was simmering with new ideas. You’re bound to leave the show with a nagging sense of what was lost as well as gained during the electronic juggernaut of the last three decades.

Part of the magic of this show, which was recently extended for three more weeks, is in the works’ crude immediacy. One side of the gallery is wallpapered in hundreds of colorful magazine covers. On the opposite wall a more detailed timeline maps out the evolution of the culture of architectural magazines, from an obsession with politics and pop culture to a descent into increasingly abstruse and self-involved theoretical debates. The rarest magazines are encased in clear plastic bubbles (made of cheap plastic skylights that the show’s curators bought on Canal Street), evoking time capsules descended from outer space.

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The art of Arik Roper

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Semyaza (2007).

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Witch Banner (2006): Witch South x Southwest banner.

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Eyehategod NYC (2005): NYC show poster.

Arik Roper produces much band artwork and design (including for Boris who I’ve been listening to a lot this week). He’s also part of the splendid Arthur posse. Go thou to his work and marvel.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Underground history
Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

31 days in Iraq

“If you look at what’s transpired in Iraq, Chris, we’ve made enormous progress.”
US Vice President Dick Cheney, Fox News interview, January 14th, 2007.

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A visual depiction of the continuing human cost of the Iraq war,
by Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Alicia Cheng. From the NYT.

In January more than 1,900 people—soldiers, security officers and civilians—were killed in the insurgency in Iraq, up from 800 in January 2006. Many corpses showed signs of torture, meaning the victims were probably killed by religious and tribal death squads. This map, based on data from the American, British and Iraqi governments and from news reports, shows the dates, locations and circumstances of deaths for the first month of the year. Given the vast size of Iraq and the communications difficulties inherent in war, the information may be incomplete. Nonetheless, it is our effort to visually depict the continuing human cost of the Iraq war.

Adriana Lins de Albuquerque is a doctoral student in political science at Columbia.
Alicia Cheng is a graphic designer at mgmt. design in Brooklyn.

Update: Seems like The Independent was taken with this as well.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Liberty 2006