Suggestions in Design by John Leighton

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Among the new book arrivals at the Internet Archive is this study of global design and ornamentation, with art by John Leighton and text (or “descriptive and historical letterpress”) by James K. Colling. Suggestions in Design was published in 1880, with the pictorial matter having been available for many years as part of Dover Publications’ Pictorial Archive series. I don’t have a copy of the reprint, however, so this was a useful find. Leighton’s illustrations are black-and-white throughout, and all separated from each other, which is what you want if you’re looking for a design you may use yourself. The illustrations are also carefully done, something you can’t always say about the smaller books of this type.

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The Victorian era is where design history begins. Suggestions in Design follows the structure of Owen Jones’ landmark study, The Grammar of Ornament, ranging across the world and through the ages to demonstrate the evolution of decoration and sculptural form. Leighton ends the book with several pages of his own designs. Browse it here or download it here.

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Continue reading “Suggestions in Design by John Leighton”

A Day of Expo 70

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Poster design by Yusaku Kamekura.

More expositiana. Expo 2025 opens in Osaka in April, 55 years after the last expo staged in the city. Looking at the Expo 2025 website I can’t see the event generating much interest 50 years from now the way that Expo 70 does today. Expo 70 is the only 20th-century exhibition with any substantial cult value, something I’d guess to be a combination of several factors. On the design and architecture fronts the exposition was especially notable, with a great logo, great posters, and pavilions that look like a future that never arrived. In the 21st century the Japanese dimension of Expo 70 adds to its attraction; among other things the event is the only exposition whose site gets trashed by battling kaiju monsters, as happens at the end of Gamera vs. Jiger.

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The Tower of the Sun from the Expo 70 Official Guide.

Then there’s the centrepiece of the event site, Taro Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun, which joins the Eiffel Tower, the Brussels Atomium and Seattle’s Space Needle in being an exposition remnant that future generations have decided to preserve. Okamoto’s Tower is the strangest of all the surviving exposition structures, the creation of a multi-talented artist, designer and jazz drummer (!) who exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s. Now that the Tower is now left standing alone in open parkland it seems more like the world’s largest Surrealist sculpture. In 2018 Kôsai Sekine released a feature-length documentary, Tower of the Sun, about the artist and the construction of his tower.

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A Day of Expo 70.

A Day of Expo 70 is a much shorter documentary made to promote New Zealand’s involvement with the exposition. This is one of the longer English-language films made while the expo was still in progress, and one of many films about the event at this dedicated YouTube channel. Most of the clips are in Japanese, like this three-hour TV special, but still worth seeing for the documentary detail. For French speakers there’s an hour-long documentary at the Radio Canada archives. And while I usually dislike the pointless upscaling of old film and video material this clip shows overhead views of the expo site from the monorail and the cable cars.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Impressions of Expo 67
Expositiana
The exposition moiré
Angkor in Paris, 1931
The world of the future
Space Needle USA
A Trip to the Moon, 1901
Le Panorama Exposition Universelle
Exposition cornucopia
The Evanescent City

Weekend links 764

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Bruxelles 1958 Exposition Universelle (1958) by Leo Marfut.

• “In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same.” Welcome back, Ubuweb.

• A catalogue of lots at another After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• At Public Domain Review: George Baxter’s print of Crystal Palace dinosaurs (ca. 1864).

• At Spoon & Tamago: Contemporary Nihonga images of hamsters created by Otama-shimai.

• At Discogs: James Balmont explores Japan’s ambient boom of the ’80s and ’90s.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Sakina Abdou.

• RIP Mike Ratledge, co-founder of Soft Machine.

• New music: Signals And Codes by Andrew Heath.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Les Blank’s Day.

Signaux Codes Non Identifiés (1978) by Michel Magne | Code Rays (Codex Dub) (1995) by Main | Silent Code (1999) by Robert Musso

Impressions of Expo 67

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I ought to have included this miniature in the collection of exposition films I posted a couple of years ago. Impressions of Expo 67 was made by William Brind for the National Film Board of Canada. It’s a lot shorter than Henry Charles Fleischer’s home-movie record of the Montreal exposition but has the edge over Fleischer’s shaky, hand-held shots by being very smartly shot and edited. Brind also avoids spoiling his film with over-eager narration, what you get is eight minutes of light-rail journeys, international visitors and speculative architecture, all of it scored by a groovy soundtrack.

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The architecture had a lot to recommend it at this expo: the inverted pyramid of the Canadian pavilion, Buckminster Fuller’s enormous geodesic dome (one of the few structures still standing today), the “Gyrotron” pyramid, and Frei Otto’s West German pavilion whose membranous roof looks forward to the stadium he designed for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Wikimedia Commons has a detailed map of the entire site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Expositiana
The exposition moiré
Angkor in Paris, 1931
The world of the future
Space Needle USA
A Trip to the Moon, 1901
Le Panorama Exposition Universelle
Exposition cornucopia
The Evanescent City

Weekend links 763

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I Live in Shock (1955) by Mimi Parent.

• At Public Domain Review: “Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922) is at turns obtuse, grotesque, and moralizing—and sought to provoke the obscenity trial of the century. Only it didn’t, quietly vanishing instead. Colin Dickey rereads this failed satire, finding a transcendent rhythm pulsing beneath the novel’s indulgent prose.”

• “There are no surprises when a pallet of CDs arrives at my office, but when a pressing plant alerts me to a shipment of records headed my way I start to worry.” John Brien, head of Important Records, on the problems involved in the manufacture of vinyl albums.

• The sixth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

They were building a vast alternative religion with a lack of dictates but no shortage of rituals and icons. They’d pass through the end of the world to get there first; the next album was based on a vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse slaughtering their animals and constructing a earth-gouging machine from their jawbones, demonstrating they weren’t quite intending to settle down yet. It would take them far from mainstream culture, and indeed mainstream gay culture given their repeated disdain for sanitised queerness, and into enigmatic territory. Having scared away most fans of synth pop and industrial with provocation, and the weak and tyrannical with ambiguity, they were unencumbered and “allowed to mature in the dark”, sustained by a cult following (you rarely encounter a tepid fan of Coil, most are acolytes).

Darran Anderson looking back at Coil’s debut album, Scatology

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition.

• At The Daily Heller: How did pink become a colour? Meanwhile, Steven Heller’s font of the month is Vibro.

• New music: Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds by Lawrence English.

SciURLs: A science news aggregator.

Shackleton’s favourite albums.

• RIP Marianne Faithfull.

The Pink Panther Theme (1963) by Henry Mancini | The Pink Room (1988) by Seigen Ono | Pink (2005) by Boris