At first you might assume that Cathy Whitlock’s book, Designs on Film: A Century of Hollywood Art Direction is another sumptuous Hollywood-inspired coffee table book, brimming with oodles of stunning movie stills and illustrations of iconic movie scenes.  Designs on Film, however, is so much more. A well-researched overview of the profession of film art directoion, the book profiles the top professionals who have worked in the field over the past hundred years.

Ms. Whitlock organized her work into two parts. Part one, “Architect of Dreams,” explains what it is that an art director does and how the profession has evolved over the course of film history. Ms. Whitlock also does a fine job of describing the responsibilities of the production designer and set decorator in relationship to the art director. The second part, the real heart of the book, recognizes the work of major art directors from the silent era through the early 2000s.

Designs on Film finally gives credit to the brilliant  talents whose on-screen work is so distinctly memorable, but whose names and faces are barely known. Several photos feature great art directors at work in the studio: Hans Dreier (“Sunset Boulevard”), Edward Carrere (“The Fountainhead”), Carroll Clark (“Top Hat”) and RKO’s supervising art director Van Nest Polglase.

Designs on Film, one gains a greater understanding and appreciation of the work of the innovative designers responsible for Hollywood’s most iconic backdrops, those folks who were part-architect, part-artist, part-military leader and part-dreamer.

Calling all (would-be) architects and Legos fanatics! Have you ever dreamed of building your own mid-century modern home inspired by the California homes of Richard Neutra or John Lautner? Well here’s your chance to enter Dwell Magazine’s Lego Modern Home Design Contest. Details can be found here. But hurry, you only have until March 29, 2012 to submit.

Live voting on entries will begin on March 31. The winner will be chosen from five finalists whose work will be on display at this year’s Dwell on Design, June 22-24, 2012.

Good luck!

This cartoon posted on artdepartmental’s blog made me laugh out loud! Thanks for sharing, Alison.

Liquid Angel, 2011.
Source: http://www.wherethepunis.com/changing-tone-tone-dont-pun-378.html

Earlier this year Design and Desire posted an article on the artist Isamu Noguchi. We’d like to share a terrific interview with the former director of the Noguchi Museum, Shoji Sadao. Sadao discusses Noguchi’s long-lived relationship with Buckminster Fuller. The accompanying photographs are also well worth a look.

Thanks to Skibinskipedia for bringing this fine article to our attention.

Geoscope (“Mini-Earth”) prototype under construction at Cornell University, 1952. Courtesy of the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller and Stanford University Libraries, Special Collections, R. Buckminster Fuller Collection.
Source: http://put.edidomus.it/domus/binaries/imagedata/big_353046_1674_Web_142_Buckminster_F_Geoscope_Cornell_19521.jpg

“The American Look: Fashions and Furnishings of the Arts and Crafts Era” features selections from the Sue Genet Costume Collection at Syracuse University and from Dalton’s American Decorative Arts. The show opens at the Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse, NY on October 15, 2011 and runs through November 11, 2011.

Nendo Collective, Visible Structures (2011). Photo by Masayuki Hayashi.
Source: http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/07/20/carbon_all02_custom.jpg?t=1311796714&s=4

National Public Radio’s Susan Stamberg reviews “Modern by Design,” an exhibition that was recently held at the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. The show features everyday  Twentieth Century items that are part of then Museum of Modern Art’s design collection.  Read or listen to Ms. Stamberg’s report.

Conformists die, heretics live forever.— Elbert Hubbard

In the documentary, “Elbert Hubbard: An American Original,” which first aired on PBS in 2009,  director/writer Paul Lamont presents Hubbard, a major figure in the American Arts and Crafts Movement, as a man of contradictions. Hubbard was devoted to art, yet motivated by business; interested in the welfare of the common man but his Roycrofters created exquisite items only the wealthy could afford; family played a central role in his life, yet he was involved in a long-lived extramarital affair.

Hubbard’s early life is the stuff of Horatio Alger lore.  He began selling soap at the age of 16 for the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York. With a keen mind for business, and perseverance, young Hubbard quickly rose up the ranks in the company by introducing “from factory to family” direct catalog sales. In 1880, Hubbard married Bertha Crawford and began a family. Three years later the Hubbards moved to East Aurora, a village outside of Buffalo.

Elbert Hubbard, photographer unknown.
Source: http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1216826209p5/114059.jpg

Yet with all his success Hubbard felt unfulfilled and began to question the direction of this life. The works of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman deeply moved and influenced him.  Later on Hubbard would repackage many of these writers’ ideas as catchy mottoes in order to promote his ideals.

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Who’s not feeling a little older? This hilarious cartoon shows even mid-century modern design is having a difficult time aging gracefully. Thanks to Core77 for sharing, and you can view the entire mid-modern design cartoon on their blog.

Craighton Berman. Cartoon (2011), originally posted on FueledByCoffee
Source: http://blog.fueledbycoffee.com/photo/1280/5865659382/1/tumblr_llt42bPoCc1qb5vt3