Search result for: the-last-thing-you-aquired-
| # | Post Title | Result Info | Date | User | Forum |
| I'm not sure if the best procedure is to decide on a rug... | 1 Relevance | 15 years ago | william-holden-... | General discussion | |
| I'm not sure if the best procedure is to decide on a rug before other furnishings, since rugs are used to unify a space, and are available in an endless array of dimensions, colors, and textures; why limit yourself to accommodating THIS specific color & texture, available in only two sizes? But the question of "where to begin" is a good one. I guess the first thing I'd do is determine the furniture items I consider essential (sofa, desk, dining table, whatever). Then assess the architecture & layout of the empty space before deciding on anything specific. How much wall space is there to play with? Are there furniture pieces that would be better than others in front of those enormous windows? Ceiling height? Where do I want the dining table in relation to the kitchen? How about the room's traffic patterns to the kitchen, bath, bedroom, closets? Decide where the living, dining, and office areas should roughly be, that'll give you an idea of the the types of pieces that would work in those areas. Then, do a lot of shopping and imagining before committing to anything in particular. Decide on a sofa and dining table & chairs that work well together and within the space. Then fill in with coffee tables, easy chairs, etc. I can't see why you'd BEGIN by choosing a rug, frankly. I'm inclined to think that all of the furniture pieces of the "living area" should sit atop an area rug to unify the space, so how can you know the ideal size, color, and texture of your area rug until you've decided on the furniture? | |||||
| Olive...Pt. 1 | 1 Relevance | 20 years ago | dcwilson | General discussion | |
| Olive...Pt. 1 How about painting Stonehenge in a kind of Gerrit Rietveldt scheme of RGB? 🙂 Seriously, I wonder if you might dig down a bit in your thoughts and explain why rehabbing the pyramid would be such a ghastly thing, since we have a pretty good idea what it was supposed to look like. I'm not saying your wrong. But I think my question and your intense response get at some philosophical issue about artifacts from the past. What exactly is valuable about them? Why would rehabbing the Great Pyramid be such a bad idea. People rehab Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and get strokes for doing so. Are you saying that we ought to let the Guggenheim, a smaller and lesser, but nevertheless similarly monumental structure, just slowly deteriorate into a weathered, cracking artifact of Wright's time? Where is the frontier between what should be preserved and what should not be? Take the Sphinx for another example. What will be gained by letting its kisser eventually become entirely indistinguishable, as what it was? How sphinx-like will it be when the expression is entirely gone? And why is it okay to preserve the great cathedrals of Europe, or the Hagia Sophia, but not the Great Pyramid? Does it all really just come down to value in use? If a religion wants to keep using the Hagia Sophia in Turkey, or Il Duomo in Florence, Italy, then is it okay to sand blast it back to its earlier glory, but if that religion extincts then those buildings would be more better tended by letting them fall slowly into ruins? Is it just simply that Pharohnic governance and Nile and Sun God worship have long since ceased to be practiced and so the Great Pyramid contributes more to the human legacy as a ruin than as a rehabilitated masterpiece of human design and construction? | |||||
| Do you mean how is the back | 1 Relevance | 11 years ago | Spanky | General discussion | |
| Do you mean how is the back upholstered? It's not complicated at all, it's just two curved pieces of fabric seamed along the top edge (or tacked to the frame directly, kinda depends on a couple of things) and stapled or tacked along the bottom to the frame. The ends are finished in one of two ways: 1) the raw edge of the fabric is tacked or stapled to the wood and trimmed very closely to the tacks or staples, then the tacks/staples are covered with double welt. Looks like yours has single welt, in which case the raw edges of the fabric are folded under and the welt seam allowances are tucked under with them. This is probably glued down though gimp tacks are sometimes used. A decent upholsterer can handle this, even someone who does mostly conventional upholstery. The techniques are the same as on lots of conventional dining chairs. It's mostly the fabric that's different! And you don't want thick padding, either. That's about the only thing you need to worry about and it's easy enough to explain to an upholsterer. (Same with the seats--don't let anyone overpad them. Poufy seats on Danish dining chairs look ridiculous.) On the other hand, if you like the fabric and it's in good shape, then seriously consider masking off the back fabric if you end up having to strip varnish. And use the thickest possible paste type stripper you can find. That stuff will pretty much stay where you put it! (Also, get a respirator and chemical resistant glove and a long sleeved shirt! 3M makes a very comfortable and effective respirator for under $25. It's one my my most valued pieces of equipment.) | |||||
| I don't know what color you | 1 Relevance | 11 years ago | Spanky | Off topic | |
| I don't know what color you are, eameshead, but I believe hetero caucasian men get a Man Card at birth. Not that you seem the type at all to be using it just because you can! I saw someone else on video listing all the things that a Man Card entitles one to and that so few question because it's been going on for so long. It was done with some humor, but, well---gotta wrap that one up and move on, y'know? Trump apparently thinks he has the Platinum Man Card Express with Bonus Miles and other assorted freebies and entitlements. I know Hillary isn't perfect but one thing she's very, very good at is dealing with the kind of crap he throws at her. She's been dealing with crap flung at her since the early 90s, quite possibly more than any other woman in public office. Bernie's ideals are closer to mine than hers are, but I don't think he's got what it takes to immediately turn Trump's insults around on him the way Hillary can and does. You have to move SO fast these days in politics. I think that was the problem with Kerry---? He took too long pondering responses and when he finally came up with something, his opponent and the public had long since moved on and it packed no punch at all. So aggravating! Regarding running mates---I think it was Seth Myers who pointed out that candidates often choose opposites for running mates. Obama the young cool black man chose an old white guy. Old white guy McCain chose a young woman. So it would follow that Trump will choose "a Mexican guy who builds walls and has huge hands"! I love Seth Myers. | |||||
| Most American chrome furniture | 1 Relevance | 19 years ago | barrympls | General discussion | |
| Most American chrome furniture was really Streamline not Deco. I consider Art Deco to be a primarily vertical style and Streamline is a primilarly horizontal style. Now, I know that's a rather controversal view...because Streamline and Art Deco are clumped together and Streamline was never a movement that had its own identity, starting in the early 1970's when Art Deco got so hot...Streamline was tossed into the mix. Anyhow, most American Chrome furniture was done in the mid to late 1930's and (believe it or not) was designed for the home. It bombed, big time and other than kitchen dinette sets, most chrome furniture ending up being sold to offices, public spaces, not to mention people's patios. I guess the Depression, coupled with the coldness of Chrome turned people away. That first big wave of Chrome furniture collecting - about 1968-1975 - was darn exciting. You could find Lloyd two-seaters in excellent condition cheap, and I had a honest-to-goodness Howell Z chair in that nice fat chrome tubing. It did have to be recovered, tho...I only wish I still had the darn thing. Strangely, the Chrome madness of the 1970's faded away soon after, only to be taken up by the first glimmer of Mid-Century Modern madness; you know, the Eames chairs scattered among the tacky Flamingos and Leonard prints and alot of 'groovy' 1950's designs that have now been discounted as generic. It's nice that the good MCM stuff is forever in vogue, but it's a shame that the better Chrome pieces aren't still treasured, except by a few. | |||||
| The Zenith shells in... | 1 Relevance | 13 years ago | Eameshead | General discussion | |
| The Zenith shells in... The Zenith shells in excellent original condition do have a very shiny surface. The shine is not a coating, but an inherent property of the resin that surrounds the fiberglass. Your chair possibly spent some time outside if it is very rough to the touch with a very dull finish. Sometimes that same weathering is partly what makes the chair so beautiful to look at though. And at least you know its an honest surface, showing its character. Like you, I dont like the penetrol results-- mostly because you can tell when a chair has been re coated with that stuff from a mile away. Most of the time it just looks ridiculously "wet". There are several other less severe options that would enhance the surface in more subtle and measured ways. Waxes, fiberglass buffing compounds, etc., all can bring back some depth and sheen to different degrees, depending upon the surface condition. One important practical issue is if the fiberglass is so rough that it is causes irritation when it comes in contact with skin. What looks beautiful might not feel beautiful. I lean towards taking more subtle steps, and I am probably a bit extreme in my tolerance for the impractical. I would put up with a less functional chair that was smashing to look at. But that is such a personal thing. Just one opinion. Hope this helps. PS I guess if you just want the closest look to original shine, in a superficial way, then penetrol does get it back to looking shiny again. But to me, "penetrol shiny" is very different look than "original" shiny. And once its coated, its no longer original. Its refinished. Rough is at least real. (And beautiful too.) | |||||
| Yeah, whatever. But to address SDR's main question... | 1 Relevance | 17 years ago | fastfwd | General discussion | |
| Yeah, whatever. But to address SDR's main question... No, I don't think the Aeron will be admired in the future as we currently admire the iconic mid-century chairs that were designed using then-new technology. The Aeron's big problem is that it ISN'T new. That is... Its various pieces are the product of recent research, but the chair as a whole is just the ultimate (so far) realization of an old-fashioned idea: That the "best" task chair is the one with the most knobs and levers. The Aeron's sorta like an audiophile turntable: expensive, and with a whole lot of adjustments to tweak and fiddle with. When I want to listen to music, I have no interest in getting out a protractor and setting a turntable's VTA and azimuth, measuring its motor speed, selecting weights for its tonearm, adjusting its anti-skate, etc.; I'd rather just throw a CD in a drawer and press "play". It's the same with a chair. Why do I need to twist all those knobs and pull those levers just to get comfortable in the thing? Why can't it just adjust to me automatically? If the Aeron's admired at all in the future, I think it'll be by engineers and engineering-minded hobbyists... The way that those people currently admire complicated old mechanical watch movements or automotive carburetors FOR their complexity. In my opinion, the next task chair that'll be admired for its design will be the one that dispenses with all the adjustments because it just works, for everyone, without them -- the way digital watches just keep perfect time without regular adjustment by a watchmaker, or the way cars with electronic fuel injection just work under all conditions without any of the ridiculous tweaking that carbureted cars required. But that's just my opinion. | |||||
| None of the paper cord made | 1 Relevance | 9 years ago | Spanky | General discussion | |
| None of the paper cord made today is made in Denmark and maybe it never was, I'm not sure---it's a type of cord used on Danish furniture and a few things here and there from other countries. It's mostly 3 ply (some 2 ply on older things); each ply is a strip of brown kraft paper tightly twisted, then three of those strands are twisted together. Good quality cord is made of wider strips that are more tightly twisted, resulting in dense, durable cord. Cheap paper cord is made with less paper. I got some one that actually snapped while i was weaving it! You can buy it online. Shipping is high because it's heavy so you might want to figure that in when decided where to get it. Sources are discussed in the other threads though keep in mind some of the info in the earlier posts is now out of date as regards to quality & pricing. I get mine from HH Perkins on the east coast (US). Just do a search for "danish paper cord" for other sources. I used to get it from Frank's Cane & Rush in CA but their quality dropped --not sure what they're selling now. Shipping from the west coast is too high for me. DO NOT GET FIBER RUSH! It looks very similar and is a lot cheaper but it's not the same thing and will not work as well with all Danish weaves, plus it's just not appropriate design-wise. here's the first thread in that series---there is a lot to read but there's so much good material there. Regular user "tchp" started it and he ended up doing a set of six chairs that look professionally done! Different weave than what you have, though---but still. Very inspiring. https://www.designaddict.com/forum/Repair/Replacing-Cord-Danish-Side-Chairs | |||||
| It will cost less if you | 1 Relevance | 14 years ago | Spanky | General discussion | |
| It will cost less if you convert them to woven seats and do the work yourself. But some purists might advise you to get them upholstered. I think it's ok to convert to woven. They are really nice chairs but they were very mass produced and the same chair can have either woven or upholstered seat. I think there is a little corner detail at each leg post, but it's so minor that I don't think it makes a noticeable difference. I have done a lot of dyeing, though not of papercord. I do know that the dye will likely not penetrate the entire cord. What this means in the long term, I'm not sure. Maybe nothing. The other thing is you'd have to test the cord first to see if it swells when the dye soaks in. Water causes it to swell and in my experiments it does not shrink completely back to its original diameter when dry. This isn't a big deal when the seat is already woven (which would be the case when cleaning a woven seat with soapy water). But I would not particularly like to dye a woven seat on a chair because I'd worry about dye seeping under whatever I used to mask off the wood. And dyeing the spool of cord wouldn't work if the dye causes the cord to permanently swell! On the other hand, if the dye is non-water based, maybe you can dye the unwoven cord. I dunno. I love black cord seats and have put a lot of thought into how to get black cord (including dyeing) but in the end I decided it was too much work and/or expense. I like the natural cord nearly as well. On the side rails the nails will be much closer together and it's important to stagger them as someone else said--just want to make it clear that they should be the same distance apart, but at different heights. I just redid a Moller chair where the original nails were in a straight line and they had split the rail! Maybe a new guy worked on that one? I was very surprised to see it. | |||||
| I also don't think it is | 1 Relevance | 8 years ago | leif ericson - Zephyr Renner | General discussion | |
| I also don't think it is wrong to say that Gunni Omann was the designer. He was who the family put forward as the designer's name back then. The family sales manager for the largest market of the day probably did have an outsized say in the designing if he was being good at his job. And it is reasonable and helpful for the family to clarify now just what they think was meant, or not meant, by Gunni's name on the designs. Families are complicated. And the concept of design is complicated. And it is even more complicated with a family firm like Omann. Americans love to put their names on things, even when they are claiming someone else's thing. Danes have a much different culture around putting their names on things, which makes all this even more complicated. Did Hans Wegner design the Chinese chair and all its later variations, or did he do it in collaboration with a lineage of nameless chinese cabinetmakers and Danish ones? According to the mythology Wegner was an amazing woodworker and he delivered perfect sketches capturing on one page every detail the cabinetmaker would need to know. And when the cabinetmaker could not figure out a particularly complex woodworking problem, Wegner himself woud provide the answer. So he is perhaps an example of the most pure use of 'designer', but it is still tainted with historical references, at minimum. And I could ask analogously with Finn Juhl and his Egyptian chair. Did George Nelson design anything at all? How much of the Eames' design was theirs and how much came from their design office? Human relationships are complicated. Is there anything truly new under the sun? The word 'designer' is inherently flawed when used in this way. The case of Gunni Omann might, perhaps, be more flawed than some. It is probably less flawed than others. Everything is a story. | |||||
| cont. | 1 Relevance | 21 years ago | koen | General discussion | |
| cont. The fourth thing to consider is matter of attitude. We all are able to be overwhelmed by the task at hand and to do nothing because we know we are not going to solve all the problems facing us. One can also answer the call by action, even if each step is small, each step is an improuvement. Sometimes I look at an old picture of the rubble that was left of my grand-parents house after the 4th of April 1943 bombing by american planes that killed close to 3000 people in a small town of 15.000...and I wonder 62 years later how people were able to overcome, not only the grief and the destruction but also the overwhelming scale of the task. Where do you begin re-building something that was so harshnessly destroyed...and yet brick by brick was cleaned from previous cement ( In spite of my age, I know I have done my part) and re-used. If you drive through the same place today you would not even be able to imagine that the center square was ones filled with open coal trucks filled with dozens of coffins in the middle of a landscape of destruction. All of this to make one point: We are all, no matter how ambitious we are, part of a larger scale and even if the ask seems Herculian, it starts with one brick. I am sure that even a small step taken in the right direction now we later be seen for what it is: the right direction. The solution only comes when more and more people move it that same direction. Of course we would all like to be part of it, we would all like to see the end result, but we will not. Time will catch up and aging is as inevitable as gravity, but it should not prevent us from moving in the right direction. So, What would I say to designer that is fresh out of school and who doesn't want to be responsible for th next gizmo...Learn enough to be able to recognize what would be the right direction and start moving... | |||||
| As much as I've tried to avoid contributing to this topic | 1 Relevance | 18 years ago | dashes | General discussion | |
| As much as I've tried to avoid contributing to this topic (not the table ID, the other one), it continually amazes me how so many people here are so quick to slam and judge people asking questions, as if the mere asking of the question is offensive to their oh-so-delicate sensibilities! As though somebody were standing next to them, physically restraining them so they could not avoid hearing the question being asked, and then demanding that they provide an answer! Yes, that is how some here appear when they respond in threads that they don't like or think is wasting their time. Hey! I have news for some of you! You don't HAVE to read all the threads, and NOBODY is forcing you to answer any questions!! Really, you can choose to just answer within your little clique, that's fine, but you don't need to ridicule anyone else who wants to answer, or try to intimidate those who have the guts to ask questions in this envirnoment! Why the hell does it matter what the price is or any thing else (except to the potential buyer/seller) in order to answer a question? It's very simple, you either recognize the table or you don't; if you do, you could perhaps post what you know; if not, then just don't post anything -- in fact, if the question offends you, just don't ever click on the thread again! I mean, really. These threads that you don't like are not somehow excluding you from participating in the threads you DO like, it's not like there's an either/or situation going on, this is a FORUM for chrissakes, discussion at the rate the individual chooses. Most people who post questions for identification of a piece, are really not expecting that the readers are going to run to the library or other resources and start pouring through catalogues in order to help them (although some will and do, but that's their choice) - the idea is that some readers here might just KNOW what something is because they have run into it in the past. Is it really *that* offensive to ask such questions? I mean, REALLY? If so, then remind me, what's the point of a (ahem) "discussion" board? Why should the OP feel she needs to justify her question to any of you? GAWD, the frikken stuck up mentality around here is just beyond belief! /rant | |||||
| For Olive: Part 5 | 1 Relevance | 21 years ago | dcwilson | General discussion | |
| For Olive: Part 5 But the information age fundamentally changes this model (at least if we continually let it). The information age is not about me, or about you or about the breadmaker, or about the toaster, or the bread oven, or about any of us getting to know each other as human beings in commerce. The information age is about itself (certain epistemic communities like DA being exceptions to the rule, though what I type here is inescapably reduced to ones and zeros and used for content in a pipe that I am essentially raw material for). Whatever else the information age MAY be about, it IS about reducing everything to zeroes and ones and treating everything as part of a system whose currency IS zeroes and ones. (Even money in this system is reduced to zeroes and ones. This is no conspiracy either. This is just the effect of the technological capability of an information age. It can happen so it is happening. And if history teaches anything (at least the unprocessed history one finds when one occassionally slips behind the matrix) it teaches that anything that can happen technologically usually does happen and keeps happening until the next technological paradigm shows up to prevent it. So: I think design has become (temporarily at least) irrelevant partly because the information age has the tendency to make products, product messages, and human being irrelevant in a traditional sense; that is, in the sense of these things being ends in themselves. In the information age, the products, the product messages, the designers, the consumers, every thing is raw material of the information matrix. Now, don't jump off a bridge, Olive, or react by thinking that this is paranoid rambling. Something quite similar happened for a time in the industrial age and probably in every age in history when a new transcendant paradigm emerged. | |||||
| Olive Pt. 4 | 1 Relevance | 19 years ago | dcwilson | General discussion | |
| Olive Pt. 4 In northern New Mexico, these lands have some Spanish land grant issues embedded in them, though they rarely surface and they are perhaps not quite as problematic and conflicted as those in, say, California. But still, lands with land tenure histories stretching back a couple centuries in lands that have known several sovereigns, particularly those related to multi generational Hispanic family ownership (it doesn't matter that they are Hispanic per se, just that it was Hispanic folks from Europe via Mexico that first settled the area--if you ignore the rich Native American heritage that predates them--and these families sometimes held and conveyed title over the generations in undivided interests) that can be particularly tough to unsnag when title is challenged for whatever reason. Now 99% of the time none of this matters, because the land is of only conventional worth for say grazing or ranchette use, and everyone acts as if it is as improbable of a problem as it really is. But if you happen to get hold of what seems like a nice, but inconsequential parcel, and then sometime down the road discover that someone wants to route a powerline right of way through it, or commence resource extraction, or a native american gambling operation arises in the vicinity, or preserve the area (i.e., an environmental org. wants to flush you out to enlarge one of the environmental holdings that they from time to time swap to energy companies for even more "precious" lands) suddenly you can find yourself with a parcel that someone may challenge the title to. And all the really knowledgeable locals know about this sort of thing, so you might as well know it too, I figure. | |||||
| To AP or not to AP | 1 Relevance | 13 years ago | DudeDah | General discussion | |
| So, went to a MidCentury auction today in a SMALL town near me that you would NEVER associate with Modern design, for a planter I saw in the listing. There was a key-wound Nelson starburst clock and an OLD DCW but I WANTED this planter. When I got there I was HOPING it was AP but upon closer inspection I didn't see the telltale stamp and only saw "USA" scrawled on the bottom so I thought it might be Gainey. Well, the auction was running long and VERY hap-hazard, no lot numbers they just randomly picked up stuff and let the hounds have at it, and I had my pregnant wife and five year-old daughter in tow, so I asked a friend to bid $50-$55 and left. When I got home this evening I was SHOCKED to find the planter on my porch. I took it inside and looked at it some more and thought, DANG this REALLY looks like AP. SO i took it over and compared it to my STAMPED AP hourglass-looking planter and found the proportions in shape, thickness and even throwing marks to be EYE-DENT-TI-KUL. So...I know everyone always thinks they have a PREPRODUCTION VERSION of a mid-century-icon-du-jour, but WHAT GIVES with this thing? Anyone? David? | |||||
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