Baskerville.

Decades.

1920s green here.

Thanks, Kurt.  Very telling.

Contrast.

UX Collective has a Baskerville case study ...

Baskerville took a radical approach in which much of his designs recalled aspects of his own handwriting. And, compared to other typefaces popular during the period, Baskerville also increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes, made the serifs of his characters sharper and more tapered, and defined curved strokes as more circular in shape.

Foggie.

Done.

Done and done.

Thanks to Walker's Arms.

Morris, Trellis Wallpaper, 1862

Peer.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

William Golding

Half-Tone.

The origin of Windham Hill's great logo ...

The logo was designed by my friend Jay Durgan… he and I were on Skyline Blvd above Palo Alto and Stanford and slightly over onto the western side on Old La Honda Rd. and walking in an open field ringed with redwood trees… Jay looked to the west and saw the sun going down behind the redwood trees and said something like “there’s your logo.” It was inventive in that it was a line drawing that incorporated a “half-tone” in part of the shadow of the trees.”

Thanks, Kurt.  You're doing God's work.  Inspirational.

Erik Satie and folk fingerpicking ...

I'm looking for help on the name of the typeface they used.   

Microgramma.

Leonardo.

I highly recommend (have your journal handy) the latest documentary by Ken Burns, Leonardo da Vinci ...

Among the highlights is the presence of two historians mirroring the role of The Civil War's Shelby Foote, historians Paolo Galluzzi and Martin Kemp, who figured prominently in NOVA's 2003 masterpiece, Leonardo's Dream Machines ...

I'm grateful to Execupundit for signaling it's approach.

Enthusiast.

How is a taste in this beautiful art to be formed in our countrymen, unless we avail ourselves of every occasion when public buildings are to be erected, of presenting to them models for their study and imitation?...You see, I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile them to the rest of the world, and procure them its praise.

Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to James Madison, September 20, 1785

Functionality.

The important thing is that, in architecture, this is not merely a hunch but a testable empirical result. It means that the objects that are most profound functionally (when I say objects, I mean buildings, streets, door knobs, shelf, room, dome, bridge) are the ones which also promote the greatest feeling in us. This is a very peculiar thing. At first it sounds like rank sentimentality; and you just say, It can't be true. Why should it be true? And yet, it's a discovery which accords very well with the era that we live in. Because we are living in a period where that is perhaps the most noticeable and most problematic feature of our world is that feeling has been removed from it. When I make a joke in reference to this horrible meeting hall that we are in, maybe I am beating a dead horse, but I mean really, the problem is that whatever feeling there is in here is obviously not a profound positive feeling. And this is what we have come to expect in our modern world. The failure of that profound feeling to exist in the world around us at small scales, large scales, middle scales, here, there and everywhere, is tragic. It's the thing that we miss. Of course, people have been writing about this for many decades. Writers have, of course, made this known. We all know it. The difficulty is that people don't seem to know what to do about it. If anything, at the moment, (I'm talking now again about my own discipline, of architecture) the problem is getting worse. It's not getting better. The world that is being built is more and more unfeeling. We are in a sense more lost, more fragmented, more sort of wandering about in this lonely desert than before.

Christopher Alexander, from his 1996 talk, "The Origins of Pattern Theory, the Future of the Theory, the Generation of a Living World"

Woods.

Stickley, Craftsman Farms, 1908

The quiet rhythmic monotone of the wall of logs fills one with the rustic peace of a secluded nook in the woods.

Gustav Stickley

Happy Birthday, Stickley

Stickley, Gustav Stickley Home, 1902

Gustav Stickley was born on this day in 1858.

Pause.

All beginnings are delightful; the threshold is the place to pause.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 

Thanks for the image, Walker's Arms.

Happy Birthday, Wren

The Hammock Papers commemorated Sir Christopher Wren's birthday today in 2010 ...

The architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, Christopher Wren, was born on this day in 1632.

A sense of scale is appreciated in the illustration below, in comparing St. Paul's with Wren's other London works.

 

The architect issued the following order prohibiting swearing among the laborers of the cathedral. I believe that I'll nail a copy of this to the tree on our school's playground ... ok, and leave one in my car. 

It is ordered, that customary swearing shall be a sufficient crime to dismiss any laborer that comes to the call; and the clerk of the works, upon sufficient proof, shall dismiss them accordingly. And if any master, working by task, shall not, upon admonition, reform this profanation among his apprentices, servants, and laborers, it shall be construed his fault; and he shall be liable to be censured by the commissioners.

Wren also designed beehives.

Wren’s choice of an octagonal shape for his wooden hive was intended to create an environment similar to what the bees naturally preferred. Wild bees tended to inhabit hollow trees, and the octagonal hive was thought to be the closest approximation to a hollow tree trunk that could be made from boards. Moreover, bees cluster in a ball around the queen bee during the winter to keep her warm, and the shape of an octagonal hive was believed a better fit for the cluster.

For more, buzz on here to one of my favorite sites.

Old.

How.

Deep.

Happy Birthday, Goldicutt

Goldicutt, Design for the Facade of a Town Building, Possibly a Club House: Elevation, 1829

John Goldicutt was born on this day in 1793.

Thank you, Dr. Kitchen.