PAP.Coffee, a coffee shop in Harajuku, Tokyo owned by a specialty paper and printing company, designed to showcase paper throughout the interior. Lovely.
via Spoon & Tamago
Notes
Interesting and/or cool stuff I've come across from art, design, technology, photography, movies I've watched and liked and, occasionally, my thoughts.
A contest where professional gardeners create small gardens and landscapes on beds of their kei trucks. Very Japanese.
via Spoon & Tamago
Japanese sailor sitting on sacks of cement, 1967.
via
Photo by Yuichi watanabe 渡辺裕一
via mahaa-k
Japan is littered with vending machines, always beaming, always ready to (mostly) quench your thirst, or appetite for pretty much anything you can think of. And not just in the cities – I once came across one, very conveniently, halfway up the hill at the Fushimi Inari-Taisha.
The photo above is by Eiji Ohashi, who has been photographing the lonely-looking machines – here's
part one, part two, part three and part four.
The KDDI au design project
Balmuda recently caused a bit of a stir in the tech press by announcing the launch of an Android-based smartphone of their own design. A phone launch in itself is nothing very special these days, but this one is a bit different in that Balmuda is not a phone maker or a computing company. Instead, Balmuda makes home appliances. The Japanese company is most known for its beautifully designed, high-end toaster ovens that have apparently achieved cult-like status in their homeland.
The Balmuda Phones somewhat pebble-like shape reminded me of the KDDI au design project.
Starting in 2002, the au design project was born as an effort to revive the company by collaborating with designers to produce a series of original phone designs, some of which have now ended up as part of the permanent collection at MoMa in New York. The commissioned designers included superstar names like Marc Newson and Naoto Fukasawa, who continued the collaboration and designed the new models of the Infobar series of phones.
I can't remember how I found out about the project, probably from a design blog like Core77 or some other. What I do remember, is lusting after every new concept they released, one wilder than the other. While we had rather boring, albeit reliable Nokias and Alcatels that were downright ugly and unreliable to boot, the Japanese had all these wonderful delights. There was no way though, even if I could have afforded these shiny toys at the time, the cellphones of Japan were not compatible with the networks in Europe.
info.bar concept, designed by Naoto Fukasawa
infobar2, also by Naoto Fukasawa
ishicoro concept by Naoto Fukasawa
Talby, designed by Marc Newson
All images are courtesy of the KDDI au design project.
New facade for Louis Vuitton's Ginza store by Jun Aoki.
Photo by Daici Ano courtesy Louis Vuitton.
via Spoon & Tamago
Super nice Tokyo storefront illustrations by Mateusz Urbanowicz.
Huge, 3×1m pen and ink drawing by Manabu Ikeda, titled Rebirth, finished after almost 3.5 years.
via This is Colossal
After Tohoku
For Retrace Our Steps French photographers Carlos Ayesta and Guillaume Bressio took residents of Namie, now a ghost town like many others in the region, back to their old settings as if the 2011 Tohoku earthquake never happened.
Onomatopoeic Japanese Chockolate
This is zaku zaku, japanese for the crunching sound that stepping on ice might make. It’s one of a set of chocolates designed to represent japanese words for certain textures, by studio Nendo for the Maison et Objet design show in Paris. Go see the rest of them on Nendo’s site because they’re all fantastic.