13. What Happened When We All Stopped
La Dolce Vita. | Puglia, Italy.
Here’s five wonderful distractions that I found this week.
1. On Scent
These interesting unisex perfumes made by *Apartment. in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Click through for each scent’s details, my best on ingredients and imagination alone is ‘Please wait here’.
Please wait here.
Page 128 was missing.
The other details were hazy.
Forgetting Sandra’s emails.
Done in straight lines.
Please wait here.
An ode to Japanese onsen.
Hinoki, a Japanese cypress, is often used to build traditional onsen.
The wood offers its fragrant fresh terpenes when these boxy baths are filled with water.
This scent begs to be worthy of the onsen experience.
Hinoki, pine, cedarwood, sandalwood, violet leaf, violet, moss.
Hilariously, NASA has managed to bottle a scent that they believe smells of space.
2. A poem
‘INVITATION’ by Mary Oliver.
Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy
and very important day
3. The Geography of Happiness
Richard Aslan writes thoughtfully about happiness on a trip to Bhutan. Bhutan happens to be the happiest country in Asia and 8th happiest in the world.
“Where can I find happiness? In the pulse of fluids rushing around my body, perhaps? In a thick, sleeping layer under my skin? Or in the jelly around the nerves running from my spine? Or will I find it between flicking synapses and the collage of memories in my mind? If it is there, lurking among shifting images and swells of emotion, how can I be sure it exists at all? Or is happiness out there in the world, somewhere, waiting to be found? Is there a place where a gentle havoc has been wrought on our messy, struggling hearts, and we can just be?”
4. Bozen’s Cottage
The incredible transformation of a Georgian Cottage built in 1842 by Australian architects Taylor + Hinds.
before:
after:
see more pictures and more of their projects here.
5. Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know
Full list by Michael Sorkin via Reading Design.
(RIP, March 2020)
My favourites:
1. The feel of cool marble under bare feet.
2. How to live in a small room with five strangers for six months.
3. With the same strangers in a lifeboat for one week.
26. How Antoni Gaudí modeled the Sagrada Família and calculated its structure.
47. What the brick really wants.
93. The pleasure of a spritz at sunset at a table by the Grand Canal.
133. Finding your way around Prague, Fez, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Kyoto, Rio, Mexico, Solo, Benares, Bangkok, Leningrad, Isfahan.
170. The components of a comfortable environment for sleep.
200. What rusts.
215. How close is too close.
225. How and when to bribe public officials (for the greater good).
242. Your neighbors. (ha!)
My favourite London architecture - Barbican Conservatory (via IGNANT)