Helping hand

Although I advocate donating to the Red Cross or another vetted organization directly to help with relief in Japan, I am also heartened by the efforts of artists to raise awareness and lend a hand.

Flavorwire has a great gallery of artists selling pieces to benefit relief efforts in the wake of the country's devastating earthquake and tsunami. The print above, designed by Max Erdenberger of W+K Studio, is $25, and 100% of the profits go to the Red Cross.

Order to madness

Le Corbusier, an architect and painter, created The Modulor, an anthropometric scale of proportions in the vein of Vitruvius, da Vinci, and Alberti, in 1943. (My fascination with Le Corbusier stems from Sumeet's growing up in Chandigarh, India's first planned city, which the architect had a big hand in planning.)

Le Corbusier described the measure as a "range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things"; I picked up this copy of The Modulor (second edition, trans. Peter De Francia and Anna Bostock, Harvard University Press, 1966) from The Strand's $1 book cart. I admit that I understand the math behind it very little, but I love that he applies the system to city planning, building construction, painting and composition, and the movement of consumer goods. 

Lots of scans behind the cut, and in my Flickr set.

Click to read more ...

Coffee. Books. Yes, please.

The new D'Espresso outlet (317 Madison Avenue, at 42nd Street, (212) 867-7141), just one block from the New York Public Library, offers a twist on the crowded bookshelf, courtesy Anurag Nema and his team at nemaworkshop. Fastcodesign.com reports:

The "books" are actually tiles printed with sepia-toned photos of bookshelves at a local travel bookstore that ring the room, including the floor, walls and ceiling. In addition to painting unusual surfaces with intriguing patterns -- whoa, you're standing on books! -- it gives an Alice in Wonderland-esque sense that the room has been suddenly upended.

Origami teabags

I love birds. I'm obsessed with tea. I used to make thousands of tiny paper cranes. The product for me? Clearly, Natalia Ponomareva's origami tea bags. Almost too precious to use.

Bubbling up

Fabulous teapots at the TEA-OFF! 2009 competition, sponsored by World Kitchen. I'm particularly enamored with the ONE Teakettle, which is white porcelain until the water boils, causing a pattern to appear on the outside of the vessel.