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Star forts were once the cutting edge of military technology. As with the fort below, Goryokaku in southern Hokkaidō, Japan, its five-point star shape served to eliminate blind spots for cannon fire that were an aspect of earlier circular tower design.

Note the blooms of the cherry orchards:

Undoubtedly, these forts were also puffed-chested displays of state power and wealth. As history has shown us, over and over, there was never a wall constructed that could not be breached, the boasting may've been more symbolic than actual. Still, it was a potent symbol.

The Dutch fort of Bourtange (above) was initially built during the 80 Years War (c. 1568 - 1648) by William I of Orange. The fort's purpose was to control the only road between the Groningen province and Germany which was an important trade artery. At the time it was controlled by the Spaniards.

Some examples of other European counterparts:

Palmanova, Italy:

Almeida, Portugal:

Saint Martin de Ré, France:

The burdens of Empire, Fort George at Inverness: This bastion was built to keep down internal revolts and rebellious Scots in their place. Now, it's one of England's most beautiful country strolls.

Many years later, with their intended military purposes behind them, the properties would be turned into gardens and public museums. These fortresses now inhabit sparsely populated areas. As is often the case, areas once considered of extreme value economically and strategically were abandoned as development happened elsewhere. Travelers to the American south will also often find this to be true.

Below, two views of the fort at Naarden, the Netherlands:

Another star fort built during William of Orange's reign, Wierickerschans: As often happened in the Dutch marshland, this fort was constructed to withstand flooding.

Now, the fortified walls and geometric moats serve only to protect finely manicured gardens.

You'd have to admit there is a kind of a poetic justice at work here, this transforming of hegemonic displays of military might into tranquil scenic gardens. The Flower Children would've been proud.

Addenda: Just discovered this, a contemporary homage to star forts in the form of this public garden located in Heerhugowaard-South, The Netherlands. Design was by HOSPER and DRFTWD Office Associates.

Digging through the unpublished archives of this blog we found this: A reaction written about the release of the new IKEA catalog of a year ago. No matter what you feel about IKEA—as a corporation, design entity, or manufacturer of furniture designed to be thrown away—you have to give them respect as one of the best design oriented companies out there. Anyway, here it is.

If you saw The Devil Wears Prada, you'll no doubt remember the scene where Meryl Streep's character looses a ninja-like assault of deadly force upon her assistant's fashion naiveté. The restrained diatribe, more or less, described how color comes to the market. It does not arrive arbitrarily, she argues. In the world of fashion subtle changes of color often come at the ends of long and arduous journeys, whether it's a sweater hanging in a Rodeo Drive boutique or polo shirt in the bargain bin at Walmart. Never scoff at the nano-differences between two blues.

This is also true of design trends in general; The evolution may begin crawling on the catwalks, but for the mainstream, they don't begin to walk upright until they reach Ikea. For better or worse, Ikea is trending in the classic epoch. Then, it seems, is when the rest of the world begins to notice.

So, when Ikea launches a new catalog, it's a big deal.

Aesthetically, the degrees between the above and Architectural Digest are minute. Ikea admits that many of the photos use environments created in the studio and not displays of product in their natural habitat. It's hard to argue with the results: These pictures are pretty. Results in your own home are sure to vary.

Ikea in the professional kitchen (it's a dream so just go with it): A room such as this could only encourage deep breaths and gentle thoughts. Gordon Ramsey* could not exist in here.

*He of reality television's Hell's Kitchen, et. al.

Ikea knows: The trend of vintage industrial is shown in full flower.

This is not some Sears catalog of old, to end its short life in a back country outhouse. If this isn't where design is going it is certainly where its gone and here the world follows.

In any event, you've got to admit it looks pretty good.

I want to shout out, "Do what you please, follow your star: be original if you want to be and don't if you don't want to be." Just to be natural and gay and lighthearted and pretty and simple and overflowing and general and baroque, and learn and learn and learn. Open your minds to every form of beauty."

Constance Spry 1886-1960

She may've been the ultimate Modernist. Like a Prometheus bringing fire to the mortal world she brought the quotidian aspects of a decorated life to the modern masses. She was an innovator who believed that people could beautify their home from the hedgerow or the green grocer. She made flower arranging—once the exclusive decorative territory of royals and nobles—egalitarian. Take from what's around you, she would urge, practically anything will do—be it pussy willows dropped into an ash bucket from the attic or plants cascading from bird cages—and make it your own.

One of her simple arrangements of garden flowers in a footed serving dish:

An arrangement with Kale:

Democratizing design was no small feat, mind you. It also required a temerity for iconoclasm. As Modernism implored us to revise history and even parody it, it also asked us to treat history like an Agnostic. In this way the work of radical practitioners like Spry (whether she knew it or not) would help spread enlightenment further down the cultural food chain. As Dorothy Parker said, "A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika." Doesn't innovative design always begin with a pushing of the boundaries of taste?

Later in her career this former nurse would also found a school of domestic science, publish a bestselling cookbook, arrange flowers for QE II's coronation and Westminster Abbey, cultivate antique roses, and dabble in interior decoration with her friend Syrie Maugham, wife of Somerset.

A wall of Spry: A rose variety named in her honor.

The White Room from the Maugham house on which she collaborated.

Material and its surprises:

A couch constructed from a solid piece of poly-foam. Here, the material not only allows the designer to test new possibilities with a new medium, it allows him/her a means to experiment with conceptions of traditional shape and form.

Non-traditional materials allow dialogues with new layers of undiscovered subtext. To wit: Lamp shades made from beet and cabbage leaves...

...dry pasta...

... and milk bottles.

Cowhide chairs: Molded and formed wet, then dried into the desired shape and structure from a single hide.

Described as a piece of hell frozen in space, designer Charlie Davidson has fashioned these Black Lights from layers of foil. Light eminates from the center and passes through colored gels.

Davidson then brings Hell back to earth in the form of his Crunk chair (below). Similarly constructed as the Black Lights but with added reinforcement. As described on Charlie Davidson's website:

Formed over a simple wooden buck from a giant sheet of aluminum foil measuring 5 meters square, the final shape was filled with self hardening polyurethane foam.

The Cabbage Chair by designer Oki Sato, otherwise known as Nendo. Fabricated from many layers of coated paper. For details and a demo on construction go here.

A chair of hemp rope coated in resin.

A table formed from hardened dollops of heated rubber.

Gary Harvey, a multi-hyphenate designer/businessman with a résumé that includes creative director at Levi-Strauss and Dockers Europe, plays with perceptions of elegance as well as material. For a vision he calls "street-tough glamor" he has developed a line of ball gowns constructed of recycled textiles.

For Cinderellas who rave on both sides of midnight, a dress made from black rock t-shirts:

And another of re-adapted laundry bags:

For a hair salon, an thematically constructed chandelier.

Canadian artist Brian Jungen juggles subtexts like flaming sticks of semiotics in his recreations of northern indigenous images. The material: Nike Air Jordans.

On his work, Jungen writes:

"It was interesting to see how by simply manipulating the Air Jordan shoes you could evoke specific cultural traditions whilst simultaneously amplifying the process of cultural corruption and assimilation."

Jungen's choice of Nike wasn't arbitrary. Besides producing shoes specific to the fit needs of native peoples (apparently, width is an issue) as well being the makers of the Nike Air Native, the Air Jordan's color scheme of white, black, and red is also the traditional colors of the Haida, an indigenous peo­ple of the Pacific Northwest coast.

As in all of the work above, maybe the act of "simply manipulating" material does indeed amplify the corruption. And perhaps it's this "corruption" that's not only at the heart of innovation, but modernism itself.

Leaving the material comfort behind may be the way forward.

Her name was Eileen Gray (Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray). Her peers were MacIntosh, Lloyd Wright, Van Der Rohe, Le Courbusier, and various others of the mid-century Modernist brigade. As a designer she was manifold extraordinaire, bringing her vision to architecture, interiors, furniture, textiles, graphics, Art Deco, and Modernism.

She may be best remembered for this Bibendum chair:

Voluptuous is the overused word here but in an era besotted with the streamlined Bauhaus aesthetic this chair may be the leisure equivalent of the Venus of Willendorf.

When an object is copied and reproduced to such an extent as to seem universally ubiquitous, as the tubular steel and glass table below, it's easy to forget that it was once the product of a designer. To wit: Gray's steel and glass end table.

A quick Google search reveals many versions of this most copied day bed still abound. You might forget that she debuted this design in 1925. The tubular lamp is another of hers.

Early in her career Gray explored a fascination with lacquer, famously displayed in the black screen below. The fruits of this fascination would bring her the first of many successes to follow. It would also infect her hands with a lacquer-induced disease. Most fortunately, the disease did not discourage her.

If her work resembles Le Courbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, or the Eames it could just as easily be said that their work resembles hers.

Her version of the quintessential Modernist chair ca. 1925-29: A sycamore frame with chromium-plated mounts and fixtures, completed with leather upholstery.

There's a strategy behind this Non-conformist chair's (1925) one-armed structure: To allow the user the ability to comfortably lean or turn around while sitting.

Below, her graphic work in the form of two rugs and a print.

Easy to do, considering pink's traditional provenance: Pepto-Bismal, bubblegum, young girls' bedrooms, princess ball gowns, toilet paper, Angelyne, Paris Hilton, Miami Vice, supermarket bouquets, and splayed road kill. To use pink without conjuring any of the above requires certain skill.

Though, in the right hands pink can become the new frontier.

Pink is best when it comes to us as a surprise.

As it veers toward the hotter end of the scale, pink is a color with both hot and cool properties.

Below, something we don't usually associate with pink: Subtlety. It floats lightly over a green jacket and yellowed hair like a cloud at sunset.

Just a lampshade's worth in a white room. Imagine the scene with the colors reversed: A color with the power to go from graceful to Graceland in a stroke.

Below, a pink dream world reflected back in the mirror's image. A physicist might explain this as the optics of mismatched vibrational frequencies, reflected energies, color transmissions or the like. Then again, maybe it's just a radiating hot pink pillowcase. Whatever, the effect is stunning.

The reflected light of the above is recreated to similar effect below through a painting and chair cushions. Bluish shadows on the walls and floor subdue the animal from going alpha.

Below, pink adds drama to a dark palette. Suddenly, there's more Feng Shui and less Pepto-Bismal.

Photo from the David Hicks Archive

Upon returning from a trip to India Gloria Vanderbilt may or may not have said "Pink is the new black."

This, on the other hand, is from Vogue editor Diana Vreeland's 1984 memoir, D.V., weighing in on pink this way:

Actually, pale-pink salmon is the only color I cannot abide. Although, naturally, I adore PINK. I love the pale Persian pinks of the little carnations of Provence, and Schiaparelli's pink, the pink of the Incas. And, though it's so vieux jeu I can hardly bear to repeat it, pink is the navy blue of India.

It appears the culture of India has braved pink for centuries.

Above, in the work of great designer David Hicks (ca. 1970s) pink and bright green joust for the eye.

Above, pink and gray continue their longstanding relationship. Though, here, the pink may be a little hotter and the gray a little warmer.

Face it. We inhabitants of this little experiment known as Earth face a dilemma: While demand for our finite resources is ever increasing, the supply is diminishing rapidly. What to do?

In a word, garbage: The one resource at our disposal that may be just about inexhaustible. But if garbage is ever to manifest into a kind of design revolution — if not for our survival, then at least for our continued lifestyle — that responsibility may rest squarely on the shoulders of designers. Before any revolution can take place, though, paradigms will first need some major shifting. Designers will need to hack into the market's hidebound conceptions on materials. A new language will need to be born from re-usability, a language that will speak native to consumers.

Seth Godin, renowned marketing guru, suggests that any artist looking to make an impact needs to do this: "See the rules. Keep most of them. Break one or two. But break them, don't bend them." In other words: Acknowledge tradition, don't worship it.

Tord Boontje (pronounced Boonj), an industrial product designer perhaps best known for his HP Minis, is attempting to do exactly that. His Rough and Ready Collection not only breaks rules of conventional style and construction for designer furniture, but in the process he both democratizes interior and furniture design while radicalizing the language of usable materials.

The manufacturer for this Rough and Ready collection is the user. The materials are common and accessible and the cost is negligible (recycled wood, found material, tape, etc). And the design comes with a considerable pedigree, owing more than a nod to the work of Enzo Mari. The furniture may be only slightly more expendable, and probably no more difficult to assemble, than much of what's sold at Ikea.Below, a day bed made from the remnants of a white picket fence.

Construction plans for the chair below are offered free on the Rough and Ready web page.

Tord Boontje's Transglass series: Glassware made from refashioned wine bottles.The Taekwondo chair, below, by Dutch designer Jonas Lutz, was created with yellow martial arts belts. While the birch of the frame isn't recycled, and the chair itself has no pretensions of sustainability or low cost, it's design is certainly influenced by design that does. In this way the work is much in the same spirit as the disheveled chic of Clarke and Reilly.

Designers Humberto and Fernando Campana created this chair in response to the recycled crafts they'd seen in favelas (slums or shanty towns) in Brazil. The irregular pieces of wood used are glued and nailed together.

Chilean designer Alexandra Guerrero creates thread from recycled cigarette butts. The spun filters create a thick knitted-like cable: Urban wool.

Thanks to the treehugger blog for the heads up.

Recalling Frank Gehry's experiments with corrugated furniture (1969 - 1973) is this recycled cardboard chair built in the Gomi style below.

Below, a Capellini Love end table from designer Stephen Burks. The table has a paper structure and core and then covered, paper-mâché style, in shredded magazines and then treated with adhesive and a hardener. Each piece is assembled by hand in South Africa.

Close-up of the texture:

A black enamel-coated packing crate reimagined as a console.

Before the Wang Guangyi painting on the wall, bundled fabric bound as chairs.

This Ayako Uenishi chair is formed from recycled steel pipes and rubber base boards, fixed together with reclaimed nuts and bolts. The chair weighs 250 lbs.

The history of art is the DNA of Art. Nothing crawls from the evolutionary muck without first standing on the shoulders of a long ancestral line. And like any evolution, innovation and change happens at a pace so slow and incremental as to be hardly noticeable. Creating the truly innovative work requires stepping outside of natural selection and hacking into art's DNA, engineering the genes like a GMO. The more divergent the work, the more radical the splice.

To wit, two interpretations on baroque style antique chairs:

Georgian armchairs as imagined by London-based designers Clarke & Reilly (otherwise known as husband and wife team David Grocott and Bridget Dwyer). The chairs are covered in 19th century Mennonite petticoats. In bringing together divergent materials with their own histories, the designers have genetically spliced the chairs way beyond mere reupholstering. They have added not only value but dimension. Like the apple farmer who joins together two trees through grafting, enabling the tree to bear more fruit.

In this version, Dutch artist/designer Sebastian Brajkovic takes his inspiration from digital graphics. Unlike Clarke & Reilly, Brajkovic doesn't graft with pre-existing materials but creates his objects from scratch. This work, from his "Lathe Series," is designed with CAD and assembled by hand. The graphics on the upholstery are embroidered. The history Brajkovic seeks in his work is of a more surreal nature. Says he: "My decor is the dreamworld." A world that normally exists only in "the back of our heads."

Above, this version of Brajkovic's chair seems to be cleaved between two dimensions.

Clarke & Reilly's work, as with the above chair, is described as "chic utilitarian," "shabby chic," and simply "disheveled." To simply call it Adaptive Reuse would be to drain the work of all its poetry. And what about the designers themselves? They call it "unashamedly romantic and tirelessly imaginative." They travel the world with an eye acutely open for vintage, antique, and otherwise extraordinary pieces from which to begin; For David Grocott, it was an eye trained with 20 years experience in the antique industry, including running his own company, Plinth.

Like a vine crawling over a brick wall, an antique textile is layered over a vintage couch. The raw appearance is no accident. Rather than cover the essence of his pieces beneath upholstery Grocott prefers to let its historicity show through.Below, a bedroom outfitted with unpainted shutters and an antique wood-burning stove used as a kind of console/bureau.

Below, the Suitcase Chair from South African designer Katie Thompson.

Like the work above, Thompson goes beyond simply recycling objects or adapting them for reuse. In some of her work she also mashes-up narratives. For her Suitcase Chair she plays with the tension of two opposing narratives: In the suitcase we have the experience of travel and relocation with its attendant anxieties and misadventures as the yin. For the yang she intersects the first with the cozy comfort of home and hearth in the deep white linen cushions and turned legs.

Then, the white linen Ottoman Tub: The wash tub gets its own Cinderella story.

Below, a reupholstered vintage couch with embroidery: More use of the Suitcase Chair yin and yang tension. The DNA of home and homeostasis spliced with the chaotic flight pattern of a butterfly. Or something like that.

Le Courbusier revisted: The Theater of Cruelty take on the Swiss master by fellow countryman, interior architect and artist Stefan Zwicky. Manufactured from concrete and rebar the chair weighs in at a ton. The title: Domage a Corbu, grand confort, sans confort (1980)

Let's see the very thing and nothing else.
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.

Wallace Stevens, 1946