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Sticking beauty
A FLICKR USER named Happy Monkey has developed a new art form, “tapecraft,” that puts a contemporary gloss on the ancient Japanese art of origami. The smallish architectural forms are similarly complex: multifaceted spheroid objects covered with pyramids of various colors, for example. But the key ingredients here are scotch tape and permanent markers.
The works are crafty, DIY, and cheap, a popular combination in these straitened times. Happy Monkey’s Flickr page includes step-by-step instructions on how to assemble one shape from scratch, as well as video of one bit of tapecraft that’s been equipped with blinking lights.
The artist, a wordsmith as well as a tapesmith, has given some of his works serious technical names. Care to guess which one is the “rhombitruncated cuboctahedron”?
How can Schiff make such a bold, seemingly anachronistic claim? Because Mahler’s influence can be heard in many composers who did, in one way or another, chronicle the horrors of the century that followed 1900: Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, and others.
In his lifetime, however, Mahler hardly seemed such a central figure: “French composers dismissed him as German, Germans considered him to be Viennese and the Viennese either admired or detested him for being a Jew.” (Schiff writes: “Never mind the sublime notes; it all came down to the nose.”)
“The Three Little Pigs” has always been, at heart, a tale about architecture. Steven Guarnaccia, the chair of the illustration program at the Parsons New School, has simply made that connection explicit. In his version of the story, just published by the art-book publisher Corraini (and available in both Italian and English), the three little pigs appear in the form of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Frank Gehry. Albeit with snouts.
“In their famous buildings,” says the publicity copy for the book, “they live among objects designed by some of the most internationally representative architects and designers. But one day the wolf pays a visit to them {hellip} ”
Apart from introducing children to three great modern architects, the book serves as a more general reference work on modern design, as the houses’ ample furnishings are all identified in a glossary.
The book is a follow-up to Guarnaccia’s take on “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” in which Goldilocks discovers, for example, that the bear-chair that fits her best is a 1946 classic by Charles and Ray Eames.
Christopher Shea is a weekly columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at brainiac.email@gmail.com. 
