Design

Meadow House 1

Tuesday, November 29th, 2016 Design

My first full-scale architecture project started in Robert Meredith’s Advanced Architecture class in high school, wherein eight or nine students were given a final assignment of conceiving a small-to-midsize dwelling and executing a certain number of drawings—all done by hand, with pencils and Koh-i-Nor Rapidograph pens on vellum—and an optional model which I attempted but […]

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Star Trek Paperback Covers

Saturday, March 7th, 2015 Books / Design / Writing

As I mentioned in my Slate article about Leonard Nimoy, “The stacks of Star Trek paperbacks we all bought…had glorious oil paintings on their covers that depicted the Trek universe with baroque realism that far surpassed the cheap effects of the show.” Probably the best example from the early-to-mid-’Seventies (Star Trek’s “decade in the wilderness,” […]

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The Art of Parody

Friday, October 31st, 2014 Design

Ubiquitous early-1970s magazine ad for Earth Shoes (directly below; click for full size), and, below that, a 1974 National Lampoon parody of the same ad (for “Earth Tires”): The “Earth Tires” ad was almost certainly written by P. J. O’Rourke (whose conservative leanings went against the grain of the rest of the masthead), author of […]

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