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Category / Art & Design Awesomeness

Oh, Just an Abandoned Hobbit Castle Built for Sheep

Having spent seven years surfing what I’ve come to call the “underweb”, I’ll tell ya, it takes some pretty weird stuff to surprise me these days. But this? This restores my faith in the internet’s ability to never run out of obscure things to show me. Behold “Colin’s Barn”, an eccentric hobbit-like superstructure built in the 1980s by…

Only Photographs Remained of the First Flying Man, Until Now…

“Sacrifices must be made…” were reportedly Otto Lilenthal’s last words following the fatal accident that saw him plunge to his untimely death from an altitude of 50 feet (15 meters) in his glider. Okay, so this might not sound like the most “uplifting” story so far, but for anyone who’s ever had in interest in collecting old photos, there’s…

The Junk King and his Cathedral of Bric-a-Brac

Paris might have the Notre Dame Cathedral but in Austin, Texas stands a one-of-a-kind structure called the Junk Cathedral. Impressive in it’s own right, it is the work of Vince Hannemann, also known as ‘The Junk King’. Vince has been doing installation works using found objects since he was 16 years old and contrary to…

Window Shop in Art Deco Paris

It was a lucky link I found on Pinterest that led me by chance to the digital image catalogue of the Wolfsonian-FIU, a treasure trove of rare books rescued from obscurity. Deep within the collection of more than 100,000 images, two dog-eared books acquired from the French archives published in the early 1930s have been digitally…

Lost to the Iron Curtain: The Avant Garde Artist the World Forgot

Paris may have been the artistic hub of Europe’s cultural life and modern ideas at the beginning of the 20th century, but a majority of its greatest thinkers and artists actually came from abroad, from places such as Spain, the US and even further away, like Russia and its surrounding countries. Across the Black Sea around…

The Obscure World of Kitschy Christian Vinyl

Bob Dylan nearly crossed over to the Christian music industry in the late seventies. He had just announced his conversion to Christianity in ’79 and proceeded to release a total of three albums based on his newfound faith. He spent several years touring and preaching from stage, but was never fully accepted by Christian music fans…

The Futuristic Dwelling Machine that Could Have Been

If a real estate listing described a house with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a spacious living/dining room that was self-heating, self-cooling, self-cleaning, self-powering, environmentally friendly, and priced at the cost of a Cadillac, it probably wouldn’t take very long before it was snapped up off the market. But plans for such a house exist,…

Stop Everything and take a Tour of this Museum of Miniatures

The exquisite detail under the roof of Taiwan’s miniature museum is enough to make you teary-eyed. It was the first museum to collect miniatures in Asia, founded in 1997 and now ranked the 2nd biggest collection in the world– not bad for an off the beaten path museum hiding in the basement of an office building.…

Today I’m Shopping for Vintage Star Finders

There are countless applications that we can download on our smartphone these days to identify the constellations, but I’m not so much searching for the stars right now as I’m searching for inspiration– design inspiration. And these vintage Star and Planet Finders I found in abundance on the internet today, provide a whole lot of that. This…

England, is that You?

For some 30 years, a collection of nearly 4,000 slides sat undiscovered in a university basement in Sheffield. The lost collection of photographs, found inside a forgotten pile of boxes, has since been digitised by students of the University of Sheffield, and I just spent the morning digging through it. Back Lane, Blanchland, Northumberland (c) JR James…

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