1. The House that Madness Built
In the tidy Westphalian town of Lemgo, Germany, where the gabled houses wear their history with restrained Protestant pride, there stands a house that seems to have wandered in from another reality. It is a house made of wood, and also of something more difficult to name—delirium, perhaps, or obsession. It is the Junkerhaus, the handmade gesamtkunstwerk of Karl Junker, a 19th-century architect, painter, sculptor, and recluse who, over the course of several decades, created a domestic cathedral to his own singular vision.
The Junker House is now a museum open to the public. Found World of Interiors.
2. Private island near London For Sale
The private island has a fascinating history: it was used as a secret naval base during WW1 and was occupied by the British Army during WW2. More recently, it’s been used as a television and film location, and housed a high-profile rehab centre (Amy Winehouse was treated there in 2008). Asking a cool 25 million.
Found on The Spaces.
3. Rudolf Steiner’s First Goetheanum (1920)
Steiner’s work falls into no stylistic category, its idiosyncrasies and originality makes it as unique as the Czech phase of Rondo-Cubism….
After an abortive attempt to build a centre for the anthroposophical movement in Munich, Rudolf Steiner was able to erect the headquarters of his new organization not far from Basel. His entirely timber-clad design was made in 1913. Building soon began and the first Goetheanum was opened in 1920. At the same time, strange edifices connected with the movement grew up around the new ‘temple’ in the grounds at Dornach. The Goetheanum was burnt down on New Year’s Eve, 1922/3 and was replaced by a new building in reinforced concrete.
Found on Tumblr.
4. A Hair comb from 1904
Designed and crafted by Lucien Galliard, one of the more significant Art Nouveau jewelers of the time. He chose to employ one of the most popular natural images of the period, dragonflies in the composition. The comb itself, as well as the larger portion of the wings is made from carved animal horn, probably steer horn. Part of what makes this piece a virtuoso work his use of plique-à-jour, a vitreous enameling technique, in which the enamel is not applied to a metal base, but rather set in a gossamer thin wire framework. You can see it in segments of the wings. One of the two dragonflies holds a large topaz in its legs, while the other hovers close.
Collection of the Rijksmuseum. Found here.
5. The First Recording of the Human Voice
When inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville sang a nursery rhyme into his phonoautogram in 1860, he had no plans to ever play back this recording. A precursor to the wax cylinder, the phonoautogram took inputs for the study of sound waves, but could not be turned into an output device. How amazing then, that 150 or so years later, we can hear the voice of Scott in what is now considered the first ever recording of human sound.
What you will hear in the above video are the various stages of reconstructing and reverse engineering the voice that sang on that April day in 1860, until, like wiping away decades of dirt and soot, the original art is revealed.
Found on Open Culture.
6. America’s Last Top Model
Following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 … the Army Corps would build infrastructure to corral and maneuver the river in order to control it… they wanted a way to test out their building projects to make sure that they would work…. In 1943, the Corps began construction on a model that could test all 1.25 million square miles of the Mississippi River.
It would be a three-dimensional map of nearly half of the continental United States, rendered to a 1/2000 horizontal scale, spanning more than 200 acres. It was so big that the only way to see all of it at once was from a four-story observation tower.
As computer models became more accurate—or accurate enough—the Mississippi Basin Model gradually lost its funding.
By 1993, the model was closed. Today, it is completely derelict. The pipes and pump houses are rusting away. The earth and mud and water have all dried up, leaving a mess of concrete and wire mesh.
Listen to the full story podcast found on 99% Invisible.
7. An untold Cast Away story of an affluent 18th century American Woman who was kidnapped, became a pirate and eventually died a cave-dwelling hermit
Born into privilege in the mid-18th century, Sarah was raised among the colonial elite, the daughter of a well-to-do family living on Long Island. But the American Revolution would soon uproot her carefully laid path. At some point during the chaos of the war — historical accounts vary — Sarah was reportedly kidnapped by British soldiers or privateers, an ordeal that marked the beginning of her descent into a world wholly removed from the drawing rooms of her youth. According to local legend, she was either taken aboard a ship against her will or sought escape from trauma through the sea, and in either case, became entangled with a crew of pirates. Her appearance was described as “a lady of considerable beauty”. Though documentation is thin and her exact role on board unclear, Sarah is often described in oral histories as a rare female figure within a male-dominated world of high-seas lawlessness. Whether she fought, healed, or hid, she survived.
After her release or escape—another murky detail—Sarah returned not to society, but to solitude. Settling near North Salem in Westchester County, New York, she took up residence in a small, damp cave on the side of West Mountain. There, for decades, she lived in hermetic seclusion, wearing rags, eating roots and berries, and sleeping on moss. Villagers occasionally caught glimpses of her at a distance, walking barefoot through snow, appearing in town only to receive food or attend church, where she sat alone in the back pew. Though some assumed madness or trauma, others saw in her a woman of fierce independence — someone who had glimpsed the worst of humanity and chosen instead the quiet austerity of nature. Sarah Bishop died in her cave sometime around 1810, her story already blurring into myth. In time, her cave became a local curiosity, a pilgrimage site for those drawn to tales of haunted women and lost lives.
What remains of Sarah is a haunting American archetype: the woman who walked away from the world, shaped by violence but not defeated by it, and who left behind whispers that still cling to the rocks of her solitary home.
Someone needs to make her movie. Found on Wikipedia.
8. Rachel Spelling uses old, and new, paint charts as her canvas, fills them with tiny, colour appropriate works of art
9. These Early 20th Century Advertisements for an Ink Company (1903-1907)
I love the colorful illustrative style of these adverts for the Queen City Printing Ink Company done by Augustus Jansson in the first decade of the 20th century.
Found on The Public Domain.
10. On Working for Andy Warhol
No matter how famous he became, he was still the ‘embarrassing little creep’ who, when he first arrived in New York, had harassed Truman Capote with daily fan letters, phone calls, and camped out on his doorstep; he was still the balding twenty-something sitting every day at the counter of Chock full o’Nuts, eating the same cream-cheese sandwich on date-nut bread; someone who founded his art on boredom, repetition, because only unvarying sameness could soothe his raging anxiety.
I told Andy the first time we met that this was something we had in common – that although, as he put it in his Diaries, I was a ‘beautiful girl’, a banker’s granddaughter, I was also a freak like him, a person who in some way would rather stand outside staring up at the Factory windows than be invited in.
Full article found on Granta.
11. Lost and unknown for generations, Mark Twain’s charming children’s book: “Advice to Little Girls”
Found on The Marginalian.
12. Lagos in the 70’s, captured by a husband & wife team of photographers
Husband-and-wife duo, John and Funmilayo Abe, founded Abi Morocco Photos on Aina Street in Lagos — they captured the energy of the city in the 1970s and chronicled the street-style capital in staged solo shots, family portraits, and images from traditional events. In the ‘70s, Lagos was thriving — Nigeria was celebrating a decade of independence from British colonialism, the end of the war, and an oil boom that had triggered its soaring population.
Found on the British Journal of Photography.
13. Art Smith, the Cuban born American jewellery designer in his Greenwich village shop, 1950s NYC
Found on Tik Tok.
