Happy Valentine's Day!

... and be sure to click over to You Have Been Here Sometime and read our short guest post about Ettore Sottsass, his Superbox, and all things boxy and striped.

Fiorucci Fioruscha

Late 70's Fiorucci shopping bag. Above, from The Official Preppy Handbook; and top, on our kitchen wall by way of Ebay, years ago (this is the actual auction photo- 17 dollars,framed under glass!)

Fiorucci put out some amazing graphics during their heyday but this is my favorite. Equal parts Ed Ruscha and the actual gas station down the road from where I used to live in Italy, which I'd either ride my bike by or hitchhike by just about every day.

Standard Station, Ed Ruscha 1966

Total Station, S.S. 222 from Greti to Greve in Chianti

Progettazione 1x2

Gustav Eiffel/ Enzo Mari- inspired 1x2 plank mantel ("Eiffel Mantel") just after completion in the summer of 2008. Highly mathematical instructions on how to build it are in our book Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found.

Below that is from the following spring, when a winter outside oxidized the nails and they leached into the wood grain, but I like it even better that way. It shows more of "the hand".

Above, a pig working on a Mari-esque progettazione (interlocking end table/s) in the illustration for the book's last page (the end).

also:

Enzo Mari at DesignMuseum.org

Enzo Mari at Reference Library

Enzo Mari at Daddytypes, and Greg.Org

Fiam glass nesting tables

Three thick glass nesting tables made by Fiam Italia, makers of Cini Boeri's Ghost Chair. Linda found these browsing Craigslist one day but the listing was over a month old. We called anyway and the guy said he still had them, that no one had responded. They were his boss's, who had a yard sale after he got divorced, but nobody bought them there either so the guy took them. Crazy. they were $40.

Domestic Landscape Bliss

Designer Fantastica Ettore Sottsass, from a 1974 Oui magazine article on the new domestic landscape.

And relatedly, really enjoying all the fascinating posts

lately about Poltronova at the excellent blog RoLu.

Sottsass' luminous mirror, a photograph of which doesn't seem to exist without a half naked or enraptured woman in front of it.

2 for Tuesday

From Massimo Vignelli, designer fantastico Italiano:

Stacking plastic tableware, 1967-72

New York City subway map, 1970

Giorgetto Giugiaro Logica

A find from last year is this Necchi Logica sewing machine. It's not often great designers take on sewing machines, but when they do the results usually go straight to museums' permanent collections. The Logica was designed for Necchi by Giorgetto Giugiaro, the great Italian automobile designer and leading proponent of the awesome "folded paper" school of design. Besides Linda's sewing machine, his most angular and notable designs are the Volkswagen Rabbit, the Nikon F4, the Delorean, a slew of Italian Supercars, but most fun- and most like the Logica- is his Lotus Esprit, a car I used to build out of Lego tirelessly after seeing James Bond submarining around in his.

one of Linda's Logica-assisted coats