Proposed architectural designs for Boom, a 100-acre alternative retirement space.

via Coolhunting:

What began as an innovative project for LGBT retirees seeking refuge from cookie-cutter approaches to conventional retirement has evolved into something much more ambitious. More than 100 acres in the Mojave Desert will soon be the site of a $250 million idea, bringing together 10 architectural firms from five countries to succeed where so many fail by reclaiming shared community spaces that invite pedestrians and casual interactivity among neighbors.

Located near Palm Springs, California—an area known for perennial sunshine and wide-open spaces—Boom will cater to outdoor living with pedestrian pathways and communal spaces, as well as eateries, wellness centers and shops. Living spaces include private homes, assisted living and a nursing home. Each separate development will differ as the individual architects are being given free reign to realize their ideas of livability, adding diversity to the common goal of functionality and livability.

Another exciting facet to the project is that the Boom community already exists in virtual space. Participants can brainstorm and create a shared vision with the developers and architects in these early stages when the buildings are still rendered lines in an AutoCAD program.

…the overarching idea is a space where denizens celebrate life with each other rather than retreat into isolation that so many other modern developments ultimately foster—as lead designer Matthias Hollwich from HWKN explained to his fellow architects, “Boom has to be about living, not retiring, about inclusion and not seclusion.”

Nursing homes can be a scary place. Being stuck in high school was a horrible experience for many of us. It sucked because you were grouped with a bunch of people you had nothing in common with, simply because you were all teenagers. Being in a conventional nursing home is probably similar, except you’re all old and don’t have the prospect of escaping into adult life to look forward to. Perhaps that’s an overly depressing way of looking at it. But according to a recent survey in the UK, more people “fear losing independence in old age than death.” Perhaps being in a nursing home that’s part of a community in line with your interests wouldn’t be so bad. As a friend recently said, “anything that there’s currently a cruise for, there will one day be a retirement community for.” Well, there’s a goth cruise. A rave cruise. One day, there will probably be a Burner/hippe retirement community, with dreadlocked 70-year-olds listening to psy-trance.

Some questions: in the event that you could no longer live on your own, what kind of people do you want to spend your twilight years with? Would you rely on the family you make in the world to create this kind of space? Would you join in a retirement community based on common interests, like hacking/period costuming/witchcraft/polyamory/sci-fi? What would the day-to-day activities in this place be like, in an ideal world? What do you envision really uniting you with people as you get older, as opposed to things that turn out to be passing interests?

Stunning X-Ray images of corsets from 1908 by Dr. Ludovic O’Followell, via hypnerotomachi(n)a and billie jane. Many more images from the book (some NSWF) can be found at the Wikimedia Commons. Could this have been the inspiration for Helmut Newton’s gorgeous X-ray fashion photography from the late 70s?

“Walking around SOMA, we find this little gem. Stay classy Kennith Cole.” [via Flickr]

Earlier today, Kenneth Cole twatted, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC.” After a massive Twitter outcry, Cole hastily scrubbed the tweet and attempted to backpedal. “I’ve dedicated my life to raising awareness about serious social issues,” claimed the designer in a two-sentence apology on Facebook, admitting that posting the tweet as unarmed protesters in Cairo were getting shot was, perhaps, “poorly timed.”

However, this morning at 2 AM, San Francisco residents spotted this mysterious and super professional-looking decal on the window of Kenneth Cole’s SOMA location.

Are any Coilhouse readers in other cities perhaps encountering similar window displays at Kenneth Cole store locations? If so, please send pictures. We will gladly update this post with images of Kenneth Cole storefronts from around the US.

These images are from the stunning book “Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea” by artists Kahn & Selesnick. A description from the artists:

On an altered yet recognizable version of our neighbouring planet, we find a world populated solely with two women. We do not learn their names nor how and when they came to Mars, but we observe their wanderings in a desolate landscape which they attempt make navigable and habitable with an amalgam of high-tech components retrofitted to found artifacts and monuments that appear to be the remnants of a long-gone civilization. The remains of massive stone listening devices are littered about the landscape, leading us to wonder: is this a colony that has collapsed and lost touch with earth? How did its occupants become stranded? Or are these the nocturnal imaginings of two post-apocalyptic survivors?

The book can be viewed and purchased on Blurb. The artists write on Tumblr, “the ideal book we designed for the series, 12”x12” hardcover, 80 pages, available now through blurb online only, until a publisher daring enough picks it up. A full preview of it is on the website.” $108 may seem somewhat pricey, but that’s actually because Blurb is expensive for people to use, not because they’re trying to make a huge profit. If a real publisher picked up this book, it would be more affordable. Fingers crossed.

More images, after the jump! [via Synaptic Stimuli & Wurzeltod]

Polish designer Katarzyna Konieczka first made an appearance on Coilhouse this past July, but these newer photos of her medical fashion are too wonderfully twisted not to share. Above is a new image of her previously-featured Elephant Man-inspired ensemble, shot by Maciej Boryna. After the jump, two dreamlike masks, photographed by Marcin Twardowski. Definitely one to watch.

See also:

• Una Burke’s Medical Armor
• Face Corsets by Paddy Hartley
• Surgical Nightmares

Daredroid, Pseudomorphs, Fragilis and Intimacy.

Anouk Wipprecht creates garments that move, breathe, and react to the environment around them. Wipprecht started with a background of fashion, theater and dance, but a growing interest in interaction design and electrical engineering inspired her to develop clothing that appeals as much to the DIY/tech crowd as it does to fans of haute couture. “Instead of the body having to give a purpose to a design” Wipprecht said in a recent interview with Fashioning Tech, she’s interested in developing “design [that] gives a purpose to the body.”

Wipprecht has crafted projects such as Intimacy, a set of garments that become transparent when in proximity of each other, Fragilis, a dress that evokes the heart and veins through lighting and motion, and Daredroid, a cocktail-making robot dress equipped with IR sensors that administers booze through pneumatic control valves. More projects can be found on her site. Here she is discussing Pseudomorphs, her self-painting dresses:

Not much is known about this photo. It looks like the carte-de-visite of a Broadway actress named Nora. That’s all we may ever know about her, though it’s fun to imagine her as a feisty character who smoked cigars, cheated at poker, held séances, and habitually carried a riding crop.

What else might she have done? Tell me your stories about her. I loved your tales of Athanasius Scrimshaw and his good lady, Jerboa.

See also:

• Lost Marvels of Revolution-Era Russian Theater
• (Mostly) Vintage Images of Queer Visibility
• Hussar Ballad: Soviet Crossdressing Wartime Musical
• The Tarnished Beauties of Blackwell, Oklahoma

[via Wunderkind Jellygraph]

Over at Instructables site, maker  j_l_larson writes, “I have noticed a strange inequity between the poseability of girls and boys dolls.  Most of the female dolls have stiff arms and legs, which permit them to do little more than model clothing.” To rectify matters, Larson created a step-by-step tutorial for modifying girls’ dolls so that they can actually do stuff. Lisa Wade of SocImages adds, “scholars have noted that ‘action figures’ and ‘dolls’ tend to be pose-able and non-pose-able, respectively, reflecting the idea that boys are encouraged to be active agents and girls passive objects.” The tutorial is a great way to examine this issue, and the disembodied in-between shots are works of art in their own right.

Wheeeeee! The finished product.

Previously:

• Circuit Bent Decapitated Barbie Head
• Margaux Lange and Barbie Vivisection
• The Furby Gurdy Man Comes Singing Songs of Love

PhocalPoint | Sarah Jake | Kate O’Brien / Drea Morsby | Stacey Lynn | Katacha | Tiffany (TLP Photography)

Last week, Geraldine Hoff Doyle, one of the inspirations for the character of Rosie the Riveter, died at age 86 in Lansing, MI. Doyle was just 17 years old when a photographer for United Press International snapped her photo at the metal-pressing plant where she worked. The photo was subsequently used by the U.S. War Production Coordinating Committee as reference for a poster titled “We Can Do It!” Lansing was oblivious to her fame until 1984, when she came across a reproduction of the poster in a magazine. Doyle’s daughter, Stephanie Gregg, told the Lansing State Journal, “she was very kind and generous. She lived the ‘We Can Do It!’ life every day.” The image was originally aimed to encourage women to enter the workforce in support of the war effort, but became an image of empowerment for the ages, inspiring, as Marina Galperina writes in her Rosie tribute post at the Animal NY blog, “a legacy of posters, merchandise, motivated females and countless internet doppelgangers.” Galperina has posted a selection of her favorite Rosie images from Flickr, and invites others to do the same. More “We Can Do It!” girls on Flickr right this way.

Kelly Docheny

The last supper… before Oswalt’s “a-pop-calyplse.” Image from The Last Supper Collection. Painting by Misha.

Yesterday, Wired published an essay by writer/comedian Patton Oswalt titled Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die. It’s about the demise of geekdom, the rise of otaku culture in America, and what it means to be living in a world where Boba Fett’s helmet appears “emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells.” All this discussion is very near and dear to our hearts, and was eloquently explored by Joshua Ellis in an essay called Children by the Million Wait for Alex Chilton, which appeared in Coilhouse Issue 04.

Both essays make the point that “we’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.” But where Joshua Ellis suggests that we’ve won the culture war by essentially remaking the world in our image, Patton Oswalt argues that  “with everyone more or less otaku and everything immediately awesome… the old inner longing for more or better that made our present pop culture so amazing is dwindling.” This, he warns, produces “weak otakus” – not a generation of artists, but one of noncommittal pop-culture consumers. “Why create anything new,” he asks, “when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie?” The proposed solution to this problem steers the essay into a weird, fantastical place. In order to rebuild geek culture, Oswalt argues, we must first bring about the “Etewaf Singularity.” He goes on to explain:

It has already started. It’s all around us. VH1 list shows. Freddy vs. Jason. Websites that list the 10 biggest sports meltdowns, the 50 weirdest plastic surgeries, the 200 harshest nut shots. Alien vs. Predator. Lists of fails, lists of boobs, lists of deleted movie scenes. Entire TV seasons on iTunes. An entire studio’s film vault, downloadable with a click. Easter egg scenes of wild sex in Grand Theft Auto. Hell, Grand Theft Auto, period. And yes, I know that a lot of what I’m listing here seems like it’s outside of the “nerd world” and part of the wider pop culture. Well, I’ve got news for you—pop culture is nerd culture. The fans of Real Housewives of Hoboken watch, discuss, and absorb their show the same way a geek watched Dark Shadows or obsessed over his eighth-level half-elf ranger character in Dungeons & Dragons. It’s the method of consumption, not what’s on the plate.

Since there’s no going back—no reverse on the out-of-control locomotive we’ve created—we’ve got to dump nitro into the engines. We need to get serious, and I’m here to outline my own personal fantasy: We start with lists of the best lists of boobs. Every Beatles song, along with every alternate take, along with every cover version of every one of their songs and every alternate take of every cover version, all on your chewing-gum-sized iPod nano. Goonies vs. Saw. Every book on your Kindle. Every book on Kindle on every Kindle. The Human Centipede done with the cast of The Hills and directed by the Coen brothers.

That’s when we’ll reach Etewaf singularity. Pop culture will become self-aware. It will happen in the A.V. Club first: A brilliant Nathan Rabin column about the worst Turkish rip-offs of American comic book characters will suddenly begin writing its own comments, each a single sentence from the sequel to A Confederacy of Dunces. Then a fourth and fifth season of Arrested Development, directed by David Milch of Deadwood, will appear suddenly in the TV Shows section of iTunes. Someone BitTorrenting a Crass bootleg will suddenly find their hard drive crammed with Elvis Presley’s “lost” grunge album from 1994. And everyone’s TiVo will record Ghostbusters III, starring Peter Sellers, Lee Marvin, and John Candy.

This will last only a moment. We’ll have one minute before pop culture swells and blackens like a rotten peach and then explodes, sending every movie, album, book, and TV show flying away into space. Maybe tendrils and fragments of them will attach to asteroids or plop down on ice planets light-years away. A billion years after our sun burns out, a race of intelligent ice crystals will build a culture based on dialog from The Princess Bride. On another planet, intelligent gas clouds will wait for the yearly passing of the “Lebowski” comet. One of the rings of Saturn will be made from blurbs for the softcover release of Infinite Jest, twirled forever into a ribbon of effusive praise.

The essay continues on to describe “year zero for pop culture,” in which we’ll be stuck with nothing but “a VHS copy of Zapped!, the soundtrack to The Road Warrior, and Steve Ditko’s eight-issue run on Shade: The Changing Man” to work with for creating new culture. Oswalt goes on to describe the society that emerges: it includes entire musical genres spawned by Road Warrior (“waste-rock” and its counterpoint, “flute-driven folk”), the creation of the Iranian Beatles, and the ubiquitousness of Shade as “the new Catcher in the Rye.”

A great read, right down to the comment thread. For the full essay, click here. [Via William Gibson, whose name, incidentally, appears in both essays, both times in the passages describing the authors’ personal golden age of otaku/alternative culture].

One possible visualization for how Patton Oswalt’s “Etewaf Singularity” may play out – with the world being destroyed by 8-bit characters from old video games. Amazing video by Patrick Jean.