Three Classic Fairy Tales Examined Through the Lens of Architecture

What Rapunzel’s braid-to-tree connection has to do with the rotational circumference of Baba Yaga’s house.

As a lover of classic fairy tales and longtime fan of Kate Bernheimer’s modernist ones, I was delighted to come across Design Observer’s three-part series, in which Kate and Andrew Bernheimer reimagine the magical homes from three beloved fairy tales — Baba Yaga, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel — through the lens of architecture. In each installment, a different architecture firm selects a favorite fairy tale and examines its pivotal structure through a new kind of imaginative architectural storytelling.

Houses in fairy tales are never just houses; they always contain secrets and dreams. This project presents a new path of inquiry, a new line of flight into architecture as a fantastic, literary realm of becoming. We welcome you to these fairy-tale places.” ~ Kate Bernheimer & Andrew Bernheimer

As a child of Eastern European folklore, I’m partial to the first installment, in which Bernheimer Architecture examine Baba Yaga through its most important structure — the chicken legs, of course — and consider “how one might make a structure or an architecture ‘chicken-like,’ both externally and internally.”

In part two, Leven Betts Studio take a curious paradox of Jack and the Beanstalk — that the vehicle for the story’s magic, adventure and triumph is the beanstalk, yet it’s rarely described — and use it as the focal point of their architectural explorations.

Fairy tales are exemplified by spare and abstract detail, leaving enormous space — big as the sky — for the reader to wonder.”

In the third and final installment, Guy Nordenson and Associates bring their masterful structural engineering to Rapunzel’s tower, blending the original vision of the Brothers Grimm with their own pre-existing design for The Seven Stems Broadcast and Telecommunications Tower .

Rapunzel’s tower has come to symbolize both an enchanted, magical home and a dreadful prison from which to escape. Inside, one’s heart is full of desire and longing; and one must always also get out. The complicated emotional valence of this space is part of its longstanding appeal.”

For more modernist fairy tale magic, don’t miss Kate Bernheimer’s My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales — a wonderful anthology of stories by some of today’s greatest fiction writers, including Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Aimee Bender and Lydia Millet. And for a classical take, look no further than the best illustrations from 130 years of the Brothers Grimm.

via It’s Okay To Be Smart

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A List of Don’ts for Women on Bicycles Circa 1895

“Don’t ask, ‘What do you think of my bloomers?’”

We’ve already seen how the bicycle emancipated women, but it wasn’t exactly a smooth ride. The following list of 41 don’ts for female cyclists was published in 1895 in the newspaper New York World by an author of unknown gender. Equal parts amusing and appalling, the list is the best (or worst, depending on you look at it) thing since the Victorian map of woman’s heart.

• Don’t be a fright.
• Don’t faint on the road.
• Don’t wear a man’s cap.
• Don’t wear tight garters.
• Don’t forget your toolbag
• Don’t attempt a “century.”
• Don’t coast. It is dangerous.
• Don’t boast of your long rides.
• Don’t criticize people’s “legs.”
• Don’t wear loud hued leggings.
• Don’t cultivate a “bicycle face.”
• Don’t refuse assistance up a hill.
• Don’t wear clothes that don’t fit.
• Don’t neglect a “light’s out” cry.
• Don’t wear jewelry while on a tour.
• Don’t race. Leave that to the scorchers.
• Don’t wear laced boots. They are tiresome.
• Don’t imagine everybody is looking at you.
• Don’t go to church in your bicycle costume.
• Don’t wear a garden party hat with bloomers.
• Don’t contest the right of way with cable cars.
• Don’t chew gum. Exercise your jaws in private.
• Don’t wear white kid gloves. Silk is the thing.
• Don’t ask, “What do you think of my bloomers?”
• Don’t use bicycle slang. Leave that to the boys.
• Don’t go out after dark without a male escort.
• Don’t without a needle, thread and thimble.
• Don’t try to have every article of your attire “match.”
• Don’t let your golden hair be hanging down your back.
• Don’t allow dear little Fido to accompany you
• Don’t scratch a match on the seat of your bloomers.
• Don’t discuss bloomers with every man you know.
• Don’t appear in public until you have learned to ride well.
• Don’t overdo things. Let cycling be a recreation, not a labor.
• Don’t ignore the laws of the road because you are a woman.
• Don’t try to ride in your brother’s clothes “to see how it feels.”
• Don’t scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run.
• Don’t cultivate everything that is up to date because yon ride a wheel.
• Don’t emulate your brother’s attitude if he rides parallel with the ground.
• Don’t undertake a long ride if you are not confident of performing it easily.
• Don’t appear to be up on “records” and “record smashing.” That is sporty.

For more on the history of women and bikes, see the excellent Wheels of Change, among both the best photography books and the best history books of 2011.

via m-bike HT MetaFilter

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Mail-Order Mysteries: Real-World Stuff from Vintage Comic Book Ads

What hypno-specs and atomic pistols have to do with the duality of the human condition.

We’ve already learned that comic books can be a remarkable medium for nonfiction, but it turns out they can also be a vehicle for the most fantastically fraudulent fringes of fiction. Pop-culture historian Kirk Demarais set out to explore the artifice of childhood by ordering the curious, outlandish, improbable products marketed to kids in the ads on the back of comic books from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. He shares his findings — funny, bizarre, a little bit heartbreaking — in Mail-Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads!, a compendium of over 150 such peculiar collectibles, each dissected through the entertaining lens of what was promised and imagined versus what was actually received.

To [young] me the ads’ seductive nature was the result of a powerful combination of factors. Most obviously, the products were otherworldly: X-ray vision, karate courses, a money-counterfeiting device — they almost seemed too good to be true. For the first time, I wasn’t thinking in terms of playthings; these were life-enhancers that offered the means to satisfy a familiar range of wish-fulfillment, including power, glory, revenge, and romance.” ~ Kirk Demarais

While infinitely amusing, Mail-Order Mysteries also pokes at the architecture of our deepest-running wiring to fall for fads, to seek shortcuts, to suspend our disbelief in the hope of becoming a better version of ourselves with minimal effort. Equal parts optimistic and tragically flawed, these parallel capacities for wonder and for guile capture one of the most tender dualities of the human condition.

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