Reference Page: August 2010

A Better Box Lunch
Black + Blum has designed a cute lunch box called Box Appetit. But when it comes to food containers, the real art is often inside the box. Kitchen artists post their creations on Flickr’s bento-box pool, where food arrangements are poetic, adorable, or even funny, such as this sushi shaped like Gene Simmons from Kiss. For advice on making your own, start with Lunchinabox.net, a blog by a San Francisco mom who offers tips on making rabbit-shaped apple wedges and octopus-shaped hot dogs.

The House That Phil Knight Built
The editors of the University of Oregon’s student newspaper have renamed the Jaqua Center, designed by ZGF Architects, the “Phil Knight Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Who Wanna Learn How To Do Other Stuff Good Too.” Yes, they’re a little bitter. And that’s mainly because the center’s two top floors are restricted to athletes. It didn’t help that the director of support services for athletes called the center “the Taj Mahal of academic facilities.” This led to an outraged op-ed by an art-history professor, who compared the squalor outside the actual Taj Mahal, in India, to the “substandard quarters” surrounding the Jaqua.

Random Acts of Architecture
Ogrydziak/Prillinger Architects, who designed the Gallery House last year, recently created the visitors’ pavilion for the Presidio Habitats exhibition in San Francisco’s Presidio park. On view until May 2011, it features 11 stylish homes for lucky local animals, all created by renowned international designers. There is a porcelain nest for Western screech owls, by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a sculptural den for gray foxes (by Denmark’s Cebra Architects), and for robins, avant-garde nesting by Philippe Becker Design.