Room Ideas

Crystallized Book Art Alexis Arnold

Polo

Published: about 7 hours ago

Books convey meaning through words, but they’re also physical objects, whose materials react to environmental conditions and the passage of time. This is what Alexis Arnold examines in her ongoing series, Crystallized Books, in which she treats found books with a borax solution so they grow crystals.

The resulting objects look like books frozen in time — dropped in the snow and abandoned, or mysteriously calcified mid-read.

They also resemble layered rocks, laminated pastries, frozen waterfalls, bent bodies. They tell a different story now than the ones printed in their pages.

The series “addresses the materiality versus the text or content of a book,” the artist explains on her website.

“The crystals remove the text and solidify the books into aesthetic, non-functional objects. The books, frozen with crystal growth, have become artifacts or geologic specimens imbued with the history of time,

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Garden

An ‘Upside Down’ Family Home Floating Among The Treetops

Polo

The Riverview house by Nobbs Radford Architects has been designed to blend into the bushy parklands surrounding it. Owing to the steep and rocky block the house sits upon, the central hub of the house is located on the second floor, with views to the treetops outside. The architect’s central concern was to maximise the connection between the home’s inhabitants and this surrounding landscape.

Materials and colours were selected to naturally frame the treetop vista, while internal design work was focused on re-choreographing the existing floorplan around day-to-day-family life. ‘The clients wanted us to reorganise their home, rather than add extra space,’ explains director, Alison Nobbs.

As the house is situated on a steep slope, its unusual layout flips a conventional residential floorplan, with the entry on the lower level and communal spaces above. On the upstairs floor, the generous kitchen is the central hub of the house, and Alison’s

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