Twelve Step

Hello. Here’s this week’s newsletter. All killer and no filler. Let’s get straight to it.

Can Manhattan’s underused office buildings be turned into housing?

The team behind several of my favorite Brooklyn restaurants (like Sisters) just finished an amazing NYC apartment renovation

They also founded a product line of furniture and lighting

Brooklyn-based furniture showroom Love House

Swedish-Iraqi designer creates minimalist objects and furniture inspired by Brutalism and heritage of Mesopotamia

Chalet Nova in Spain

Is Brutalism here to stay?

New photo series captures Madrid's Brutalist architecture heritage and another does the same in Belgrade

Lots of concrete in this beautiful minimal home in Basel, Switzerland

A concrete memorial in China creates a quiet and meditative atmosphere

In Taiwan a military bunker has been turned into a multimedia gallery

#SOSBrutalism is a growing database of buildings in danger of being demolished

Let’s pivot from concrete and move onto nice examples of wood use like on this courthouse in Spain, these timber-clad cabins on a coastal Chilean hillside, this duplex home in Austria and this rentable house in East Hampton, NY

A nearly hundred-year-old shoe factory in East London has been converted into a live/work space

These five architect-designed London lofts are on the market right now

An apartment in a Victorian house in London gets a total overhaul

This unassuming house in Portugal

A 1970s bungalow in Australia gets an update

A mid-century home in a quiet Melbourne suburb

A fun loft apartment in Stockholm

There’s a house in the Hollywood Hills for sale that was built by Norwegian shipbuilders in the 1950s

This turn of the century apartment in Sweden is really bright

Watch a timelapse video of a 140-year-old Victorian home move through the streets of San Francisco (thanks Lin)

I’m really into this Victorian house remodel in Toronto and its reading nook

A school in Shanghai has a new theatre/library building that resembles a whale (thanks Mar)

The design for this school in Senegal was inspired by the surrounding rivers

IKEA launches disassembly instructions encouraging customers to extend product life

IKEA is now selling tiny prebuilt homes that come on a flatbed trailer

The story behind Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Chair

Collection of "impossible" virtual furniture sells for $450,000 at auction

Enter the wild, revolutionary and highly confusing art market springing up around virtual artworks

An NFT for the popular ‘Nyan Cat’ GIF just sold for a whopping $560,000

If you’re on Clubhouse, make sure to tune in to tonight’s Culture Club talk on NFTs in the art world (reach out if you need an invite)

Andrés Reisinger, Complicated Sofa.

Brooklyn-based company mounts paintball gun to a Boston Dynamics robot dog and lets people shoot works of art remotely

Artist Tom Sachs has a new show in Palm Beach and you can listen to him talk about it here

For less than $250, you can get a set of limited-edition artworks by the likes of Jenny Holzer and Martin Creed mailed to your door

A sale of works from the collection of the late artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude brings in $9.8 Million including a Yves Klein that was given to the couple in exchange for a portrait of Yves and his wife

A hundred-year-old Brooklyn townhouse is now a nice shade of Yves Klein blue

And a quick reminder that the Contemporary Artists' Book Conference starts Friday and Printed Matter’s virtual book fair is already underway

Some of my favorite publishers are: 8-Ball Community, Aperture, Arquitectura y fantasía, Artphilein Editions, Corraini Edizioni, DelMonico Books, Marcus Campbell Art Books, Cody DeFranco, Deadbeat Club, Joyce S. Lee, KARMA, Kodoji Press, MIGRANT, Other Forms, Phaidon, Ruja Press and Sternberg Press

If books aren’t your thing, this new free app will read your webpages to you

Install it and try it out on these two pages:

How to slow down and write better emails

If you’re good, say you’re good

That’ll do it this week. I think I’ve left you with enough to keep you busy. Thanks for still being here with me and thank you all who’ve emailed. And as always, shoot an email over to capa@bloodandchampagne.com and say hi. See you in March.

Thomas