All three Germans in the office have started baking their own bread. The one above is mine from this past weekend. It has bacon in it. It’s so good even the camera couldn’t focus on anything after it was cool enough to eat. We got started just after the winter holidays with Jim Lahey’s book The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method. In a nutshell, you mix the ingredients the day before you plan to bake. Water, flour, yeast and salt ferment for 18 hours and produce a sticky dough that you shape and let rise again. You bake the loaf in a cast iron pot and out comes a crust that is so crackling good that it reminds me of home. It’s kind of hard to convey how exciting it is without letting you take a bite. We shared one of the first loaves with some favorite clients when they came in for a meeting. I’m pretty sure that’s why the project is going so well. Here’s the original recipe from the Sullivan Street Bakery.

Outside the Art Gallery of NSW,  the two monumental bronze sculptures The Offerings of War and The Offerings of Peace (1923) that are flanking the museums entrance, have been put in a new, quite absurd context. Titled War and Peace and in Between, the artist has built a perfectly average looking living room and bedroom around the sculptures which visitors can access via two ramps. It’s a stunning experience to grasp the actual scale of an oversize bronze statue from so close. And beyond that it really makes you aware of the divide of public and private in the objects that surround us in our daily urban environments.

The Sydney project marks the latest in the series of Kaldor Public Art Projects, running since 1969 throughout Oz and including the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gilbert & George, Jeff Koons, and Bill Viola.

Building domestic spaces around public monuments, artworks and streetlights has been Tatzu Nishi’s signature act for over a decade. The artist lives and works in Cologne, and you can see more of his projects at his website.

Only 24 days left to apply for this year’s Macktez Summer Stipend. For the fifth year in a row the tech consultancy has been offering $500 to support creatives and their ideas: those just taking shape and those gasping for oxygen with the finish line in sight. There have been some really great nominations and winners.  In 2007 Macktez helped Andrew Sloat finish his video project A More Perfect Union and just last year support was given to Nicole Kenney and her wildly successful Before I Die I Want To. How did we find this one? Because we’ve been Macktez’ ideas and illustrations partner on the project since it started.

It’s one of those dumb male cliches, that we love to spend hours at Home Depot. For me this is absolutely true, and these french guys here even make an art of it. Makeshift Guerilla art installations, just pure boy’s fun. They go by the name ENCASTRABLE (I’m pretty sure that means something sexual, as most french things — just to ponder a bit more on stereo types…) Click on the images to enlarge or check out their website — it’s fun!

[Via we-make-money-not-art.com ]

(top and bottom rows): From the 1970 NYCTA Graphic Standards Manual, Unimark Design Consultants, a page indicating directional information, the cover and and typeface instruction using Standard, not Helvetica; (middle) “Donna” illustration of platform signage by Bob Noorda (c.1966, colorized in 2008).

This should be a nice weekend read for a rainy day where you don’t feel like going out to get the paper and have no books or magazines left to read. Or for any other ordinanry day if you really really like reading lengthy stuff on your screen…

UPDATE: here’s the link to the AIGA article