Old furniture, lamp parts and other cast-away ephemera from domestic life transform into finely crafted architectural models in the hands of artist and designer Ted Lott, who uses a bandsaw as a tiny sawmill to produce the pieces.

In a new collection of work, Lott explores the hidden lives of domestic objects like suitcases, train cases, trunks and furniture, inserting timber frame structures just as thoughtfully assembled as the real thing. Lights installed inside each one impart a sense of habitation and illuminate all of those beautiful details.

Previously, we covered Lott’s “Habitation Series,” in which vintage chairs, stools and tables are taken over by the framework of parasitic miniature architecture. The structures almost seem to have grown organically according to the proportions of the original furniture, like fungus, each one entirely unique.

In his artist statement, Lott says he draws inspiration from the replacement of hand-crafted local materials with industrially produced materials and a resulting loss of traditional skills.

“By combining a diminutive version of this building system with chairs and other objects pulled from the everyday domestic environment I honor the logic and engineering brilliance of stud frame construction, taking what we usually only see when we pass by construction sites, and exaggerating it in a way that renews our vision and understanding. The work uses the bandsaw as a scale sawmill to generate perfectly proportioned raw materials. An engagement emerges between the architecture and found objects, each bringing it’s own visual language while differently scaled systems try to occupy the same space. Unexpected solutions often emerge from the two finding ways to accommodate the other, and pointing to the deep relationship between the design of domestic objects and the architecture of the space itself.”

In a 2014 interview with 365 artists 365 days, Lott explains that he grew up living around cities as big as Chicago as well as tiny towns with populations under 400. “That tension between those two environments has continued to be a source of fascination, from the greater concentration of wealth in cities, to the differences, and similarities in the built environments and everyday lives of people who reside there,” he says.

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For a sense of the scale of these works, check out Lott’s Instagram, where you can see images and videos of the work in progress.

via This is Colossal

Taking inspiration from La Flaine Hotel by Marcel Breuer and the Glenkerry House in London by Erno Goldfinger, these ‘Cuckoo Blocks’ by artist Guido Zimmermann use iconic Brutalist architecture to make a political statement. Structures like these were once built as affordable housing, but now many of them are far out of reach for the middle class, housing luxury residences instead.

Zimmerman creates an unlikely contrast by pairing their stained, drab and blocky proportions with the classic cuckoo clock, long considered a symbol of prosperity.

“The updated version, a prefabricated panel construction (“plattenbau”) reveals today’s urban and social life in residential blocks,” says the artist.

“The hull is new, but the soul, a clockwork with a cuckoo, is still an old one.”

While there’s definitely something a little absurd about the pairing, it works. These miniature faux concrete buildings are just as interesting to look at as the original ornately carved wooden versions, and it’s fun to peer into the windows to try to catch a glimpse at what’s inside. They’re especially cool after dark when the lights come on.

Zimmerman also extended the series by turning one of his mini Brutalist wonders into a birdhouse.

“The prototype, a model of a social housing building from Catania/Sicily, was quickly inhabited by a pair of titmice,” he says. “The three nondescript birdhouses next door remained uninhabited. Perhaps it was the small satellite dishes which convinced the bird of the ‘social bird housing.’”

Nature begins to take back New York City after all the humans are gone in this series of artfully photographed post-apocalypse miniatures. A collaboration between artists Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber, ‘Empire’ is the duo’s second series on this theme, the first focusing on interiors while the latest depicts exterior scenes. Living in New York provides all the inspiration the artists need, particularly subway rides between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and all of the architectural detail that can be appreciated if you just look up.

Nix is the architect of these tiny structures, while Gerber is the sculptor. The work is labor-intensive, with a single diorama taking anywhere from three to fifteen months to complete. They start each piece in their apartment, and then move to the outside studio when it’s close to being finished to set it up for documentation. The lighting and the tiny details are what give each one its realistic edge.

The materials used include basswood, extruded foam sheets, acrylic, polymer clay and epoxy. The most challenging aspect of the work is making those materials look like something else – for instance, turning a tiny piece of foam and wood into a leather and steel office chair.

“I don’t really have a death wish, it just seems that way,” says Nix. “For the last eight years my photographs have highlighted a fictional urban landscape ‘after’. An aquarium after a flood, a church after a fire, a beauty parlor after…who knows what. Mankind is gone and what remains are vacant fragments of buildings, a few slowly being reclaimed by nature.”

“‘The City’ imagines what New York City and Brooklyn would look like if suddenly mankind had disappeared. The exact cause for the desertion is left vague. Was it a natural disaster, a virus, global warming, war? A few images hint at the destructive history of the space – a library dome crushed by a tornado or a subway car filled with sand. To me, imagining something so globally catastrophic is both chilling and exciting. I often wonder about my own survival instincts when pondering an emptying city.”

Empire, on the other hand, “presents a world transformed by climate uncertainty and a shifting social order as it stumbles towards a new kind of frontier. These places are eerily beautiful but also unsettling in their stillness and silence. Long ago, man entered the landscape and forced nature to his will. Once grand and emblematic of strength and prosperity, these landscapes now appear abused and in decay, and it is uncertain how they will continue to (d)evolve.”

Cities can change so rapidly, leaving behind barely-recognizable versions of the streets we once knew and loved, adapting and transforming along with the rest of the world. It may be a fact of life, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to preserve what we can of the history that’s meaningful to us – even if that just means paying tribute to it with art. Australian-born, London-based illustrator Max Tiles does just that with tiny illustrated cut-outs, which he often photographs against the real-life buildings they represent.

Tilse’s most recent series captures some of London’s most charming pubs, like The Bricklayers Arms in Fitzrovia, which he describes as “a quaint piece of Georgian architecture… the Bricklayers Arms has been a running pub since 1789.” Other pubs seen here include the Coach & Horses at 5 Bruton Street in Mayfair, The Blackfriar, The Crown in Seven Dials, Covent Garden and The Dove on Broadway Market in Hackney.

Tiles also draws miniatures of other major London landmarks, from Big Ben to the Tower Bridge. While backpacking across Europe, Tilse kept a ‘diary’ of sketches of the scenes he liked most, turning them into 5×5-inch postcards.

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You can see more of his work at his website, and purchase prints at his Etsy shop.

When catching a contemporary Hollywood movie like ‘Blade Runner 2049’ at the theater, it’s easy to assume nearly everything we see is CGI, but a new video from the famed Weta Workshop gives us an inside look at the incredible miniature world they created for the film. They bring Philip K. Dick’s dystopian sci-fi vision of Los Angeles even further into terrifying focus through the lens of director Ridley Scott, showing how the city evolved over the decades that have ensued since the original 1982 film took place.

The city is now blanketed by smog, constant rain and snow from extreme pollution of the entire earth. The Weta design team built upon the original film’s classic aesthetic, making the architecture even more doom and gloom than it was before, and exploring the ways in which the polluted atmosphere affects residents of the city, even at ground level.

Weta artists conceived, built and hand-painted the miniature sets, creating an entire fictional L.A. that’s terrifying and amazing all at once. The centerpiece of the set is the LAPD building, which has come to loom villainously over the rest of the city. The miniature for this particular structure is 16 feet tall, so large and heavy, they had to build it lying down and lift it into vertical position with a chain block.

As noted on Weta’s Instagram, each and every shot of the city (led by cinematographer Alex Funke) “represents many, many hours of meticulous setup and painstaking attention to every detail.”

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“During the film’s production, Weta Workshop was brought on to build large miniatures for many of the key environments. The sequences had been worked out in pre-vis, but required a detailed design pass to imbue the environments with life and realism, these concepts were used as a guide for the miniature teams. Extreme weather, tropical storms, and tsunamis are commonplace in 2049, leaving coastal cities destroyed. Mostly abandoned, the cities are now wastelands, occupied only by scavengers and those that were unable to escape.”