Design

Bennie Railplane

The Bennie Railplane was a propeller-driven train suspended above an ordinary railway. Scottish inventor George Bennie imagined fast passengers travelling overhead while slow freight continued underneath. In 1930, he demonstrated a single Art Deco carriage on a 130-metre track near Glasgow, propelled by enormous blades at either end. Bennie claimed a full-sized system could reach 120 miles per hour, and proposed routes across Britain and beyond. None found funding. He went bankrupt in 1937, and his only Railplane remained beside the tracks until it was scrapped in 1956. For twenty-six years, the future rusted in a field.

Codex Rotondus

The Codex Rotundus is a late-15th-century Book of Hours whose parchment pages and cover were cut into circles just 9.3 centimetres across. Its 266 pages contain prayers in Latin and French, three full-page miniatures and thirty illustrated initials.

Scraper bikes

Scraper bikes are ordinary bicycles transformed with brightly coloured tape, foil and paint, usually arranged in geometric patterns across the wheels. The style emerged in East Oakland in the mid-2000s.

Dodge Power Wagon

Introduced in 1946, the Dodge Power Wagon was the first mass-produced four-wheel-drive medium-duty truck offered by a major American manufacturer. Derived from Dodge’s wartime vehicles, it retained their flat fenders, upright cab and general expectation that the bridge ahead might be missing.

Rashaidah veils

Rashaidah veils are traditional face coverings worn by women of the Rashaida community in Sudan and Eritrea. Made from dark fabric, they are densely embroidered with silver thread, beads and sometimes seed pearls. Some feature a vertical row of coins known as tears.

Battoulah

The battoulah is a traditional face covering worn by women around the Persian Gulf and in southern Iran. Although it often resembles polished metal, it is typically made from treated fabric shaped around the eyes and nose.

Prattware puzzle pipes

Prattware puzzle pipes are English ceramic objects made from the mid-18th century onward, distinguished by their elaborately coiled and intertwined forms. Some contain several meters of handmade clay tubing folded into a piece barely longer than a hand.

Leichtbau Maier

Leichtbau Maier is a mostly unknown German car brand from the beginning of the twentieth century. The engineer Friedrich Eugen Maier from Berlin drafted and built in the 1930s at least one car prototype and succeeded in bringing this vehicle on the road.

Hosea Hayden

Hosea Hayden was a furniture designer. Hosea Hayden stands at the nexus of self-taught genius as a practical tool of American individuality and self-praise, and its turn toward singular, idiosyncratic creativity. He descended from a family of farmers and shipbuilders who fought in the Revolutionary War and migrated from Massachusetts to Ohio and Indiana in the early 1800s. Hayden starting making unusual chairs in 1883; the first is marked in memory of the one-hundredth year of the “burth” of his father, Stephen. Hayden made more than one dozen tripod folding chairs of his own construction and design, each distinctive, each a veritable journal of his beliefs and observations related through drawings and words scratched into every surface like an errant schoolboy.

Indian Larry

Indian Larry was an American motorcycle builder and artist, stunt rider, and biker. He first became known as Indian Larry in the 1980s when he was riding the streets of New York City on a chopped Indian motorcycle. Respected as an old school chopper builder, Larry sought greater acceptance of choppers being looked upon as an art form. He became interested in hot rods and motorcycles at an early age and was a fan of Von Dutch and Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, whom he would later meet in California.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime