I first encountered this amazing infographic hanging on a professor’s office wall when I was visiting law schools back in 1999. I’ve been trying, off and on, to run down my own copy ever since. It’s been one of those back-burner projects that I’ll poke at when it comes to mind, every now and again, but until quite recently all my leads had come up dry. All I really knew about the poster was that it had been created in the 80s by analysts at Rockwell International and that it was called the “Integrated Space Plan.”
From Wikipedia:
Rockwell International was a major American manufacturing conglomerate in the latter half of the 20th century, involved in aircraft, the space industry, both defense-oriented and commercial electronics, automotive and truck components, printing presses, valves and meters, and industrial automation. It was the ultimate incarnation of a series of companies founded by Willard Rockwell. At its apex in the 1990s, Rockwell International was No. 27 on the Fortune 500 list, with assets of over $8 billion and sales of $27 billion.About a month ago, all the little threads I’d been pulling on suddenly unraveled, and I was able to connect with a generous donor willing to entrust an original copy of the poster to me long enough to have it scanned at high resolution. It’s a large document, at 28 x 45″, but fortunately it’s monochrome, and reproduces well using 1-bit color at 600dpi, so even uncompressed bitmaps come in at under 5MB.
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At the end of the 1980s, the company sold its valve and meter division, formerly Rockwell Manufacturing, to British Tyre & Rubber. It also sold its printing press division to an internal management team. Following the “peace dividend” after the fall of the Soviet bloc, the company sold its defense and aerospace business, including what was once North American Aviation and Rocketdyne, to Boeing Integrated Defense Systems in December 1996.
Thanks to Todd Blecher at Boeing for assistance with their archives, to Austin’s Miller Blueprint company for their quality large-format scanning work, and of course to our anonymous donor.
Integrated Space Plan (Preliminary) (.PNG)
Integrated Space Plan (Preliminary) (.PDF)
Filed under: Art, Astronomy
When I stumbled upon Aimée Baldwin’s work, I literally gasped and held up my laptop to show everyone in the office. Aimée spends hours upon hours crafting these birds that she’s dubbed Vegan Taxidermy. The first step is to create the design — she sketches from photographs and also goes out bird watching to really get a sense of how they move. Once her sketches are finalized, Baldwin carves the bird torso from rigid foam and then begins the process of gluing countless hand-cut crepe feathers in place. The legs are made from wire, and a sculpting putty is used to craft the beak and the claws. The only prefabricated part of the sculptures is the glass eyes. It’s a process that she’s spent a decade refining. No molds are used, so each bird is completely unique. Aimée hopes that her work connects people to the natural world. She says, “I have chosen to make work that does not lend itself well to mass production. It is a very slow process, taking me an average of about a week per bird. This makes it difficult to make a living from it, but it also hopefully means that I am not creating work that will end up in a landfill within a few years.” Aimée’s work is available through her 
