What exactly is a living room? Is it a formal room for special occasions, or a casual space for everyday life? The meaning has been unclear ever since the late 17th century, when architects first considered what “living” in the home meant.
In 1691, in the first edition of what was to become a hugely influential architectural manual, “Lessons of Architecture,” Charles Augustin d’Aviler drew a distinction between formal display spaces and a new kind of room, spaces that were “less grand.” D’Aviler used an unusual phrase to describe these new rooms: “le plus habité” — literally the most lived in. This marked the first time that an architect discussed the notion of living rooms, rooms intended for everyday life.
Before this, anyone who could afford an architect-designed residence wanted it to serve as proof of status and wealth; almost all rooms were display spaces. But once d’Aviler opened the door, French architects began making rooms for specific activities of daily life integral to the design of the home: initially the bedroom, then dressing rooms and bathrooms. These “less grand” rooms were the original living rooms. More…
From n+1 magazine, originally published by Paper Monument…
“Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.” March 21 – June 20, 2010. Pacific Design Center, MOCA.
“Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas.” September 18, 2008 – January 4, 2009. SFMOMA.
Las Vegas was once assessed as “the grand proletarian cultural locomotive.” It is unlikely that anyone would venture such an appraisal today, even if a demographically more precise “bourgeoisie” now stood in for the proles. But this was not a farfetched metaphor at the time of coinage: Las Vegas was originally a railway town, and in 1968 it still had a public station. Californians, always the city’s chief patrons, could arrive via locomotive in a matter of hours. Nevertheless, they usually drove. Drive-ins and -throughs were booming. Cinemas, churches, restaurants, post offices, liquor stores; never had a city catered so comprehensively to the motorist.
So when Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and their students at the Yale School of Architecture arrived in Las Vegas, much of the curiosity that drove them was automotive in nature. The group visited Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard—the Strip—to document and theorize the city’s vernacular architecture, and their findings eventually formed the counterintuitive classic, Learning from Las Vegas. “Research,” in their rigorously free-wheeling view, was often as simple as pointing a camera out of a car window. Of the many angles from which the group approached the city during their architectural census, the view from the blacktop pervades. More…
Lever House, the first all-glass International Style office building in New York City, passes its half-century mark this year. The 24-story green glass building, which has been partially hidden by scaffolding for the past three years, has undergone a $60 million refurbishment—including a top-to-bottom restoration of its curtain wall, which, being the first of its kind, was technologically primitive and thus had decayed badly over the decades, to the point where it was literally starting to disintegrate. As one of the most acclaimed buildings of the 20th century, Lever House has often been called the Platonic building of the 1950s, a sea-foam-tinted gem which brought to a new level of refinement the Le Corbusier–Mies van der Rohe style of lightweight glass-and-steel construction. Its meticulous restoration is a cause to celebrate.
In 1952, the last year of Harry S. Truman’s administration, when only three percent of the American public traveled by plane and only 34 percent had TV sets, Lever House looked as if it had dropped from the sky onto Park Avenue across from the Racquet and Tennis Club and the grand old Montana apartments. Its elegant glass-and-stainless-steel slabs—a horizontal one set over columns on an open ground floor, and a vertical one perched as if floating above it—were quite unlike anything New Yorkers had ever seen. By day the structure shimmered in the sunlight and reflected the brick and limestone buildings around it. By night it lit up like a taut rectangular lantern—a vision of the future on a block between 53rd and 54th Streets. For weeks after Lever House opened its doors in April, curious citizens lined up to enter its airy lobby for a closer look. The architecture critic Lewis Mumford noted that the public was acting as if the new soap-company headquarters were “the eighth wonder of the world.” More…
Nicolas Hayek, a Lebanese-born business consultant who is widely credited with having saved the Swiss watch industry with the introduction of the Swatch, the inexpensive, plastic — and, as it transpired, highly collectible — wristwatch that made its debut in 1983, died Monday in Biel, Switzerland. He was 82.
Mr. Hayek, a founder and the chairman of the Swatch Group, died of heart failure while working at the company’s headquarters, according to an announcement on the company Web site.
The formation of the Swatch Group, which in addition to Swatch today comprises high-end watch brands like Breguet, Omega, Longines, Tissot, Calvin Klein and Mido, made Mr. Hayek one of Switzerland’s wealthiest men. The exquisite irony is that the company came about after Mr. Hayek was brought in to help shut the foundering Swiss watch industry altogether.
A flamboyant figure with a roguish sense of humor, Mr. Hayek was “a rare phenomenon in Europe — a genuine business celebrity,” as The Harvard Business Review described him in 1993. More…
Winners of this year’s W Hotels Designers of the Future awards presented pieces at Design Miami/Basel in Switzerland last week. The designers were asked to create installations that encouraged participation.
Since its inception, Design Miami/ Basel has guided its Designers of the Future Award toward the recognition of designers working in innovative ways – whether new materials, new processes, or new approaches. The goal of the Award, launched in 2006, is to offer the best representatives of the next generation of design creatives the opportunity to present newly commissioned work to a powerful audience of collectors, dealers and journalists, drawing attention to design practices that exemplify new directions for the future of the field.
This year, Design Miami/ Basel is pleased to announce its new partnership with W Hotels in presenting the 2010 W Hotels Designers of the Future Award. This alliance will allow Design Miami/ Basel to expand the benefits that the award brings to the winners, including the chance for the commissioned projects to have a life after the fair through practical applications within W’s sites around the world. More from Dezeen…
At my table were two diplomats and a cultural researcher. My own role was designated as ‘designer.’ We were told that there was a post-conflict situation in an African nation where the U.N. had been called in. Local institutions and forms of self-governance had been eroded during the long and bloody conflict. Child soldiers had been involved in the civil war on both sides, and the competing ends of Justice and Rehabilitation had both to be balanced. Our job was to plan the series of activities that would result in a contextually-appropriate program of activities for the U.N. teams working in the region. We had two hours.
We began by trying to itemize all the different internal and external stakeholders in the situation, from U.N. agencies to neighboring countries to international investors, and gave up once we got into double digits. Then we tried to bound the problem by trying to establish what kind of time-line and terms of reference we were working with. It seemed foolish to try to do anything in less than six weeks time, for meanwhile the country was burning, and the U.N. agencies would need a plan to start working with as soon as possible. But six weeks was also nowhere near enough time to collect meaningful cultural and socioeconomic data on twenty or thirty million people. We agreed that we would have to rely on secondary data from prior sociocultural research, while also involving regional and in-country experts. We also wanted U.N. agencies to pre-pone our terms of reference to a period well prior to the U.N. flag going up in the nation in question. More…
Beginning in 1963, when she teamed up with Bea Feitler as co–art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Ruth Ansel has been busy revolutionizing the look and feel of American magazines. Vanity Fair’s design director from 1983 to 1988, Ansel also left her visual stamp on The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and House & Garden before going on to found her own design studio, in 1992. As Oyster Press publishes Hall of Femmes: Ruth Ansel, VF.com celebrates the designer’s remarkable career with snapshots of her life and art—described by the subject herself. More…
William J. Mitchell, the former dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, who pioneered urban designs for networked, “smart” cities and helped oversee an ambitious building program that transformed MIT’s physical campus, died on June 11 after a long battle with cancer. He was 65.
Mitchell was considered one of the world’s leading urban theorists. Through the work of his Smart Cities research group at the MIT Media Lab, he pioneered new approaches to integrating design and technology to make cities more responsive to their citizens and more efficient in their use of resources. He likened tomorrow’s cities to living organisms or very-large-scale robots, with nervous systems that enable them to sense changes in the needs of their inhabitants and external conditions, and respond to these needs. A major portion of this new urban infrastructure focused on revamping urban transportation as we know it, and included the development of the CityCar, a light-weight, electric, shared vehicle that folds and stacks like supermarket shopping carts at convenient locations and has all essential mechanical systems housed in the car’s wheels. Other Smart City innovations include the folding electric RoboScooter, and GreenWheel, which turns an ordinary bicycle into an electric-assisted one. More…
Edward Tufte has a big backyard that stretches for hundreds of acres near Cheshire, Conn. Over the years, he’s filled that space with giant metal sculptures as big as the trees.
“I think it was Richard Serra who said that the market for big, outdoor landscape pieces is like the market for Canadian experimental poetry,” he says. “So I can never be accused of being market-driven in the art world.”
Tufte is an accomplished grand-scale sculptor, but he is perhaps more famous for making charts, graphs and diagrams beautiful. He’s been called the “DaVinci of Design” and the “Minister of Information.” His books — with titles like The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — are widely read by Web architects, scientists and basically anyone else who’s interested in presenting data creatively and clearly. More…
Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus—the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe’s sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919. It then flourished from 1925 to 1932 in Dessau, an industrial backwater where the school’s first director, Walter Gropius, built its image-making headquarters (see illustration on page 25); and it ultimately but vainly sought refuge in cosmopolitan Berlin, where it closed in 1933, when Hitler took power. Now, nine decades after its inception and three quarters of a century after its dissolution, the Bauhaus has finally been explained to the museum-going public in terms much closer to its actual intent and immense achievement than ever before. More…
Called Made in Italy, the series of five talks on Italian design were chaired by Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic and took place in London, Brighton and Glasgow.
Look out for movies in this series featuring designers including Fabio Novembre, Ross Lovegrove and Antonio Citterio on Dezeen over the next few days.
When Romans criticize their incomparably beautiful city, they often mutter, terzo mondo—third world—and shake their heads. The sharp contrasts of Italy’s capital are part of its wonder and joy. The primness of the seat of the Catholic Church, where timid nuns scurry about in groups of two and three, stands in stark contrast to the overt sensuality—in mood and dress—of the general populace. The city is packed with more art treasures than any other in the Western world, yet, at least by European standards, Rome is an extreme backwater in terms of anything having to do with pre-19th-century art. Last week there was a sense of renewal and redemption in the air here as a new much-awaited museum devoted to contemporary art finally opened its doors. The mammoth structure, called MAXXI—short for Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI—is designed by Zaha Hadid, and is located in Flamino, a residential and former light-industrial area near the Tiber. MAXXI’s opening week was greeted with delight by both local sophisticates and average Romans. Romans have been praying for something to reinvigorate contemporary culture in this ancient place, which has been in an innovative art drought since the golden ago of Cinecitta expired many decades ago. To make matters more frustrating, MAXXI’s arrival has been long-delayed and full of dramatic twists and turns. (It was supposed to open in 2005.) More…
Free Range is an Old Truman Brewery special project set up by Tamsin O’Hanlon in 2001 to support new creative talent. The Free Range graduate art & design show takes place every June and July at the Old Truman Brewery. The show provides the best platform for graduate art and design students to showcase their work to both public and industry. Free Range is a one stop shop featuring more than 100 university courses from across the UK providing visitors with a unique opportunity to meet the hottest new creative talent all under one roof. Shows rotate weekly over the 8 week season and are curated by discipline including design, graphics, photography, art and interiors. See diary for full listings and opening/ closing days and times. More…
In a city of world-class art museums and an instantly recognizable skyline, no image is more closely examined than the New York City subway map, the ubiquitous blue-and-taupe rectangle scrutinized by millions.
Now the subterranean icon is poised to get a spruce-up.
Next month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will unveil a resized, recolored and simplified edition of the well-known map, its first overhaul in more than a decade.
Manhattan will become taller, bulkier and 30 percent wider, to better display its spaghetti of subway lines. Staten Island, meanwhile, will shrink by half. The spreadsheetlike “service guide,” along the map’s bottom border, will be eliminated, and the other three boroughs will grow to fill the space. More…
Italian design collective Acquacalda have designed a range of kitchen gadgets based on the laws of physics, including this device for pouring exactly equal amounts of wine into four glasses.
Called Applied Physics, the collection also includes a self-hydrating plant pot, a glass with a measuring reservoir, a bowl for weighing dry food in water and a vase that indicates the water level inside through its handle. More…
The final design of the New Bus for London, based on the much-loved Routemaster, was today unveiled by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and London’s Transport Commissioner, Peter Hendy.
The bus will use the latest green technology. It will be 15 per cent more fuel efficient than existing hybrid buses, and 40 per cent more efficient than conventional diesel double decks and much quieter on the streets.
The pioneering design makes use of lightweight materials, with glass highlighting key features and producing a light and airy feel inside the bus. An impressive glass ‘swoop’ at the rear and offside pick out the two staircases and provide a dramatic visual effect. An asymmetric design for the front-end completes the futuristic look. More…
It was for decades the most enduring piece of ephemera in New York City and is still among the most recognizable. Trim, blue and white, it fits neatly in the hand, sized so its contents can be downed in a New York minute. It is as vivid an emblem of the city as the Statue of Liberty, beloved of property masters who need to evoke Gotham at a glance in films and on television.
It is, of course, the Anthora, the cardboard cup of Grecian design that has held New Yorkers’ coffee securely for nearly half a century. Introduced in the 1960s, the Anthora was long made by the hundreds of millions annually, nearly every cup destined for the New York area. More…
Although it looks small and unassuming, the tiny origami crane sitting in a sample dish in University of Illinois professor Jennifer Lewis’ lab heralds a new method for creating complex three-dimensional structures for biocompatible devices, microscaffolding and other microsystems. The penny-sized titanium bird began as a printed sheet of titanium hydride ink. More…
The pat social critique of architecture is doubtless as old as architecture itself: High design is nice to have, but it’s a luxury. MASS, a new Boston- and Kigali, Rwanda-based firm, aims to change the mindset that shelves ambitious building design in times of crisis. MASS co-founder Marika Clark says the revelation came three years ago, when she and fellow designers learned that NGOs often weren’t using architects for major projects in troubled areas: “[They] were building critical infrastructure work without the use of design professionals.” And at first architecture was a tough sell, even to current client Partners in Health: “PIH was very unsure of how architects could be useful at that point,” she says. Eventually, the organization came around, commissioning the project MASS now sees as its flagship, the under-construction Butaro Hospital in the Burera District. More…
“Clients” — Michael Bierut’s presentation on the designer/client relationship.
“When Ugly Meets Lovely in London” — Morag Myerscough, Richard Seymour and Alfonso Albaisa on ‘why and how things are created to look they way they do’.
“Designing Obama” — Scott Thomas on his work with the Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign.
Neville Brody has been named as the new Head of the Department of Communication Art & Design at the Royal College of Art, taking up the position on 1 January 2011. He will be succeeding Professor Dan Fern, who retires at the end of the academic year.
An internationally renowned designer, typographer, art director, brand strategist and consultant, Neville Brody has outstanding credentials in the world of graphic design. He currently holds a visiting professorship in the Faculty of Design at the London College of Communications, where he is an alumnus.
Neville Brody’s appointment will help the Royal College of Art explore new challenges and directions in the rapidly-moving world of communications. The move signals the College’s intention to maintain its vitality and relevance both within the discipline, and beyond.
“Neville Brody is both an eloquent advocate and a superb practitioner,“ said Dr Paul Thompson, Rector of the Royal College of Art. “His design talent traverses so many different media – traditional print and typography through to online and motion graphics, and packaging. He is one of the most influential designers of his generation and perfectly captures the interdisciplinary ethos of the Department of Communication Art & Design.” More…
London designer Min-Kyu Choi was awarded the Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award 2010 for his Folding Plug at a ceremony at the Design Museum in London. Min-Kyu Choi’s inspiration came from having to carry around the world’s largest plug (UK pin plug) with the MacBook Air, the world’s thinnest laptop. In creating a plug which could fold flat for easy transportation, Choi received much praise on showcasing the plug at the Royal College of Art’s graduate show in 2009, with a brilliant and seemingly obvious improvement to a product that had changed little since its inception in 1946.
Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum comments ‘It’s great to see such a practical but elegant demonstration of what design can do to make everyday life so much better. Min-Kyu Choi is a designer just setting out on his career and he clearly has a great future ahead of him.’ More…
Debra Dupar, pregnant with her fifth child, is sitting outside her new house. She is washed by the noon sun of an early spring day, nursing a pinkish-red drink and chatting to her friends. A short way off a camera crew is setting up, assessing shots, squinting at the light, chatting to potential interviewees. They are working for Spike Lee, who is making a documentary about the place where Debra lives.
A guided tour of about a dozen people tramps along the vestigial street, marked out by some sinewy evergreen oaks, or “live oaks” as they are called here. Two men, self-consciously dressed – architects, probably – get out of a maroon taxi, scan the scene, sweep it with camcorders, say to each other: “OK, I’m good”, get back in the taxi and go, all in about 60 seconds. And then the man from the London Observer wants to look inside Debra’s house. More…
London curator Alex Newson walks through this year’s Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition on show at the museum until 6 June 2010. In the podcast Newson talks about some of his favourite projects from the exhibition, including BMW’s GINA concept car, a Folding Plug by Min-Kyu Choi and Thomas Heatherwick’s bench Extrusions.
COME April, the first tenants may finally be able to move into Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, now the tallest building in the world. Despite a series of setbacks since its ostensible opening two months ago, including the closing of the observation deck, the tower has already prompted an exuberant proliferation of record-breaking statistics: it soars more than half a mile high, stands twice the height of the Empire State Building, boasts views that reach 60 miles, etc. But all the hoopla misses two other symbolic milestones that should enliven the history books. Namely, the Burj Khalifa is primarily residential and its structural frame is reinforced concrete.
Why are these two facts so important? The pursuit of maximum altitude is a major technological undertaking, requiring extraordinary economic investment, significant innovations in materials and a high tolerance for risk; as we survey the monuments of architectural history, tall structures provide remarkable insights about the aspirations of the societies that created them.
Think back to the Middle Ages. The soaring cathedrals of Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres were awe-inspiring landmarks in stone. Gothic churches maximized the structural capacity of available materials, transforming heavy rock into delicate, lofted skeletons enclosing voluminous spaces. Pilgrims to these edifices would no doubt have been awed by their apparent defiance of gravity, and moved by the breathtaking spiritual power conveyed by the churches’ vast, light-pierced interiors. More…
Late last week, President Barack Obama announced that he would be appointing a gentleman named Edward Tufte to the independent panel that advises the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (i.e., the team of inspectors general who track how stimulus funds are spent). It wasn’t a particularly sexy announcement; no thrill went up Chris Matthews’s leg or anything. But in its own quiet way, the news was heartening for anyone who believes that government can and should communicate more clearly with the American people—especially when it comes to the much derided (and misunderstood) Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Among fans, Tufte is known as “the Da Vinci of Data.” After receiving a B.A. and M.S. in statistics from Stanford and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, the Beverly Hills native launched his academic career by signing on to teach courses in political economy and data analysis at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs. Over time, he became increasingly interested in information design—charts, graphs, diagrams—and in 1982 he took out a second mortgage on his home in order to self-publish his first book on the subject, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.It redefined the field and was later named one of Amazon’s 100 best books of the century. More…
The White House and GOOD are officially joining forces to ask: What kind of healthy kid app would you like to see developed?
As part of the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign, which hopes to eradicate childhood obesity within a generation, today Michelle Obama announced the Apps for Healthy Kids competition run the USDA. The contest will help to encourage innovative design and development, with up to $40,000 in cash prizes.
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Apps for Healthy Kids challenges software developers, game designers, students, and other innovators to develop fun and engaging tools and games that drive children, especially “tweens” (ages 9-12)–directly or through their parents–to eat better and be more physically active. More…
Bruce Graham was the architect behind Chicago’s Sears Tower, the tallest building in the world when it was opened in 1974 and still the tallest building in the U.S.
Mr. Graham, who died Saturday at age 84, was senior design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and was involved with projects including Canary Wharf in London and King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia.
But Chicago was where Mr. Graham left his greatest mark, not only in the Sears Tower, but in the city’s second-tallest building, the John Hancock Center, two buildings that together bracket the city’s skyline—much of which he also helped design.
He also played an important role in developing a downtown master plan for Chicago.
Following in the footsteps of such giants of Chicago architecture as Daniel Burnham and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Mr. Graham was an outspoken advocate of the power of architecture to communicate messages of optimism and power.
From Edward Tufte, as told to Jimmy Guterman in the MITSloan Management Review:
On the (Very, Very Bad) Design of Corporate Web Sites
The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. That’s great. And so the question is: How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called “sharing our values,” “participation” and so on? No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing your company’s values.
A corporate Web site should do what a good news Web site does. If you look at the really successful Web sites where there are millions of hits, especially nonfiction Web sites, the New York Times and Google News, they all have 300 links on the opening page. How come businesses don’t do that? How come the links are to “sharing,” “participating” and “our values”? That’s flabby design for flabby content. The models for presenting nonfiction should not be what your competitors are doing, but rather excellence in reporting nonfiction. And there are terrific examples out there for reporting nonfiction.
The kind of conformity toward flabbiness in corporate Web sites is astonishing, and they’re imitating each other in their content and design flabbiness. It’s silly. People are inherently distrustful of them. And yet most of those sites are, in fact, about reporting facts. But they get softened up by the marketing people. You get all these pressures that tend to normalize design, that tend to make it like other corporations and that make things intellectually flabby and visually flabby. They turn into pitches.
The Earth Awards recognize design that offers groundbreaking solutions to the ecological and social challenges of the 21st century. The 2009 recipient is Neri Oxman, acknowledged for her work in interdisciplinary design and design research.
Neri Oxman is an architect and researcher whose work attempts to establish new forms of experimental design and novel processes of material practice at the interface of design, computer science, material engineering and ecology. A graduate of the AA School of Architecture and previously a medical scholar at the Hebrew University and the Technion Institute of Technology, she is currently based at MIT where she is a presidential research fellow and a PhD candidate in Design Computation. Transcending disciplinary and professional boundaries, Oxman’s work pioneers Material Computation as a design paradigm beyond typological expression. She promotes the aesthetics of material formation and behavior as a scientific contribution to ecological activism.
For two weeks the National Mall in Washington D.C. has been transformed into a boulevard of homes of the future.
The solar-powered houses are the work of university teams from across the U.S., Puerto Rico, Germany and Spain, all taking part in the Solar Decathlon. The aim: to design, build and operate the best energy-efficient solar houses. Most teams have spent at least two years working on their projects.
Preet Anand, a senior at Santa Clara University and member of Team California, told CNN about the build-up to the event:
“Our team is the only undergraduate-led team in the entire competition. We’ve built our homes on our home campus and then transported it to the National Mall in D.C., where it was reassembled over five days.
“Prada Transformer, a portable, shape-shifting cultural pavilion designed by Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Rem Koolhaas, will make its first appearance in Seoul, Korea next month”.
“The Transformer combines the four sides of a tetrahedron: hexagon, cross, rectangle and circle into one pavilion. The building, entirely covered with a smooth elastic membrane, will be flipped using cranes, completely reconfiguring the visitor’s experience with each new programme” - Marcus Fairs
To read more about this please visit the Dezeen website here.
From Edward Tufte, as told to Jimmy Guterman in the MITSloan Management Review:
