Michael Wolf is a German-born photographer whose time behind the lens is spent examining life in the metropolis. His work “Architecture of Density” unorthodoxly depicts a day-to-day existence in Hong Kong – one of the world’s most populated cities and Wolf’s current home. His point of view reduces buildings to a complex series of patterns and lines that offer no end, no ...
We don’t want to speak to soon, but it seems to be warming up. The trees are in bloom and our vague memories of the sun are becoming more vivid. We may not have completely shed our winter skin, but we can’t help but dream of sunscreen, barbecues and swimming pools. The last frost may not have yet thawed, but we’re already compiling our wishlist of poolside lounging mater...
The Stockholm Furniture Fair is officially in full swing! Each year, the Greenhouse serves as a “Garden of New Ideas”, displaying new talents from around the world. For the second year in a row, Stockholm-based Note Design Studio designed the hall. Intent on representing the social aspect of the event, the Swedish design studio put participant and customer interaction a...
New York artist Karen Margolis has a profound fascination with the inner workings of the mind. Her art, through a beautiful and almost obsessive repetition of circles, is actually a calculated expression of human psychology. Circles of shadow, color and absence map out the thoughts and feelings flying through our gray matter. Drawing upon her background in psychology,...
What looked like a great exhibition turned out to be more than that. From January 25th to April 6th, the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is hosting one major event. A few figures can sum it up: 7 architects from 6 countries and 4 continents have the task of filling more than 2,000 square meters with one monumental exhibition. The point is to make architecture interact with ou...
Raise your hand if you often eat in front of the television, or at the computer, or standing in the kitchen, or in your bed. Okay, maybe that last one is just us, but the point is that many individuals no longer sit down at a proper table to eat. Mealtimes are often used for multitasking, however eating is also a profoundly social act. In order to bring the focus back o...
Studio Fludd is a creative collective based in Venice, Italy. Consisting of Matteo Baratto, Caterina Gabelli, Sara Maragotto, and Valeria Sanguin, Studio Fludd is inspired by alchemy and named after the alchemist Robert Fludd. Recently, the collective hosted the first in a series of GELATOLOGY workshops. Being lovers of gelato, we were keen to learn more. Essentially, t...
“Go home with the idea, not the object!” The Studio Formafantasma design duo could not have uttered a more fitting statement for their current exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. Titled Prima Materia, the show surveys the plenteous work of Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin. Indeed, in the span of their relatively short career, t...
Innovative social design lab Studio Roosegaarde has unveiled their illuminated bike path in Nuenen, Netherlands. Inspired by the art of Vincent van Gogh, who lived in Nuenen between 1883 and 1885, the swirling patterns of the kilometer-long Van Gogh-Roosegaarde Bicycle Path use special paint that charges in daylight and embedded LEDs powered by a nearby solar array. Stud...
Beyond The Wall in all its Dekton glory stands tall, proudly representing a technological and industrial leap. This non-traditional, polycentric spiral effectively twists to a dramatic apex. While its unique look was by the hand of architect and designer Daniel Libeskind, it is the first structure created using Cosentino’s Dekton surface. What a pair! And now, after its ...
Entering Patrick Parrish Gallery‘s exhibition at Design Miami was somewhat like stepping into a life-sized sketchbook. Titled “Surfaces On Which Your Setting and Sitting Will Be Uncertain”, the installation was a surreal play of of gridded patterns upon gridded patterns created an ever-changing visual puzzle that made reference to the Italian design collaborative Superst...
Sometimes, it turns out poetry is just what we need. With one beautiful floating walkway, the Polish studio Zalewski Architecture Group managed to bring both joy and magic to a dull and somewhat oppressive office building in Gliwice, Poland. The weedy, sinuous path suspended above the courtyard is the expression of simple, yet profound, ideas. First, this lovely proje...
Green roofs are no longer a new phenomenon. They have become a veritable staple of ecological building, but sometimes it’s nice to have a little reminder of just how fantastic green roofs can be. Not only do they add a unique touch to a home, they are also incredibly functional with their natural heating and cooling properties. Form + function: isn’t that what good desig...
The M Family is a French brand launched by Michael Malapert that creates artistic 3D printed objects. Most recently, the brand debuted the Dark Side collection. The Dark Side revisits everyday objects, transforming vases, bowls and plates into sparse geometric forms. Mimicking the graphics of 3D modeling software, each 3D printed piece is reduced to its pure skeleton – ...
As Chaplin pointed out, in our modern era, time seems to have lost its essence. Constantly running around, constantly late, trying to keep up with the latest news, we have lost track of it. This is perhaps what Dutch designer Maarten Baas is trying to point out with his Grandmother Clock and, more generally, with his Real Time series. After the success of the Grandfa...
December is rapidly drawing to a close, which means it’s the perfect moment to revisit the most visited articles of 2014. From a Vietnamese house in Ho Chi Minh to the Mojave desert in Nevada, let’s take a little trip down memory lane. Here are the top five projects from the past year.
Reality is such a relative thing. New-York based street artist Aakash Nihalani decided to play with our senses with his exhibition Vantage, a series of awesome optical illusions that fill the walls of Wunderkammern as well as parts of Rome‘s walls. The show opened on April 5th and will run until May 17th. Throughout this collection and most of his work, Nihalani raises t...
Of the 65 countries participating in the 14th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, one in particular caught the jury’s eye. The Golden Lion for best national pavilion was awarded to Korea for their exhibition Crow’s Eye View: the Korean Peninsula. With its politically charged situation, the Korean pavilion was a particularly int...
See ya, paint! See ya, tile! Wallpaper is back, and it’s not your grandmother’s wallpaper. Obviously, we’ve got nothing against grandmothers, but the seventies were traumatic for our retinas. Fortunately, wallpaper is no longer about covering every surface, but rather about creating pertinent focal points or interesting accents in a room. Don’t believe us? Several des...
Love it or hate it, sometimes you need a bit of gold sparkle in your life. And sometimes you just need a lot. It’s the holidays, so we’re going to go all out before the sobering realizations of January 1st roll around. Most of these items are not made of gold, but they all have a bit of bling. Happy Holidays!
It’s Valentine’s Day, the most loved and hated holiday of the year. For singletons, V-Day can be a painful reminder of the numerous Friday nights spent alone on the couch with the cat and a pint of ice cream. For couples, it often involves paying exorbitant prices in restaurants and trying to ignore the obnoxious displays of public affection at adjacent tables. We,...
Brrrrrrrr! It’s getting cold out there, and today is a flurry of snowflakes and low-hanging clouds. Winter can be brutal, but it’s not all bad! We’re currently dreaming of wool scarves, snowflakes, ice skating and snowmen. To go along with our wintry mood, here are a few designs that give us the best kind of chills.
The birds are chirping, flowers are blooming, our skin is slightly crispy from the sun…It’s not yet official, but spring is springing! April showers, blustery winds and random snow storms, spring is a tempestuous, uncertain mistress that nonetheless wakens us with a rush of Vitamin D and the promise of warmer days. To celebrate the fat raindrops, pastel colors and baby a...
This human-sized kaleidoscope is basically the coolest thing since sliced bread. ‘Wink‘ is a mind-bending installation that was presented at last year’s KOBE Biennale and lets users create the colors of their own kaleidoscope. Designed by Saya Miyazaki and Masakazu Shirane as part of the Art Container Contest, the kaleidoscope was contained within a single shipping conta...
We like design /art that makes us cock our heads and turn round in circles, which is exactly why we so enjoy Norman Kelley’s Wrong Chairs. On display at Volume Gallery in Chicago through January 24th, Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley revise the traditional Windsor chair. Using the American design ‘standard’, they explore and pry open what we perceive as ‘correct’ and ‘rig...
32-year-old architect Yener Torun has spent the last year seeking out and photographing minimalist buildings in Istanbul, hoping to show a different side of the city from the standard images of old streets and mosques along the Bosphorus. He claims that because there aren’t many such buildings in Turkey he spends most of his time searching, which turns his mission into a...
Founded in 1979, the Pritzker Prize is considered one of the top distinctions in the field of architecture. Every year, a living architect is awarded the honor, and the 2014 winner is none other than Japanese architect Shigeru Ban.Known more for his temporary works of humanitarian architecture than permanent icons, Mr. Ban represents an anomaly in his field. His interest...
Andrés Jacque, who won the Silver Lion for the best research project at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, has won this year’s Young Architects Program of New York’s MoMA PS1 for the COSMO water purification system. The PS1 series, which offers emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and construct temporary outdoor installations that provide shade, se...
Villa Kugelhof by Paul de Ruiter Architects is a self-sufficient, carbon-neutral home that has won the prestigious Dutch ARC13 Architecture Award as well as a FIABCI Prix d’Excellence Award in the Sustainable Development and Residential (Low Rise) category. Situated in Noord-Beveland in the southerwestern Netherlands, the residence is located on 25 hectares of protected ...
Ah, Paris. We never get tired of Paris. The whirlwind of Paris Design Week spread from the Marais all the way to Maison & Objet in the suburb of Villepinte. We ran from stand to stand at Maison & Objet and from exhibition to exhibition in the city to find a selection of products that we love. Of course, our list is not limited to ten! Petite Friture, Collection Partic...
Kids may not have all the fun, but adulthood can definitely be a drag. Fortunately for the 18+ crowd, playful design is on the rise, and some of our childhood favorites are being revamped and revisited . So, in honor of the weekend, let’s take a few moments to indulge our inner child. And who knows? You might find some early holiday gift ideas!
The holidays are coming faster than a high speed train, but you’ve still got time to decorate! We’re not in love with the idea of a red and green explosion, so we decided to seek out some options. We’ve selected ten holiday decorations that we think will make the season just as jolly while stepping a little bit out of the holiday mold.
No longer relegated to grandma’s rump room or your newborn child’s nursery, dare we say that rocking chairs rock? New materials, bold colors and modern lines and ergonomics have rejuvenated the humble old wooden rocker. There are quite a few modern offerings that are sure to surprise and delight you, and we’ve compiled our favorites here for your rocking pleasure.
We were rather ambivalent about terrariums…actually, we’re still rather ambivalent about terrariums, but 10¹² TERRA is the exception. Designed by Daisuke Tsumanuma and Kenichi Yamada, the minimal glass frames strip branches, leaves and flowers down to their roots – which is precisely what makes them interesting. The clutter and kitsch of traditional terrariums is removed...
German street artist 1010, known for his fantastic spray paint portals, most recently brought his outdoor murals inside for a solo show at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco. Titled Limbus, the show featured a new series of smaller work on paper as well as larger murals. The artist’s effect is based on concentric layers of color, which reveal surprising layers of de...
How much space do we really need? In fact, what if all of your daily living requirements could be met in a mere 2.5³? Polish design team Ania Rosinke and Maciej Chmara examined this idea with a minimal living cube that they aptly named 2,5³. A revisitation of the ‘living cube’ by Papanek & Hennessey, Chmara.Rosinke‘s sparse-but-snug structure meets our basic needs of foo...
