The Austrian manufacturer Wittmann has been making elegant upholstered furniture since the 1950s—but apparently its sofas and chairs would have looked just as good in the living spaces of the 1150s. At least that’s the idea behind the company’s new catalog, which Stefan Oláh shot at Schloss Ernstbrunn, a gorgeous medieval castle in Lower Austria. This is pretty much exactly how I plan to live once I find that winning lotto ticket. More photos after the jump. Read more…

Last week, the New York International Gift Fair arrived at the Javits Center with, as usual, a handful of terrific new products. Here’s a quick look at a few of my personal favorites.

The Brooklyn-based distributor neo-utility was showing this elegant stainless-steel pen by Düller and the German designer Dietrich Lubs, of Braun fame. It’s available as a ballpoint pen, a fountain pen, and a mechanical pencil.

Read more…

Photo: the Design Revolution Road Show on Flickr

Last night, in San Francisco, Emily Pilloton and her merry band of  humanitarian-design crusaders hosted the official send-off for their Design Revolution Road Show, which will be touring the country in a vintage Airstream trailer between now and April. I am very sorry I wasn’t able to attend—the invite to the “parking lot party” touted a tantalizing trifecta of mobile food vendors: one taco truck, one pizza truck, and one cupcake truck. Fortunately, even if you can’t make it to any of the tour stops, Pilloton and company are posting copious photos and videos on their blog. In fact, the Road Show has already made three pre-kickoff stops, including one at Pilloton’s alma mater, Redwood High School.

One other piece of related news: Pilloton’s nonprofit, Project H Design, is in the running for a $50,000 grant from Pepsi to help launch Studio H, a design-build program in the poorest county in North Carolina. It’s a terrific idea, so be sure to take a moment to vote for Studio H here.

You can also watch a video about Studio H, “the country’s first design, vocation, and community-service program in a public high school,” after the jump. Read more…

For years, New York City’s electricity grid has strained under the stress caused by peak demand, the times (like midday or, in a seasonal cycle, the summer) when residents are most apt to use electrical appliances and max out the municipal power network. Stress on the aging system will likely only increase in coming years, with some experts predicting a 30 percent uptick in the city’s peak demand by 2030. One strategy to deal with the problem, addressed by a panel on “Smart Grid for Smart Cities” yesterday morning at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, is the creation of a more flexible energy system—one that allows customers to know exactly how much energy they’re using and lets them reduce their load (by, for instance, shutting off their water heaters when they’re not home). For city residents, that will mean smaller energy bills at the end of the month. Other features of the smart grid—like the storage of electricity, harvested during lulls and used during times of peak demand—also increase the reliability and cost-effectiveness of the system, while reducing its environmental impact. Read more…

Civic involvement is top of mind in Washington, D.C.—at least in the White House, even if it’s scarce on the Hill. This spring, it will be also on the agenda at the National Building Museum, which, on May 11, will honor three “civic innovators” who have helped build strong communities and neighborhoods, made breakthroughs in clean-energy technology, and aided in recovery from a natural disaster. The honorees are Perkins + Will, the architecture firm well known for its stellar pro-bono work, in addition to its expertise in building stellar schools, hospitals, and other large projects; the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon; and the founders of the New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village (Harry Connick, Jr., Branford Marsalis, Ann Marie Wilkins, and Jim Pate).

Perkins + Will’s Hector Garcia Middle School, in Dallas, was included in our recent survey of outstanding K–12 schools. Photo: James Steinkamp/courtesy Perkins + Will

The designers at Perkins + Will are the first to tell you that their pro-bono work enriches them as practitioners and human beings as much as it helps their clients. Read more…

Images: courtesy WORK Architecture Company

With its startling lack of parks, community gardens, or farmers’ markets, the Gravesend neighborhood of southern Brooklyn is currently one of the least green sections of New York’s most populous borough. That is set to change this fall, however, when a neighborhood public school—P.S. 216—launches the first East Coast incarnation of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed in 1995 by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation to teach schoolchildren about food, farming, and nutrition. For the new venture, Manhattan’s WORK Architecture Company designed a solar-powered farm—complete with classrooms, a pizza oven, and a chicken coop—scheduled to be built over the summer on what is now a parking lot beside the school. The firm’s founders, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, have previous experience with urban gardens: in 2008, they created Public Farm 1 (P.F.1), an undulating cardboard bridge filled with vegetables and herbs, for the annual MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program. Recently, I talked to Andraos and Wood about the Edible Schoolyard and their longstanding fascination with the intersection of architecture and farming.

Why was P.S. 216 chosen to host the Edible Schoolyard?

Dan Wood: John Lyons, president of production at Focus Features, is on the Chez Panisse Foundation board. He was in New York City’s Principal for a Day program and the last school he went to was P.S. 216. He became a huge fan of the school and its principal. The school is amazing. In a district where one hundred percent of the students are eligible for the free-lunch program, she is running an amazing school: they have art classes, healthy snacks, a new library. It’s a real neighborhood with a mix of different students from many parts of the world.

Amale Andraos: The idea, as well, is that we will, hopefully, be able to expand the Edible Schoolyard to all five boroughs. So everybody felt this was a great school to test the first prototype.

DW: And the school has a huge parking lot! Read more…

Now that green design has gone from a fringe concern to an absolute imperative for the architecture community, you have to wonder what, if anything, is the next frontier. The recent publication of New York City’s Active Design Guidelines suggests one possible answer: architecture to get people off their butts.

The Guidelines, which were unveiled at the Center for Architecture last Wednesday, outline how architects, city planners, and other design professionals can encourage daily physical activity among city dwellers. Strategies range from the simple (posting signs encouraging office workers to take the stairs) to the formidably complex (creating a vibrant streetscape with mixed land use, attractive public plazas, and designated bikeways). And although they’re specifically geared to New York, many of them would be relevant anywhere. Read more…

Last month, we wrote about some of the Haiti relief efforts coming from the architecture and design community, including, notably, a long-term reconstruction plan being put forward by Architecture for Humanity. Over the weekend, we received word of a global fundraiser that should help finance AFH’s efforts. On February 20, the creators of Pecha Kucha—the 20-slides-for-20-seconds presentation format that has been adopted in 277 cities–will hold a continuous 24-hour Internet broadcast to solicit donations to help rebuild Haiti. They will be streaming video of 2,000 presentations in 200 cities, starting in Tokyo and  moving eastward around the globe. The organizers are saying that the “WaveCast” may be “the world’s biggest single-day globally-distributed conference.” But you don’t have to wait until the 20th to do your part; visit Pecha Kucka for Haiti to donate now.

To learn more, watch the video announcment (above), with PK cofounder Mark Dytham and AFH’s Cameron Sinclair.

Previously: How Are Architects Responding to the Haiti Disaster?

If you think Thom Mayne designs buildings that stand out for the sake of standing out, you’re only partially correct.

Last week, at the Center for Architecture in downtown Manhattan, Mayne gave a talk on  “performalism,” a portmanteau that describes how architectural form can influence building performance—the way, for instance, the scrim-like façade of Morphosis’s San Francisco Federal Building effectively replaces a traditional cooling system, or the dramatic roof of the still-in-process Phare Tower that doubles as a wind farm and electricity generator, both engineering feats as much as architectural ones. The idea, according to the architect, is to use architectural skins and shape to increase environmental performance, reduce financial burden, and integrate various programmatic and mechanical systems: to create, in Mayne’s words, “layers and layers of performance.”

And, of course, to produce a building that grabs attention. Read more…

Last week, General Motors’ design manager, Susan Skarsgard, spoke at the Museum of the City of New York on her book Where Today Meets Tomorrow, a monumental tome devoted to Eero Saarinen’s design of the GM Technical Center, in Warren, Michigan. Before her talk, Skarsgard was kind enough to give me a close-up tour of what is literally a one-of-a-kind book: Skarsgard personally put it together for the 50th anniversary of the Technical Center, in 2006, and there is only her one original copy. Which is a shame, because after spending an hour immersed in the scores of archival photos, plans, and other documents—not to mention pop-up models of interior spaces and a sumptuous fabric lining borrowed from the interior of a 1956 Cadillac—I almost felt like I had visited the iconic campus in person.  Read more…