In its inaugural year, the Curry Stone Design Prize, which seeks out designs that “improve the human spirit, increase awareness of the environment, or respond to areas of need in the world,”  bestowed its award to an ingenious shantytown composed largely of sandbags. The impressive roster of jury members–journalist John Hockenberry, architect David Adjaye, designer Renny Ramakers; and Michael Speaks, design scholar and dean of University of Kentucky’s College of Design–called the winning design “super-intelligent”. Read more…

In this month’s issue, Metropolis reports on the myriad sustainable efforts of lodgings around the world striving to be green in Eco Innkeepers. And already we have an update on one of these featured hotels: Proximity Hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina. Since its completion in October 2007, Proximity and its ever-ebullient staff have been determined to achieve a national record: being the first hotel to achieve Platinum LEED status from the U.S. Green Building Council. Well, we couldn’t keep a secret: It’s official.

Metropolis is the first to learn from both Proximity and the USGBC that the hotel’s 70+ sustainable practices have earned them the coveted Platinum rank. Read more…

Top Hat (2007) by J. Smith Esquire
Image: Justin Smith

At a recent exhibition opening at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, a flame-haired woman in a breathlessly tight green latex dress chatted with an statuesque man outfitted in tiny black shorts, knee-high, patent leather boots, and a cascading cape of sheer, ebony lace dotted with bursts of gold embroidery. The woman, aptly named The Baroness, is known in many fetish-fashion circles for her high-end latex clothing line. The soaring man with whom The Baroness spoke, whose name no one seemed to know, stood surrounded by an entourage of gothic admirers—many of whom wore corsets, bone-white makeup, and sky-high collars of architectural allure.

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Although the auspicious day of 08.08.08 seems like, well, just last month, in the world of Olympic design, the Beijing games were over before you even knew they’d started. As Beijing packs up its fireworks, its floating sphere and its giant, Fuwa beach toys, we’ll fast-forward to London time, where the 2012 Summer Olympics will be taking place - and perhaps only a mundane few will be getting married.

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This weekend, I had the pleasure of catching the tail end of London-based artist Anish Kapoor’s exhibition, Past, Present, Future, curated by Nicholas Baume at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Manageably sized and well selected, the 14 sculptures on display compose the first U.S. museum survey of Kapoor’s work in over fifteen years. Kapoor is best known to Americans for his 2004 Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millenium Park, now affectionately nicknamed “The Bean.” In Manhattan, his 2006 temporary Sky Mirror, a 35 foot-diameter concavity of polished stainless steel placed outside the Rockefeller Center, gave New Yorkers a vision of something they rarely get to see at such close range: blue sky.

Sky Mirror, 2006 - Stainless steel Read more…

The Beijing Olympic Green Convention Center
(Photography: H.G. Esch/Courtesy RMJM)

In preparation for the Olympics, the media facility at the Beijing Olympic Green Convention Center (BOGCC) won a gold medal of its own: becoming the largest media center in Olympic history. It operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and serves more than 20,000 accredited journalists, photographers and broadcasters in 150,000 square meters of copper-clad and glass-encased space.  Read more…

Official outfitter of the 2008 U.S. Olympic team, Ralph Lauren dropped a navy blazer bomb on last Friday’s opening ceremonies in Beijing. While the design choice was meant to reflect, in the words of U.S. Olympic Committee’s chief operating officer Norm Bellingham, “a timeless and quintessentially American look,” more than a few voices have piped up to criticize the blatant branding of the oversized Polo^TM logo. Read more…

With offshore drilling debates at an all-time political high, it goes without saying that the hunt for oil has never looked so grim. However, there’s another global crisis that nobody’s talking about: the colored-awareness-rubber-bracelet crisis. Now that we’ve depleted the Crayola 64, we’ve exhausted our supply of colors that denote specific causes that no one can remember. (It seems www.rubber-bracelets.com hasn’t received the memo; just steal any cause’s color and make it your own. Sorry, Lance!)

But wait. Just when you thought offshore color-drilling would be the only way to resolve this problem, a solution has landed on your doorstep: shoelaces! Read more…

Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist on June 13, 2008 at the Van Alen Institute. Photo by Patrick Hannaway, Courtesy of Van Alen Institute.

Switzerland’s Hans Ulrich Obrist may well be the curators’ curator. In the past fifteen years, he has organized over 150 global exhibitions, collaborating with countless figureheads such as Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, Danish installation artist Olafur Eliasson, and the late, great Philip Johnson. Obrist has spent much of his career assembling forums and asking questions to a global audience and with Formulas for Now: Hans Ulrich Obrist’s New York Interviews, he asks architects, artists, mathematicians, scientists, and taxi drivers his most sweeping question yet: “What is your formula for now? Read more…