Warning: the 2009 documentary Casa Bronfman is guaranteed to arouse severe real estate envy in even the most sanguine New Yorkers. The 38-minute film—which is being shown this weekend at the 28th International Festival of Films on Art, in Montreal—takes viewers on a leisurely tour of the Manhattan townhouse of Edgar Bronfman, Jr., and family. Their 12,800-square-foot home was designed in the 1990s by the architect Peter Rose (who also designed the Canadian Centre for Architecture for its founder and director, Phyllis Lambert—the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, Edgar, Jr.’s grandfather.) Rose took a 1918 townhouse that had been converted into apartments and returned it to a single-family home, organizing the interior around two vertically-stacked central courts. This allowed for ample natural light in the middle of the building—traditionally the darkest part of a New York townhouse—and also created an interesting arrangement of space, with a large semi-private event/entertainment core surrounded by a warren of private family rooms. (And, on top of the lower court, an outdoor garden designed by Dan Kiley.) For a quick tour, check out the three-minute sample of the charming-if-jealousy-inducing film above.

Update, 10/19: Due to a technical glitch, the video is now unavailable; we’re working to restore it as soon as possible.

Hard to believe but true: It’s already time to start making plans for this year’s ICFF, the nation’s premier trade show for contemporary furniture, which takes place each May in New York’s lovely Javits Center. This year, the four-day fair begins Saturday, May 15; and, as in years past, ICFF Monday will feature a day-long conference organized by your humble servants here at Metropolis.

The 2010 theme is Design Entrepreneurs: What’s Next, with leaders from a range of design disciplines talking about how they’re reinventing their businesses and remaining creative (and socially-conscious) in the new economy. The speakers will include Valerie Fletcher on universal design; Foster + Partners’ Jürgen Häpp on the Abu Dhabi zero-carbon ecotopia Masdar City; WORKac’s Dan Wood on his firm’s Edible Schoolyard in Brooklyn; Yves Béhar on a line of student-designed solar-cell products; this year’s Next Generation honorees on their brilliantly simple fixes for the design environment; and several others. Click here for the full conference schedule.

This year’s conference is sponsored by the American Society of Interior Designers, Dornbracht, and Interiors from Spain. For video of last’s year’s Metropolis Conference at ICFF, click on over to our Multimedia site—or check out the one-minute teaser below. Read more…

Last fall we wrote about the architecture firm Anshen + Allen’s Green Patient Lab, a traveling mock-up of a hospital room stocked with the latest and best in sustainable health-care technology and design. Today the firm let us know that it has also begun working with Containers to Clinics (C2C), a Dover, Massachusetts-based nonprofit that’s developing a prototype portable health clinic constructed from industrial shipping containers. C2C was founded in 2008 by a Boston-area physician’s assistant named Elizabeth Sheehan; it aims to deliver routine preventive care to underserved areas of the developing world. (Right now, it’s working to deploy its first prototype in Haiti.) Sheehan estimates that one C2C unit will cost approximately $100,00, but that figure includes transport, equipment, medications, and salaries for seven local staff members. You can watch the retrofit process in the video above; read more at containerstoclinics.org.

After the jump, Anshen + Allen’s renderings of the prototype clinic provide a better idea of the distribution of medical facilities within the 8-by-20-foot steel containers. Read more…

It’s only the ninth of March and already we’re having trouble keeping up with all this month’s design news. If you’re like us (harried, easily distracted, constantly hungry, etc.), then read on for a quick, painless recap of the month’s biggest design news, so far.

President Obama Appoints Edward Tufte to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel

In his new role, the information-design guru (and vocal PowerPoint critic) will help track and explain the $787 billion in federal stimulus funds. “I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service,” Tufte wrote on his Web site. “And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do.”
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MIT’s New Media Lab Building Opens

Fumohiko Maki’s design draws on Piet Mondrian, George Seurat, and Japanese paper lanterns for a 163,000-square-foot exercise in transparency.

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As much as we love to read around here—and even though we rely on the printed word (and the e-printed word, or whatever you want to call it) for our livelihoods—by some Friday afternoons, we’ve reached our limit; it’s all we can do to drag our text-saturated eyeballs across another line of type. If you’re feeling about the same—and a quick nap isn’t an option—then perhaps a video diversion will help. And we think we have just the thing: a collection of time-lapse architecture videos from around the Web. Read more…

What is happening in the murky video clip to your left? To be honest, I’m not entirely certain. All I can tell you for sure is that this is a preview of the new work by Joris Laarman Lab to be exhibited at Friedman Benda Gallery, in New York, beginning Friday.

Laarman is the young Dutch designer best known for creating the Bone Chair and Bone Chaise, among other bone furniture. For those limited-edition pieces, he used computer algorithms and a trademarked CAD casting method to mimic the growing patterns of bones in bizarre-looking aluminum or polyurethane seats.

His new work includes the Half Life Lamp, which again tries to imitate a biological process in a manufacturing setting. This is a case where it may be best to let the designer speak for himself. Here’s an excerpt from a statement by Laarman:

This lamp Half life – it is half made of living organism and half made of non living material recently died. It was born on February 23 in a Dutch tissue culture laboratory. On the video Half life radiated brightly when it was in healthy conditions. The cells responsible for the emission of light in the hood of the lamp originally stem from a Chinese hamster. In 1957 these CHO cells were isolated from a hamster’s ovary and kept alive as a cell culture for research purposes. In the 1990s this cell line was enriched with the fire fly’s luciferase gene. Ever since than these hamster cells glow in the dark in presence of luciferine. According to present state of knowledge in the life science the development of bioluminescence systems in living organisms occurred naturally about 20 or 30 times in evolution. Well known examples of bioluminescence are found in bacteria, fire flies, and jelly fish.

So the above video illustrates this bioluminescence. And the final result? Read more…

Attention, New York artists and designers: the city’s Department of Transportation just announced  that it is soliciting conceptual designs to refresh the new pedestrian plazas at Times Square. As you may recall, Mayor Bloomberg decided last month to make permanent the five plazas that DOT installed in the area last May. Now the DOT is looking for “a series of economical, temporary surface treatments” to keep these spaces looking good until it’s able to implement a permanent build-out (currently slated to for 2012). Designs must enhance the pedestrian experience, improve the setting for Times Square events, and accommodate fire lanes, crosswalks, and other “use zones.” The complete request for proposals is supposed to go up on the DOT Web site sometime today.

Update: Here’s a direct link to the RFP.

For an enlightening and occasionally amusing glimpse of the arcane world of New York City landmarks preservation, point your browser to HDC@LPC, a new Web site by the city’s Historic Districts Council.

As a nonprofit advocate for New York City’s historic neighborhoods, the HDC reviews and comments on hundreds of applications for alterations to landmark buildings in the five boroughs. (In fact, it is the only organization to do so.) At weekly public hearings, it testifies to the Landmarks Preservation Commission about the appropriateness of the proposed changes. Now it’s also posting that testimony online, making it easy for any New Yorker to tap into the behind-the-scenes conversation about the city’s historic buildings.

This afternoon I spent some time perusing the most recent entries. One thing I noticed right away: the HDC is not afraid to play the neighborhood curmudgeon, giving a resounding thumbs-down to proposals that seem relatively innocuous to this casual observer.

For instance, you may think that installing a bracket sign on an old factory building in DUMBO would easily meet HDC’s approval. You would be wrong. “Bracket signs gussy up the very simple, clean lines of Industrial neo-Classical style factory buildings like 72 Front Street, and after a while they lose their effectiveness, the clutter of signs all canceling one another out,” the HDC wrote.

How about a rear-yard addition to a Greek Revival house in Brooklyn Heights? Read more…

If you’ve ever wished you could take a peek at some of your favorite designers’ off-the-cuff sketches and exploratory doodles, you’ll soon have your chance. At this year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile, in Milan, the Italian National Trust and Moleskine will present an exhibition of 462 drawings by 150 international designers. Called The Hand of the Designer, the exhibition will be accompanied by a book of the same title containing reproductions of the designers’ sketches; and, on May 13, the original drawings will be auctioned at Sotheby’s Milan. (All the proceeds from the book sales and the auction will go to the Trust—and, in particular, its maintenance activity for the Villa Necchi Campiglio.)

The doodling designers include the Bouroullec brothers, Michael Graves, Hella Jongerius, Karim Rashid, Matteo Thun, and many others (a few of whom were also included in last year’s The Hand of the Architect.) Check out several examples after the jump. Read more…

Last week, Parsons the New School for Design announced that it will begin offering an MFA in “Transdisciplinary Design” this fall. If you have no idea what that means, you’re not alone—the program’s chair, Jamer Hunt, recently made a short video to find out how some random New Yorkers would define the nascent discipline. (Watch until the end for a cameo appearance by MoMA’s Paola Antonelli.) Read more…