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Each month, Productsphere brings design professionals a wealth of innovative and inventive new products, organized around a central theme of particular relevance to the industry. After the jump, Metropolis’s editorial director, Paul Makovsky, talks about his Productsphere column in the October issue of the magazine.

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Four Seasons ashtrays—which, according to the critic Ada Louise Huxtable, were meant to be stolen. Photo: Paul Makovsky

The Four Seasons restaurant is always a fun place to go to for a special occasion. Last evening was especially so, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation presented Alex von Bidder and Julian Niccolini, managing partners of the restaurant, with the President’s Award for their longstanding stewardship and preservation of the restaurant’s interiors. It’s the first time that the President’s Award has been given in recognition of a modern interior—something the preservationists and developers need to focus on more these days. Read more…

Yesterday, I attended the New York launch of Emily Pilloton’s new book, Design Revolution (Metropolis Books). The party was hosted by Anne Kennedy, Peter Nadin, and Amy Novogratz, at Anne and Peter’s beautifully-restored Federal Style house in the West Village. A good cross section of the design world showed up for light conversation and drinks, including Core 77’s Allan Chochinov, architect Charles Renfro, graphic designers Stefan Sagmeister and Scott Stowell, architectural historians Gwendolyn Wright and Beatriz Colomina, deans Stan Allen, Bill Morrish, and Mark Wigley, and just about everybody from the Cooper Hewitt’s education department. Emily stood on the back porch to update the crowd on her latest venture, which will now include improving design education and building bus shelters in North Carolina. You can hear Emily speak at the Cooper Hewitt tomorrow night. In the meantime, here are some party photos from yesterday’s event.

Photos: Alex Galan
Left to right: Allison Walker, an Emily design fan, Stefan Sagmeister, and TED Prize director Amy Novogratz Read more…

The winners of the third edition of the INDEX Award, a competition that focuses on designs to improve life, were announced today in Copenhagen, as part of the city’s design-week festivities. This year’s competition received more than 700 entries from six continents and 54 countries. The organizers give out a whopping 500,000 euros in prize money, making it one of the world’s biggest, if not the biggest, design award. This year’s five winning entries are a diverse group, ranging from a fetal heart-rate monitor that works off the grid and a stove designed to limit smoke in indoor cooking to a micro-lending Web site and a book tracking all the products made from a pig.

Here’s a rundown of the five winners, which fall under the categories of body, home, work, play, and community:

Freeplay Fetal Heart Rate Monitor
Category: Body
A fetal heart rate monitor that works off the grid, designed by Freeplay Energy (South Africa) Read more…

Book photo, Sarah Palmer; others courtesy Nicole Huber and Ralph Stern

When it comes to taking popular images of Las Vegas, the picture-postcard nighttime shots of the Bellagio with its streams of fountains on the Strip or the slightly drunken and very silly party shots in front of the Eiffel Tower replica are the probably the norm. Architecture and urban theorists Nicole Huber and Ralph Stern have taken a more serious view of Sin City in their new photo book, Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas, which shows a hybrid landscape reshaped by everyday urbanization, focusing on the radical transformation of the Mojave Desert. Their 192-page book (published by Jovis Verlag) features a lengthy essay and 150 color photographs of everything from billboards and abandoned trailer parks to power plants and golf courses rising out of the desert. I spoke to the authors about the book, the idea of a green Las Vegas, and how  recent developments in Las Vegas are redefining the desert landscape.

How did you come up with this idea for the book?

Ralph Stern: In architectural theory and architectural circles in Las Vegas, much of the identity is still organized around Venturi/Scott Brown’s Learning From Las Vegas, and there’s still this allegiance to the Strip as an ideal, even though the original has all but vanished. When I got there in 2004, the greater metropolitan area population was at 1.7 million and already planning for a city of four million. The Strip is certainly an element, but it’s not what’s going on here. It is this incredible metropolis that nobody seems to address in terms of its impact on the surrounding federal lands, on any land use and land policy issues, or on water issues. Our book is a response to the misplaced focus on the Strip and a lack of attention to the city on the whole. Read more…

Courtesy Artifort

I was saddened to learn recently that Pierre Paulin, the designer of iconic space-age furniture, passed away on June 13 in Montpelier, in southeast France. Paulin’s work first became popular in the 1960s and ‘70s, when he designed a number of technologically innovative seats with names like Orange Slice, Tulip, and Groovy. His chairs—shaped like mushrooms and ribbons and covered in colorful skintight upholstery—won widespread acclaim and found their way into major museums around the world. (In 1969, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, became the first major museum to add his furniture to its collection.) Chosen by two former French presidents, Georges Pompidou and Francois Mitterrand, to furnish the presidential residence, his furniture is still in the Élysée Palace, in Paris. “He made design into an art form,” President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a tribute to the designer. “The beauty of his work spread far and wide, from the furniture of the presidential palace to the daily lives of millions.” Read more…

Council has been one of my favorite new American manufacturers. They work with designers like Arik Levy, Khodi Fez, Monica Förster, and Nendo. This year, the San Francisco–based design duo Mike and Maaike debuted their Divis table (named after the nickname of a street in San Francisco that the designers take when they need to go to Council’s offices). They designers challenged themselves to see how natural processes could inspire the industrial manufacturing process. According to Mike Simonian, their design draws upon the idea that wood is a naturally anisotropic material—so the table highlights the random splitting and cracking found in wood. Here, the rectangular top is split by the supporting legs of the table, which creates a surface that appears to be cracking. It’s available in natural poplar or a slightly more expensive black-stained-ash version.

Pierre Paulin is having his moment. Although he left Paris to retire to a secluded life in the French countryside, he now seems, at age 82, busier than ever. I first met him and his wife in January at Ligne Roset’s exhibition in Paris, where he was showing a collection of furniture. He’s already collaborated with Ligne Roset and Artifort; now you can add Magis to the list. His Flower chair for Magis makes its North American debut at ICFF. The injection-molded piece, available in North America through Leif Petersen, is made of transparent polycarbonate (available in clear, smoke grey, or brown) with colored seat cushions. While plastic chairs sometimes feel a bit flimsy, this one weighs more than 20 pounds, so it has some heft. It wasn’t easy to get right: Magis’s founder, Eugenio Perazza, had to do at least ten prototypes, and he drove to Paulin’s house in the country more than twenty times (for an estimated total of about 25,000 miles on the road). Magis is also showing the new Grcic 360 stool, which I can only describe as … fugly.

One of the best school projects I’ve seen in years was the work of fourth-year industrial design students from Lund University who exhibited their school project at the recent Stockholm Furniture Fair. How To Get Ourselves and Stuff Around with Zero Emissions proposed some ways that we could change our living arrangements so that we reduce our transportation and the need to travel.

What made this project so appealing was that the students designed individual objects that fit into the context of an improved transportation solution for the Lund area by increased use of electric public transportation, walking, and cycling. Solutions ranged from a feeding station for butterflies to a fat separator as well as an improved neighborhood transportation network.

(Photos: Paul Makovsky)

More on the projects after the jump.

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Li Edelkoort stands in the background above. Photo from Rossana Orlandi.

Some surprising news: Li Edelkoort, chair of the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands for the past ten years, is resigning this Fall. Read more…