The Tulip Collection bathtub, featured in Metropolis’ February 2013 issue “Productsphere”

All too often fragility is accepted as part of manufactured luxury goods; the product’s short lifespan considered as luxurious as its disposability. With the recent release of their WETMAR™ update, WETMAR BiO™, Wetstyle set out to combine the purity of environmentally-sound material with industrial durability into the foundation of their sumptuous product lines. And as with all their products, WETMAR BiO is produced in the Wetstyle factory in Montreal.

WETMAR BiO craftsmanship includes hand polishing

WETMAR BiO craftsmanship includes surface buffing

Wetstyle’s entire product line now incorporates the updated material including its five new collections, designed to work with the enhancements of WETMAR BiO. To see how, check out the Wetstyle featured storyboard on the Metropolis Pinterest page. Read more…

If you look up Industrial Design on Wikipedia today, these are the pictures included with the article: an iPod, a blender, a rotary phone, a typewriter, a guitar, a car, and a chair. It is the last of these objects that I’m thinking of today. As I’m drinking coffee and writing this, I sit on a chair. The chair I am sitting on is certainly not the product of a brilliant industrial designer. It does serve its function as ‘chair’, so it must have followed some sort of design. It’s made of cheap particle board, has a trapezoidal seat which gets wider toward the ledge, and a slightly obtuse back rest made up of a frame and three vertical slats. To be honest, it’s not very comfortable. But it does serve its purpose, at least until my back starts aching and I’m forced into all kinds of neurotic personalized stretches.

Whenever people talk about industrial design, the chair is almost always one of the main cultural objects discussed. Indeed, almost every famous designer or architect has their signature chair: from the first industrially mass-produced No. 14 chair by Michael Thonet, to the Bauhaus like Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer, to more modern designers like Alvar Aalto, Charles Eames, and Arne Jacobson, to name a few popular figures. So, why the chair?

An over-simplification of industrial design goes something like this: we need objects that function, and most aren’t found ready-made in nature. So someone somewhere needs to conceptualize what it should look like, how it’s made and with what materials, and how we interact with its functionality. The degree to which aesthetics, artistry, and innovation come into play can vary from non-existent to excessive formalization. Great industrial design sits at the crossroads between form and function. Read more…

The U.S. EPA, the European Union Commission on the Environment, the State of California are among the government organizations that have come out on the side of healthy materials for our built environment. In addition, there are a growing number of associations and firms engaged in collecting data on toxic materials that should be avoided, sharing their information with the public. They include the Healthy Building Network ‘s Pharos Project, Clean Production Action, Perkins + Will’s Precautionary List, Living Building Challenge and that organization’s Watch List, and the various LEED programs, such as HC and Pilot.

Most recently, the first open standard format for reporting the content and hazards in building products was launched at Greenbuild 2012. Called the Health Product Declaration (HPD) Open Standard Version 1, the program is managed by a non-profit group of collaborators. The HPD Collaborative is lead by the Pilot Project Committee of 29 building product manufacturers and 50 expert reviewers from across the building industry. The collaborative is in the process of developing, maintaining, and evolving the HPD Open Standard to meet the growing demand from the design and specifying community for health information on the many products used in our buildings. Included in this pilot group is the Canadian furniture manufacturer Teknion. In an effort to build the case for HPD, starting from the supplier’s point of view, I asked Tracy Backus, LEED AP ID+C, director of sustainability programs at Teknion U.S. to answer a few questions. Here she talks about what one manufacturer is doing to safeguard human health, and the Earth that gives us life.

Susan S. Szenasy: As a member of the Health Product Declaration (HPD) Working Group, in the manufacturing sector, and with Teknion’s long-term commitment to environmental health, could you tell us why your firm has decided to join this particular group? And what are your hopes for outcomes?

Tracy Backus: We were asked by Google to participate originally.  As we looked more closely at our history and how Teknion has already made steps to reduce chemicals from our products, like PVC, it was a natural for us to begin the work of full disclosure to the public. The challenge was developing a method that worked for all manufactures of building materials. That is the work of the HPD.

SSS: I understand you heard about HPD from a client, Google, in search of more transparency in products’ chemical/material content, as these relate to human health effects. What was Google looking for?

TB: Google is aligning its business to protect the health and well-being of it’s employees by building and procuring products that eliminate chemicals of concern, identified by the EPA, Living Building Challenge, and the National Cancer Institute. They are investing and, therefore, expect the same of manufacturers to advance the industry to research and develop safer materials for the built environment. Read more…

Winning an award should be in and of itself good enough, but the satisfaction of the win inevitably deflates when you’re stuck with a plastic trophy to put on your desk. That was not the case when our Game Changers received their Corian, laser-engraved, geometric trophies by Tietz-Baccon at this year’s Game Changers awards ceremony.

The awards presented at the ceremony were custom designed, assembled, and graciously donated by the digital fabricators, based out of Long Island City. They were laser-carved out of Corian, with the seven sides of each award carved simultaneously. Their heptadronal shape allows for each model to sit on any side. Put together, they create an entirely different symphony of shapes and capture the spirit of our Game Changers.

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Portrait of Neil McEachern, photo by Vasco Roma

“There are many, many really cool things about the house,” said Neil McEachern, retired Detroit public school principal, who has lived in Lafayette Park for 20 years. He is describing life at Lafayette Park, and how the residents there have turned this modern blank slate housing into their much-loved homes. “Lafayette Park was built on land that once was a densely settled, working-class, African-American neighborhood called Black Bottom. Classified as a ’slum’ by the city of Detroit in the 1940s, Black Bottom was razed and left vacant until the mid-1950s, when a citizens’ group led by labor activist Walther Reuther succeeded in attracting Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald to the project. Greenwald brought in Mies van der Rohe to serve as architect, and Mies in turn brought his colleagues urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell on board. Hilberseimer’s plan for the area called for rerouting or blocking off some of the streets to create a superblock, on which would be built housing, a large park, an elementary school, playgrounds and space for retail. By the early 1960s many elements of this plan had been completed,” notes the introduction to the recently released Metropolis Book, Thanks for the view, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park Detroit, edited by Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar, and Natasha Chandani. There are hundreds of stories that create the human texture of this special place. Here, excerpted from the book, is the story of one long time resident, Neil Mceachern.

We have been trying to get a sense of how this neighborhood came about and what was here before. It’s unusual to have an urban renewal project like this, where a large area of land in the middle of a city was cleared and an entirely new neighborhood was established. I always like to recognize the people who came before us in this area of Detroit now known as Lafayette Park. Before 1701 it was the home of the Huron, Ottowa and Potawatomi Indians. Then, after the arrival of Cadillac, this land east of the fort was divided into ribbon farms — narrow strips that started at the river and continued far inland. [1] Many of the streets still retain the names of those early farm families: Rivard, Chene, St. Aubin, Joseph Campau and so on. Then, as the city expanded, the farms were broken up and the area became home to many German families. Many of the old German churches still line the Gratiot corridor — Trinity Lutheran, St. John’s/St. Luke’s, St. Joseph’s, for example. Many of the side streets along Gratiot have German names because they were built out during this period. Then we get to post–World War II and the beginnings of what is Lafayette Park. Generally, “urban renewal” in this country meant tearing down big areas where poor people lived and building new housing. That’s basically what happened here. Black Bottom was home to a large part of Detroit’s black community at the time and also to the city’s emerging Syrian community. It was a very poor area. Mostly it was rentals — little wood houses. It was torn down as part of a plan to keep middle-class people living in downtown Detroit.

Was this area always considered part of downtown Detroit? By the time Lafayette Park was built it was on the edge of downtown. If you stand outside when there aren’t any leaves on the trees you can see the big buildings of downtown. You can see the Renaissance Center from my living room. We’re within walking distance of the Central Business District.

So was this on the west edge of Black Bottom? I don’t really know that Black Bottom had an actual defined boundary. Hastings Street was where the Chrysler Freeway is now, and that was the commercial street where the bars and restaurants and barbershops and stores were.

Top, a nighttime view of artwork hanging inside Neil McEachern’s unit, photo by Vasco Roma; above, a wall with prints at his house, photo by Daniel Aubert

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The international design competition, sponsored by HP and Microsoft, in partnership with the creative platform Talenthouse, was called the HP/Microsoft Smart Office Challenge. The challenge was nothing less than to design the ultimate office space of the future. No pressure. The only requirement was that the design had to feature existing HP technology.

Our team won both the judges’ and the people’s choice awards. We are MulvannyG2 Architecture and industrial design firm Zac & Co., formed as collaborators on a design called HP MIMIC, a movable workplace that can be customized by touching a screen. With this design, users will be able to transform their offices to match their individual work styles and requirements, in addition to incorporating their company’s culture. Made of rigid aluminum and fully wired, the “plug and play” design features a collapsible system of rotating electrochromatic glass modules, controlled via a HP tablet interface. Last month, a prototype, built by HP, was presented at the Alt Design Summit in Salt Lake City. This animated video, created by MulvannyG2, illustrates the concept.

Here Alan Feltoon and Zachary Feltoon – in real life they’re father and son – discuss their design process for the HP MIMIC, the rapidly expanding role of flexible technology in the workspace, and the importance of design competitions in pushing forward new ideas.

Alan Feltoon: Collaboration can be wonderfully messy, particularly when crossing disciplines, with the potential for creating big ideas and concepts. Our two firms had previously worked together on the Battery Park Conservancy Design Competition, “Draw Up a Chair.” Through that process we realized how well we work together and were eager to do it again. The HP/Microsoft Smart Office Challenge presented an ideal opportunity.

Zachary Feltoon: I found it fascinating how much the language surrounding various types of creative design can differ. At first, it was like having a multilingual charrette. We were using different terms, yet trying to get to the same place. But soon we progressed to conversations that would include all aspects of the user experience while also using other mediums to inform our own work. When you collaborate you open yourself up to new ideas, and in that regard you’re never working solely within your own medium.

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I have mixed feelings about the sea of mail that inundates us around the holidays. Having worked with architecture firms for many years, I’ve had the card versus email greeting debate time and again (and, admittedly, landed on both sides over the years). But once in a while, I receive a card that reminds me what thought and intentionality can do for the “hard copy” format.

KieranTimberlake’s annual message of good wishes is a five panel, fold out card. On the one side there are elegant, muted-hue diagrams from five of the firm’s green roof projects, illustrating how the vegetation has evolved over time. The Middlebury College Atwater Commons project, for instance, is shown in 2003 and 2012; the other depictions vary in duration. All prompt careful study.

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Any environment that encourages walking is a place that works. We may be walking up or down stairs or to and from meeting rooms. It doesn’t matter why we’re walking, as long as we do. Interiors designed to encourage getting up and moving around may have open, central staircases that link floors together or cafeterias that are located within walking distance from workspaces.

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Moving earth is always exciting to watch. For me, it was even more so as I watched them break ground on the Colorado State University Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory’s (EECL) expansion into the Powerhouse Energy Institute. This development is the latest step in a march of innovative progress that has characterized the lab since it’s beginning in 1992. Three years ago, when I decided to attend CSU for Mechanical Engineering, the lab with its innovative, student-involved research approach played a major role in my choice. Interestingly the EECL was named one of the top 25 ‘Awesome College Labs’ by Popular Science in 2011 – Wow!

The great research environment within the EECL may have pushed me to apply for a position at the lab, but it is the building that has made the lab comfortable and inspirational. The 1936 Art-Deco brick structure with its large, welcoming doors and multitude of windows, combined with the work and people, houses the true spirit of ‘The Engines Lab’ as a location that has served to unite private and university research and development with the goal of innovation to improve human life.

Three years and many great projects later, the power of the building has come to the forefront of the lab with the development of the new Powerhouse Energy Institute. Led by architect Bob Hosanna, the Neenan Company has worked collaboratively with the Powerhouse Energy Institute staff to design a highly sustainable solution for its expansion. The new building is a 65,000 square-foot addition onto the south end of the former Fort Collins power plant in North Old Town Fort Collins.  The new workspace is exciting in itself. But this addition is especially meaningful to the lab as the design (and present construction) has been in complete alignment with the innovative, yet historically respectful tradition of the lab. The current structure is an awesome tribute to the individuals who made the building, Fort Collins, and Colorado so great.  As a result, the design team was inspired to create an addition that complements the building, mimicking the original structure while still making it cutting-edge (LEED Platinum rating is expected).  Fittingly, the facility will be a laboratory for the development of green building technologies.  The vertical-axis wind turbines and a woodchip hopper for a gasifier system will stand where four smokestacks and a coal-hopper once stood, creating a modern study tool for the historic building’s former structures.

1936

2013 Rendering

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We had modest goals when we first took on the “ideas competition” to design the office building of the future. All we wanted was to use the tight deadline—the discipline and structure that comes with a competition—to organize our ideas about the future of office buildings. In the beginning we saw this as a way to engage in an internal debate about a myriad of related topics. We began as we always do, asking many questions. This time, though, we went beyond our usual inquiry:  Will there even be office buildings in the future?  How will people want and need to work in an office 15 or 20 years from now?  What impact will technology have on design and engineering?  But we never once asked, “What will it look like?”

As principals, we calculate the risk against the rewards for our architecture practice. Naively, we guessed that this project would involve a few weeks of work for those staff members who weren’t fully employed on other projects. Our economic risk would be minimal. Our reward would be a 10-minute presentation to show our developer clients, inspiring their thinking about office buildings. With no clear vision of what could happen, we nevertheless pushed our team to reach for something beyond what they already knew.  If we were going to enter this competition, then we were in it to win. Go big or go home.

The effect on the office was profound. We took the opportunity to look over the horizon, unfettered by the normal project restrictions and, in the process, energized everyone. Suddenly they all wanted to get involved. We engaged the best engineers to contribute their ideas. We decided to do a video (which we’d never done before).  Most importantly, we would allow ourselves to dream. Suddenly the risk expanded far beyond a monetary risk. Now we were taking an emotional risk as well, pouring our hearts and minds into a collaborative effort and then, perhaps, ending up being disappointed with the outcome. When we announced to the office, over champagne, that we had been named one of four winners nationally, everyone cheered!

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