Photo: Gregory Gibbons, courtesy Ivorypress.

Norman Foster is not an easy architect to get on the phone. We’ve covered a number of Foster + Partners’ projects in the past, and requests for interviews with the boss were often met with “Lord Foster is traveling in Asia” or “out of the office until the end of the month.” So, while reporting on Foster’s remake of Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion Car, it came as a bit of surprise when an offhand, what-the-hell-I-might-as-well-ask request for an interview was met with a yes. The project, as it turns out, was a real labor of love: an homage to a beloved figure in Foster’s life. Here, the architect talks about his relationship with Fuller, the continued relevance of the car, and the legacy of his former mentor. As an added treat, we include a short film of Foster driving the new Dymaxion Car #4.  

What inspired you to recreate Bucky’s famous Dymaxion Car?

Bucky is never far from my thoughts. We collaborated on projects for the last twelve years of his life. When I was awarded the Royal Guild Gold medal in London, he gave the talk. At that point we had decided to do houses for each other. So he came over and we talked about the project. He gave the talk and then he left for America, off to see his terminally ill wife, Ann, in the hospital. On arrival, he had a fatal heart attack at her bedside and she died thirty six hours later. Curiously, on that trip to England, he said to me, “You know, Norman, anytime, I can pull the plug.” I guess that’s when he pulled the plug. He got there and realized that his wife wasn’t going to recover. Read more…

Grace Designs: Memphis showroom designed by Sottsass Associati. World Trade Center, Dallas, TX, 1984.

Rumor has it that the short-lived design movement, Memphis, got its name as group of designers sat around late one evening in Milan with their leader, Ettore Sottsass Jr., while American music played on the radio. The story goes that Bob Dylan was singing “Oh, Mama, can this really be the end /To be stuck inside of Mobile/ With the Memphis blues again.”  With its pop-culture roots, it’s not surprising that some of Memphis’s most memorable products, plastic laminates, have become the favorite surfacing material of “fast food restaurants and cheesy nightclubs,” as Belinda Lanks writes in our March 2011 issue.

Abet Laminati’s Memphis tabletops in Big Daddy’s, New York. Read more here.

Knowing that Lorry Dudley, who now runs the U.S. warehouse and distribution center for such great European brands as Moroso, Kasthall, and Droog while consulting with international manufacturers and museums, was personally involved in spreading the word about Memphis in the U.S.A., I could not resist asking her remember the time when the colorful furnishings with their wild shapes first appeared in North America. Here are some of her recollections of a transformative time, nearly three decades ago. Read more…

Many developing countries have highly developed cultures of making-do: ingenious strategies that help people work with the realities of economic disparity, growing populations, and rapidly developing cities that put constant pressure on scarce resources. Out of things like old oil tins and discarded car parts, people put together remarkably creative products. In Kenya they call it Jua Kali, in Brazil they call it Gambiarra. The word Indians use is Jugaad.

At the Centre for Architecture, New York, a pioneering exhibition called Jugaad Urbanism is taking a closer look at this rich culture of innovation in India. 22 projects, ranging from a smokeless stove to overhead pedestrian walkways, show how Indian citizens and designers are finding solutions for pressing urban issues.  I spoke to the curator of the exhibition, architect Kanu Agrawal, to find out why this kind of grassroots ingenuity might be important for us to look at, and what designers and architects can learn from it. Read more…

Since we posted the December 2010 issue last month, our cover story on New York City’s landmarked interiors hit the charts (Most Shared Stories in web language) consistently. And no wonder. These memorable spaces add the kind of rich experience to being in New York that the iconic buildings crowding our skyline can only promise. These rooms deliver an aesthetic trip back in time, a trip that makes a visit here a truly memorable time. Though these theatres, lobbies, restaurants, and stores are public spaces where you can marvel at the detailing—its richness, its restraint, its exquisite sense of proportion, its materials—photographers have a hard time setting up their tripods in them. Access is grudgingly granted or often denied.  Obstacles can be daunting. This is the story of one such adventure.

Documenting this crop of landmarked interiors (including the Cunard Building, Film Center, Brooklyn Historical Society, Time & Life Building, Charles Scribner’s Sons Building) fell to photographer Sean Hemmerle. The tight deadline added to the degree of difficulty. As he tells it, it takes a village (in our case our editorial and art staff) to pull off such an assignment. So I asked Sean to find a comfy chair in his downtown studio, and talk into my Flip camera about photographing the Beacon Theatre, which ended up on our cover. He’s currently updating his website http://seanhemmerle.com/  where you’ll find full documentation of the shoot as well as his other shoots from the world over.  But for now, take a look at the image he took inside the Beacon, lit by only one light bulb, then compare this to what his camera captured when the lights were—seemingly miraculously—turned on.

 
The Beacon Theatre, lit by one lone bulb.

In our January 2011 issue, we featured just a few of the works included in Postcards of the Wiener Werkstätte, a recent exhibition at the Neue Galerie of about 500 postcards from the Leonard A. Lauder collection. If you missed the show, which closed a few days ago, take heart: the curator Christian Witt-Dörring has edited the museum’s visual feast down to a digestible bite of six postcards. Here he presents his personal favorites and explains what makes them special.

Postcard n° 540
Meat Market: Old Roofs (1911) by Adalberta Kiesewetter

The topic of this postcard is the unspectacular or, to put it another way, the familiar. It tries to capture the atmosphere of the fast disappearing old city of Vienna around 1910. Nostalgia embraces contemporary artistic expression—the ambiguous play between the flat plane and a perspective rendering. The image breathes tradition in the Secessionists’ interpretation of the term as a revival of a lost quality.

Read more…

The story of a storefront in Brooklyn’s Bushwick section, proudly inspired by Jean Nouvel’s Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, is in the current issue of Metropolis. The short piece made me want to know more about the security gate with its unusually memorable appearance.  So I asked architect Andre Kikoski to talk about how the system works, as well as how the neighborhood is responding to it. Our art intern, Hannah Elliott, animated the stills, so you can see the façade in action. 

Photos: Francis Dzikowski/courtesy Esto

Susan S. Szenasy: Are all the businesses in the building warehouses? Or are some retail?

Andre Kikoski: The building is in a pair of former warehouses. There are three commercial tenants – a wine shop, an organic food market, and a live music performance venue. Read more…

Bjarke Ingels is known to fill up rooms where his fellow architects come to be entertained, to learn, and to bask in the young Dane’s enthusiasm and seemingly inexhaustible energy. Most recently he made an appearance at Relative Space in downtown NYC, at a pre-holiday evening organized by designerpages. There, he revealed, among other things, that BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) now has a New York office. While others of his profession lament the lack of work, the leader of BIG is poised to start in on one of his mega-projects in a city crushed by frozen credit.  Michael Holt and Marissa Looby talked to the architect who, among other inventive moves, likes to coin expressions to fit his new ideas, such as “hedonistic sustainability,”  “neighborship,”  “inclusivism”. The interview focuses on BIG’s  “trilogy” of housing complexes in Copenhagen - the VM House, the Mountain House, and the most recent 8House (featured in the December 2010 issue of Metropolis).

The 8 House, by Bjarke Ingels.

Michael Holt: The recently completed 8House is you third project with the same developer in what you label a “trilogy”. Could you explain a little bit about this trilogy of housing complexes?

Bjarke Ingels: The term of trilogy? I think it’s mostly a result of the fact that it is three buildings! All three projects are located in the same new part of town, governed within a questionable master plan. As a result the whole neighborhood is suffering from a sort of dilemma or challenge - a typical tabula rasa modern master plan - how do you impregnate the future city with diversity and identity? The whole master plan was based on a single typology – the perimeter block – which is the sort of archetypical European typology dominating most old European cities. Hence, all three projects try to deal with this idea of how can you wedge as much diversity and surprise and variation into a virgin city and how can you liberate yourself from the tyranny of the perimeter block. Read more…

We listed the Copenhagen Wheel, designed by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, in The Green Vanguard, our A-to-Z list of sustainable design in this month’s issue of Metropolis. The device not only converts a standard bicycle into an electric cruiser, but can also upload information on air and noise pollution, traffic, and road conditions to the rider’s smart phone. And if that were not enough, this new video suggests that the cheerful red wheel hub could have larger implications.

We’ve always known that getting citizens to ride bikes can make the city a greener place. But now, thanks to the Copenhagen Wheel, each bike can be turned into a research tool for urban planners, directly influencing the decisions they make. Cycling to work just became an even smarter idea.

In this month’s issue of Metropolis, Mason Currey wrote about the fantastic story behind Made in Japain, the exhibition of Spanish design at this year’s Tokyo Designer’s Week.

In a bid to make the Japanese see Spain in a new light, the work of big design names like Manolo Blahnik, Jaime Hayón, Lladró, David Delfín, Nani Marquina, Camper , and Pretty Ballerinas y Tous, will be presented with an intriguing conceit. The curators, CuldeSac, claim that in the hoary past, Spain and Japan were one country – Japain – that was torn asunder by shifting tectonic plates. 

In these videos, grandmother Hana explains to 7-year-old Leo why the two nations have so much in common – the secret language of fans, a tradition of floral textiles, and the love of the color red. Read more…

When he was approached by Jack Schreur, the vice president of North American Seating at Herman Miller, Yves Behar finally felt he was ready to take on the “the hardest industrial-design project” – an office chair. The SAYL chair, designed by Behar’s studio Fuse-project, made it to Metropolis’s The Green Vanguard, our A-to-Z list of sustainable design.

At $399, SAYL is one of the least expensive work chairs in the Herman Miller catalog. It appears that Schreur asked Fuse-project to design this chair, not just because they were an excellent design team, but also because of the studio’s specific expertise in developing low-cost solutions like the $100 laptop.

SAYL’s most innovative feature is its 3-D intelligent back, which has different degrees of tension to give each part of your back the support it needs. As opposed to a mesh, or fabric, the back is actually molded in one piece in polyurethane, and it is the geometry of the pattern that gives it its “intelligence.” Here is a rather lovely video of the iterations that Fuse-project created for that pattern: SAYL_back_iterations

With such attention lavished on a single feature, one begins to see why Behar felt that designing an office chair is “the last project a designer should do.” SAYL manages to distinguish itself from the “10,000 chairs out there” because its colorful highlight of a back combines high performance with a subtle hint at poetry.