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…
Design activism is ontherise. The most recent and public expression of this movement can be examined at New York’s Center for Architecture. Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Saving Modern Landmarks recently opened to large crowds and runs through May 1. It chronicles efforts taken to save, or try to save, Modern architecture’s significant buildings. For me, the most inspiring of these initiatives is the ADGB Trade Union School (left), built in 1930 in Bernau, Germany, by architects Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer. (Meyer, you may recall from your history class, was the second director of the world-shaping Bauhaus design school where Wittwer was an instructor.) The activists in this case began working together in 2001, creating the kind of positive and sustained energy such efforts demand. Local government, business, and academia participated in devising a competition to save and restore the building. Now it’s not only a great place to learn, but a resource for the community as well as an inspiring case study for scholars and architects wanting to know more about the living, breathing buildings of the early Modernists.
Sadly, the record for saving Modernist masterpieces remains spotty. One of the most distressing losses to the cause is Paul Rudolph’s Riverview High School, built in Sarasota, Florida, in 1958 and demolished to make way for a parking lot in 2009. Our film, Site Specific: The Legacy of Regional Modernism (below) was chosen by the curators to be part of the show at the Center. It tells the story of innovative design followed by a willful resistance to new ideas and benign neglect. Though the local and international community of architects mounted a strong campaign to save Riverview—they convinced the World Monuments Fund to put it on its most endangered list—the building was in such bad condition that it was impossible for the school board and the public alike to imagine its rebirth, even though at least one proposed renovation scheme had great potential for bringing Rudolph’s design into the 21st century and creating a smart asset for the community.
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…
The Tata Nano, on display now through April at the Cooper-Hewitt, looks a lot like a Smart Car, though it’s sold for about a fifth of the price. The Nano is billed as “the People’s Car,” mostly because it retails for around $2,500, and while it’s currently designed, built, and marketed exclusively in India, Tata expects to roll out versions for the European market as early as 2011. It’s likely that the versions of the Nano sold in Europe, and eventually in America, will look more like the car displayed at the Cooper-Hewitt than the ones that have become popular in India; the yellow Nano in the museum’s lobby is the LX version, an upgraded model that has retained many of the features—air conditioning, leather seats, a music system—that were jettisoned to keep down costs in the original. The luxury version is still relatively bare-bones, but a fuel economy of around 54 mpg might make the Nano attractive even to skeptical American consumers.
Sargasso Cloud, by Philip Beesley, is a room-sized sculptural environment produced by students during a two-week summer workshop in Denmark. Photo: Terri Peters
Timed to coincide with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this month, the exhibition Climate and Architecture aims to relate architecture and sustainability to the larger context of climate. This is a daunting task, and, fortunately, the exhibition takes a uniquely personal approach. Rather than presenting alarming statistics or a selection of green projects, it invites visitors inside to see, hear, and feel climate variations for themselves. The show asks, “Does architecture have the power to make you feel different? How does a building’s interior ‘climate’ relate to our own bodies and to the world around us?” Read more…
Three years ago, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) expanded into a titanium-clad addition by Daniel Libeskind, which, typical of the architect, features a dramatic series of jagged outcroppings and angular interiors. The new building has quickly become a symbol of the Mile High City, but a number of critics have balked at its asymmetrical galleries, arguing that they are poor spaces in which to display art. Now the DAM is confronting those criticisms with an exhibition, opening tomorrow, titled Embrace! The show’s curator, Christoph Heinrich—who was recently named the museum’s new director—invited 17 artists from around the world to, yes, embrace the museum’s unique design and use the architecture itself as a canvas for their work. Here’s a look at what several of the artists came up with. Read more…
Walking up Chapel Street, in downtown New Haven, an uncannily familiar form becomes visible inside the large windows of Paul Rudolph Hall. There is a massive yellow curve, illuminated like a neon billboard, and it isn’t until you pass directly beneath the entrance to the building that you realize you are looking at a full-scale McDonald’s golden arch. People gather on the sidewalk and stare in confusion. An adjacent poster offers clarification: What We Learned, a new exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture, returns Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and their legendary 1968 Las Vegas studio to Yale for a much-anticipated 40-year reunion. Read more…
The parking garage is the Rodney Dangerfield of building types, the troubled snag in the urban fabric, the Gordian Knot of design. But for all the ugly-red-haired-stepchild car parks of the world and the many generic, bunker-like auto warehouses, there are also stunning examples of man-and-machine triumph that incorporate both function and aesthetics. And they are about to be celebrated in an exhibition that opens tomorrow at the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C.
Based on the book The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Formby Shannon Sanders McDonald (Urban Land Institute, 2008),the show highlights the driving designs of such standout architects as Santiago Calatrava, Louis Kahn, and Eric Owen Moss, among others, and plumbs the building type’s history. Originally adapted from the design of stables, early garages offered a similar kind of “curry” service: You could get your car gassed, tuned up, and washed while it was parked. The future of parking brings some of the same, with plans for “smart” garages where you can get your electric car charged inside a building that sports environmentally friendly features like solar panels, green roofs, and (in something of an ecological irony) LEED certification.
If McDonald’s exhaustive tome isn’t enough, you can always check out Simon Henley’s The Architecture of Parking(Thames & Hudson, 2007), which, in addition to using case studies to discuss design theory, delves into how the auto garage has influenced the designs of such buildings as the Mercedes-Benz Museum by UNStudio, as well as designs by Rem Koolhaas, David Chipperfield, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.
John Ruppert’s Orb, on the grounds of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Ruppert’s sculpture helped earn him a prestigious Mary Sawyer’s Baker Prize this spring. All photos by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson unless otherwise noted.
When you see John Ruppert’sOrb from a distance, it looks as though a large soap bubble has floated to a landing. Draw closer and you realize that the seemingly delicate sphere is, in fact, fabricated from industrial chain link. Read more…
Show, published by Glitterati, is slated for release at the end of June. Right: Mannequins produced by Pucci with Darr clothing and a Ruben Toledo mobile. Photos: courtesy Ralph Pucci International
Ralph Pucci Show, due out at the end of this month, presents a retrospective of the past fifteen years of work from Ralph Pucci International, the New York–based exhibitor and seller of furniture, lighting, and fine-art pieces. Pucci himself took an active role in putting together the book—rewriting the introduction when he didn’t like an earlier draft and insisting on an economical use of text—which may explain why his vision for the gallery is so apparent in the new publication. Read more…
Design activism is 
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 
Three years ago, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) expanded into 
Blog feed
Newsletter
Twitter
BACK TO TOP
