Reference Page: March 2010

Unusual Activity

If you think their designs for Whistler are wild, wait until you hear what Sarah Gluck and Robyne Kassen did while they were students at Pratt Institute. For one project, they created Sam the Maintenance Guy, a “special needs” doll with a coiled, limbless body, and they imagined him navigating a financial-district high-rise through its HVAC system. Such exploration could easily have led them down a dystopian path, but their ideas about “the body driving space” took a more upbeat course. In 2006 the Boston chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded Kassen a grant that allowed them to map the movements of subjects wearing motion-capture suits and to create surfaces that stimulate healthy movement. The rest is Olympic history. Check out all of Gluck and Kassen’s work at www.urbanmovementdesign.com.

The Avatar Age

This month we learn that Metropolis’s contributing editor Karrie Jacobs loves Grand Theft Auto. Yes, the M-rated video game (for a “mature,” over-17 audience only) is full of intense violence and explicit sexual content. But what Jacobs really likes is the design, and it is indeed stunning. Go to www.rockstargames
.com/IV to explore Liberty City, with its diners, Albanian gangsters, junkies, and … law firms. It is all very much like the Big Apple. You can compare Liberty City buildings with their New York City inspirations here.

The Cost of Convenience

Thomas Thwaites, an RCA graduate, has meticulously documented his nine-month-long toaster-construction project at www.thetoasterproject.org. You can watch him explore an iron mine and build a homemade smelting furnace. But maybe you’d rather see Thwaites in Rotterdam as he presents his toaster at a design show. He is working on a book about the toaster. Thwaites wants to show that “the real cost of objects is hidden” and to question the idea “that having more stuff more cheaply is better.” Online comments about his work range from admiration (“They should teach this in schools!”) to outrage and mockery (“It just kind of seems like you wanted to make a reality miniseries about yourself”). There’s more at Dezeen.