Metropolis Magazine - Metropolis Magazine March 2011
You Look Worn-Out
A Belgian collective examines how architectural materials degrade as they age.
Making Do
A new exhibition touts the ingenious resourcefulness of Indian design. But is jugaad good urbanism?
Triple Threat
The Masters chair combines the silhouettes of classic seats by Saarinen, Eames, and Jacobsen.
Site Visits
Two intrepid designers add their experience to our understanding of interiors.
Prep School
A scrappy little organization in downtown Los Angeles provides an alternative path into top architecture schools.
Bookshelf
Notable new releases on contemporary architecture, design, and culture.
Made in the U.S.A.?
A new exhibition on the American factory asks some provocative questions about the future.
The Total Package
Grimshaw Industrial Design creates a seamless interface between the building and its users.
Blazing Saddles
A Norwegian firm’s rigorously engineered mobility aids are designed to excite and empower disabled children.
The Art of the Fold
The fashion designer Issey Miyake continues his career-long fascination with the essence of clothes.
Material Mimicry
Faux design is in demand. With advances in reproductive-image technologies, workhorse materials like porcelain tile and furniture upholstery can now adopt the look of wood, glass, oxidized metal, and natural fibers. Delicate-looking materials prove durable and easy to clean, and severe-looking seating is unexpectedly plush. Here are six products with surprising trompe l’oeil effects.
Mission-Driven
Leddy Maytum Stacy’s new Ed Roberts Campus epitomizes the firm’s commitment to socially relevant design.
Small Wonder
Rem Koolhaas and Clément Blanchet outfit a tiny Parisian bistro
with marble, mirrors, and a hint of Hellenistic architecture.
One for the Road
Norman Foster and a team of auto restorers finally realize a roadworthy version of Buckminster Fuller’s legendary (and legendarily flawed) Dymaxion Car.
Shelf Life
The medicine cabinet is a highly useful invention, but it has seen few innovations since man first thought to stash his Band-Aids and prescription- drug bottles behind the bathroom mirror. That finally changed, however, at January’s Maison et Objet, in Paris, where the German manufacturer Authentics exhibited a new line of bathroom accessories by the London design studio Doshi Levien….
American Progress
Seven of our leading young product designers reveal how they’re conquering the tricky global marketplace.
Ones to Watch
WEB www.newschool.edu/parsons www.tagheuer.com Here’s a good lesson for aspiring designers: get used to making things that you will probably never be able to afford. But that was hardly the only real-world lesson to come out of a recent collaboration between Parsons the New School for Design and Tag Heuer, the Swiss manufacturer of luxury watches. Last fall, junior product-design students…
Amy Lau
The interior designer talks about trailblazing mentors, Greek cave houses, and the glories of tequila.
Ecology and Commerce, Revisited
Paul Hawken on what has and hasn’t changed since he first challenged business to embrace environmentalism
Clever Kitchens, Brilliant Bathrooms
This year’s best new products for the two most important rooms in the house
