Hasta La Ideas

Designer Tomáš Gabzdil Libertiny of Studio Libertiny has created The Bic Blue Cabinet, which is coated with the ink used in disposable Bic Cristal ballpoint pens.

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Following their collaboration with Threadless back in November, our friends at the Rhode Island School of Design dropped us a line to let us know about their most recent project: designing cardigans for Gap. The clothing retailer asked the school to come up with something new and interesting to do for a limited-edition run, giving a very open guideline of just “keep them wearable.” So the students and faculty got together, used materials like beads made from recycled paper, vintage lace, and something called tulle (which we had to look up — turns out it’s a kind of “lightweight, very fine netting”). In the end, Gap has produced a small collection of their designs, thirty in total, and have put them up for sale at just their location in New York at 54th and 5th Ave. They were nice enough to pass along a couple of photos of the whole process, which you’ll find here and after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

Day two of Cape Town’s Design Indaba began very promisingly, with a demonstration of the best that South African animation has to offer. Jannes Hendrikz and Markus Smit from The Black Heart Gang showed their beautiful 2006 short film, The Tale of How. The Black Heart Gang are interesting in that they’re just a trio comprised of a video-maker, an illustrator, and a writer/musician and that, between them, have produced such well-crafted and involving work…

The BHG have also produced a series of 13 prints based on scenes from the film (which was originally written as a poem by Smit). The success of The Tale of How led them onto a similarly sea-bound spot for United airlines, in which a lobster conducts an animal orchestra.

Next up was Commonwealth, the Brooklyn-based studio formed by husband and wife David Boira and Zoë Boira-Coombes.

Impossible to pigeon-hole, these architecturally-trained designers have been responsible for making, or collaborating in producing, all manner of objects where the process of creation often mixes cutting edge technologies with traditional craft.

One of a pair of masks made in SLA photoresin and horse hair, for a collaborative project with Timothy Saccenti

Furniture is key to them, but they’ve turned their hand (and in some cases their studio-based three axis CNC mill) to a range of work: from record sleeves for Warp, vases with Josh Davis designs, bronze door handles to, most recently, a pair of bright green masks, complete with hand-plugged horse hair.

Boira’s father was an artist and in a revealing diptych, a picture of Boira Snr showed him working on a large canvas; clearly an important echo from the past as, twenty years later, a photo of the younger Boira showed him adopting a similar pose as he got to work on a Commonwealth project.

Indeed, for all their contemporary technical know-how (which is vast) and mastery of materials, the pair reveal an innate love of making things.

Morfina door handles, in bronze

They often use animation tools to instigate the design of a project – as in their Fleshless Floor created for a NYC gallery space – but the end result, in this case, also relies on the natural beauty of layered wood and a particular finishing technique that makes the surface look like skin.

Boira-Coombes put it nicely when she said that, for Commonwealth, the “technological tools have given us a change to engage with the traditional processes. They’re a mode for translating your ideas better.”

Table from Commonwealth’s Lard Series

The studio also challenged the ideas of exterior/interior relationships via a beautiful table and bureau set, that reveals a luxurious, wet-looking, sensual area within each sliding drawer; adding an intimacy to an otherwise minimally designed exterior.

“We sometimes don’t know how to control the things we work with,” said Boira-Coombes, “our best work could be in 20 years. We really don’t know what’s coming.” Whatever is, it’s undoubtedly going to be exciting.

From London, interiors, furniture and product designers BarberOsgerby gave a run through of their working process and induced the first collective “ahhhhh” from the audience when they revealed the final outcome of their Iris Table project for Established & Sons on the big Indaba screen:

Blue Iris Table by BarberOsgerby

Each striped segment is a piece of anodised aluminum. It’s heavy and much, much bigger than it looks in this picture (about four feet across at a guess?). I think the BarberOsgerby boys have collected a fair few new fans in Cape Town.

Dai Fujiwara, creative director of Issey Miyake proved to be an inspired choice for the Indaba line-up.

He explained the genesis of the A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) concept and the intrinsic ‘flatness’ of fabric that, in the creation of a garment, becomes three-dimensional. The A-POC idea is centred around interactivity, with the consumer cutting out a shape for an item of clothing from two pieces of material.

The notion of “hidden stories” also permeated Fujiwara’s accounts of the research processes that go on at the Japanese studio. Color Hunting is one such example.

Image: Giovanni Giononni

Fujiwara showed a film of his trip to the Amazon jungle to research the specific colour palette of the environment, to be used in a collection. His team were shown matching colour swatches to giant leaves, tree trunks, flowers and, bizarrely, the river itself.

While such a project certainly raised a few knowing eyebrows, it seemed that – pretentions aside – this was more about the vision of someone determined enough to carry an initial concept through to its conclusion.

Indeed, writing off Fujiwara’s Amazonian Color Hunting as a frivolous exercise was by the by.

What proved interesting was that, rather than one leaf being much the same colour as another, the meticulous colour comparisons revealed a range of “weak greens”, of light beige and, when it came to matching the colour of the river, among the light browns and greys, a hitherto undetected peach tone emerged. Back in the studio the assembled colours looked great and knowing how they were related to one another added something quite special to the work.

A priceless stud hanging from your wrist and some priceless stones hanging from your heavenly-constructed head could only mean one thing: you’re Angelina Jolie. While it may be difficult to nab a studly look-a-like like Brad Pitt, one fashion must-have can be mimicked. As if an appearance by the Brangelina duo at the Academy Awards wasn’t enough to turn heads, Angelina stole the red-carpet with a bit of ear candy: her 115 carat Lorraine Schwartz Colombian emerald drop earrings that have been estimated to be valued in the high millions of dollars. The boldly shaped and colored jewels peeking out from her long flowing hair formed a fashion statement that will be remembered for many Oscar nights to come. Her already elegant look, premised with a premium choice black Elie Saab gown, was brought to a whole new level of movie-star mogul-dom with the pair of deep, piercing green gemstones- plain-jane black never looked quite so, uh, un-plain. Click the slideshow to see some style picks that follow Jolie’s jewelry look at prices that are … less than millions.
Photo credit: PR Photos

Architects Oyler Wu Collaborative have designed a moving, ceiling-mounted installation for the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design in Los Angeles, USA. (more…)