Hasta La Ideas

Feathers fly around this 15 metre-long tank installed by Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.

Called The Snow, the installation is part of an exhibition called Sensing Nature that continues until 7 November.

See all our stories about Tokujin Yoshioka »

Here’s some more information from Yoshioka:

In recent years, I have been studying the essence that human beings would sense. It is neither arranging nor minimizing the forms, but integrating the phenomena and the low of the nature into the design, and see how it would affect and inspire ourselves.

Because I believe there is a hint for the future somewhere in-between the essence of the design and the nature, I would like to pursue designing works with this aspect.

The Snow is a 15-meter-wide dynamic installation. Seeing the hundreds kilograms of light feather blown all over and falling down slowly, the memory of the snowscape would lie within people’s heart would be bubbled up.

This work would show unimaginable beauty by capturing the irregular movement of the nature. This is designed after the installation in 1997 that expressed the “snow” by the concept of the color “white”.

The material is feather, which I believe is the lightest material of the present day.

The snowscape created with the feather would be more like the memory of snow lying with people rather than the actual snow.

The theme of the exhibition is to rethink the Japanese perception of nature, which is to question how the unconscious power to sense the nature and the value of nature in Japan would affect the contemporary art and design.

I do not really know about the value of nature in Japan, but what I would like to do is not to reproduce the nature but to know how human senses function when experiencing nature.

The most beautiful things I believe in this world is what is irreproducible, accidentally born, and disorder that cannot be understood by the theory. I believe the nature is the ultimate beauty in this world.

The sunlight, soft breeze, and the harmony that leaves create, the variety of the essence in the nature touches our emotions. I intend not to reproduce them, but to pick the element that inspires our heart and integrate it into the deign.

Sensing Nature
Place: Mori Art Museum
Date: 2010. July 24.~ November 7.
Tokujin Yoshioka Design

See also:

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Rainbow Church by Tokujin Yoshioka	Snowflake by Tokujin Yoshioka	All our stories about Tokujin Yoshioka

In this movie made to coincide with the Design Museum’s Sustainable Futures exhibition, exhibitors at London graduate show New Designers talk about their views on green design.

Can’t see the movie? Click here

The video features an interview with designer Sophie Thomas from the Design Museum’s advisory board, plus graduate designers Sebastian Cox, Tortie Hoare, Rich Pearson, Tom Broadbent, Jade Folawiyo, Andy Dunn and Tom McKeown.

The Sustainable Futures exhibition continues at the Design Museum until 5 September. More information and a guided tour of the exhibition in our podcast for the museum.

New Designers Part 2 took place 8-11 July. Read our earlier story about the New Designers 2010 Part 2 Awards winners here.

See all our stories about this year’s graduate shows »
Watch all our movies »

Here’s some info from the Design Museum:

The Design Museum went to New Designers in search of sustainable design.

The Design Museum’s current exhibition Sustainable Futures is a survey of the most important sustainable design projects around, so we wanted to find out what’s next on the horizon. We wanted to find out people were using sustainable ideas in their work. Sophie Thomas, of thomas.matthews, who was part of the advisory committee for the exhibition, gave a talk at New Designers on sustainable design.

Graphic designer and BMX rider and enthusiast Johann Chan approached Seb Lester to create the graphics for a bike frame he’s designed for bike company Emer Bicycles – the Emer Swift. Here are some photos of the frame and decals – and also some shots of the bike fully made up and ready to roll…

“It’s a 24inch cruiser with modern BMX geometry,” explains Chan of the bike frame’s design. “The geometry puts the rider in the same riding position as a modern BMX, but it runs large 24 inch, skinny wheels and high set gearing for a faster ride.”

Of the commission, Lester explains: “I was contacted earlier this year about designing the graphics for a new BMX 
frame, designed by Emer Bicycles. BMX was a big part of my life for the best 
part of ten years, and I still follow the scene, so I was really pleased to help out. Emer said they wanted a logo that conveyed speed and dynamic energy, as that’s 
what the bike is all about. It’s a very light and fast cruiser with 24” wheels and modern BMX geometry. It seemed like a strong idea to make the letters out
of the swooping flight path of a Swift with the inline treatment accentuating 
movement as well. The lettering style developed is a very modern, cursive, 
flourished script. Emer wanted the logo to look strong and robust, like the frame, so it’s got 
a solidly constructed feel to it without looking clunky.

“The logo took shape quickly,” Lester continues. “I always start with very loose spontaneous pen and paper sketches as it’s the quickest 
way to get ideas down. Once roughs were approved (some of his sketches shown below) I went about drawing the vector outlines.
I’m pleased with the results. Emer seem to be too – they’ve produced
 a small run of tshirts, screen printed with the logo in a metallic 
gold ink, which look excellent.”

Whilst Seb Lester’s lettering style might be recognisable to many readers of the CR blog, we’d imagine that hardly any of you know that Lester used to ride freestyle BMX back in the 80s. Chan interviews Lester about those glory days on the Emer Swift website – which includes a photo of Lester performing a bar ride (standing on the handlebars) during a 1989 flatland competition:

Says Lester in that interview: “In [both] my line of work and BMX you have to be highly focused and patient to progress. So to some extent I think I learnt about the rewards of single minded focus and hard work from BMX.”

emerbicycles.com/

seblester.co.uk/

A very miscellaneous collection of all-things-green here, so let’s just jump right in. First comes an announcement from the hotel chain Marriott that they’ve developed a new prototype for future building projects with full LEED certification. Working with the U.S. Green Building Council, the company plans to have 300 LEED-certified hotels by 2015, with this first using this prototype completed by 2012 in a suburb of Charleston, South Carolina. Less positive greening news comes in this story from the University of Kansas’ School of Architecture, Design and Planning, where students worked on a long-term project building impressive, energy efficient, LEED platinum homes in the Kansas City area, only to see them continue to sit on the market for months, unsold. Says the professor at the head of the project, “…many people ‘talk the talk’ about sustainability, but don’t want to pay a bit more for it.” Last, the Chicago Tribune‘s Blair Kamin finally decided that he could sit quietly no longer and had to respond to the much-discussed “World Architecture Survey” published recently by Vanity Fair. Initially ignoring the piece because he’d found it “a pretty harmless, attention-getting device,” he then heard one of the authors of the Survey’s connecting essays, Matt Tyrnauer, talking to NPR about why no green buildings made it on to the list. “These buildings in general don’t look so hot because they have to do a lot of things that buildings traditionally never did,” said Trynauer in the interview. This was Kamin’s breaking point and he files this great response, bringing out Renzo Piano‘s California Academy of Sciences building and Jeanne Gang‘s Aqua along the way to prove that the writer’s comment was more than a bit foolish.

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