Hasta La Ideas

pIn an unusual departure from industry practices, A HREF=”http://www.autoblog.com/2010/08/30/mazda-shinari-concept-debuts-new-face-of-the-brand-in-style/” Autoblog was invited out to Milan/A to see Mazda’s new Shinari concept car, rather than having to wait to see it at an auto show. Check it out:/p

pimg alt=”0shinari.jpg” src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/0shinari.jpg” width=”468″ height=”311″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” //p

pMy initial impressions of the car were of confusion. I’m used to seeing clean, well-integrated designs from Mazda, whether it’s their 3 series, the venerable Miata or even their racier RX-8, but this one recalls some of Hyundai’s early styling missteps in muscle car territory, i.e. the Tiburon. I realize that most cars these days are designed by committee, but I’ve always felt the best designs have one powerfully talented designer overseeing the process and instilling a design consistency, but this one just seems all over the map./pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/mazdas_new_designed-by-committee_concept_car_leaves_me_confused_17275.asp”(more…)/a
pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/MZh201EasVYgyfdKsshOWhIgaQ0/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/MZh201EasVYgyfdKsshOWhIgaQ0/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/
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Venice Architecture Biennale 2010: a blue-foam model city is suspended in the top half of the Dutch pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Entitled Vacant NL, the installation curated by Rietveld Landscape aims to highlight the potential of temporarily vacant government space for use by creative enterprises.

Visitors enter on the empty ground floor while the models are suspended on wires overhead.

Ascending to the mezzanine reveals the cityscape from above and a drawing created with threads and pins.

See all our stories about Venice Architecture Biennale 2010»

Top image is copyright Rob ‘t Hart.

Here’s some more information from the Netherlands Architecture Institute:

Thousands of buildings in the Netherlands lie vacant. Some of them for a week or a few months, many even for years. During the twelfth Venice Architecture Biennale, the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) and Rietveld Landscape will highlight the huge potential of all that temporarily unoccupied space in making the Netherlands one of the top-five knowledge economies in the world. The exhibition Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas is a call for the intelligent reuse of temporarily vacant buildings around the world in promoting creative enterprise. The Venice Architecture Biennale takes place from 29 August 29 to 21 November 2010.

Built in 1954, the Dutch Pavilion on the biennale grounds in Venice has been empty for over 39 years. After all, it is in use for just three months each year. That makes it one of the thousands of unoccupied government buildings on Dutch soil. Rietveld Landscape, the office appointed by the NAI to curate the Dutch presentation in Venice, decided to emphasize the vacancy of the pavilion during the architecture biennale. The experience of the empty space will sink into visitors, and only then will they discover the hidden installation.

Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas is not only an appeal to creative talents to exploit the value hidden in society but also unsolicited advice to countries who want to advance up the table of global knowledge economies but don’t know where they can find the hidden strengths. The transition to a creative knowledge economy demands specific spatial conditions. Offering young talents from the creative, technology and science sectors an affordable place where they can share their knowledge, creativity and networks is a way of promoting mutual influences, enterprise and innovation. Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas shows how architecture can contribute to tackling major social problems. The exhibition is therefore fully in line with the NAI innovation agenda called Architecture of Consequence.

Project team

Curator Rietveld Landscape worked with a multidisciplinary team on the exhibition design. The team consists of Jurgen Bey (designer), Joost Grootens (graphic designer), Ronald Rietveld (landscape architect), Erik Rietveld (philosopher/economist), Saskia van Stein (NAI curator), Barbara Visser (visual artist).

Twelfth edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale

This year the artistic direction of the Venice Architecture Biennale is in the hands of the Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima (SANAA). The overarching theme is People meet in architecture, in which Sejima raises the question of the quality of architecture in relation to society.

The Dutch entry will be presented by the Netherlands Architecture Institute on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

See also:

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Canadian pavilion by Philip Beesley	Villa Frankenstein by muf architecture/art	Polish pavilion at Venice 2010

For those having to face the unfortunate task of going to a car dealership in the new future to buy a new automobile, you might have a few seconds spared from the impossibly dull and endless process by looking at the nifty new designs for the fuel economy labels stuck there on the windows. The Environmental Protection Agency, along with the Department of Transportation, have rolled out two new designs for the signs, which indicate the fuel efficiency of a particular make and model. Our favorite, Label Option 1, features a big, bold letter, showing off the ranking the car receives on a scale from A to D, hybrid to SUV/sports car respectively. Label Option 2 looks fairly similar to what’s out there now, though cleaned up and looking much nicer than before. Both agencies are looking for public input before they put either into mass circulation, so if you feel strongly either way, here’s your chance to be a true patriot.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New from Redstone Press comes this lovingly produced Inkblot Test complete with 12 cards. As a sceptical sort, I was eager to see if the blots could get the measure of me…

In addition to the series of colourful freeform blots and the accompanying booklet of interpretations, there’s also great essay on the history of the blobby medium by writer and journalist Will Hobson.

Far from ramming home the validity of Hermann Rorschach’s psychological tests, Hobson acknowledges the ridicule that the visual experiments have often brought since first used in the 1940s and 50s, and how it is now perhaps in art rather than in science that the inkblots live on as “catnip to the imagination”.

The opening paragraph to the Short History of Inkblots essay, for example, begins with this funny Andy Warhol story.

“When Andy Warhol showed his series of Rorschach paintings in 1984, he claimed he’d been confused about what the Rorschach test involved while he was making them. He thought the person taking the test – him in this case – had to create his or her own inkblots, which a psychologist would then analyse. If he had known better, he said, he would have just copied Rorschach’s ten standard inkblots.”

The basic Redstone Inkblot Test is simple: just look through the series of 12 inkblots and select the three that you’re most drawn to. From this group, choose your favourite, turn it over and see if what you saw in the image is in the list provided.

This will, apparently, feed into the overall personality profile of the particular inkblot. The handbook then provides more detail on the profile and what it says about you.

Suffice to say that on picking my favourite blot and duly flipping it over for the definition, I’m informed that there appears to be some kind of “ascerbic struggle going on under the surface”. So watch out.

More details on the Redstone Press Inkblot Test at redstonepress.co.uk. It’s available from the Redstone Shop from tomorrow (£11.95).