Hasta La Ideas

Duomo 1992, Missoni. LCP Chaise Lounge. Design by Maarten van Severen.

It should come as no surprise that Kartell Loves Milano. The global headquarters of this Italian furniture company known for their whimsical plastic design icons is headquartered in Milan. Next Tuesday, October 25th, Kartell will be auctioning the 45 one-off pieces they showed at the Kartell Loves Milano exhibition during the Salone del Mobile 2011. The pieces are collaborations between Kartell and a range of creatives from the world of design, fashion, photography literature and entertainment. All proceeds go to the Umberto Veronesi Foundation, dedicated to the advancement of scientific research.

Each piece reads like a love-letter to the city of Milan—Philippe Starck transforms his Ghost Chair with a 1913 map of Milan, Patricia Urquiola painted a silhouette of the Duomo on her Frilly chair, Tokujin Yoshioka painted his Ami Ami chair with a special metallic paint. Check out more pieces for auction after the jump or head to Kartell’s site to bid.

Left: The Ghost of Scala, Philippe Starck. Right: Eureka, Piero Lissoni. Ghost chair. Design by Philippe Starck.

Left: Twin Intertwined Masters, DSquared2. Masters chair. Design by Philippe Starck. Right: Frilly Domm, Patricia Urquiola. Frilly chair. Design by Patricia Urquiola.

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Frost è uno studio grafico australiano di cui ho sentito parlare la prima volta durante le giornate dell’Innovazione Responsabile a Forlì. Lo studio è stato fondato da Vince Frost a Londra ed è poi sbarcato nel nuovissimo continente: ora la sede principale si trova a Sidney e da lavoro a 30 persone. Frost design cura la comunicazione dei suoi clienti su ogni tipo di media, mantenendo un livello di qualità davvero alto.

Osservando lo stile dello studio si riconosce la cultura anglosassone d’origine, e trapela una predilezione per i lavori più commerciali che un blog con un logo come quello di Elmanco non può che apprezzare. Nella pagina di presentazione dello studio, Frost scrive così: “We undestand design. We understand business. But most importantly we understand the business of good design.”

Parole che condivido in pieno. Sono, infatti, convinto che il buon design possa emozionare e stupire rispettando le regole del business, e senza dover scomodare la parola “Arte” per ambiti che non gli appartengono.

In queste pagine ho scelto diversi lavori di Frost, ma nel sito c’è tanto altro materiale. Come ho detto in precedenza lo studio si occupa di ogni possibile applicazione del brand ed ha realizzato persino alcuni allestimenti di interni, come il padiglione che rappresentava l’Australian Institute of Architects alla Biennale di Venezia del 2008.

Tutti gli studenti che aspirano a realizzare buon design dovrebbero desiderare di lavorare in uno studio come questo! Se stai pensando di emigrare in Australia facci un pensierino…

Visitors enter this nursery in northeast France through a curving concrete orifice.

Architects Michel Grasso and Paul Le Quernec designed the nursery, which is located beside a noisy road in the town of Sarreguemines.

The undulating entrance walls lead into a round reception room at the centre of the building.

The rest of the nursery is arranged like a human body cell, with classrooms and playrooms encircling this central nucleus.

Ceiling heights in these surrounding rooms slope down to just over two metres-high to create a comfortable environment for young children.

Rooms around the building’s perimeter open onto sheltered terraces and a surrounding garden.

Other nurseries and kindergartens on Dezeen include one with pyramidal chimneys and another with brightly coloured rotating shutters – see more stories about kindergartens here.

Photography is by the architects, unless otherwise stated.

Here’s a short description of the project from Michel Grasso:

Nursery in Sarreguemines (France)

It’s with a feeling of total freedom that we designed this project. Our first intention was to provide a protective and protected building, for comfort and safety of children, but also for the tranquility of their parents.

Our second intention was to introduce the concept of double standards within the building, the children and adult, because we don’t lose sight that it is primarily children who are the main subject of this institution. Finally, our third purpose was to find a way to modify the perception of the building.

Indeed, the requirements impose a development on the ground floor of the 1350 square meters of the building…

The project was designed as a body cell with its nucleus (the nursery), its cytoplasm (the gardens) and its membrane (the wall closure).

The perception of the nursery is a bush of bamboo with small boxes bringing the light into a building with curved lines.

The project:
1 350 m2
2 400 000 euro

Client: Communauté d’Agglomération Sarreguemines Confluences
Architects: Paul Le Quernec & Michel Grasso

See also:

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Tellus Nursery School by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter	Kindergarten Kekec by Arhitektura Jure Kotnik	Fagerborg Kindergarten by RRA

Alphabetize your vice with this sinful set of dictionaries

Naughty Deadly Dictionaries, based on the Seven Deadly Sins. Jennifer Wood has compiled the collection to elucidate gluttony, wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, and envy—each given its own cloth-bound reference tome with the look and feel of an antique. Consider it a portable, curated distillation of the Oxford English Dictionary that you don’t need a magnifying glass to read. These books may not make you good, but they will teach you the proper lexicon for being bad.

We got to sample Gluttony: A Dictionary for the Indulgent here at Cool Hunting, and after a coincidental deep-fried office lunch, picked our favorite entries. Interspersed throughout the definitions are quotations from famous rhetoricians, weighing in on the sin at hand. Benjamin Franklin reflects on the vice of gluttony (and, unwittingly, the obesity epidemic) when he writes, “In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.” Best of all, this handy guide arms us with a host of ways to call out our portly pals—or chow hounds, gourmands, sybarites, trenchermen and wastrels, as we now call them.

The Deadly Dictionaries are gift-ready this holiday season, so go ahead and indulge the eloquent sinner in your life on Amazon.

Knoll, known for workplace furnishings, kicked-off National Design Week in New York City last week with an exhibition showcasing office furniture through the ages and an exclusive panel where Cara McCarty, curator of the Cooper Hewitt, discussed the future of design with Masamichi Udagawa + Sigi Moeslinger (Antenna Design) and Lee Mindel (Shelton, Mindel & Associates).

The event—inspired by Knoll’s win of the Corporate & Institutional Achievement Award earlier this year—drew a large crowd who came to hear about the future of design from current and past winners of the National Design Award at the Knoll showroom. The panelists touched upon the roles that human behavior and user experience play in defining the design process and how design affects quality of life, which is a tenet of the National Design Awards. In this, Masamichi Udagawa + Sigi Moeslinger of Antenna Design delved into their work with the MTA (in designing Metrocard machines and even subway cars)—thus providing plenty of humorous anecdotes about how the machines succeeded their work with Las Vegas slots.

The exhibition highlighted key decades, harnessing the look of the 1960s (the era of the Mad Men) by featuring pieces like the 1961 Executive Table Desk by Florence Knoll, the 1963 Pollock Chair, and the 1950 Desk Lamp by Clay Michie. It concluded with the modern day office of featuring 2011 Antenna Workspaces and the Generation by Knoll chair by Formway.

While Knoll is known for its iconic furniture pieces, its ability to consider and plan for evolving times is a large part of its award-winning success.

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