Hasta La Ideas

Store Designer / BIM
Specialized Bicycle Components
Morgan Hill, California

Specialized Bicycle Components—innovative, world-class, designers of bicycles and equipment for discerning riders—is looking for a motivated, thorough, ArchiCAD professional with retail or commercial environment design experience. The Store Designer/BIM is the lead individual, responsible for translating the Specialized Store Style Guide, for global and US markets, and for upholding the excellent brand standards through creating store design that manifests the Specialized quality and experience.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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Voici le studio basé à Nagoya Stands Architects qui a pensé cette résidence privée “House O” dans la préfecture de Mie au Japon. Avec un design très transparent et minimaliste, cette superbe structure est à découvrir en visuels dans la suite de l’article.

Previously on Fubiz

• Toda House
• Basque Culinary Center
• Ty Hedfan House

Copyright Fubiz™ – Suivez nous sur Twitter et Facebook

As the year starts to wind down, I start dreaming about all the things that I’d like to do in the following year. At that point, the new year exists in the future as an ideal, a fantasy… In my mind, I say, “In the new year, I’ll have more time to do X, Y and Z. In the new year, I’ll have systems A, B and C in place to ease my workload.” It’s a soothing thought to think that the new year will bring a fresh start, a clean slate. Especially at such a busy time for my business—with managing the surge in Christmas orders and subscriptions, there’s also a magazine to edit and design and get to the printer before the holidays. 

This November, I thought I was on my way to getting the X, Y and Z and the A, B and C set up. After considerable thought, planning and diligence, I hired a full time employee. Despite best efforts by all concerned, the person just wasn’t working out and I had to let them go (a few weeks before Christmas! I felt like such a Grinch!!) So rather than ending 2011 with some help and light at the end of the work tunnel, I was going solo once again: editing, designing, shipping, database entry, subscription management… The equivalent of at least two full time jobs in a part-time schedule (I stay at home with my toddler in the mornings). 

And so here is the first of January. (So soon! How did that happen?) The season of resolutions and best intentions. And now begins the really hard work: figuring out how to achieve the ideal. I suspect it is going to take the rest of 2012 to get there.

*   *   *

A FEW CREATIVE RESOLUTIONS

• improve my handwriting! I have so limited time that when I write anything by hand, my thoughts rush faster than I can write (emailing and typing on the keyboard are the culprits) and my scrawl is just awful. I resolve to make time to slow down, breathe, write and appreciate pen on paper. I will be posting handwritten blog posts as often as I can muster. I suspect that there are many of you who share my desire to improve your handwriting. I invite you to join me in pen posting! Leave a comment if you’d like to join me on this quest.

• more online content. I have no shortage of content to share, but the blog has necessarily had to be ignored at times. I’d like to get back into regular posting as well as sharing more behind the scenes of the magazine process and supplemental content to each new issue. (The bigger project here is a complete revamp of all of my online assets.)

…and of course, more great content for the magazine and future book projects to be announced! 

Happy new year to one and all.

The latest collection by London designer Philippe Malouin combines concrete with a complex brass grid.

An extension of his earlier Gridlock project, the pieces are made entirely by hand.

The new work is on show at NextLevel Galerie in Paris until 14 January.

See all our stories about Philippe Malouin here.

Photographs are by Alexandra B.

Here are some more details from Malouin:

NextLevel Galerie, Paris, on show until January 14th 2012
Foreword by Will Wiles.

Brutalism’s name is a gift to its detractors. It conjures architecture that is somehow brutish: buildings that are aggressive and inhumane. The stark, primal forms of brutalist architecture and its rough, unadorned surfaces don’t immediately help dispel this impression. But brutalism is possibly the most sensual architectural style there is – or at least the most tactile, the most attuned to touch and feeling. Its raw, exposed concrete surfaces – the béton brut that first gave the style its name – invite touch. Your touch is rewarded with a surprising variety of textures from a that is so often derided as sombre and monotone. Poured, it can be as smooth, dense and cool as marble. Or it can take on the surface qualities of whatever formwork is used to shape it. I remember first seeing the wood grain on the shuttered concrete of the National Theatre in London – my first instinct was to run my fingertips across it.

This same invitation to touch applies to the concrete surfaces that are the new addition to Philippe Malouin’s Gridlock range of furniture. Concrete has been used for furniture before, most famously Ron Arad’s Concrete Stereo. But Arad’s stereo was post-modern, post-industrial kitsch, exaggerating its own weight, cracking under it to reveal the rusting rebar underneath. Gridlock revels in its modernism, and with the glittering lattices that are the material heart of the range, the concrete is rendered almost weightless.

It’s still the brassy grid that takes the eye, of course – in the light scattering through the structure of the Svetko chandelier, an inverted pyramid like Stefan Svetko’s office for Slovak radio in Bratislava, and in the intriguing moire patterns that gather in the depths of the supports of the Scapa desk. But what the addition of the concrete slabs brings is this touch, a tactility that the materially sparing grid itself never quite had.

The way the grids express large architectural volumes with minimal matter makes it clear why they appealed so much to the utopian designers of the 20th century – architects and engineers such as Buckminster Fuller, Cedric Price and Yona Friedman. With space frames and geodesic domes, these designers took the modular, repeatable nature of metal framed structures and extended them outwards to their logical conclusion, proposing vast, city-enclosing megastructures. The addition of the concrete surfaces also makes the range’s debt to the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s more obvious. It’s an entirely conscious aesthetic strategy – and it’s partly autobiographical. Malouin was born in Montreal, Canada, but lives and works in London. Both cities have particularly fine collections of modernist and brutalist architecture, and it’s this shared heritage that Malouin wanted to emphasise. As preparation for the new Gridlock series, Malouin toured London’s brutalist highlights with studio colleague Will Yates, lingering particularly at the Barbican Centre and the Golden Lane Estate, the closest the city has to a fully developed megastructure. the curved lip of the Barbican balconies can be seen at the edge of the Powell shelves, which take their name from one of the centre’s architects, Geoffrey Powell of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.

But while Gridlock feels industrial – in its straightforward, platonic forms and the repetitive efficiency of the grid – it is in fact assembled entirely by hand. Malouin’s tribute to the industry-inspired, labour-saving dreams of modernism is paid for in toil. This paradox appeals to the designer – he likes things that are handmade that don’t look handmade, such as geometric Yachiyo rug in chainmail. Malouin’s practice is based on experimentation – he doesn’t use a material that he hasn’t got to grips with directly and played with, or tested to destruction, to explore its properties. His projects emerge from these explorations. They have a thoroughness and care built into them at the lowest level, while still expressing the automated, machined dreams of the modernist flowering.

Let’s kick off this year with a new song.
Smooth guitar with a delay/swell…

Download here: Sunnydayrain (5.12 MB 2:14)