It’s 1849, and a Gold Rush is drawing thousands of American prospectors to California, which was snatched from Mexico only a year earlier [1]. The lay of the land is still poorly surveyed, the risks and resources of the terrain as yet largely unknown.
So US President Zachary Taylor initiates a …
Candlestick made out of oak inspired by fireplace log. It is double sided and features hole for tea and long candle. Due to its raw material and rando..
Photography by Glen Jackson Taylor for Core77
I met the founders of The American Design Club a few hours before the opening of their benefit show Threat, an exhibition of objects designed to protect you in case of a break-in or some other ‘threatening’ situation. All of the 54 pieces were submitted as part of an open call, though most come from AmDC members, an expansive collective of some of the most talented young designers working today. Just being in the gallery space with core members Kiel Mead, Annie Lenon, Henry Julier and Steph Mantis as they put the finishing touches on the show—adjusting the lights, arranging handouts, stocking the bar with bottles of Brooklyn Beer—feels like the beginning of something that’s going to be really big one day very soon.
AmDC held their first exhibition in 2008. “We were young then,” says Kiel. To be fair, they’re all still really young, but in the last four years they’ve gained considerable momentum, hosting a series of exhibitions each year in addition to representing at NYIGF, ICFF and the Architectural Digest Home Design Show. Of course, all that costs money, hence the fundraiser, which you can visit by appointment—a worthwhile endeavor if you’re inclined. The interpretations of defense mechanisms run the gamut from funny to passive to quite beautiful. “Human Catcher,” by Ladies and Gentlemen Studio, is riffs on a dog catching device, only it’s made from a gorgeous mix of shining silver and copper metals.
Object Trust created a paper bag that comes with three simple instructions: 1) Open bag, 2) Place on head, 3) Enjoy your break in. The outside of the bag reads “Take What You Want,” while the inside is lined with images of palm trees and white sand beaches meant to bring the wearer to a happier place. It’s a great complement to Reed Wilson‘s “Defense Mat,” a doormat printed with the message “The neighbors have better stuff.” Mantis also took a humorous approach with her pizza ninja stars made from actual slices of pizza from her family’s Greek pizzeria in Maine, cast in resin to make ninja throwing stars. It sounds funny and they look more like cool desk objects than weapons, but these hunks of preserved pie could do some serious damage.
Rounding out the show are ten, wooden baseball bats that ten designers were asked to treat like a blank canvas. A few went the aggressive route, turning their bats into medieval torture devices with spikes and rusty saw blades. Harry Allen, on the other hand, used Swarovski crystals to spell “Namaste” in cursive at the end of his bat. As you can tell, the range of objects is as diverse as the designers on the American Design Club’s roster. Make an appointment by emailing info@americandesignclub.com.
Five smoky eats around SXSW
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If you’re coming to Austin, you got to eat yourself some barbecue and there’s some terrific ‘cue available throughout the city.
Since the first day Franklin’s Barbecue opened its doors on E 11th street, barbecue fans have been praising it to the high heavens, and Bon Appetit magazine recently named it the best barbecue in America. Owner and pitmaster Aaron Franklin starts smoking his meats in the wee hours of the morning and when he opens for business at 10am there’s a line of anxious eaters waiting to place their orders. By around 1pm the barbecue is sold out and Franklin’s closes for the day. You’ve got about a three-hour window of opportunity to experience Franklin’s sublime melding of fire, smoke and spice.
Follow that sweet scent of smoldering oak uptown and you’ll find Ruby’s BBQ. Ruby’s slow-cooks their barbecue using brick and mortar pits and oak for the flavor and heat. In addition, they offer something few BBQ places offer: all-natural beef brisket that is free of steroids or hormones and an array of side dishes that includes enough variety a vegetarian can find more than enough to satisfy their hunger. Ruby’s feels like a backcountry roadhouse and the sound system provides the perfect soundtrack of Blues and down home Americana.
The Iron Works BBQ is convenient to the hub of SXSW action, just a few blocks south from 6th street on Red River. Originally an ornamental iron work shop, it was converted to The Iron Works BBQ in 1978, and the Texas State Historical Commission has designated it a historical site. It gets busy around noon and the best deal are the sampler plates featuring brisket, sausage and beef ribs. During SXSW the place is jammed with musicians, industry types and disoriented regulars.
If you can possibly find the time to make the 25-mile trip to Taylor to visit Louie Mueller’s BBQ, go for it. Since 1949, the Mueller family have been making some of the best, if not the best, barbecued brisket in Texas. Featured in countless magazines and on all the food channels, Mueller’s is not only a great place to eat barbecue, it’s a wonderful place to visit. A warehouse-size restaurant whose walls and floors have turned brownish yellow from years of smoke, Mueller’s sits on the main drag of the mostly abandoned downtown Taylor. There is a beautiful kind of serenity that pervades this once-teeming manufacturing town, which now looks and feels like a scene from The Last Picture Show.
On the east side of downtown is one of Austin’s oldest barbecue restaurants, Sam’s, which has been in business since the 1940s. A popular stop on the Chitlin Circuit, Sam’s has served R&B royalty from Tina Turner to James Brown. Not much has changed over the years—the joint is funky and full of soul. Specialty of the house: barbecued mutton. Sam’s is open until 3am on weekends.
The range in NYC-based filmmaker Casey Neistat’s body of work is awesome, since he shoots whatever he wants to and the man has broad, weird interests and skillsets. “YouTube is my favorite thing and if I had no responsibility I would spend all my time making YouTube videos,” he writes.
For starters, he gets my vote for DIY-of-the-Week by using a jar of peanut butter to repair the cracked lens hood on his Canon:
On the more whimsical side, he and an accomplice smuggle a floating, remote-controlled shark into the Museum of Natural History and let it loose for a good amount of time before they’re finally thrown out. (Sadly, the shark ultimately meets its demise in the NYC subway system.)
Hit the jump to see it in action…
Voici la société Naf Architect & Design qui a pensé cette maison, située dans un quartier résidentiel de Tokyo. Avec un véritable mur d’escalade et un design très épuré, cette construction pensée pour une famille se dévoile en images dans la suite de l’article.
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Mr. Edwards recently emailed to share his typographic collages with us:
“It is made up of bits of found type and images from my collection of vintage magazines. I don’t like to cut them up, as they have survived for so long so I scan them all in. They are the 20th century equivalent of today’s spam mail. I like the ambiguity of these snippets of type taken out of context, it makes a kind of Dada poetry. I find it quite mesmerising. I think it should be pasted on subway station walls and at bus stops to pass the time while waiting for public transport.”
Read an interview and purchase posters at Empty Frame.
Years ago, in those golden days of our youth, our favorite section of the now five-year defunct magazine Premiere was called “The Gaffe Squad.” A small box tucked away on some single page, it picked apart movies for those little mistakes here and there, be they continuity or a distracted grip accidentally being spotted hiding behind a curtain. The section was successful, we think, because not only did it give you the smug satisfaction of knowing that these big shot movie people were in fact fallible, but it also gave you a little peek behind the canvas in a way a PR firm never could. Fortunately, now that our lives are so steeped in the design world, we can still occasionally revisit those feelings when it comes to what’s become a standard on the internet: the dissection of type design in period films. Enter the great Christian Annyas, who invited type designer Mark Simonson to carefully analyze and critique the typography and lettering of the recent Oscar winner, and movie your friends won’t shut up about when you tell them you haven’t seen it yet, The Artist. In general, Simonson gives the film relatively average marks, noting that some of the type they’d selected looks passable for the era, whereas others, such as using typesetting instead of the hand-written or painted style that would have been the method of the day. There’s of course also the usual “that type didn’t come out until 60 years after the movie is supposed to take place!” talk, but we love it as always. In the end, with both this latest type-on-film analysis and back in the good ol’ days of Premiere, it isn’t so much even the careful dissection, as it is knowing that someone took all that time, and their years of knowledge, to lend us a little inside look at something that, for many of us, we might have otherwise had just wash right over us.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
As ever, 3D printing is at the threshold of cultural consciousness, almost-but-not-quite the next major innovation in consumer technology. While hardware remains a bit too niche for the average user, plenty of brilliant DIYers and hackers have been developing new tools and applications for 3D printing technology, typically with the goal of making bigger, more colorful tchotchkes.
1 μm (micrometer) = 1,000 nm = 0.001 mm
A team at the Vienna University of Technology is taking the Wayne Szalinski approach, not in terms of scaling-down the hardware but the actual output, fine-tuning the motion of the lasers and mirrors for a process called ‘Two-Photon Lithography.’ The technical details escape me, but their breakthrough involves an innovation that is more about a 100,000-fold (!) improvement in speed as opposed to nanometric scale: their 3D printer can produce “100 layers, consisting of approximately 200 single lines each, in four minutes.”
The 3D printer uses a liquid resin, which is hardened at precisely the correct spots by a focused laser beam. The focal point of the laser beam is guided through the resin by movable mirrors and leaves behind a polymerized line of solid polymer, just a few hundred nanometers wide. This high resolution enables the creation of intricately structured sculptures as tiny as a grain of sand. “Until now, this technique used to be quite slow”, says Professor Jürgen Stampfl from the Institute of Materials Science and Technology at the TU Vienna. “The printing speed used to be measured in millimeters per second—our device can do five meters in one second.” In two-photon lithography, this is a world record.
This amazing progress was made possible by combining several new ideas. “It was crucial to improve the control mechanism of the mirrors”, says Jan Torgersen (TU Vienna). The mirrors are continuously in motion during the printing process. The acceleration and deceleration-periods have to be tuned very precisely to achieve high-resolution results at a record-breaking speed.
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