Hasta La Ideas

Louise van der Veld’s Chick-a-dee Smoke Detector

Tradeshows are often induce sensory overload, and design shows are no exception. Every booth and its contents scream for attention—”Over here! Look at me! Touch me! Hear me!” All of it can quickly wear on the senses, and my patience.

Oddly, Dwell on Design—held this past weekend in LA at the Convention Center—felt more calm than most trade shows. Having recently moved from NYC to LA, I am hyper-aware of these differences, but I was surprised at the marked contrast between the Dwell show and ICFF nonetheless. Granted, the two events are incomparable in many ways: ICFF is a huge annual event, overtaking the NYC design scene for days, while Dwell on Design is decidedly more low-key in its intentions and purpose overall. But, whether due to the scale, or general NY/LA differences, it was actually a pleasure to casually walk the show and talk with participants, rather than run around in a frenzy trying to catch it all.

One booth where my senses were actually intrigued and happily engaged was at the A+R Store. The LA shop had a few new, interesting sound design objects for the home, for music and otherwise. Each have a refreshing take on how we hear.

Balance-Wu’s loop speaker

Taiwanese designers Balance-Wu’s loop speaker is a hollow loop of pressed, recycled paper pulp. The power supply and amp sit in the base, distributing sound through the circular tube, with the paper acting as a filter. The speaker has a rechargeable battery and USB outlet, and connects via an earphone plug. The device is incredibly lightweight, the sound is decent, and the presence of the paper pulp loop is nicely subtle but recognizable as a speaker.

Balance-Wu’s loop speaker

Another interesting sound machine in the A+R space was Louise van der Veld’s Chick-a-dee Smoke Detector (pictured at top). Inspired by the “canary in a coalmine” story of miners relying on canaries’ senses to detect and warn of gas leaks, van der Veld created the American black-capped Chickadee to detect and warn of smoke. After winning the Dutch Association of Insurer’s competition for new solutions for fire prevention back in 2006, the design was recently approved for use in US homes.

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Dezeen Wire: this weekend The Sunday Times featured us in their Home section’s top-ten interior sites, describing Dezeen as “indispensable”. Read the full article here.

Brace yourselves, art and design lovers: artnet Magazine is no more. The pioneering online art magazine is ceasing publication, effective immediately. Artnet’s French- and German-language publications are also being folded. The abrupt decision “is an economic one,” according to the brief announcement posted today to the magazine’s website, “and reflects the fact that during its 16 years of digital life, the magazine was never able to pay its own way.” Archived artnet content will remain available on artnet.com, at least for now. Longtime contributor Charlie Finch penned a brief farewell. “Nothing lasts forever,” he wrote earlier today. “But it is a shame that, at the point at which artnet Magazine’s content is more comprehensive and lucid than ever, that it will disappear.”

The fate of artnet Magazine was apparently sealed by a leadership change at the Berlin-based company, which reported 2011 revenues of €13.3 million (approximately $16.6 million at current exchange). Hans Neuendorf is retiring after 20 years at the helm of artnet AG. Stepping into the role of CEO and chairman is Jacob Pabst, who since January has served as president of Artnet Worldwide (the 120-employee operation based in New York). His appointment, announced today, is effective July 1. It may not surprise you to learn that Pabst, 39, has a degree in economics. In his previous role as artnet’s chief information officer, Pabst introduced online auctions and analytics reports to the site. Pabst plans to focus on expanding marketing and sales efforts for the artnet platform, now stripped of fresh editorial content. For the time being, archived artnet stories will remain available on artnet.com.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Young architects seek to shake up design norms from Mecca to your living room

Alex Josephson, Pooya Baktash and their fellow architects at Toronto-based Partisans are engaging in architectural guerrilla warfare. They want your attention and, most likely, they’ll get it as they poke, prod, shock and awe you into changing the way you see the world, or at least its buildings.

“Everyone at Partisans is young. The average age is 26,” says Josephson. “The idea was to graduate and immediately start working, to be free and experiment and research and try to figure out a way to make that viable as a business.” Part of that experimentation involves seeing how far they can push their industry, with proposed projects like their New Mecca Masterplan, for which they were recently awarded the 2012 People’s Choice Award for unrealized projects by Azure magazine.

They came up with their vision for a new Mecca in response to the actual commission to redesign the holy city’s center, which was awarded to Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster (and 18 other architects) by the Saudi royal family.

Partisan’s plan replaces the Kaaba—a building at the center of the Masjid al Haram (the Grand Mosque) in Mecca and the holiest site in Islam; it is towards the Kabaa that Muslims face when they pray and a tenet of the religion that a pilgrimage to the site must be undertaken at least once in a lifetime—with a void, an absence of architecture. “As a counterpoint, we realized the most interesting place to imagine redesigning is the mosque itself. All these other projects stop there and build these grotesque buildings around the mosque,” says Josephson.

Partisans sees the parameters of the official competition as misguided, and critiques the winning plan that puts such emphasis on “huge buildings, luxury hotels and giant entrances—the things architects like to build,” says Josephson. Partisan’s proposal questions why the Saudis couldn’t do better to honor the creativity of their ancestors. “This is just bling,” he says, pointing to the Abraj-al-Bait Towers, a clocktower, giant 5-star hotel and shopping center that was completed in 2012 as the first part of Mecca’s redesign.

Projects like the Mecca redesign are indicative of the challenges Josephson and Baktash would like to present to the industry—as conceptualized by the rag-tag, energetic and diverse band of architects they’ve assembled under Partisan’s roof. “I imagined creating a practice with people of different backgrounds, of different disciplines,” says Josephson. “In-house we have a writer, musician, innovation and business strategist; we’re Hindu, Jews, Christians, Muslims and Atheists. We’re Iranian, Canadian, Slovakian, Indian, American. The idea was to bring these people together with disparate interests and professions to establish a new language of design.”

“The point is that it’s not perfect,” he goes on to say. “And the point is to challenge, the consumer first, and then the establishment. We’re interested in politics. We’re interested in the masses.”

That isn’t to say that every Partisans project has to take on issues as significant or controversial as the center of the universe for the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. They’re also bringing the fight to places like Pottery Barn with items like Tufftit, their take on the tufted leather bench where the soft leather is replaced with sculpted wood.

“Ninety percent of the world doesn’t buy into the idea of modern design, or contemporary design. People are conservative. Tufftit feeds off of that,” says Josephson. “We wanted to design furniture. People want tufted leather. We can we explore that language in a way that reinvents it, that is contemporary, that is perhaps futurist.” Also, it doesn’t look half bad.

Partisans currently has several projects in process that can be previewed on the firm’s website.