Hasta La Ideas

The London 2012 Olympics are well underway and every day this week we’ll award medals to design and architecture created for the games, starting with the three most popular stories. The Olympic Torch by BarberOsgerby takes the gold, with over 40,000 pageviews. Watch BarberOsgerby talk about their design in our movie interview here.

The silver medal goes to the Olympic Stadium (above) with over 38,000 pageviews. You can explore all the buildings in the Olympic Park in our interactive aerial photo here.

Coming in third with a bronze medal is a motorway floating on the River Thames (above) to ease congestion in the city, cunningly unveiled on 1 April with almost 30,000 pageviews.

That’s it for today – we’ll be back tomorrow with another round of medallists!

Meanwhile see all our coverage of London 2012 Olympic design here.

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Olympic designs appeared first on Dezeen.

A boxy wooden staircase twists up through the floors of this design store in Shanghai by architects Neri&Hu.

The architects refurbished an existing building to create the Design Collective store, which houses a series of showrooms including one for their own furniture brand Design Republic.

A huge steel funnel leads customers into the triple height atrium, where products are displayed within recesses in the walls.

Design Republic is located on the ground floor beside an exhibition and events space, while eight more showrooms are located on the two upper levels.

Patterned panels made from carbon fibre cover the building’s entire exterior, transforming its appearance and giving it a new identity.

See more projects by Neri&Hu here, including the award-winning hotel they designed in a disused army headquarters and our movie interview with them at last year’s Inside awards.

See all our stories about staircases »

Photography is by Shen Zhonghai.

Here’s some more information from Neri&Hu:

The new Design Collective is located in the outskirt of Shanghai in a town called Qingpu. Neri&Hu inherited an existing building and was given the task to completely redesign both the exterior and the interior without demolishing the existing structure.

Neri&Hu’s concept was to cover the existing building to create a new exterior identity and simultaneously fabricate an introverted spatial platform to create a new identity for the Design Collective, a group of avant garde furniture retail initiative in the city.

The existing building has been completely covered with an opaque graphic wrapper made with carbon fiber panel to create an introverted spatial condition to showcase furniture both visually and experientially.

The main entry is characterized by a large steel funnel, serving as a transition element from the urban context to the exhibition space.

The shape of the entry tube also serves as a means of emphasizing the arrival into the 3 story exhibition hall where the visitors introverted journey begins.

The staircase wrapping the interior of the main exhibition space leads the visitor throughout the multiple levels of display where the furniture can be experienced from varying spatial relationship and viewed form different vantage points and voyeuristic snippets of retail display.

This journey is accentuated as the visitor climbs higher through the gallery levels by the seven large openings in the roof which serve to allow daylight into the exhibition space while at once generating a moment of visual release from within the introverted exhibition environment.

Design Republic Qingpu store is located on the first floor, with a total area of 2,000 sqm. Design Republic offers a unique collection of products created by the world’s best design talents collaborates with many designers both foreign and local to create products that will explore a new modern Chinese aesthetic.

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Design Republic stands for a new birth of life and style. At its foundation, it is a republic of life – life that creates meaning and understanding through its relationship to objects of habitation. Seeking to explore the relationship between people and the simple objects they use in life – a plate, a teacup, a chair; it is here where we discover the beauty of everyday life.

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Design Republic is also a republic of style – style that creates new ideologies in design, retail, and merchandising concepts embodying a distinctive aesthetic for contemporary China.

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It crosses traditional boundaries to merge old and new, traditional and modern, opulent and austere, to ultimately create a dynamic platform of design.

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by Neri&Hu appeared first on Dezeen.

In its latest exhibition, “Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper,” The Morgan Library & Museum contests that Albers (1888-1976) is best known for a brightly colored series of late career paintings called “Homage to the Square,” tossing in his vastly better known years at the Bauhaus as an afterthought, calling it a place where he was “a onetime instructor,” to say nothing of the program he later ran at Black Mountain College in North Carolina for sixteen years. Add to this the fact that the “Homage to the Square” series was never exhibited during Albers’ lifetime, only rarely after his death and never once before in New York and you get the idea that ‘best known’ may be a bit of a stretch. I realize that 26 years spent painting more than 2,000 squares is no small effort (The Morgan has about eighty of them), but it seems like a major oversight for this exhibition to discuss “the artist’s investigation of form and color” as if for the first time without making the connection to the place where that investigation first began, thirty years earlier in Weimar, Germany, where Albers was a student at the Bauhaus before Walter Gropius asked him to join the faculty in 1923.

That said, I agree with The Morgan’s Director, William M. Griswold, that the museum does an excellent job of exhibiting finished work side by side with evidence of the “artistic process and the often surprising, experimental drafts that lead to a finished work of art.” Like the Morgan’s previous exhibition of neon artist Dan Flavin’s drawings, Albers’ sketches “provide important insight into his working methods and, in contrast to the austerity and strict geometry of the finished paintings, these vibrant sketches are remarkable for their freedom and sensuality.” They also show just how many hours of sketching and drafting go into what might strike many as simple, straightforward paintings.

(more…)

The brand plans a relaunch in Detroit with watches, bikes, cola and notebooks

Taking a name that’s likely recognizable among the last few generations, Detroit-based consumer goods company Shinola is hoping to make it easy to tell shit from Shinola. First imagined in Dallas a few short years ago, the relaunch of the more-than-100-year-old company recently made the move to a 60,000 square foot space in Detroit’s midtown neighborhood. Drawn in by a city with open arms and a rich history of manufacturing, Shinola felt that Motor City was the best place to stage its comeback for Fall 2012.

Interested in exploring Shinola’s curiously focused range of “consumer goods”—the brand originally known for shoe polish is now creating watches, leather goods, notebooks and cola—we accepted an invite to check out the brand in Detroit. Shinola ambitiously plans to make each of these products right here in the U.S. whenever possible.

In order to realize the best possible execution with domestic production, Shinola has placed collaboration at the core of its business and design strategy. Housed on the fifth floor of what was formerly home to General Motor’s engineering, research and design department—the first designated department of its kind in the auto industry, one responsible for inventing the automatic transmission engine, introducing tail fins, and even designing the first Corvette—Shinola has taken over the space with the intention of building on that legacy of creative innovation. Built in 1928 across the street from the original GM headquarters, the massive building is now the run by Detroit’s College of Creative Studies.

While the building occupies a certain sense of historic importance, CCS’ students and their forward-thinking design talent are also of interest to Shinola, which has enlisted their help in everything from designing their office to assisting in product development as part of their curriculum. “At a very fundamental level CCS and Shinola honor the same philosophies,” says Shinola creative director Daniel Caudill. “They honor the idea of the artisan and craftsman, and our relationship with the CCS students illustrates our core brand pillar of collaboration.”

The brand kicks off its collaborative product line with watches. The substantial inaugural line comprises models assembled entirely on-site in a surprisingly large “clean room” of sorts. The pressurized room—to keep dust out—will eventually be the workspace for dozens of assembly line workers, pumping out hundreds of watches each day. At the moment, with the company still very much in the development stages, the output stands at just a fraction of that goal. Nevertheless the workers currently assembling prototypes and early production editions are intricately skilled and closely supervised to ensure precision assembly. Certified by the US government to claim the distinction of being American-made, Shinola watches are being made with the help of the 65-year-old Swiss manufacturing company Ronda AG with Swiss-made movements, locally sourced components and some pieces imported from China.

Much like their watches, the small range of bicycles are produced elsewhere and assembled in Detroit. Once the Wisconsin-made frames are outfitted with additional top-of-the-line components (like Shimano’s Alfine group) sourced from Portland, OR and abroad, each bike is topped off with custom Horween leather saddles, matching leather grips and a shiny Shinola headbadge.

Operating as a “community of consumer products” as Caudill puts it, Shinola sidesteps the typical platform of scheduled seasonal launches and design deadlines. “Instead we’re opting to develop and release product when it’s ready, fine-tuning and tweaking the product until we feel it is perfect,” he says. This unconventional but logical approach stems from a dedication to producing good design with the customer in mind, running with the spirit of making products intended to last a lifetime.

The commitment to sourcing components domestically whenever possible inevitably comes with a higher price point on Shinola goods. Their handmade bicycles will sell for roughly $2,500 while the larger range of watches will go for between $400-$800. As Caudill points out, the definite launch date has not been confirmed, though e-commerce is tentatively slated for Fall 2012. Also in the works is a showroom to open sometime close to December in NYC’s Tribeca neighborhood, which will then transition into a stand-alone retail space in early 2013.

For more information on the history and mission behind Shinola see their site and for more from their expansive Detroit HQ click the slideshow.

Images by Graham Hiemstra