Hasta La Ideas

The 2010 launch of the Centre Pompidou-Metz modern art museum brought almost half a million new visitors a year to the northern French town. This month, the second stage of an innovative trilingual wayfaring system to guide those visitors around the city was launched

Metz sees itself as a town at the ‘crossroads of Europe’. To entice visitors drawn to the Pompidou’s northeastern outpost to discover the town and its monuments, Mayor Dominique Gros commissioned a signage system from the Franco-Swiss agency, Intégral Ruedi Baur. Its second and definitive phase was unveiled on November 12.

Visually, this was a highly sensitive project, as Metz’s historic town centre is protected by both UNESCO and the Architectes des Batîments de France (the French organisation responsible for vetting work on historic buildings). Each creative proposition had to be justified and evaluated before being accepted. The citizens of Metz – or ‘Messins’ – also had their say. “I find this normal,” says Paris-based designer Ruedi Baur, “This ensures the system will be kept alive for years to come.”

Baur rejected a traditional sign system, as, he believed, this would have destroyed the visual harmony of three centuries of architecture in the town. Instead, with the objective of ‘opening the town up to the world’ he developed an ‘ethereal, poetic’ concept; ‘écrire la ville’ (spelling out the town).

Drawing on Metz’s heritage in the steel industry, Baur designed a sign system in aluminium cut by water jet. This technique produces large format signs in a single piece without any soldering marks. White letters are positioned between two horizontal bars, recalling musical notation. The resulting filigree effect is designd to be read against a background of sky or stone.

Baur chose Irma for the type for its consistent height so that the characters sit easily between the horizontal bars. Only the sides of the letters are coloured. The colour code is subtle, becoming more vivid, even fluorescent, the closer they’re placed to the town centre. Each colour was individually selected in situ in the prototype phase, to make sure each sign harmonises with its surroundings. QR and NFC codes are integrated invisibly in the city centre’s signs so that visitors can access up-to-the-minute information on what’s on in Metz in real time by scanning these with their smart phones.

The most technically challenging part of the project, according to Baur, will be launched in January – a system of street signs with mobile letters suspended between buildings on cables in the historic Coeur de Ville (mock-up shown above). “I was inspired by jewellery,” says Baur of his approach. “By the way a pendant adapts itself to the wearer’s body.”

Also to come in January will be a series of awnings for the town’s covered market (see above).

At just 90 minutes from Paris by TGV, either to visit the Centre Pompidou-Metz or to explore the city with Baur’s sign system, Metz ‘vaut le detour’ (it’s worth the trip).

Creative team: Ruedi Baur, Stephanie Brabant, Eva Kubinyi, Claudia Leuchs, David Thomazeau, Thibault Fourrier.

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CR In print

In our November issue we look at ad agency Wieden + Kennedy in a major feature as it celebrates its 30th anniversary; examine the practice of and a new monograph on M/M (Paris); investigate GOV.UK, the first major project from the Government Digital Service; explore why Kraftwerk appeals so much to designers; and ponder the future of Instagram. Rick Poynor reviews the Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design; Jeremy Leslie takes in a new exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery dedicated to experimental magazine, Aspen; Mark Sinclair explores Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery show of work by the late graphic designer, Tony Arefin; while Daniel Benneworth-Gray writes about going freelance; and Michael Evamy looks at new telecommunications brand EE’s identity. Plus, subscribers also receive Monograph in which Tim Sumner of tohave-and-tohold.co.uk dips into Preston Polytechnic’s ephemera archive to pick out a selection of printed paper retail bags from the 70s and 80s.

The issue also doubles up as the Photography Annual 2012 – our showcase of the best images in commercial photography produced over the last year. The work selected is as strong as ever, with photographs by the likes of Tim Flach (whose image of a hairless chimp adorns the front cover of the issue, above); Nadav Kander (whose shot of actor Mark Rylance is our Photography Annual cover); Martin Usborne; Peter Lippmann; Giles Revell and more.

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Product news: each of these lamps by Swedish design duo Mats Broberg and Johan Ridderstråle for Nordic furniture company Muuto is shaped like a single leaf at the end of a long stem.

The Leaf lamps by Broberg & Ridderstråle for Muuto combine aluminium, steel and brass stands with energy-efficient LED technology.

“Though the design is minimalistic and straightforward, a soft asymmetric geometry gives the lamp an organic and friendly appearance,” say the designers. “Depending on the viewing angle and how the shade is turned, the lamp will subtly transform its shape to create a graphic and leaf-like silhouette in the room.”

The Leaf lamp is available in table and floor versions and comes in black, white, grey, rose and green.

Broberg and Ridderstråle founded their Stockholm-based architecture and design practice after graduating together in 2006 from Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft and Design. This is the second lamp from Broberg & Ridderstråle for Muuto, following the Plugged Lamp designed in 2008.

Previous products by Muuto on Dezeen include a chair formed from laminated plywood shells slotted together and some containers shaped like little birds by TAF.

See all our stories about Muuto »
See all our stories about lighting »

The post Leaf by Broberg & Ridderstråle
for Muuto appeared first on Dezeen.

Some 43 years ago this month, an art-loving (and still anonymous) Grumman engineer smuggled a ceramic wafer imprinted with sketches by artists such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg onto the Apollo 12 lunar landing mission. Today Trevor Paglen adds to that fledging extraterrestrial museum with “The Last Pictures,” a public project presented by Creative Time. The artist worked with materials scientists at MIT to develop his visual time capsule: a silicon disc encased in gold and micro-etched with 100 photographs selected to represent modern human history. The disc has been affixed to the exterior of the communications satellite EchoStar XVI, which launches into orbit today from Kazakhstan. Watch it live here at 1:15 p.m. EST.

Among the images that made it onto the disc is a shot of “Glimpses of the U.S.A.,” the installation designed by Charles and Ray Eames (at the request of George Nelson) for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. Team Eames compiled some 2,200 still and moving images of American life that flickered across seven massive screens under one of Bucky Fuller‘s geodesic domes. Does your head hurt yet? Mission accomplished! Paglen set out to create “a meta-gesture about the failure of meta-gestures, a collection of images that spoke to the Janus-faced nature of modernity, a story that was not about who the people were who built the dead satellites in perpetual orbit so much as a story about what they did to themselves,” he told Creative Time curator Nato Thompson in an interview. While aliens may be stumped by photos of gear used to make atomic bombs or of refugee children frolicking in the sea, you can feel superior by purchasing The Last Pictures (University of California Press). Notes Paglen, “The book contains explanatory captions and texts about the images that tell the viewer what they’re looking at; the disc in orbit does not.”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Chen Yaoguang is the principal and founder of Hangzhou-based architecture studio Dianshang Building Decoration Design Co. Ltd., DBDD for short. Over the past two decades, Chen has established himself as Hangzhou’s premier interior architecture practice, garnering plenty of Chinese-language design press as well as exposure in the mainstream media. (His next challenge is to make a name in the West.)

In fact, China’s swift ascent to economic superpower status is readily reflected in his success—the studio has grown to some 30 employees—and continued demand for his work is perhaps the surest sign of the nation’s trickle-down prosperity. Indeed, he has built an impressive list of projects and clients, from corporate headquarters to cultural venues, from high-end hotels to ritzy residences for China’s burgeoning nouveau riche.

Image courtesy of DBDD

Image courtesy of DBDD

And as is often the case with rapidly-acquired wealth, it seems that money can’t buy taste: newly munificent Chinese tend to err on the side of overstated opulence as opposed to the understated aesthetic of, say, the Japanese or the Scandinavians. Yet DBDD’s extensive portfolio proves that prosperity need not be too ostentatious: the interiors are thoughtfully-designed and vastly superior to the gaudy Gilded Age-inclination of conventional Chinese luxury.

Image courtesy of DBDD

Image courtesy of DBDD

Indeed, Chen’s studio—a two-story office space, plus a couple courtyard-house-style archive beyond the terrace—is a veritable trove of uncanny curios from all over the world (he took the design team to Bali last year for ‘research’), scatterbrained yet somehow coherent. The East-meets-West pastiche of ancient artifacts, Old World wonders and miscellaneous mementos collectively expresses an understandable instinct towards extravagance that is met with a healthy degree of restraint in his body of work, which is well-documented on his website [NB: the site was down as of press time].

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This modern pendant lamp, named Medusa, was inspired by the majestic jellyfish and mimics its elegant form and colorful fluorescence. Similar to the way the tissue of the jellyfish disperses light, the Medusa lamp creates a vibrant, directional glow from within its bell-shaped shade. Colorful translucent strands, visible only when looking into the shade, allude to tentacles and create a filtering effect with a spectrum of light intensities and magenta tones.

Designer: Marko Vučković

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(Psychedelic Jelly was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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