By now, you may have seen some of the giant, designer eggs that have popped up around New York City. While the Fabergé Big Egg Hunt may be a well-known event in London, it’s only now making its first appearance in NYC this spring. Beginning on April 1st, more than 200 giant eggs—designed by names like Ralph Lauren, Jeff Koons, Zaha Hadid, Diana Von Furstenberg and Marchesa (among many others)—are taking over the city.
While all of the eggs are outstanding in their own right, or friends at Brooklyn-based furniture studio Hellman-Chang shared a behind-the-scenes look at their egg, whichthat—in true furniture design fashion—uses every inch of space for good use.
About a year ago, I traveled to Cornell University to interview a bunch of materials scientists who work at the nanoscale level. This means they work with stuff that is very, very tiny. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. One of the challenges nearly all of the scientists kept mentioning is the issue of overheating in electronics. Most of us are directly familiar with the heat released from our computers when we balance them on our lap for a period of time, for example. And this becomes a big deal as devices get smaller and smaller. The smaller the copper wires—which connect chips, among other things—the more heat they emit. This is important for future devices and wearables.
Scientists are exploring all kinds of solutions but a proven one has recently been announced in the journal Nano Letters. We’ve mentioned the magic material graphene before and it continues to be the superhero material, coming to the rescue over and over again. This time, it shows up as a possible damper for heated copper wires.
Graphene is a one-atom thick material that can move electrons and heat. And it is able to cling to copper. Apparently by sandwiching copper between layers of graphene, the heat created by the metal is decreased by 25 percent. When attached to copper, the graphene actually changes its structure in such a way that allows the heat to move more freely through the metal, instead of being trapped in it.
From left: (1) copper before any processing, (2) copper after thermal processing; (3) copper after adding graphene. Image via UCR Today
Le réalisateur canadien Guillaume Blanchet a réalisé une vidéo en stop-motion « A Girl Named Elastika » racontant l’histoire d’une jeune rêveuse qui conduit beaucoup trop vite et qui est aussi yamakasi. Elle aime l’aventure, les feux d’artifices et la mer. Cette fille est spéciale : elle est entièrement faite en élastique.
In a private residence on NYC’s Upper West Side, we recently had the pleasure of attending a thrilling performance organized by Culture Shock featuring pianist Christopher O’Riley. Renowned…
Behind the brickwork exterior of the new Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, England, architecture studio Haworth Tompkins designed a curved auditorium built from 25,000 reclaimed bricks (+ slideshow).
Haworth Tompkins was tasked with designing a new home for the popular theatre, previously housed in an nineteenth-century chapel, to make room for an expanding programme. Working on the same site, the architects tried to retain some features of the original building.
“The biggest challenge was to win over those who were worried the character of the Everyman would be lost in a new building,” project architect Will Mesher told Dezeen.
“The original Everyman had an informal character, described as somewhere you didn’t have to dress up to go to, but could wear a ball gown if you felt like it,” he said. “We tried to retain this spirit in the new spaces.”
The walls of the old building had to be carefully dismantled so that the bricks could be reused within the new theatre. These now form the main wall between the 400-seat auditorium and its surrounding foyer.
Photograph by the architects
Another distinctive feature of the new building is an animated facade where over 100 sunshades are etched with the portraits of some of Liverpool’s residents, taken by local photographer Dan Kenyon.
A glowing red sign in front references the original signage, while a row of large ventilation chimneys give the building a distinctive silhouette. The rest of the exterior is built from a typical local brick stock.
“It is a common material in the area, both in the nearby Georgian terraces and in the industrial and warehouse buildings to the rear, so brick serves to tie the theatre in with the surrounding streets,” said Mesher.
The building’s interior is laid out over split levels to negotiate a slope across the site. This means public spaces such as the bar and foyer are arranged over several storeys, creating a tiered route from the street to the auditorium.
A concrete structure is left exposed throughout these spaces and sits alongside a palette that includes black steel, oak and recycled iroko wood. “We looked for materials that would be robust and age well,” said the architect.
As well as the main auditorium, which features a thrust stage, the building accommodates a smaller performance space, a large rehearsal room, exhibition spaces and a writers’ room.
Photography is by Philip Vile, apart from where otherwise indicated.
Here’s a project description from Haworth Tompkins:
Everyman Theatre, Liverpool
The Liverpool Everyman is a new theatre, won in open European competition, for an internationally regarded producing company. The scope of work includes a 400 seat adaptable auditorium, a smaller performance and development space, a large rehearsal room, public foyers, exhibition spaces, catering and bar facilities, along with supporting offices, workshops and ancillary spaces. The entire facade is a large, collaborative work of public art. The design combines thermally massive construction with a series of natural ventilation systems and low energy technical infrastructures to achieve a BREEAM Excellent rating for this complex and densely inhabited urban building.
The Everyman holds an important place in Liverpool culture. The original theatre, converted from the 19th century Hope Hall chapel, had served the city well as a centre of creativity, conviviality and dissent (often centred in its subterranean Bistro) but by the new millennium the building was in need of complete replacement to serve a rapidly expanding production and participation programme. Haworth Tompkins’ brief was to design a technically advanced and highly adaptable new theatre that would retain the friendly, demotic accessibility of the old building, project the organisation’s values of cultural inclusion, community engagement and local creativity, and encapsulate the collective identity of the people of Liverpool. The new building occupies the same sensitive, historic city centre site in Hope Street, immediately adjacent to Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral and surrounded by 18th and 19th century listed buildings, so a balance of sensitivity and announcement in the external public realm was a significant design criterion. Another central aspect of the brief was to design an urban public building with exceptional energy efficiency both in construction and in use.
The building makes use of the complex and constrained site geometry by arranging the public spaces around a series of half levels, establishing a continuous winding promenade from street to auditorium. Foyers and catering spaces are arranged on three levels including a new Bistro, culminating in a long piano nobile foyer overlooking the street. The auditorium is an adaptable thrust stage space of 400 seats, constructed from the reclaimed bricks of Hope Hall and manifesting itself as the internal walls of the foyers. The building incorporates numerous creative workspaces, with a rehearsal room, workshops, a sound studio, a Writers’ Room overlooking the foyer, and EV1 – a special studio dedicated to the Young Everyman Playhouse education and community groups. A diverse disability group has monitored the design from the outset.
Externally, local red brick was selected for the walls and four large ventilation stacks, giving the building a distinct silhouette and meshing it into the surrounding architecture. The main west-facing facade of the building is as a large-scale public work of art consisting of 105 moveable metal sunshades, each one carrying a life-sized, water-cut portrait of a contemporary Liverpool resident. Working with Liverpool photographer Dan Kenyon, the project engaged every section of the city’s community in a series of public events, so that the completed building can be read as a collective family snapshot of the population in all its diversity. Typographer and artist Jake Tilson created a special font for a new version of the iconic red ‘Everyman’ sign, whilst regular collaborating visual artist Antoni Malinowski made a large painted ceiling piece for the foyer, to complement an internal palette of brickwork, black steel, oak, reclaimed Iroko, deeply coloured plywood and pale in situ concrete.
The Everyman has been conceived from the outset as an exemplar of sustainable good practice. An earlier feasibility study had recommended a much larger and more expensive building on a new site, but Haworth Tompkins argued for the importance of continuity and compactness on the original site. Carefully dismantling the existing structure, all the nineteenth century bricks were salvaged for reuse as the shell of the new auditorium and recycled the timbers of the roof structure. By making efficient use of the site footprint Haworth Tompkins avoided the need to acquire a bigger site and demolish more adjoining buildings. Together with the client team they distilled the space brief into its densest and most adaptable form.
Having minimised the space and material requirement of the project, the fabric was designed to achieve a BREEAM Excellent rating, unusual for an urban theatre building. Natural ventilation for the main performance and workspaces is achieved via large roof vents and underfloor intake plenums, using thermal mass for pre-cooling, and the foyers are vented via opening screens and a large lightwell. The fully exposed concrete structure (with a high percentage of cement replacement) and reclaimed brickwork walls provide excellent thermal mass, while the orientation and fenestration design optimise solar response – the entire west facade is designed as a large screen of moveable sunshades. Offices and ancillary spaces are ventilated via opening windows.
The building has taken almost a decade of intensive teamwork to conceive, achieve consensus, fundraise, design and build, and the design will ensure a long future life of enjoyment by a diverse population of artists, audiences and staff.
I have a lot of respect for companies that can redesign basic, everyday items, like screwdrivers, to make them more functional. Wiha Tools pulls this off admirably with their line of innovative screwdrivers and bit-holders, and while their booth at Holz-Handwerk was small and humble, the demos of their goods blew me and the passersby away.
Wanna see what I saw? Check out their Magazin Bithalter LiftUp 25 Schraubendreher:
Look at the sweet design of their BitBuddy and how it works:
La résidence d’artistes Urban AU à Berlin, a exposé un projet collaboratif appelé « Just Like Swimming » et créé par des artistes et architectes australiens : ZAP, JUMBO, RusselL Isaac-Cole, Ben Milbourne, Tanja Milbourne et BiLD Architecture. Le concept était d’imiter l’eau d’une piscine vide par une lumière bleue diffuse.
From their ripstop cargos to sturdy sling bags and travel packs, Topo Designs has had our attention for some time now. Each product drop delivers a sensible design, done in the brand’s typical outdoorsy style—and that…
We observed the onset last year, but at this year’s Baselworld 2014 it was evident: blue watch dials are increasingly popular—and an impressive, classy alternative to the more common black or silver. There are plenty of variations in the blue, running the gamut from sky-like to deep and dark….
Irish designer Johnny Kelly has debuted a short movie that attempts to show how design impacts on everyday life using basic shapes and without words (+ movie).
Directed and designed by Kelly, Shape was written by graphic designer Scott Burnett, who is creative director of Dublin-based Studio AAD. The movie shows a day in the life of a nuclear family, but also illustrates some of the changes that happen over time “so slowly that we never really think about them”, Burnett told Dezeen.
“The characters are actually affecting the changes themselves in the film, everything changes and shifts to suit their needs,” said Burnett. “They’re very much part of the changes, the daughter understands this and has more control, the Dad doesn’t so is hijacked by a series of chairs.”
Commissioned by Pivot Dublin as part of its remit to promote the value of design, the brief for the film included a stipulation that no text or voiceover be used so it could be understood universally.
“Having tried to explain design, and particularly its value, to everyone from sisters and grandmothers to politicians and CEOs, I know that it usually takes about ten seconds until people start to glaze over,” Burnett told Dezeen.
“In the end we did the only sensible thing and decided not to try and explain design, but just to show it. Its prevalence, its impact, its role in everything we interact with.”
The film is set to be used in schools and classroom in Ireland as part of the MakeShapeChange campaign to raise awareness about design. This informed the style of the graphics, which aim to create something that is immediately understandable for a young audience.
“I like that it is simple enough to be watched small on a phone, in fact you could probably watch it at postage-stamp size and it would still make sense!” Kelly told Dezeen. “When it comes to characters, I find the simpler they look, the more you empathise with them. So I started with a square, circle and triangle and went from there – Saul Steinberg has a lot to answer for.”
“In a lot of ways, all we did was animate the idea that good design is invisible, which is the bit that’s always hardest to communicate to people who aren’t designers,” explained Kelly. “They get the ‘designer’ stuff, the added extra, all bells and whistles version, but it can be really difficult to explain the invisible bit.”
“We didn’t want to highlight supposed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ design – that’s not the aim with this film. Rather we wanted to show how almost every thing around us has been designed, and can and will be re-designed,” he added.
Pivot Dublin – the organisation behind Dublin’s bid to be named World Design Capital 2014 – worked with Dublin City Council to commission the project. Despite coming runner up to Cape Town, Pivot has continued with its original plan to promote the value of design in Ireland and is collaborating with other design capitals to use Kelly and Burnett’s film internationally.
Here’s some information about the film:
MakeShapeChange
As part of PIVOT Dublin, the city’s bid to become World Design Capital 2014, project initiator Ali Grehan thought that a simple animated film, that somehow explained what design was, would be a great way to expand the conversation, providing a way in for the wider public. Post bid, PIVOT Dublin has continued as planned to promote wider acceptance and use of design as a tool for positive change.
In 2012, Ali approached director Johnny Kelly to collaborate on making the film, and he in turn approached designer Scott Burnett to help write it. The challenge was to show what design was, and why it’s important in a way that could be understood universally, so without language. Simple. After exploring several ideas the team did the only sensible thing and decided not to focus on design at all.
MakeShapeChange is a project to get young people thinking about how the world is made around them and where design fits in. It’s grown from a film to a website to an education programme.
‘Shape’ is the short film at the heart of the project, highlighting the changes happening around us that we don’t ordinarily notice, and how they affect us. The website makeshapechange.com hosts the film and provides a prompt to Think Design. Breaking the film into a series of scenarios, it presents design within wide contexts, prompts curiosity and identifies some of the practitioners working in these contexts.
As part of the project we’re developing an initiative to get designers into schools to talk about what they do and the difference it makes. And to come full circle, while Dublin came runner up to Cape Town for World Design Capital 2014, both Cape Town and previous host Helsinki are keen to collaborate on projects that use the film to educate, connect and explain. We hope this network will grow to include more partners.
The project was commissioned by Pivot Dublin and Dublin City Council.
Directed & Designed by Johnny Kelly Written by Scott Burnett Produced by Ali Grehan Production company: Nexus Nexus Producer: Isobel Conroy Animators: Felix Massie, Joe Sparrow, Alex Grigg and Johnny Kelly Gif Wrangler: Alasdair Brotherston Editor: Steven McInerney
Thanks to Mark Davies, Sergei Shabarov and Chris O’Reilly Special thanks to Cllr Naoise O’Muiri and Dublin City Manager Owen Keegan for their support
Music & Sound Design: Antfood Ensemble: Andrew Rehrig (flutes), Will Bone (trombone, trumpets, tuba, baritone sax, tenor sax I, clarinets), Jesse Scheinin (tenor sax II), Wilson Brown (pianos, guitars, synths, percussion), Chris Marion (strings) Composition and Arrangement: Wilson Brown Sound design: Spencer Casey, Charlie Van Kirk, Wilson Brown and Pran Bandi Final Mix: Andy Baldwin
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Graphene + Copper (not to scale, obviously)
From left: (1) copper before any processing, (2) copper after thermal processing; (3) copper after adding graphene. Image via 
