Hasta La Ideas

One of the first things they taught us in ID Rendering 101 was about reflections: You need a sky and you need some earth, and placing these correctly indicates the contours of whatever you’re drawing up. Nowadays software takes care of all that, but in the days of hand rendering, you created sky and earth with markers, Prismacolors, charcoal or an airbrush. And getting the gradations was just a matter of layering strokes and/or going over it with your fingers.

But in this video, hot rod artist Glen Weisgerber shows us how he does it “When the compressor goes down or the power goes out,” i.e. not using an airbrush, but an actual bristle brush. At 23 minutes long, the demo isn’t short, but it’s worth a scan-through to watch him go from zero to done:

Am I the only one who got the design-school-flashback stress jitters while watching him? I almost found myself glancing towards my window to see if the sun was coming up yet.

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The goal? “To build a community of students and practitioners dedicated to building a future for journalism that isn’t dictated by corporate PR, wealthy individuals, or government spin.” The means? An interdisciplinary undergraduate degree program at The New School in Manhattan that merges design thinking with traditional journalistic principles. The catalyst? A $250,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that will fund the pilot initiative along with a journalist-in-residence program to bring in practitioners and thought leaders as well as social media editors, technologists, and data reporters. “The Journalism + Design program recognizes the critical and growing role design plays in the creation, consumption and experience of media,” said Joel Towers, executive dean of Parsons The New School for Design, in a statement issued recently by the Knight Foundation. “It creates an exciting new space to explore emergent methods and channels for relaying information that will transform the media industry of the 21st century.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

News: Spanish architect Alejandro Zaera-Polo has abruptly stepped down from his post as dean of Princeton’s School of Architecture to “devote greater attention to his research”, just two years after taking the post.

Alejandro Zaera-Polo, co-founder of London-based architecture firm AZPML, has resigned from his post at America’s Princeton University one month into the new academic year.

According to a statement issued by the school yesterday, Zaera-Polo will continue to teach at Princeton, but wanted to “devote greater attention to his research and other professional activities”.

The school’s former dean, professor Stanley T Allen, will serve as acting dean until a permanent successor is appointed and will also oversee the search for the new head.

“I hope that all members of the school community will assist us in making this transition to new leadership as smooth as possible,” said Princeton’s president Christopher L Eisgruber.

The school did not offer any further comment on the resignation. With a campus in New Jersey, the University is widely considered to be one of the leading academic institutions for architecture in the USA. Past teachers and visiting architects at the school have included Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, R. Buckminster Fuller, Louis Kahn, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Robert A. M. Stern, and Robert Venturi.

Zaera-Polo launched his current practice with former Foreign Office Architects colleague Maider Llaguno in 2011, after Llaguno split with FOA co-founder Farshid Moussavi. He was named dean at Princeton in 2012, having already been a visiting lecturer to the school for more than four years.

He had recently finished work on a research project examining the evolution of architectural facades – the results of which were featured in a room of Rem Koolhaas’ Elements exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale this summer. During press tours of the biennale, Koolhaas declined to talk about this particular portion of the exhibition.

Prior to taking the deanship at Princeton, Zaera-Polo had been dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and the inaugural Norman R Foster visiting professor at Yale School of Architecture.

Earlier this year Zaera-Polo quit one of his biggest jobs – the atrium for the £600 million revamp of Birmingham New Street Station in the UK – following a dispute over cladding materials with client Network Rail. His firm is still involved in the steel cladding for the external envelope of the structure.

“We hope to be able to stay till the end of the project, despite our complete disagreement with the management in respect to the atrium cladding,” he told the Birmingham Mail.

Photograph by John Jameson. Image courtesy of Princeton University Office of Communications.

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dean of Princeton Architecture School appeared first on Dezeen.

Fou de Feu est un studio spécialisé en céramique dirigé par la designer Veerle Van Overloop. L’agence conçoit et met au point des objets en céramique très épurés. Dans cet article, nous passons en revue les différentes pièces créées par le studio flamand. Du vase au luminaire, en passant par les différentes déclinaisons proposées. Plus de détails en images.

Movie: architect Torben Madsen says new technology should be incorporated subtly into bathroom design in this movie produced by Dezeen for Danish brand Vola.

Madsen, who is design manager at Danish practice Aarhus Arkitekterne, which designs all of Vola‘s new products, says the trend for open-plan living spaces has increased the significance of the bathroom as a private space.

“Today, the interior of the house is very open, so the bathroom has become a very important room where we can retire, where we can lock the door and be ourselves,” he says. “We see a lot of products with LED lights and touch screens and I think they are very distracting.”

Vola produce a number of products that incorporate motion sensors, including a hands-free bathroom tap and soap dispenser. But Madsen says the key is to incorporate the technology subtly, so you don’t know it is there until you use it.

“For me as a designer and for Vola, it’s important to put in new technology,” he explains. “People don’t want to touch the tap, they don’t want to touch the soap dispenser. But it’s important to put that away, build in the technical part in the wall.”

This approach to bathroom design goes back to the first Vola tap mixer, designed in 1968 by founder Verner Overgaard and architect Arne Jacobsen.

“It all started back in the 60s,” Madsen says. “The main point for them was to hide away all the things into the wall that aren’t important to you as a user.”

Madsen has taken the same approach with his own products for Vola, which include a heated towel rack consisting of a series of steel bars that protrude out from the wall.

“It obtains all the things that Vola stands for,” he says. “The product is very simple, it’s an extruded aluminium bar that is put into the wall only leaving the bars visible. It’s very Vola.”

Another product Madsen designed for the brand is a round, wall-mounted shower head made from a solid piece of steel.

“It is not a moulded part, it is not a welded part,” he explains “It is made out of a massive cylinder, where you cut slices just like a salami.”

The steel is brushed in a circular motion to emphasise the shape of the shower head.

“One of the most important steps is the brushing of the product,” Madsen says of the shower head, which is hand-brushed at Vola’s factory in Horsens, Denmark. “Here I see where design and handcraft goes hand-in-hand.”

He adds: “For me it’s very important that it is not only designed in Denmark, it’s also produced in Denmark. Which is very rare for these kinds of products. Here they are producing all the things that we have been designing and that makes me happy.”

This movie was produced by Dezeen for Vola. The music featured is by Jo Noon. You can listen to the full track here.

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“hidden away,” says Vola designer appeared first on Dezeen.