Contemporary outdoor apparel is often measured by its worth in technical features, waterproof ability and breathability rating. Modern innovations in material and construction have seen water-resistance and breathability reach unforeseen sophistication……
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David Bouchat est un photographe amateur de talent basé à Seattle. L’artiste s’amuse à capturer des portraits d’automobiles vintage et classiques à travers de magnifiques paysages. Une partie de la collection est disponible dans la suite de l’article.
Joe Iurato est un artiste de rue américain basé dans le New Jersey. Côté rue, l’artiste réalise des figurines miniatures en bois qu’il dispose dans les rues ou environnements naturels de sa région. Les pièces sont souvent basées sur la photographie et piochent des références de personnages trouvés dans des peintures célèbres.
French designer Christophe Pillet has created the first store for a new fragrance brand on Paris’ prestigious Rue Saint-Honoré, with a royal blue and marble interior and modular fittings (+ slideshow).
Product and interior designer Pillet was invited by the founders of Ex Nihilo to create their first store with a design that would offer flexibility and set the tone for the perfume house’s future retail outlets.
The flagship at 352 Rue Saint-Honoré, which features a wall of modular shelving and steel worktables suspended from the ceiling, opened in December 2013 and has now been partially replicated in a small concession at London department store Harrods.
Created by French consultants Sylvie Loday, Olivier Royère and Benoît Verdier, Ex Nihilo intends to offer a contemporary alternative to traditional French perfume houses.
“Perfume is the scene of the moment. In the last year, there were 300 new launches of niche perfumes,” Benoît Verdier told Dezeen.
“Luxury brands want to be niche to be cool, and niche brands want to be luxury to make money,” he continued. “So the idea was OK, we are not niche, but we are a new fragrance brand – Ex Nihilo in Latin means created from scratch. The idea and the challenge was to be very credible and legitimate.”
Pillet said the trio were looking for a designer who “lacked a bit of maturity” so that the space would not feel old-fashioned.
“Even new perfume companies and new brands, they are very formatted, related to an old fashioned form of Classicism,” Pillet told Dezeen. “They wanted Ex Nihilo to be classic, meaning not being trendy of the moment. But they also wanted to appear like a young, fresh, start-up. So this was those two lemons together. That was interesting to translate.”
The Paris store is arranged over two floors, behind a glazed shop front framed in steel. A strip of Greek marble across the front features the brand’s logo, and the same marble is used for plinths and accents throughout the interior.
Inside, the ground floor is dedicated to showcasing the brand’s fragrances. This includes the shop’s “osmologue” – a series of scent emitters developed by Pillet specifically for Ex Nihilo that look like vases encased in blocks of transparent perspex.
A capsule at the bottom of each block contains an alcohol-free perfume sample. When a button is pressed on the front, a jet of air flushes through the capsule towards the opening at the top, delivering a shot of scent.
These will eventually be developed into stand-alone products sold by the brand, with more luxurious finishes, according to Verdier, who was previously a strategy planner for luxury brands.
“We wanted to propose a different approach to testing the fragrance, that would be non offensive, and would keep a good balance within the boutique,” explained Verdier.
The devices are housed on a steel worktop structure that hangs from the ceiling on the left side of the space, with a built-in top-light that is similar to a photographer’s light box.
The wall behind is fitted with wooden shelving made up of a series of differently sized boxes, which are mounted onto a frame at the back and can be rearranged to change the display.
“The wood is the classical American Walnut,” said Pillet. “Very chic, long lasting, and traditional at the same time. It’s like a black dress.”
A second suspended table forms a counter on the other side of the store, which customers can sit at while an assistant creates bespoke fragrances.
Each fragrance in the range can be customised with additional notes. The new combinations are created on site using specialist equipment, which sits on a gold steel counter that runs along the right-hand wall.
The fittings on each wall are mounted on rails and can be moved along to create different arrangements, with glass panels that slide in front of the shelves.
“You can partition the space in different ways,” explained the designer. “There was also this idea of being a bit dynamic, with doors on wheels, opening and discovering things, hiding things and paying with the space.”
“The shelving and furniture is really like a technical system,” added Pillet. “We have also three kinds of ingredients in our recipe, which is the marble, the metal and the wood. We can mix them and make specific treatments for shops using this system.”
Matching shelving is installed in the upstairs space, which is used for private consultations and the creation of bespoke fragrances using raw materials.
Pillet said the design approach was similar to a creating an industrial workspace like a laboratory, but using domestic materials.
All of the metal used throughout the store has been finished in a pale gold colour, and the walls are painted brilliant blue to contrast with the steel, wood and marble.
The ceilings are covered with smoked mirror, to partially reflect the blue of the walls and create the impression of a larger space.
“You don’t have to feel like you are stuck inside this small box,” said Pillet. “It’s more like furniture in a wider space.”
The new Ex Nihilo concession in Harrods opened last month and features the same shelving and fittings with a layout adapted to a narrower area.
A sampling table for customising fragrances was added towards the back of the space, with the walnut shelving covering an entire wall.
The post Suspended tables display bespoke fragrances
at experimental perfume shop Ex Nihilo appeared first on Dezeen.
Neighbouring buildings flank all four sides of this inner-city housing block in Seoul, so architecture studio Apparat-C planned the layout around the best positions for windows and balconies (+ slideshow).
Named White Cone House, the five-storey block occupies a hemmed-in site within the South Korean capital’s Mapo District, just west of the city centre. It accommodates six compact studio apartments, as well as a two-storey penthouse apartment.
Ensuring enough daylight for the penthouse wasn’t a problem, but Apparat-C had to employ a variety of techniques to provide natural light and maintain privacy for the studio flats, which occupy the building’s first and second floors.
“In planning the studio units, the key challenge was how to bring enough light into the units and yet maintain privacy, which may seem conflicting ideas,” explained Seewoong Lee, one of the studio’s three founders.
“The idea of having enough ventilation and sunlight already seems a far-fetched idea in the densely populated multi-unit and multi-family housing areas, not to mention privacy,” the architect said.
Each apartment was given a recessed balcony that extends along the front of the main living space. This allowed the windows to be pulled away from neighbouring structures.
Residents are also able to partially screen these balconies, using sliding shutters made from extruded mesh. “When looking out from the living room, the metal curtain screens off the more dull view outside,” said Lee.
Bathroom windows also face the balconies, rather than outwards towards other residences. “Often in densely populated areas, the bathroom windows are dysfunctional because they cannot be opened due to privacy,” added the architect.
A single staircase provides the entrance route to all seven homes. It sits at the building’s northern end – the darkest corner – as this spot was deemed least suitable for apartments.
It finishes at the entrance to the penthouse, which takes up the two uppermost floors. This residence contains living, dining and kitchen spaces on the second floor, and a bedroom and bathroom on the level above.
A reduced floor size on these two storeys creates a generous roof terrace, but also gives the building an angular profile that prompted the name White Cone House.
This is emphasised by the choice of white panels for the exterior – a type of cladding known as exterior insulation finishing system (EIFS). Semi-transparent corrugated polycarbonate was used for the roof.
Parking spaces are slotted underneath the building at ground-floor level, where there is also a small office unit.
Seewoong Lee founded Apparat-C alongside partners Yeonyung Choi and Pedro Ferreira. Their first completed project was a house with a zigzagging roof, and White Cone House is their second.
Photography is by Namsun Lee.
The post White Cone House creates daylit homes
on a restricted Seoul site appeared first on Dezeen.
2015 is the year of the future. 2015 marks Core77’s 20 year anniversary as the leading online industrial design resource. And, as Marty McFly discovered in Back to the Future, the technology (and a tricked out DeLorean) in 2015 has the potential to shape the way we think about our past and the power to change our future. In our recent editorial series, the Core77 Tech-tacular explores the myriad ways that new technologies are shaping the future of design: the ways we ideate, create and relate to design objects.
Besides Tech Specs, our 10-part interview series with designers from various professional backgrounds about their digital tools, the Core77 Tech-tactular took a look at digital power tools that are changing the way that we design and build with a deep dive into the Handibot and the Festool Domino. Our editor examines the design of the tools themselves and interviews users about how and why these tools make such a difference. Core77 also goes back to their beginnings in ID school by touring the workshops and facilities of four New York City-based design and technology programs to look at the tools and technologies that design students have at their disposal today.
From left to right: Handibot and DominoWe surveyed experts in our community about their opinions on technologies surrounding modeling knowledge, automating design and the ongoing search for a jack-of-all-trades device. You can still join in on these conversations and more in the Discussion Boards.
We also surveyed experts outside of the community—Carla Diana rallies designers to embrace the “Wild World of Wearables,” Sam Jacob warns against techno-utopian fantasies of “The Real Smart City,” and Tamara Warren speaks with automotive leaders about “Designing a New Mobility,” and the role of design in steering the auto industry into the future. Material ConneXion’s resident expert, Dr. Andrew Dent, opens up the library to share insight on the new materials defining connected technology. And Art Center instructor Arnold Martin gives a NURB-tastic review of the newest version of solidThinking’s 3D modeling package, Evolve 2015.
LumaFilm, a thin and flexible planar LED light emitter that does not require a heat sink.Finally, we put away the sketchbooks and pulled out the styluses for our Sketching App Showdown. No matter what your style or needs, the apps for sketching on-the-go or on-the-couch are only getting more powerful and robust. We wade through the options and ask some seasoned sketchers about their app-inions and how and what works for them.
Take a breath, dive in and enjoy our look at the technologies and ideas defining design in 2015 and beyond. As Doc famously reminds us in Back to the Future, “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads!”
A few years ago a Japanese variety show pitted three Olympic fencers versus 50
average fencers—all at the same time, Chinese-Connection-style, to see what would
happen.
Any of you who saw that must surely have wondered: How can I apply
those odds to ping pong? Well, wonder no more: Singaporean artist Lee Wen has the solution.
Conceived of way back in 1998 for an art performance in Australia, Wen’s “Ping-Pong Go
Round” was created as an interactive art installation.
Alas, it was not actually designed to allow many players to battle one or two stuck
in the middle, but rather to give players “a different perception of the
limitations” of the normally linear, dialogue-like game, in order to
provide players with “new possibilities of a broader dialogue,” in
Lee’s words.
In 2012 the Singapore Art Museum invited Lee to revisit the project and offered to
sponsor two versions: The first was his original six-meter-diameter table,
located outdoors, while the second was a scaled-down version that shared space
alongside other exhibitions inside the museum proper. “At first I was not
too happy to present the smaller one as it was scaled down,” Lee writes.
“But as it turns out the smaller table had its advantages, as [one
viewer] observed the smaller one is more intimate where players have to hit
the ball with more care, just like a more considered speech at the
international meetings or conferences of globalization and diverse societies
and countries of multi-culturalism.”
Last year Lee was again invited to break out the table, this time at Art Basel Hong
Kong. Call me shallow, but that being HK, there’s another Lee I would have
loved to see in the middle of this thing.
Via Neatorama
Cosmopolitan has named Camille Perri books editor-at-large. Perri previously served as an assistant editor and books consultant at Esquire.
At Cosmo, Perri will be responsible for all books coverage, including serial rights, author opportunities and more.
Previously Perri was a ghostwriter for YA books for Alloy Entertainment and a fiction reader for The Paris Review.
Sometimes, details about the reporting of the story are as intriguing as the story itself.
Halfway through the NYT Style section article “Could Wearable Computers Be as Harmful as Cigarettes?” (the headline has since been changed), columnist Nick Bilton wonders about the fact that a source who believes cell phones can be potentially harmful to the human body has instructed him to call out to a cell:
While Dr. Joseph Mercola is a vocal proponent of cellphone safety, he told me to call him on his cell when I emailed about an interview. When I asked him whether he was being hypocritical, he replied that technology is a fact of life, and that he uses it with caution. As an example, he said he was using a Bluetooth headset during our call.
And at the very end of the piece, Bilton reveals he’s similarly changed his own cell habits:
After researching this column, talking to experts and poring over dozens of scientific papers, I have realized the dangers of cellphones when used for extended periods, and as a result I have stopped holding my phone next to my head and instead use a headset.
Meanwhile, Keith Kloor, a science writer for Discover magazine, has quickly criticized Bilton for using Mercola as a primary source and failing to mention the good doctor’s allegedly challenged reputation as an expert.
[Image: Cary Westfall/Shutterstock.com]
The “CSI” in this case stands for Cover Story Investigation. And the reason we chose to borrow the CBS series short-form for this Wenner Media LLC item will soon become additionally clear.
According to Us Weekly’s newest lead article, by Kevin O’Leary, Katie Holmes and Jamie Foxx are a romantic item. And not just a recent item, but since 2013. The key piece of evidence is a photo.
From the Gossip Cop forensics report:
The only real “new” piece to the tabloid’s regurgitation of a discredited 2013 rumor is a picture of Foxx and Holmes with their hands touching. Us Weekly fails to give context, but Gossip Cop can exclusively report: The picture was snapped at a read-through for a new animated film. There were other people in the room, there was nothing romantic about their affection, and the idea that it serves as evidence of some kind of “secret” fling Holmes and Foxx are allegedly going to great lengths to conceal is, a source close to the situation tells us, “laughable.”
We hear through the grapevine that the animated project Holmes and Foxx were snapped at is being shepherded by Anthony Zuicker, creator of the CSI mega-franchise. Did the person who took the photo try to peddle it to individual outlets? Probably. Did they end up getting a still acceptable amount from Splash News? Most definitely.
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