Le photographe Italien Stefano Scatà a photographié de sublimes clichés de l’intérieur du Riad Dar Darma situé à Marrakech. Pièce par pièce, l’artiste nous fait découvrir la féérie et l’authenticité de ce lieu tout droit sorti d’un conte des milles et une nuits et qui en fera rêver plus d’un.
Pixellated faces decorate the brick facades of this civil rights centre in Milan, while a bright yellow staircase spirals up through its concrete interior.
Designed by Milan-based studio Baukuh, the House of Memory contains cultural facilities and an archive.
It also houses the headquarters of five institutions that exist to preserve and promote the history of civil rights and democracy in Italy.
The architects won a competition to design the building for a site on the periphery of the city’s developing Porta Nuova district, next to to Stefano Boeri’s Vertical Forest towers. It was designed to mediate between these new towers, existing 19th century structures and a nearby park.
“At the fringe of an entirely new part of the city, the House of Memory maintains a relationship with the area’s artisanal and industrial traditions,” said the project team.
“In this respect, the building’s rough appearance – just a box with few windows – and the proud sobriety of its construction materials establish a deep and precise connection with the industrial tradition of the Isola neighbourhood.”
The building’s exterior is clad entirely in brick, punctuated by a limited number of openings.
Related story: Gianluca Gelmini inserts an angular iron staircase inside a medieval Italian fortress
Brick pilasters and architraves enclose slightly recessed panels decorated with 19 portraits and eight historical scenes. These were based on images from the archives housed in the building and are composed of six different tones of brick.
The portraits of anonymous Milanese citizens were chosen to represent the city’s ethnically diverse population, while the other images depict significant moments in the city’s recent history, including the deportation of civilians to concentration camps and the liberation from Nazi fascism.
“The shell of the new building is understood as a contemporary polyptych: this collection of images tries to suggest with great immediacy both the complexity and the ideal unity of Milan’s collective memory,” Baukuh said.
Internally, the building’s simple form creates flexible spaces that are adapted to the varying needs of the institutions housed across its upper storeys.
An open ground floor provides a multipurpose space that is subdivided into three parts by a pair of octagonal columns. At one end, a full-height space incorporates a bright yellow spiral staircase that ascends to reach the three floors of offices.
At one end of the building is the archive, with its rows of shelves visible through rectangular openings in a concrete wall that ascends over five storeys.
Restrooms and technical facilities are accommodated in a similar narrow space at the opposite end of the building.
The reinforced concrete staircase connecting the ground floor with the offices above provides intermittent views of the archives to visitors as they follow its path.
“The yellow staircase is not only the building’s main distributive element, it is also the device that establishes a relation among the visitors and the collection,” said the architects.
“Given that the preciousness of the archive does not allow the visitors to directly access the documents, the relationship between the citizens and the collection is established through the rotating movement created by the staircase.”
Glass partitions were also included where possible, allowing daylight that enters through the windows to permeate deep into the building.
Photography is by Stefano Graziani.
The post Baukuh’s House of Memory features a decorative facade and a monumental yellow staircase appeared first on Dezeen.
NAKED: Bubble
Experimental trio NAKED are based in Edinburgh but prefer to be free of any geographical labels—and the hypnotic, escapist tracks off their debut EP Youth Mode speak to a generation defined more by their time on the internet than the……
Continue Reading…
La galerie Helsinki School nous dévoile cette série de collages réalisée par l’artiste Ulla Jokisalo, composée de portraits retro de femmes en noir et blanc, où des têtes d’animaux sont apposés à l’aide d’épingles sur le haut de leur corps, donnant ainsi naissance à d’intrigantes créatures hybrides.
New York 2015: New York designer Alexander Gendell has added a chair that pops out of an artwork to his Folditure collection of fold-flat furniture (+ movie).
Pop Mural is a triptych of artworks that contains the removable components required to build six chairs.
“When we started Folditure four years ago, our initial concept was to make comfortable, solid folding furniture that you can hang in a closet when you weren’t using it,” Gendell told Dezeen.
“But our customers liked the sculptural look of our furniture and didn’t want to hide it away, so I decided to find a way to hang it on the wall. The problem was when you take if off the wall, you don’t have anything there.”
The final concept uses textiles as a backdrop to create an artwork that works with or without the chair components.
Related story: Park Life folding armchair by Jasper Morrison for Kettal
“I went through different versions and materials and concepts and finally hit upon the idea of using textile to create some kind of dialogue with the chair,” he said.
“The intention is that you have an art panel when you take the furniture out of it and when you put it in, that somehow the proportion works.”
The American company has also launched an addition to its Cricket range, which currently comprises a table that can be folded flat using one hand, creating a 19-millimetre-deep form.
The new version of the table transforms into a two-person art easel with a range of attachments, which adds the functionalities to lock the work surface at any angle, to hold brushes, tools, water containers and solvent pots, and to clip on a task light.
“When designing the Cricket, I wanted it to be very versatile – something like a Swiss Army knife of a table,” said Gendell. “The Cricket is a sculptural piece, and I wanted the additions to make it even more sculptural and expressive, as well as functional.”
The third new launch is the birch plywood Star lounge chair that folds to a flat silhouette measuring just 32 millimetres deep. Perforations in the chair’s back turn into a hook when the chair is folded, enabling it to be hung in a standard-sized wardrobe.
Gendell exhibited the products at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York earlier this month.
Previous Folditure projects include the Tilt chair, the Leaf chair and the Maya chair – all of which fold completely flat, enabling them to be hung in a cupboard when not in use.
The post Alexander Gendell’s latest folding chair
pops out of a wall mural appeared first on Dezeen.
Business news: Moooi CEO Casper Vissers is to step down from the company, 14 years after co-founding the Dutch furniture and lighting brand with designer Marcel Wanders.
Vissers, 48, will hand over to new CEO Robin Bevers on 1 September this year but will continue to be involved with the luxury furniture and lighting brand until 1 July next year, after which he will cease to be involved with the company.
The news was announced in a statement emailed to business partners on Friday.
“After driving Moooi for 14 years, I have decided to step back from being the CEO,” the statement began. “Marcel and myself have decided to appoint Robin Bevers as the CEO of Moooi from September 1st 2015.”
Speaking to Dezeen, Vissers said that he felt it was time to move on to new challenges.
“People who start companies are entrepreneurs,” he said. “Then you grow your business and you don’t feel so entrepreneurial any more. I’m 48, Moooi is 14. It is a super luxury to have time to be an entrepreneur again.”
He added: “There’s no hard-boiled egg about what I’m going to do next.”
Bevers, the new CEO, has worked as managing director of Marcel Wanders Studio for the past 10 years. Wanders will continue in his role as art director of the brand, working alongside Bevers, while Paul Molenschot will remain as general manager.
“From a business point of view I’m super happy, Marcel is very happy, it’s great for both of us,” Vissers said. “It’s also very good for the company. If I sold it to someone else then Moooi could lose its culture.”
Moooi describes itself as an “eclectic” brand, producing designs by a roster of both Dutch and international designers including Studio Job, Bertjan Pot, Front and Neri&Hu, as well as Wanders himself.
Vissers and Wanders started the company in 2001 with the intention of shaking up the sector, which they felt had become staid.
“Fourteen years ago, the furniture and lighting industry was pretty boring,” Vissers said in a video interview with Dezeen earlier this year. “But if you opened Vogue or any other beautiful fashion magazine, it was full of beautiful photographs.”
More recently the company has expanded into new areas, launching a new printed-carpet brand and a range of bathroom products for hotels.
This year Dezeen is working on a year-long collaboration with Moooi called Extra Moooi.
The post Moooi co-founder and CEO Casper Vissers steps down after 14 years appeared first on Dezeen.
Architects are increasingly using sets of stacked volumes to create unusually shaped structures. We’ve collected together the best examples from the pages of Dezeen and pinned them to a new Pinterest board.
Follow Dezeen on Pinterest | See our new Pinterest board
The post New Pinterest board: irregularly stacked boxes appeared first on Dezeen.
A few weeks before James Callahan passed away at a Pennsylvania hospice after a valiant battle with cancer, his favorite baseball team – the Boston Red Sox – posted a message in his honor on the Fenway Park right-field scoreboard, during an April 14 game against the Washington Nationals. Callahan, who worked over the years as an editor at Bridgeport, Connecticut weekly The Bridgeport Light, Pennsylvania’s West Chester Daily Local News and other papers, died April 26 at age 62.
The Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is one of the greatest in all of sports, which Callahan faced additionally for decades in the form of his brother-in-law, Wayne, who cheers for the pinstripes. Today, Upper Dublin Patch’s Justin Heinze has shared a wonderful piece about Callahan.
Right up until the end, the baseball lines were drawn. Per Heinze, here is what happened when at the hospice in April, Wayne made the mistake of mentioning Alex Rodriguez:
Suddenly, the man on the bed’s voice seemed stripped of some of its weight, however revelrous had been its reminiscences. Something almost childish, eager, hysterical with pure delight entered his coarse hush: “That idiot, that son of a… That New York filth… I swear right now on my own grave that nothing would better ease the passing of this fan from this world than if that incubus, that despicable, that devil incarnate A-Rod failed utterly this year and baseball was wiped clean of his stench.”
The Patch article has plenty of other details. Online guestbook tributes to Callahan can be seen here. RIP.
[Photo of Callahan via: tributes.com]
The editor-in-chief of Vogue has been doing a fair amount of interviews lately. This weekend, a conversation with Wintour graces the pages of Stella magazine, the London’s Telegraph’s Sunday insert.
Reporter Patrick Sawyer has shared a few snippets from the interview, and the one that caught our attention comes at the very end of his report:
London-born Ms. Wintour, who began work at the age of 15 at the Biba fashion boutique, in Kensington, before becoming an editorial assistant at Harper’s & Queen magazine and moving to New York in 1975, is dismissive of her less than flattering image as a ruthlessly controlling figure…
She says that her father Charles, former editor of the London Evening Standard, had a similarly frosty reputation.
“He was a brilliant editor, he cared passionately about his work. I think, because he worked quickly and was decisive and he was sure about what he wanted, he got a nickname. Chilly Charlie,” said Ms Wintour. “He was the least chilly person that I or that anyone at home knew, but it stuck.”
The Telegraph has also shared, in support of the Stella feature, “Ten Quotes That Prove Anna Wintour is a Born Boss.” And below, in case you missed, some separate May Seth Meyers-Anna funny business.
[Screen grab via: telegraph.co.uk]
The front-page headline pictured at right is a New York Post classic. Sadly, Rob Walsh, the man responsible for it died Thursday, at age 52, after battling cancer.
From the Post note:
“Rob was a passionate newspaperman,” said chief copy editor Barry Gross. “He knew more about newspaper history — especially New York newspaper history — than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“In fact, although he was raised in Massachusetts and California, he was better versed in the history and architecture of New York City than most New Yorkers, and he was very proud to become one of them. He loved this business and he loved this city.”
“He was a throwback journalist — right down to his fedora — who amused readers with his clever headlines, just as he did his colleagues with his wonderful sense of humor. He shall be deeply missed.”
Walsh had been with the Post since 2000. Arrangements are being made for memorials on both coasts. RIP.
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.
