Released in 1972, Chicago’s hit “Saturday in the Park” still warms the cockles of our collective hearts to this day. Robert Lamm wrote the song after a stroll through Manhattan’s Central Park on the 4th of July, inspired by the vibrant celebrations……
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Dezeen has won the Commercial Partnership category at the AOP Digital Publishing Awards 2015 for Dezeen and MINI Frontiers – the third major award the collaboration has won this year.
Judges of the UK Association of Online Publishers‘ annual awards show described the project as “a truly creative and innovative partnership,” praising its editorial integrity.
“The campaign was a great example of a media owner being given the creative flexibility to design a really unique solution,” the judges said. “Their campaign was the most impressive in the field, achieving market-leading results across owned and earned media.”
Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is our ongoing collaboration with car brand MINI, exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.
The project beat a shortlist including the Guardian, Dennis Publishing and Global Radio to the award, which was presented to the Dezeen team by comedian Rufus Hound at a ceremony in London last night.
“The judges thought that the winner was a best-in-class example of a truly creative and innovative partnership,” said the jury of the category, which rewards innovative collaborations between online publishers and brands.
Dezeen was also shortlisted in the Editorial Team 2015 — Business to Business and Best Use of Video categories, which were won by The Drum and Vice News respectively. The full list of winners is available here.
This is the fifth award in quick succession for Dezeen and the third accolade for Dezeen and MINI Frontiers, which has already won Commercial Campaign of the Year at the British media Awards 2015 and picked up a Webby People’s Voice award for technology video of the year.
Dezeen was named Best Content Studio at the Digiday Publishing Awards 2015, while Dezeen’s social media editor Ross Bryant was given the British Society of Magazine Editors Rising Stars award for Best Use of Social Media.
Editor Anna Winston has also been shortlisted for Editor of the Year (business) at the upcoming 2015 PPA Awards, while design editor Dan Howarth is in the running for PPA Writer of the Year (business).
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The beach huts traditionally found in English seaside towns informed this temporary mirror-clad cabin installed by ECE Architecture on the coast in Sussex (+ movie).
Located on Worthing beach in the south of England, the small timber-framed structure has the same gabled form as a typical beach hut, but all four of its walls and its roof are clad entirely with mirrors, allowing it to camouflage with its seaside surroundings.
“The beach hut has a strong geometric form that we felt would look brilliant finished in mirrors,” explained Stuart Eatock, one of the directors of ECE Architecture. “They reflect its context and create a playful folly.”
Typically colourful and arranged in a repetitive form, beach huts have been a prominent fixture at British seaside resorts since the 19th century. They offer a place for regular visitors to store deck chairs or prepare food and drink.
The mirrored cabin is the latest is a series of recent projects reimagining the typology, including a row built from stones and sand, and a group of huts that are accessible for wheelchair users.
Simple in construction, the structure is made up of seven pieces, each of which is covered in a laser-cut sheet of mirrored acrylic.
The design and assembly process took six weeks in total, before the final structure was erected at the end of June.
“Word of mouth spread, locals began to descend on the beach to see what all the fuss was about,” the designers said. “They played with the unusual reflections of the seafront and made the most of a surprising new photo opportunity.”
ECE Architecture developed the project from an idea suggested by advertising agency Creative Forager. The aim of the installation is to promote both of their companies, while also engaging the local community.
At night, the light from inside the cabin shines through to reveal the architecture studio’s logo, which has been laser-cut into one of the walls. The ad agency’s strapline – A Piece of Our Mind – is printed on the outside.
“I had known Sephton from Creative Forager for a while, but we had never taken the time to look more closely at each other’s work,” ECE Director Stuart Eatock told Dezeen. “I saw a specific style of ambient marketing in Sephton’s portfolio that seemed to be a break from traditional forms of advertising.
“The seed was planted and Sephton presented a selection of 10 ideas to The ECE team and the beach hut stood out for everyone.”
Although the temporary installation was dismantled after one weekend, the designers are considering making the hut a more permanent structure, following requests from the public and the local council.
Worthing is located a short distance away from Littlehampton – another seaside town that has seen several unusual architectural interventions, from Thomas Heatherwick’s rock-inspired cafe to a 324-metre-long bench by Studio Weave.
These projects were both down to one property developer, Jane Wood, who believes playful architecture can be used to bring new life to sleepy seaside towns. “It has brought people to Littlehampton who tell me they would never come there if it weren’t for me,” she told Dezeen in an interview last year.
Photography is by Mark Sephton.
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Graduate shows 2015: tiny pieces of waste pine wood were meticulously hand-glued together by Royal College of Art graduate Simin Qiu to create these storage boxes and stationery items.
Qiu’s End Grain collection includes rectangular, triangular and hexagonal containers for storing small objects. There’s also a clock, a ruler and a sliding box for keeping pencils in.
Each is patterned with zigzag and herringbone motifs, created by cutting offcuts of pine into five-millimetre-thick pieces and then glueing them together in alternate orientations.
The designer’s aim was to utilise the properties of the wood’s composition, similar to a project of the same name by London design studio Raw Edges.
While Raw Edges used the tiny tubes that make up the wood to transfer coloured dye through sections of the material, Qiu focused on the wood’s natural patterns and translucency.
Related story: Fabrica’s Statera desk tidy brings plants into the workplace
“I designed some simple forms like boxes to give more chance to show the material’s beauty,” said the designer, explaining that the size of the objects was dictated by the timber offcuts.
Qiu also found that by cutting the pine into 10-millimetre slices across the grain, the microscopic tubes allow a small amount of light to pass through.
Rather than utilise this feature for the accessories, he also created a window shutter to demonstrate the translucency and its potential for architectural applications.
Pine is commonly used in the furniture and construction industries because the trees grow quickly, meaning that the soft wood is relatively cheap.
However, sections of the material go to waste if they can’t be used for large products, so Qiu wanted to highlight ways in which these pieces can be utilised.
“I want people to know that pine has a high-value application, and provides a good example of how to use off-cut timber,” said Qiu.
Qiu created the End Grain collection while studying on the RCA’s Design Products programme. The project is on display at the Show RCA 2015 graduate exhibition in London, which runs from 25 June to 5 July, along with a wooden spiral staircase that straps around any tree trunk and a collection of objects built using a new material made from plant fibres and naturally fermented cellulose.
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Our US job of the week on Dezeen Jobs is for an intermediate architect/designer at Clive Wilkinson Architects, the firm behind the West Hollywood offices for comedy video production company Funny or Die (pictured). Visit the ad for full details or browse other architecture and design opportunities on Dezeen Jobs.
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at Clive Wilkinson Architects appeared first on Dezeen.
With Herzog & de Meuron‘s proposed revamp of Chelsea FC’s Stamford Bridge stadium unveiled this week, Dezeen looks at all the stadiums designed by the Swiss firm, which is headed by avid football fan and regular player Jacques Herzog.
London: plans for the rebuilding of Stamford Bridge, home of Chelsea FC, were shown to the public this week. If approved, capacity will increase to 60,000 thanks to a design with gothic-style brick arches.
Related content: see all our stories about stadiums
“We have tried to make it a place where people will really feel at home,” Herzog told the Guardian. “I’ve never had that feeling so strongly, as when I saw my first games in Liverpool and Manchester, how much you have this sense of a club’s identity in the stadium in England – more than anywhere else in Europe.”
Bordeaux: framed by 900 slim white columns, the brand new 42,000-seat Nouveau Stade de Bordeaux will host matches during the UEFA Euro 2016 tournament and then become the home stadium of French team FC Girondins de Bordeaux.
Beijing: Herzog & de Meuron worked with Ai Weiwei to design Beijing National Stadium, built for the 2008 Olympic Games. Better known as the Bird’s Nest, the 91,000-capacity stadium became the symbol of both the games and China’s modernisation.
Portsmouth: this 2008 proposal for a 36,000-seater stadium for Portsmouth FC was Herzog & de Meuron’s second design for the English club, after an earlier design featuring apartments lining the stadium bowl, proposed for the city centre, was rejected.
The revised design, which would have been built on Horsea Island in Portsmouth harbour, was postponed by the credit crunch and then scrapped when Portsmouth FC went into administration. However, the slender white columns lived on in the completed design for the Nouveau Stade de Bordeaux.
Munich: the Allianz Arena celebrates its 10th birthday this year. Clad in inflated ETFE panels, the stadium is home to both FC Bayern Munich and TSV 1860 Munich, and changes from red to blue depending on which team is playing.
Basel: completed in 2002, the St Jacob-Park stadium in Herzog & de Mueron’s home town was their first venture into football architecture. It is home to FC Basel.
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Film space at Station to Station: A 30 Day Happening by Doug Aitken. Photo by Rob Stothard/Getty, courtesy of the Barbican Centre
Doug Aitken’s travelling arts project, Station to Station, has arrived at London’s Barbican Centre for 30 days of events spanning music, film, dance, design and performance art. We took a look around the exhibition, which follows an ambitious programme of “cultural happenings” in the US.
Two years ago, Doug Aitken teamed up with Levi’s to launch a series of ‘nomadic cultural happenings’ across the US. Accompanied by an ever-changing line-up of artists and musicians, he travelled from New York to California in a 1950s train, stopping to host one-off events in 10 cities. Each featured a different line-up, but all combined dance, music, art installations and short film–at an event in Pittsburgh, held in the city’s central station, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and punk band No Age performed alongside a Japanese percussion trio and a Kansas marching band, with a courtyard dotted with colourful yurts and craftspeople stitching denim.
The project received a mixed response in the US–it was criticised in California and New York for not involving local artists–but thousands turned up to watch events in their home towns (you can read our feature on it here). The project has now arrived at the Barbican, with a 30-day line-up involving over 100 artists, designers, choreographers, film-makers and musicians from Beck to Nozinja.
At a launch event last weekend, visitors were welcomed by Olaf Breuning’s colourful smoke bombs (pictured below), a performance from a Rhajasthan brass band and a gig from rock band The Boredoms. By day, it’s a quieter affair, but there’s still plenty to see.
At the entrance to the show, the Vinyl Factory has set up a mobile printing press, first launched as part of a Christian Marclay exhibition which we wrote about back in February this year. You can watch vinyl being rolled, pressed, cut and packaged, and buy a record for £20.
The Vinyl Factory Press, created in collaboration with Christian Marclay and now on display at Station to Station. Images © Arianna Power
In the curve gallery, digital artist Aaron Koblin and director Ben Tricklebank have created an oddly hypnotic light installation. A single laser projects a wall of light from ceiling to floor, which tracks visitors’ movements and travels through the space, encouraging visitors to walk towards it. At the other end of the gallery are two large moving image works; one with some beautifully shot footage of train tracks, and another with typographic projections (pictured below).
Aaron Koblin & Ben Tricklebank’s Light Echoes at Station to Station: A 30 Day Happening by Doug Aitken. Photo by Rob Stothard/Getty, courtesy of the Barbican Centre
In the art gallery upstairs, there is wood block printing at Tal R’s Rosa Pagoda (shown below) and, on my visit, a live painting session with Albert Oehlen. From an upstairs viewing platform, visitors can look down on Oehlen as he cuts, draws, plans and paints on a giant canvas, narrating via a translator throughout the process.
Elsewhere are a series of studio spaces where visitors can watch artists, dancers and musicians at work: Fraser Muggeridge studio is designing and printing record sleeves until July 13, after which Abake will take over, dancers and choreographers are rehearsing and Marcus Coates is answer painting–visitors can pin a question to a wall, Coates will select one from random and paint an image in response. Those whose questions are selected are also invited to the space for a ‘consultation’ with Coates. Event partner The Vinyl Factory has also set up a recording studio where producers will be editing music, and visitors can arrange a tour of the space, or watch discussions and performances in the music studio next door.
Fraser Muggeridge & Abake’s studio
When the gallery is quiet, watching the studios, dancers and musicians at work all feels a little self-conscious, but this will likely change as the exhibition continues. It’s a fascinating look at making, and captures Aitken’s aim of creating a ‘living’ event where no two days are the same. Later in the month, film-maker Mike Figgis will be answering questions and editing a new short, and Martin Creed will be painting and working with his band and dancers from July 8-11.
Marcus Coates’ live painting studio
In another gallery space, a 12-hour installation composed by Aitken and Austin Meredith is projected on to several large screens, which visitors can watch while lounging on bean bags and mats on the floor. The footage includes scenes from the original Station to Station trip, as well as work from artists involved in the project. There’s also a poster display, an exhibition of prints by Olafur Eliasson created using a kinetic drawing machine and a room where abstract audio clips from sound artist Steve Roden play on a loop.
Eliasson’s prints and live drawing machine
On top of the events taking place every day, there are a series of ticketed events on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, from electronic gigs and music residencies, to performances by choreographers from New York, Belgium and Glasgow. While these events are paid for, the gallery is free to browse during the day, and has a relaxed atmosphere, with visitors invited to wander, have a lie down, take pictures or browse the space for as long as they please.
The event has so far received a mixed reaction–Adrian Searles likened installations to “a collection of inconsequential sideshow, party-art entertainments” in the Guardian–but the project deserves praise for its ambition.
With so many artists involved, it can feel a little nebulous, and some of the works are more engaging than others (the yurts and poster display are a little underwhelming), but it also offers a rare chance to see painters, graphic designers, dancers, music producers, film-makers and directors at work and in Q&A sessions.
Olaf Breuning’s smoke bombs at the opening of Station to Station: A 30 Day Happening by Doug Aitken. Photo by Rob Stothard/Getty, courtesy of the Barbican Centre
A Rhajasthan heritage band performs at the opening of Station to Station: A 30 Day Happening by Doug Aitken. Photo by Rob Stothard/Getty, courtesy of the Barbican Centre
As the event is stationed in one place, it lacks some of the spontaneity of the US tour–one of the most fascinating things about the US project was seeing actual stations transformed into chaotic venues for an unlikely group of artists for just a few hours, before Aitken and his companions moved on to their next destination–but it is more accessible. Just a few hundred tickets were released for each US event, but most of the programme at the Barbican is free and open to all. The sheer number of people involved is hugely impressive, and Aitken and his co-curators have ensured that each day will offer visitors something a little different.
Station to Station is on at the Barbican Centre until July 27. For details or to see the full programme, visit barbican.org.uk
Every year on Independence Day, millions of Americans tackle the same series of questions: Where can I go to see the fireworks? What kind of snarky Facebook status update can I write that will make me feel superior while irritating my British friends? And what does it really mean to be American?
Well, here’s a new one: What does it really mean for a car to be American? Once it was as simple as Chevy=American, Honda=Japanese and BMW=German. But global manufacturing, global design centers and global supply chains have muddied those distinctions. If a car is designed at Toyota’s Californian studio by American industrial designers, then produced by American workers at Toyota’s Mississippi factory, is that a Japanese car?
American University’s Kogod School of Business has released an index to help answer questions like these. They’ve looked at the big picture by taking all of the following into account:
– Profit Margin: Where the automaker’s global headquarters is located
– Labor: Where the car is assembled
– Research and Development Inventory, Capital, and Other Expenses: Location of assembly
– Engine and Transmission: Location of production
– Body, Interior, Chassis, Electrical, and Other: Location of production
– National Highway Traffic Safety Administration AALA “Domestic Content” Score
By crunching the numbers, they’ve determined a ranking of what are, in essence, the most- and least-American cars. Top of the list is nothing to brag about, I’m afraid: The 2015 Buick Enclave is ranked #1 with an 87.5% domestic content figure.
But the list gets more surprising the further down it you go. Honda’s Odyssey minivan is more American (78.5%) than Chrysler’s Jeep Grand Cherokee (75%). The Toyota Camry is more American (78.5%) than the Ford Mustang (77.5%). The Acura RDX beats the Tesla, the Hyundai Santa Fe beats the Chevy Camaro, the Honda Accord beats the Dodge Viper, et cetera.
Take a gander at the list here, type your car model into the search box, and see just how Yankee your ride is. The answer might surprise you.
Why was New York-based Reddit employee Victoria Taylor let go Thursday? At this point, it’s not entirely clear.
Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg raises the specter of Jesse Jackson, as well as the idea that perhaps Taylor did not want to relocate to San Francisco. The Guardian’s Alex Hern meanwhile did some detective work and found this:
A hastily deleted post from an executive at Quora (a Q&A site that is like Reddit, but for Ivy League grads) gives a plausible outline.
Marc Bodnick wrote that the dismissal was because “Reddit management was pushing Victoria to do a bunch of highly commercial things around AMAs (Ask Me Anything), but Victoria wasn’t comfortable with those ideas”. He cited video AMAs as one such example, and said that her resistance led to the sacking.
In a post on CenturyClub – another sub-forum that has since gone private in protest – Taylor herself expressed bafflement at her dismissal, saying that “you guys know what I know” in relation to her departure.
The dismissal is being actively discussed on Twitter under the hashtag #RedditRevolt and the short-form AMAgeddon. As Feinberg and Hern detail, it has also led to massive disruptions of the Reddit site in the form of various subreddits having been switched to private, in protest. Feinberg continues to frequently update her Gawker post.
This is a lightning-fast developing story. As we were posting, the coordinator of Reddit’s /secretsanta program announced he was no longer with the site. Much more to come.
Previously on FishbowlNY:
Meet Reddit’s New Director of Communications
The year-old digital wine magazine aimed at millennials has enjoyed a vintage first half of 2015. As robustly detailed by Wall Street Journal wine critic Lettie Teague:
By January of this year, VinePair had attracted enough attention and money from investors that both partners [Joshua Malin, Adam Teeter] were able to devote themselves to the business full-time.
The range of content – writers now get paid from $50 to $300 an article – is considerable and impressive. Topics range from the unabashedly simple lessons of Wine 101, such as “How to Look at Wine” or “How to Swirl Wine,” to decidedly more geeky topics like tartrates and dry farming. The latter “got a lot of industry attention,” said Mr. Malin, with a note of satisfaction.
Teague has a good summary of the venture’s winding history, which started humbly in 2007 as a wine club for friends of Malin and Teeter, who moved to New York after graduating several years earlier from Emory University.
The company is headquartered in the Flatiron District.
[Photo via: vinepair.com]
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.
