Horse Cycles a imaginé un vélo qui devrait satisfaire les surfeurs. En effet, les artisans ont confectionné une bicyclette nommée The Sidecar Bicycle, qui comme son nom l’indique, dispose d’un side car destiné à porter une ou plusieurs planches de surf sans avoir à tenir le guidon d’une main. Leur création est entièrement confectionnée à la main.
Alors que l’exposition Game of Thrones est sur le point d’ouvrir ses portes à Paris, Télérama a dévoilé les premières images des sculptures, costumes et mises en scènes provenant de Westeros que les fans pourront découvrir au carrousel du louvre à partir du 8 septembre 2015. Plus d’infos sur l’évènement ici.
L’année dernière, l’agence Colt a été appelée à revisiter l’identité visuelle du très réputé restaurant Londonien Quaglino. Inspirée par les motifs géométriques et les dorures de l’Art Déco, l’agence a également apporté une touche très contemporaine à l’image de l’enseigne avec des jeux de textures et des impressions reliefs. À découvrir.
Movie: next in our exclusive video series with Julia Peyton-Jones, the Serpentine Gallery director discusses Daniel Libeskind‘s angular metal pavilion from 2001, which she likens to a folded paper sculpture.
Polish-American architect Libeskind designed the second Serpentine Gallery pavilion in 2001. Called Eighteen Turns, the structure was made from sheets of aluminium, riveted together to create a continuous form that seemingly folded over itself.
“It was like a piece of origami,” Peyton-Jones says in the movie. “The design was very clear, very simple, but in its own way very complicated. Eighteen Turns was a brilliant description of what it was.”
She adds: “All the rivets that kept it together were of a sort of regimented exactness. It was a beauty that I cannot describe.”
Libeskind worked with engineering firm Arup to create the pavilion. The structure was designed and constructed within three months – half the time that architects of subsequent pavilions have had to work with.
“Unfortunately Daniel Libeskind got even less time than anybody else has had since then,” Peyton-Jones says. “But he and Arup were fabulous to work with and they took the Serpentine ethos completely to heart. They were immensely generous and they designed something that was really extraordinary.”
It took less than 20 days to erect the pavilion. It was designed to be flat-packed so it could be easily reconstructed on other sites. This became an important part of the brief for subsequent pavilions, which the gallery tries to sell each year to raise funds.
Libeskind’s pavilion was bought by property developer Cite. In 2005 it was re-erected at Fota House in Cork, Ireland, during the city’s tenure as European Capital of Culture.
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“It set a seed for this idea of how you can pick things up and transport them,” Peyton Jones says. “This idea about the ongoing life of the pavilions was very, very important.”
This movie was filmed by Dezeen at the Serpentine Gallery in London. All photography is courtesy of Serpentine Galleries, unless otherwise stated.
Dezeen will be looking back at each of the pavilions from 2000 to 2015 in subsequent movies over the following weeks. You can watch all the movies as we publish them on our YouTube playlist:
The post Daniel Libeskind’s 2001 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion was folded “like a piece of origami” appeared first on Dezeen.
This week’s Dezeen Mail includes the world’s first technique for 3D printing with molten glass (pictured), Zaha Hadid’s campaign to resuscitate her Tokyo Olympic stadium, and a house embedded into a cliff in Chile. There’s also the latest news, jobs and reader comments from Dezeen.
Read Dezeen Mail issue 268 | Subscribe to Dezeen Mail
The post Dezeen Mail #268 features a selection of this week’s best stories and discussions appeared first on Dezeen.
“I think of a design project as an exploration that involves both the mind and the senses,” says Italian designer and architect Mario Bellini in a new book of his work published by Phaidon. “In order to understand something fully I must test it and investigate it thoroughly, just as children do, when they touch and taste everything around them.”
Titled simply Mario Bellini, the Phaidon book marks the first time that Bellini’s design work has been comprehensively catalogued, making it both a useful contribution to design history as well as a beautiful coffee table book. The objects featured are presented in themes, and include everything from calculators to record players, sofas to lighting. Alongside images of the products themselves are also sketches and photographs from Bellini’s archive, published here for the first time.
Top: Olivetti Divisumma 18, electronic calculator, 1973. Photo: © Mimmo Capurso; Above: Olivetti A4, electronic accounting machine, 1975
Minerva GA 45 Pop, portable record player, 1968. Photo: © Alberto Fioravanti
MoMA Kar-A-Sutra, 1972. Photo: © Studio Castelli
Bellini, now 80, has had a prolific career, creating products for many world-renowned brands including Olivetti, Fuji, Vitra, Yamaha and more. Alongside his design work he has also worked as an architect since the early 1960s and even managed to squeeze in being chief editor of Domus magazine from 1986-91 as well as lecturing at various unversities.
His work is distinguished by its clean lines but also its playful styling, which is most in evidence in the Kar-A-Sutra, pictured above in an amusing marketing shot. Designed in 1972 for an exhibition on Italian design held in MoMA New York, it never went into production though has been hugely influential nonetheless, apparently inspiring one of the most familiar vehicles on our roads today.
“If, as automobile historians now unanimously maintain, my approach to imagining the Kar-A-Sutra marked the actual beginning of the trend for people carriers,” Bellini explains in an interview in the Phaidon book, “it would mean that in some way that design has influenced nearly 50% of all the cars built across the world since then.”
Cassina Bruco 1, lounge chair, 1965.
Heller Ultra Bellini Chair, 1970
Meritalia Via Lattea, sofa range, 1970. Photo: © Oliviero Toscani. Unless otherwise stated, all images courtesy of the Mario Bellini archive. All images reprinted from Mario Bellini (Phaidon, 2015)
The march of time and technology has sadly rendered a number of Bellini’s products largely redundant in the modern world, though flicking through this book it is difficult not to continue to drool over them, and long for the days when such calculators or record players were still essential items in the office or home. Collectors items they undoubtedly remain.
Mario Bellini by Enrico Morteo is published by Phaidon on September 14. phaidon.com
I’ve seen a lot of office spaces, and in many of them it’s hard to quickly find a good pen or pencil on the desk, even though the resident has many of them. In a number of cases, all the user needs is a simple pencil cup, and a spare coffee mug can serve that purpose. But some people will appreciate a more carefully designed alternative.
One step up from that pencil cup is something like the Trina pencil holder from Alessi, designed by Hani Rashid of Asymptote, which allows the end user to group various types of writing and drawing instruments together. It seems that some of the sections are shorter than others, which would accommodate pens, pencils and markers of varying heights.
Anthropologie’s Multiples pencil holder has many of the same features as the Trina, but it also has smaller sections for any writing tools the end user might want to keep separate from the rest. The smallest container could possibly hold related items, such as erasers. But to some end users it could be an annoyance, taking up unnecessary space in what would otherwise be just a pencil holder.
The acrylic pencil holder from russell+hazel looks lovely in the photos—and probably less lovely in real life unless the end user has a matching set of pencils, sharpened to perfect points. It holds 14 No. 2 pencils; some pens would also fit, but probably not the fatter pens that many end users prefer. So this is not a general-purpose pencil/pen/marker holder as many other “pencil holders” are.
Less & More makes pen and pencil holders with slots for individual items. The pen holders are designed for larger pens, including fountain pens; the diameter of each hole is 1.2 cm. The holders can also work for smaller pens if the end user wouldn’t mind seeing the pens at a tilt.
The pencil holder has staggered holes for the two rows, making it easy to see all the pencils. I did wonder a bit about the center of gravity and the stability of this design, but I haven’t seen any purchasers complaining.
This type of pen or pencil holder would appeal to end users who appreciate the visual cue that an item is missing when a slot is empty.
Dudek Modern Goods also has pen holders with holes measuring .5″, but the holders can be ordered with some larger holes if need be; that’s a terrific customization feature to offer. Some of the pen holders come with a slot for a slender notebook— a smart combination that will suit some end users well.
You see a lot of pen and pencil holders, often with an animal motif, which have the writing utensils going out at all sorts of angles—as with this one from Lenny Mud. This can be a great design for children if it encourages them to put the pens and pencils away, and some adults will just like the whimsy. But such designs can also take up more desktop space than other designs do, and sometimes the pens and pencils seem less stable in the holes.
Two kinds of pen stands favored by those who sell high-end pens could also work for those using such pens in their offices. This 7-pen stand from Penn State Industries really puts the pens on display, but they’re also easy to grab and use.
One purchaser (of the larger 12-pen stand) complained about “the base, where the holes are wide enough, but too shallow to securely hold the pens that have larger finials, especially thick, cylindrical ones” but numerous other purchasers didn’t report any such problems. Still, it’s a good reminder how important it is to get the sizing right when designing this type of product.
Pens can also be held horizontally, as with this cascading pen stand. It’s a flexible design, accommodating many pen sizes. However, since it’s 8 1/2″ deep, it’s going to take up a fair amount of desktop space, and many end users don’t have that space to spare.
The Pen Rest solves that desktop space problem; it’s a modular stackable pen holder that’s less than 2″ deep. (“Modular” and “stackable” are two of an organizer’s favorite words.) The original product was launched on Kickstarter, and there’s a new Kickstarter now (closing on August 31 at 12: 29 p.m. PDT) that offers the same design with new color options.
While most pen/pencil/marker holders are designed to work with many different writing and drawing tools, another design approach involves specialization. For example, this laser-cut marker stand is designed specifically for the Copic Ciao.
Five years in the making, the Nebia showerhead is designed to get more water onto your body while reducing the actual amount you’re using. How does it do that? Science.
The Nebia is the brainchild of Carlos Gomez Andonaegui, who ran a health club in Mexico City. He observed that running all of those showers was consuming a lot of water; after attacking the problem with his father, a retired engineer, they conceived of a showerhead that could effectively atomize the water. During the subsequent years of development, thermofluid experts were brought in to refine the design. The result is that the Nebia increases the surface area of the agua by a factor of 10, while using less than a third of the stuff!
Consumers are clearly interested; the Kickstarter campaign is well past its $100,000 goal with nearly $2.6 million in funding, and nearly every Early Bird special is gone. What’s also interesting is that five pledgers have opted for the $10,000 package to receive 40 Nebias each, indicating that someone who runs an apartment complex, health club or similar has taken note. The water savings, of course, scales up:
With 14 days left in the campaign, here’s still a pledging option available to receive a single Nebia for $299, expected to retail for $399 when it comes out next year.
I do wonder a bit about the installation:
Those of you with plumbing experience, or experience designing plumbing fixtures, do you reckon the press-fit shown in the video will be strong enough to both support the weight of the device over time, and provide a leak-free seal? And whatever gasket or grommet is serving to provide the internal seal is bound to wear out over time; I think I’d be tempted to caulk-tack the back of the unit into place against the tiles, but I suppose it would need to be ripped off to replace the gasket or grommet. Any thoughts?
Part of being organized is being prepared for when things go wrong — and with your computer, tablet, and smartphone things can go horribly wrong. That’s when you’ll be glad you’re doing backups.
On Unclutterer, we’ve written about how to backup your computer and the photos on your phone, but the following five scenarios illustrate just why these backups are so important.
The hard drive that stores all the data on your computer won’t last forever. As John Gruber wrote:
Hard drives are fragile. … Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.
And you may have no indication that your hard drive is failing until it’s too late, as Lorie Marrero found out:
I have always thought that you would have a little warning when a hard drive was going out — things would be slower, sluggish, acting strange. But this was here one second, gone the next!
Sometimes data can be recovered from a hard drive that has crashed, but that can be time consuming, expensive, or both. And file recovery is never a sure thing.
When your hard drive fails, you don’t want to be sharing a story like this one from journalist Andy Patrizio, on ITworld:
After two days of agony, I lost some downloaded files, nothing I can’t live without, and my entire Outlook contact list. Years of building up contacts, all gone.
A Rutgers PhD student had his computer stolen, and it had five years worth of research data. A family dining in San Francisco had a laptop stolen from their car — the laptop had irreplaceable family photos. People leave their computers and phones behind on airplanes and may not ever get them returned. You can read sad stories like this all the time. Without backups, the files on those devices are gone forever.
Joshua Peltz lost his cell phone, with all his movies of his 2-year-old daughter, when US Airways Flight 1549 crashed into the Hudson River in 2009.
Most of you will never be in such a horrific situation, and I hope you never experience a loss due to fire, tornado, or any other such disaster. But if such a tragedy were to occur, you wouldn’t want the situation to be made even worse because you lost all your digital photos and other precious files.
I’ve seen people lose files with no idea what happened to cause the problem. Other times you do know — sometimes just seconds after pressing the wrong keys. I happen to use CrashPlan for my backup, and on Twitter I often see the company sharing tweets like this one from July: “So relieved I use CrashPlan. Folder of all wife’s photos accidentally deleted in April and only just noticed. Now restoring from backup!!”
Lincoln Spector of PC World wrote about this scenario:
A malicious program infects your PC and makes your documents and other important files inaccessible, then it pops up a message demanding money to get the files back. You’ve got a ransomware infection, and that isn’t good.
How do you get the files back without paying for them? That’s simple: Restore them from a backup. That is, of course, if you’ve been backing up daily.
Otherwise, this is going to take some work.
Recovering from a malware infection is more complex than I can get into, but having backups of your files would certainly reduce the panic level if you ever incur such a problem.
Post written by Jeri Dansky
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