If you’re ready to put down roots for a long time and buy a house you can truly afford, owning has worked out very well for most people. But renting doesn’t always mean you’re just “throwing your money away”. If you’re disciplined with your finances, then renting can be a perfectly fine lifestyle choice in the short term without putting you behind financially. It can even make sense over the long term for very financially disciplined individuals…(Read…)
Hello Neighbor is an upcoming stealthy horror game, created by tinyBuild GAMES, where you play a suspicious individual who sneaks into their neighbor’s house to figure out what kind of secrets they are hiding in their basement. The advanced AI villain (your neighbor) will actually learn from your actions and try to either catch you or set traps accordingly to keep you from digging up the skeletons in their closet. Hello Neighbor is currently scheduled to release in Summer 2017. Hello, Neighbor is a brand new first-person tactical puzzler with Artificial Intelligence as an opponent. We think that modern games lack the deployment of Artificial Intelligence, therefore we decided to change the situation and create a truly smart opponent who will be able to learn by himself, study the player’s tactics, undertake counter-actions, remember the player’s decisions, and make plans. The mysterious and unpredictable game plot will make it fun trying to unveil the secrets of the game…(Read…)
Après sa machine cinétique portant le nom de Sisyphus, conçue avec des magnets et des billes de métal, Bruce Shapiro nous dévoile une série de tables conçues selon le même concept. Recouvertes d’une plaque de verre, pour admirer les beaux motifs tracés, ces créations hypnotisantes révèlent des mandalas et autres formes précises.
The 58,000-square-metre Taichung Metropolitan Opera House was designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito with a series of hourglass wells in its facade. It officially opened to the public yesterday.
A 350-metre-long glass block ramps up from the runway of a former soviet airfield near the city of Tartu to form the Estonian National Museum, which officially opens to the public today (+ slideshow).
Designed by Paris architecture office Dorell Ghotmeh Tane (DGT), the museum boasts a huge slanted roof that is designed as an extension of the old runway, located a few kilometres outside the city.
This new set of images taken DGT co-founder Takuji Shimmura show the museum and its landscaping just ahead of the opening.
The 34,000-square-metre museum is the largest in the Baltic States. Its exhibitions chart Estonia’s history from the Stone Age to present day.
“Designing a national museum for Estonia was an extraordinary challenge given the country’s many decades of tumultuous history, a history that is recent enough to still remain in the nation’s memory,” said the architects, referring to the country’s not-so-distant Soviet occupation.
“The structure resembles a glass wedge inserted into the landscape that slowly reaches upward from the ground – a built allegory for the country’s emerging history,” they added.
The facades are covered in a printed motif of an abstracted cornflower, Estonia’s national flower, giving the glazing a frosted appearance.
A huge entrance is recessed into the tallest part of the building, which reaches 14 metres.
Inside, gallery spaces, a conference hall, public library, auditoriums, educations rooms, offices and storage space for the museum’s collections are contained within a combination of glazed and opaque boxes.
“The museum has waited for getting its real own home for 107 years and the cultural project to be completed now is the greatest in the history of independent Estonia in financial as well as spatial terms,” said the firm.
“Today ENM is the most modern museum of Europe in form and content,” it added.
The show, held inside a Brutalist sports hall rather than in its own dedicated pavilion, investigated how the region’s Soviet-era infrastructure should be developed.
London Design Festival 2016: responsive paper shredders and fans that create moving colour effects feature in the Blend exhibition created by Dutch studio Raw Color at London’s Aram Gallery (+ slideshow).
Dutch studio Raw Color has turned office supplies into a chromatic exhibition at London’s Aram Gallery
Launched as part of the London Design Festival 2016, the solo exhibition includes self-initiated work produced by the Eindhoven studio, alongside designs created for clients.
Covering textiles, photography and product design, the exhibition showcases Raw Color‘s varied research into how colour works.
The exhibition features a series of installations that cover textiles, photography and product design
The Fans installation features three shelves of fans, each with a trio of blades in contrasting yellow, orange and reds, which blend into one another once set in motion.
“Maybe you can compare it with flavour,” said the studio. “Something sweet might taste boring but by adding a bit of salty or sour flavour, it makes the taste deeper and richer. This is what we like in colours too.”
This includes three shelves of fans, featuring a colourful trio of blades
Chromatology also relies on movement, responding to the presence of visitors to create a brightly coloured rain of paper from a series of hanging shredders. As more passersby come and go, a mountain of paper builds up underneath each shredder.
The Chromatology section features suspended shredding machines
The studio has also investigated textiles, with a series of blankets that show how different shades are woven into fabric.
There is also a series of blankets that show how different shades are woven into fabric
Other highlights from the exhibition include a set of brightly coloured clocks made from graphic patterns, described as “somewhere between a kinetic object and a functional timepiece”.
There is also a series of photographs that have been translated into geometric paper compositions.
Curtains made of semi-translucent wool hang in groups according to colour
The Blend exhibition remains open until 29 October 2016.
US set design studio Robert Storey has designed a plant-filled temporary retail space for online store Everlane in New York, influenced by the verdant conservatory at London’s brutalist Barbican Estate (+ slideshow).
Open for one month, Everlane‘s space on Greene Street in SoHo is modelled on the glass-roofed conservatory at the Barbican, which is filled with tropical plants that contrast with the concrete architecture of the existing building.
“Taking inspiration from London’s Barbican, we worked with honest materials to encapsulate the ethos of Everlane: transparency,” said Storey.
“Looking at the juxtaposition of the city versus nature, we explored the interior landscape created through architecture.”
Apart from the plants, the store has a minimal palette – much more muted than the brash presentation space that Storey created for Nike in the city two years ago.
At the entrance, the main display area is hidden behind plywood partitions arranged around the building’s iron columns.
Visitors check in at a curved white desk, leaving their shoes with an attendant, before proceeding into the concept store through an arched opening.
Arches recur across the space, in the forms of a white-framed pergola covered in greenery and a floor mirror for customers trying on footwear.
Wooden plinths and shelves display shoes in all available sizes, and create seats for shoppers. There is also a refreshments bar and a cosmetics counter.
Plants sprout from the tops of the stands, and can also be found in clusters around the edges of the floor area.
“Combining the inherent idea of play and tranquility, we have built an immersive and multi-disciplinary environment for the Everlane customer to experience,” Storey said.
The Shoe Park is open until 23 October 2016. Earlier this year, Everlane also opened its first physical showroom at its San Francisco headquarters, in a pastel-coloured space designed by Brook&Lyn.
Despite the growing popularity of online shopping, physical pop-ups remain useful for retailers to showcase their products to a different audience.
American firm Ward + Blake Architects has completed a residence and guest house in western Wyoming, which features rustic materials and sweeping views of the surrounding mountains (+ slideshow).
The Safir Residence is located in Jackson, a quaint ski town that serves as a gateway to two national parks.
The home rests on a flat site that looks toward the Teton Range to the north and Sleeping Indian Mountain to the southwest, and sits in the migratory path of indigenous elk.
The rural property contains a main residence and a detached guest house that total 7,500 square feet (697 square metres). A series of wooden decks – one of which features a hot tub – are situated along the exterior of the buildings.
Both structures are topped with pitched roofs, and are clad in salvaged wood and hand-fabricated weathering steel.
The metal panels were arranged in a way that reflects the home’s interior functions, and adds “rhythm and cadence” to the elevations.
“The lack of protective finish on the steel promotes serendipitous corrosion, creating a constantly changing mottled facade, ranging from orange to a deep brownish purple,” said Ward + Blake Architects, a Jackson-based firm established in 1996.
To take advantage of vistas from the main home, the majority of rooms were positioned on an east-west axis. L-shaped in plan, the single-storey residence is divided into two wings.
A gently curved “gallery” leads to bedrooms and a common room in the eastern portion.
The western half contains the master suite, along with an open-plan kitchen, dining and living area. Sizable windows provide framed views of the towering mountains in the distance.
“Large expanses of glass with deconstructed glass corners ensures that the view capture is more than a static frontal portrait,” the firm said, adding that the glazing also ushers in daylight.
The guest house was placed to the south of the home, forming a courtyard between the two dwellings. This outdoor space “defines the entry to the main house, while sheltering it from southeasterly winds that are prevalent in wintertime”.
The guest house contains two “monastic” bedrooms, along with an open-plan kitchen, dining area and living room.
In both structures, the interior finishes mimic the rustic materials on the facade. The beams and decking are structural rather than ornamental.
A driveway was set four feet (1.2 metres) below grade – a move that helped maintain the “pristine view corridors”.
“Additionally, this placement allowed the garage to be placed lower in relation to the floor level of the main house, which reduced the apparent mass of the house when viewed from the south,” the firm added.
Heading into October, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Hawaii’s largest newspaper, faces a mandate familiar to many of its U.S. mainland counterparts. Trim the editorial staff because of a downturn in advertising revenues.
Per a report by Honolulu Civil Beat’s Rui Kaneya, the newspaper’s parent company Oahu Publications, a division of Canada’s Black Press Group Ltd., is aiming to cut 15 newsroom positions by Oct. 17. From Kaneya’s piece:
Dennis Francis, Oahu Publications president and publisher, told Civil Beat that the job cuts will affect all six categories of employees — reporters, copy editors, photographers, artists/graphics, online production and clerks — who are represented by the Pacific Media Workers Guild.
According to Sjarif Goldstein, a sports editor who serves as the union’s unit chair, five reporters and six copy editors are among those lose their jobs. The other four categories will each see one position eliminated.
Goldstein added that employees can also choose to volunteer for a buyout and receive a severance package of one week’s pay for each year worked, up to a maximum of 40. Oahu Publications, which also owns MidWeek, Kauai ‘s The Garden Island, West Hawaii Today and the Hawaii Tribune-Herald, recently laid off eight non-union employees at these other publications, including Midweek editor Don Chapman. It also decided to leave 20 current vacant positions unfilled through the rest of 2016. Once the Star-Advertiser layoffs are complete, the newsroom staff will be down to 95 from the current total of 110 editorial employees.
While recently appearing on the Graham Norton’s celebrity talk show, The Graham Norton Show, British actor Daniel Radcliffe discussed the time he met Presidential candidate Donald Trump while promoting the first Harry Potter film on The Today Show…(Read…)
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