Accurately gauging many people’s mood across the country, Audi has created a commercial for the Super Bowl that isn’t about speed or luxury—in fact, it doesn’t even advertise one particular car. Instead this TV spot, called “Daughter,” depicts a bunch……
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Four of Zaha Hadid‘s abstract paintings have been used to create animated virtual reality environments for an exhibition of her early work at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery.
Zaha Hadid Virtual Reality Experience: The Great Utopia
The Serpentine Galleries collaborated with Zaha Hadid Architects and Google Arts and Culture to create the virtual reality experiences, which form part of the exhibition Zaha Hadid: Early Paintings and Drawings.
They worked with digital production agency Novelab to translate the abstract artworks into 360-degree virtual environments, which visitors can view using a HTC Vive headset.
Within a wire-frame view of the gallery space, the four paintings on the wall can be selected by using a motion sensor embedded in the headset. The paintings then become animated, and unravel into their various elements, as shown in these four videos named The Peak, The Great Utopia, The World and Leicester Square.
Zaha Hadid Virtual Reality Experience: The World (89 Degrees)
The idea to digitise the artworks originates from an earlier conversation between Serpentine Galleries director Hans Ulrich Obrist and the late Zaha Hadid, who died in March 2016.
Her studio Zaha Hadid Architects already has it’s own in-house virtual reality team, ZH VR Group, which is headed up by Helmut Kinzler.
Zaha Hadid Virtual Reality Experience: Leicester Square
Dezeen spoke to Kinzler, the Serpentine Galleries’ digital curator Ben Vickers, and Freya Murray from Google Arts & Culture about the process.
“The VR painting installation was an idea that we pushed for – as a homage to the tragic passing of Zaha last year but also to seed and promote the potential of our VR Group,” Helmut told Dezeen.
“The paintings done by Zaha in the 80s represent a level of experimentation and development of architectural ideas that was/were groundbreaking – but also remain as valid and as alive today.”
He said that the conversion to virtual reality is a natural extension of the thinking behind Hadid’s early paintings, which were influenced by Russian avante-garde artists including Kasimir Malevich.
“The paintings were the medium of choice for Zaha to break away from the ‘traditional’ architectural toolkit and to introduce a radical and innovative viewing, and to challenge the discourse,” said Helmut.
“VR is the reciprocal digital platform today in which we want to show – and connect to – these ideas behind or inside the paintings.”
“The paintings offer a highly individual reception and discourse between the designer and the viewer,” he added.
“In my view, Zaha made this choice to manifest that the ultimate benchmark and driver of architectural design is the individual.”
Murray too believes that Hadid’s use of perspective and space in her paintings preempted virtual reality.
“By taking the DNA of four of her paintings into virtual reality, our aim was to offer visitors to the exhibition new insights of the artworks and her architectural vision,” said Murray. “It was a collaborative approach and one centred on continuing with Zaha Hadid’s legacy of experimentation.”
“The first-person perspective inherent to immersive VR is the closest development of this thought and therefore the right medium to continue to explore.”
Architects and designers have long predicted that virtual reality tools will transform the industry, allowing buildings and products to be created intuitively in 3D space.
Designer and visualiser Olivier Demangel said that virtual reality will become “more powerful than cocaine”, with virtual architecture becoming as convincing as the real thing in just a matter of a few years.
Zaha Hadid: Early Paintings and Drawings continues until 12 February 2017 at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery – a space created by the late architect in 2013, by converting and extending a 200-year-old former gunpowder store.
Project credits:
Serpentine:
Artistic director: Hans Ulrich Obrist
Digital curator: Ben Vickers
Exhibition curator: Amira Gad
Google:
Cultural Institute Google: Freya Murray
Technical programmer Google Lab Paris: Damien Henry
ZHA:
Principal: Patrik Schumacher
Head of ZH VR Group: Helmut Kinzler
CTO ZH VR Group: Jose Pareja-Gomez
Consultant: Andy Lomas
Collaborators: Melodie Leung, Magda Smolinska, Aiste Dzikaraite
Novelab:
Director: Grégoire Parain
The post Zaha Hadid’s abstract paintings translated into immersive virtual reality experiences at Serpentine Gallery appeared first on Dezeen.
Leonardo Di Caprio – a designer that shares his name with the Hollywood actor – has created a limited-edition drinks cabinet based on traditional Brazilian jewellery.
Di Caprio’s Ziggy cabinet first launched at Milan design week in 2016, where it was spotted by Miami’s Aybar Gallery curator Francisco Polo.
According to Polo, the Brazilian designer contacted him soon after, and they began to rework the cabinet together so that it would better suit the gallery’s aesthetic.
“We decided to develop the bar cabinet as there are not many beautiful bar cabinets in the design market,” Polo told Dezeen. “We shared many drawings and ideas and finally we adjusted the size and decided the colours.”
Inspired by traditional Brazilian jewellery, the cabinet is made up of more than 1000 pieces that have been individually cut, lacquered and assembled by hand.
The jagged bottom edge is based on necklaces that were originally are made by plumes from tropical birds, while each side has a different pattern so that the cabinet changes depending on the viewing angle.
“Geometric shapes and combinations of colours of bracelets, necklaces and wedding jewels have inspired Leonardo Di Caprio,” said Polo.
“The result is a unique cabinet, which translates such geometric shapes into contemporary language by using the marquetry technique.”
Correction: this story initially stated that the designer was actor Leonardo Di Caprio, but has since been amended.
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Mies van der Rohe‘s unrealised design for an amber-glass office tower in the City of London has been revealed in detail for the first time, ahead of an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects next month.
The Mansion House Square project was under development for over 20 years but never built, following a long campaign by Prince Charles – a well-known opponent of modernist architecture. It instead became the site for James Stirling-designed No 1 Poultry.
However the detailed plans were not included in the Mies van der Rohe archive created at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the late 1960s, because the project was still ongoing, so have been largely unseen until now.
They will be included in the RIBA‘s upcoming exhibition, Mies van der Rohe and James Stirling: Circling the Square, which opens on 8 March 2016.
They will also be featured in a new book by architect and writer Jack Self, if he raises enough money on Kickstarter to fund the project. He has already sourced over 150 documents detailing the design.
According to Self, Mansion House Square is one of the least-known projects by the prolific German-born architect, famous for projects including the Barcelona Pavilion and Farnsworth House, but also one of the most controversial.
“Mansion House Square, so named for the civic and monumental space it tried to create next to Mansion House, is a tale of 1980s London egos, of personal and political intrigue, and power plays from the peerage, prince and prime minister,” he told Dezeen.
“It captures a moment when belief in modernism was fading and when the public realm came to be privatised.”
The project was commissioned by Peter Palumbo, a developer who, over the years, has also owned properties by Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. It would have been Mies van der Rohe’s first and only UK building.
The architect worked on the project from 1962 up until his death in 1969. His vision for a 19-storey amber-glass and steel tower included a public square – a radical idea for the largely privatised City of London – and an underground shopping centre.
After a drawn-out planning process, the scheme was finally rejected in 1985. Palumbo instead built the postmodern No 1 Poultry, a building that has also divided opinion.
“It didn’t happen for the very simple reason that, between when we got the planning permission outline and Mies’ death, public sentiment had changed,” said Palumbo, in an interview for Self’s magazine the Real Review.
“In the 1960s you could do whatever you liked, but by the 1980s there was a hangover from the postwar euphoria. There was a very definite philosophical shift, and a popular idea that tradition had been lost,” he explained.
“Mies was central to all this, in a way, with this building in the centre of London. It was symbolic of public feeling at the time.”
Mies van der Rohe has now been dead for over 40 years, yet he ranked at number 106 in the inaugural Dezeen Hot List – a guide to the most newsworthy players in the architecture and design industry.
He completed the Barcelona Pavilion in the early years of his career, before emigrating to the United States, where he went on to complete buildings including the Illinois Institute of Technology and the Seagram Building.
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Uber has announced a partnership with Daimler to operate driverless taxis, weeks after its own self-driving fleet was ordered off the streets of San Francisco.
The ride-sharing company made the announcement in a blog post on Tuesday, where it said the deal differs from Uber‘s previous partnerships as it will not be developing its own driverless cars.
Daimler will instead “introduce and operate their own self-driving cars” on Uber’s ride-sharing network, meaning that the ride-sharing app acts as a third-party software.
“Auto manufacturers like Daimler are crucial to our strategy because Uber has no experience making cars—and in fact, making cars is really hard,” said Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.
“We can combine Uber’s global ride-sharing network with the world-class vehicles of companies like Daimler, so that Uber riders can have a great experience getting around their cities,”
In the post, Kalanick also explained the partnership should help the ride-sharing company introduce self-driving cars sooner than anticipated.
The deal comes after Uber’s fleet of self-driving Volvo’s were ordered off the streets of San Francisco until the company acquired the necessary permit. Footage also emerged of two of the vehicles running red lights.
But Kalanick believes this deal will help make cities safer – a view shared by Tesla founder Elon Musk, who said driving is too dangerous for humans and will be outlawed as soon as self-driving cars are proved to be safer.
The US Department of Transportation also backed this argument last year when it unveiled plans to eradicate road accidents by increasing the number of autonomous vehicles.
The race towards driverless cars has also seen prototypes and proposals from architecture firm Foster + Partners, tyre company Goodyear and car giants BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz.
Uber allows users to order a taxi on-demand, often at significantly lower cost than other local services, with payments automatically deducted from card details scanned into the app.
It was set up by Kalanick and Garrett Camp in 2009 as a black car service for 100 friends in San Francisco, and went on to kickstart a transformation of the taxi industry that has caused uproar in numerous countries.
The post Uber edges towards driverless taxis with Daimler partnership appeared first on Dezeen.
Nostalgia Electrics makes this 1950s-styled Family Breakfast Station machine:
I was about to slam it—what need for this thing could there possibly be?—but headed over to Amazon first to read the reviews on it. The majority of them are positive, with three out of five people giving it five stars. Reading through the reviews, I see that my initial distaste for the machine stems from the same myopia currently gripping American politics.
Since I live in an apartment with a stove and own a frying pan, coffeemaker and a toaster, I don’t have a need for this. But there are plenty of people living in trailers without these amenities, or looking to outfit their campers. These folks have a need for the machine, do not mind that you can’t toast and grill at the same time and are completely happy with their purchase.
Yes, the machine makes no sense for an already-outfitted conventional kitchen. So you might wonder why it’s not being marketed specifically towards folks that live in trailers. I imagine it’s because of the stigma.
In the future I’ll be looking out for more products that address sizable but largely invisible subsets of the population. If you know of any, please drop a line in the comments.
Cars are heading in two distinct directions these days: electric and autonomous. The E-tech, a project sponsored by Nissan, takes a look at what we might expect from the manufacturer in years to come. It’s packed with plenty of Nissan-ness, especially the brand’s unapologetic experimentation with interior and exterior style.
The exterior is defined by aerodynamics and smoothness. Low-slung with sharp edges and exaggerated curves, it’s aggressive and mean. The interior reflects this same sharpness across the cabin. It’s roomier than you’d imagine with wrap-around interactive screens for entertainment and system controls.
Designer: Michael Garcia Lopez
L’entreprise italienne de design d’intérieur Riva 1920 et l’architecte Renzo Piano ont mis leur savoir-faire en commun afin de créer une table basse à l’esthétique léchée, qui porte le nom de Earth Table. Une structure épurée en fer, conçue par l’architecte, soutient le plateau, mélange de résine et de bois Kauri, une variété originaire de Nouvelle-Zélande et conservée depuis plusieurs millénaires. Une pièce de collection élégante, qui concilie deux critères importants : style et utilité.
Dans le cadre du partenariat entre Fubiz et Nissan, à l’occasion du lancement de la nouvelle Nissan Micra, l’artiste italien Elia Colombo a choisi de représenter l’audace et l’agilité de la nouvelle citadine et de sa personnalisation, qui peut se faire via de multiples possibilités.
Dans sa dernière création il a imaginé la voiture passant dans un cercle et changeant de couleur, projetant une ombre prenant la silhouette d’un tigre, pouvant symboliser le conducteur. Il a créé son illustration dans deux coloris différents : le orange et le bleu, rappelant deux couleurs dans lesquelles est disponible la Nissan Micra : Orange Racing et Bleu Electrique.
Le Super Bowl est la conclusion du plus prestigieux tournoi de football américain au monde. C’est l’événement le plus regardé à la télévision au monde avec la UEFA Champions League en Europe. Un audimat d’une telle ampleur justifie donc l’intérêt des plus grandes marques au monde, souhaitant tous les ans placer des magnifiques spots publicitaires durant les pauses du match.
Parmi les publicités ayant fait l’histoire du Super Bowl, celle de Budweiser « Bud Bowl » de 1989, celle pour le MacIntosh Apple en 1984 et celles de 1999 et 2000 pour dot-com.
Ici, une sélection des plus belles photographies de l’événement par plusieurs photographes de renom.
John Iacono
John Iacono
Andy Hayt
John Iacono
Neil Leifer
Walter Iooss Jr.
Walter Iooss Jr.
Neil Leifer
Heinz Kluetmeier
Walter Iooss Jr.
Andy Hayt
Andy Hayt
Heinz Kluetmeier
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