La maison d’édition anglaise Hoxton Mini Press a récemment publié un recueil de photographies inédites datant des années 60, 70 et 80 prises par le défunt photographe David Granick. À travers cette série, on découvre le quartier londonien East End à la lumière des couleurs et nuances à la fois chaudes et inusitées des pellicules d’autrefois, les films Kodachrome. Véritable témoignage historique, ces photos nous transportent dans une époque londonienne aujourd’hui révolue, bien que quelques bâtiments survivent encore.
Le livre accompagne une exposition présentée à la Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives jusqu’en mai 2018.
Le photographe français autodidacte Thomas Tourral, alias SeptMai, capture l’immense imprévisibilité des montagnes et de leurs atmosphères au gré des saisons. Ses photos viennent ainsi témoigner de l’aspect à la fois brut, instantané et versatile du paysage alpin qui nous offre des prises de vues spectaculaires sur ses massifs, ses nombreux lacs ou encore ses sentiers colorés. Le Savoyard qui est graphiste multimédia de métier et photographe par passion, parvient à immortaliser la beauté de sa région avec textures et poésie. Des clichés qui nous donnent assurément envie de partir en randonnée dans la nature!
Le photographe professionnel et réalisateur Platon Yurich réalise des photographies au style surréaliste. Il fait parfois appel à des mannequins et déniche des lieux uniques pour donner à ses clichés un genre mystérieux et onirique. A retrouver sur Instagram.
An Argentinian amateur astronomer was simply testing out his new 16-inch telescope by taking a bunch of short-exposure photographs when he managed to snap an image believed to be one in 10 million—or even one in 100 million. The photo is of an exploding……
Each year Design Indaba gathers together an anomalous group of creative people, from typographers to architects to ceramicists and more, to discuss their projects, process and passions. While each speaker is as different as the next, at times there……
Independent London architecture publishing company Artifice and sister publisher Black Dog Publishing have become insolvent, leaving architects scrambling to rescue copies of their books and retrieve digital files.
Studios affected include Simon Conder Associates, Design Engine, Morris Adjmi, and Lynch Architects – whose founder told Dezeen that a thousand copies of their book were lost “in a shed somewhere”.
“The book was on its final edit,” said Alexandra Barker of Brooklyn-based Barker Freeman Design Office, another architect caught up in the collapse. “I am trying to recover the InDesign files so I can get it published somewhere else.”
The publishers ceased trading on 5 January 2018 with the loss of all 22 jobs after struggling with debts of £784,445.
Design Engine’s book Building Stories has been affected by the problems at Artifice and Black Dog
Contract publisher St James’s House Media has since bought the assets of both companies, paying £35,000 for Black Dog and £15,000 for Artifice, according to The Bookseller.
However, architects said they were waiting to hear whether their publishing projects would go ahead as planned, with some making alternative arrangements.
Problems at Artifice surfaced a year ago
Black Dog, a contemporary arts and culture publisher, was founded by Duncan McCorquodale in 1993. Artifice, which specialised in architecture, urbanism, and design, was established in 2011 and has published titles for studios including Eric Parry Architects, Feilden Clegg Bradley and Bernard Tschumi.
Richard Jobson, founding director of British studio Design Engine, said problems at Artifice first become apparent a year ago, while working on a monograph called Building Stories.
“Deadlines were repeatedly missed,” Jobson told Dezeen. “It became clear that there were major problems at Artifice. However we had been pressurised into paying the majority of the project costs in advance and had no choice but to try to push on.”
Jobson was able to buy the stock directly from the French printer and Design Engine is now managing distribution itself.
“They produced hundreds of often brilliant books”
Lynch Architects had just completed its second title with Artifice when the company folded. Director Patrick Lynch said he had managed to rescue several hundred copies of Mimesis, published in 2016, but that around 1,000 copies of were still unaccounted for. The launch and distribution of his latest book Civic Ground had also been affected.
“It’s difficult to imagine who will fill this void in British architectural publishing,” said Lynch. “Black Dog and Artifice produced hundreds of memorable and often brilliant books, and the loss of their voice is a terrible blow to architectural culture.”
Two other studios affected, Morris Adjmi of New York and HHF of Basel, said they were looking for alternative publishers for their book projects.
Others planned to enter into negotiations. Australian architect Nic Goldsmith of FTL Studio said he was in discussion with lawyers representing Artifice while Simon Conder of Simon Conder Associates is due to meet with the new owners of the publisher.
Boston-based start-up company Ministry of Supply has designed a self-heating smart jacket that is able to respond to changes in temperature and create an individual “microclimate” for its wearer.
The Mercury jacket is the first electronic garment created by Ministry of Supply, a clothing company founded by three MIT students.
Aiming to solve the challenge of dressing for transitional environments, the tech-powered jacket uses sensors and thin carbon fibre pads which automatically heat-up in response to body movement, internal temperature and outside weather.
Unlike other heatable jackets, which often have to be preprogrammed to a certain temperature, Mercury is able to constantly adapt and optimise its heat output to suit the wearer’s body temperature – creating what the company describes as an individual “microclimate”.
It also has voice-control capabilities, utilising Amazon’s smart assistant Alexa to allow users to preheat the jacket before putting it on.
Wearers can also input their preferences into a corresponding app. The jacket then uses artificial intelligence to learn and predict them over time.
“Say someone puts on the jacket before their morning commute; the jacket’s heating system turns on once they walk outdoors. When walking to their train stop – elevating body temperature – the jacket combines both the outdoor and internal temperatures to regulate heat distribution,” explained the designers.
“Thanks to the [machine learning] technology, users never have to worry about being too hot or too cold—heat rises and falls based on any situation,” it added. “We’d be surprised if you’ll ever need another jacket.”
According to the company, Mercury is the first jacket that uses data to actually change and improve its function.
“Many devices report data like heart rate or number of steps, but that data doesn’t change the experience with the device. This garment will take usage data and make the experience of wearing an intelligent heated jacket better over time,” said the company.
Taking around 90 seconds to warm up, the jacket can reach temperatures of up to 57 degrees celsius – the same temperature as a cup of coffee – and is able to run at full heat for four and a half hours.
Extra warmth is provided through two zipped hand-warming pockets, where an integrated wireless charging phone sleeve also allows users to charge their devices on the go.
Its shell is made from waterproof fabric, and detachable sleeves allow it to be converted from a coat into a gilet.
Founded by three MIT students, Boston-based Ministry of Supply launched itself via Kickstarter five years ago. The company plans on shipping the jacket and by Autumn this year.
Minimalist John Pawson turned to architecture after failing as a Buddhist monk and a sports photographer. As a book of his photographs goes on sale, he spoke to Dezeen about how he discovered his love of colour through Instagram.
Called Spectrum and published by Phaidon, the book contains pairings of photographs taken by Pawson, whose studio is based in King’s Cross, London but who travels extensively.
The images are arranged according to their colour, shifting from white at the start of the book, running through the colours of the rainbow, to black at the end.
“It’s just things that I think are nice together,” said Pawson, whose photographs have gained him an Instagram following of over 135,000 people.
The idea for Spectrum originated from Pawson’s Instagram
Both the title of the book and the rich colouring of the images in it are a surprise given Pawson’s reputation for austere, often monochromatic buildings.
Pawson, 68, is famed for his minimalist architecture. The interior he created for London’s Design Museum is uniformly oak lined; a two-tone Welsh countryside retreat called the Life House has a broody exterior and a pasty interior; and the windows of his St Moritz Church in Augsburg, Germany, are enveloped in slices of onyx to diffuse light softly through the bright white space.
Pawson said he was equally surprised when he realised his Instagram images were often of vibrantly hued subjects, so he suggested to publisher Phaidon that he produce a book of his snaps from the social media app.
“I had this idea to do a book on simplicity,” he explained. “I started to do Instagram and I printed a couple of year’s worth of photos. They weren’t immediately enthusiastic about an Instagram book, and then they said: how about doing one about colour?”
“I said, well, I don’t do colour,” he continued. “And I looked at my latest photographs over the last three or four year and they were all colour, and I was like, oh!”
“Of course when you analyse it, the work is full of colour it just depends on what light you’re in, because the white of the interior reflects anything that’s going on.”
Pawson started taking photographs regularly during a stint living in Japan in his mid-20s, and has since accrued an archive of thousands of prints.
“The only things I’ve ever kept are photographs, so I don’t have any objects, nostalgic things,” he said.
“But I’ve got some of my parents’ albums and I’ve got photographs from childhood. I only started taking photographs on a regular basis was when I went to Japan when I was 24.”
Photographs are among some of Pawson’s only nostalgic possessions
Pawson was born to Methodist parents in Halifax, in the northern English county of Yorkshire, in 1949. He attributes his preference for design without ostentation to this upbringing.
“Obviously other people wouldn’t see Halifax in the same way, but I saw it as architecturally very simple,” he said. “The Yorkshire moors; the treeless landscape.”
He left for Japan, “escaping” a broken-off engagement and his father’s struggling business. “Japan was just a very refined and sexy version of Halifax.”
He recalled that, 44 years ago, a friend drove him to a remote temple in Japan, where he planned to convert from Methodism to Buddhism and embark on life as a monk.
“I went to Japan because I was already slightly strange,” he said. “I’d seen this film about Zen Buddhist monks practicing in the mountains in Japan in the most exquisite architecture, and as a discipline they were practicing Kendo.”
“It all just looked superb and, being a very immature 24-year-old, I got on a plane and thought I’d become a Zen Buddhist monk.”
Not believing Pawson would stick it out, his friend slept in the car outside the temple. The next day, after a few hours cleaning the floors, Pawson emerged and the friend drove him back to the city.
Pawson’s time in Japan brought him brief spells with Buddhism and sports photography
After that, Pawson spent four years working as an English teacher in after a brief stint in the unlikely career as a sports photographer proved unsuccessful. He then returned to England.
“[The photographic agency] sent me off to Europe and of course I hadn’t the first clue,” he said. “I didn’t realise of course that there is one moment and that is crossing the finish line – and of course I always got a leaf on the road or sunlight on a pane, so they didn’t employ me again. I’m too impatient.”
Pawson trained at the Architecture Association in London on his return, but left before fully qualifying as an architect to set up his studio in 1981.
Four decades on, the Japanese influence is apparent in his architecture. Meanwhile, the types of image that made Pawson a useless sports photographer form the basis of his Instagram account, and his new book.
The 320 colour images in Specturm, sometimes taken on an iPhone and sometimes a Sony digital camera, are all cropped square – until recently the preferred format of all Instagram posts.
For Pawson, the images conjure up memories of site trips, client meetings and holidays with his wife Catherine. Two sedate moss-covered walls, for instance, remind him unusually of an awkward hot tub experience with a client who he’d just met in Taiwan.
“Oh crikey. I went to Taiwan for a night and it was quite spectacular,” he recalled. “I got into a hot tub with a client who I’d only just met, I mean of course naked instantly but of course there’s so much steam and cover.”
Snapshots from near Pawson’s home in Kensington and his studio in Kings Cross also made it into the compilation.
Photograph taken in Higashiyama Kyoto, Japan
“The [architectural] work in a way is a contradiction to my personality. In a way this is more like what’s in my brain,” said Pawson.
“This is part of the work but somehow this, if you look through it, you wouldn’t equate those images to the interiors or buildings that I do.”
While a lot of drones follow the same four or six figure form, Alvix utilizes a specialized double-rotor design that makes it both incredibly agile and compact. Conceptualized for use by extreme athletes like big mountain snowboarders and adventurers like mountain climbers, Alvix can be tucked away in any backpack and released when the need arises for emergency services.
Its unique constructions consist of four discs: one for the alert lighting mechanism, two for the rotors and one for the base. When it’s not being used, the rotors swivel inward where they’re shielded from damage. In the event of an accident or injury, Alvix can be pulled out and launched quickly. Like a flare that doesn’t disappear, it uses light and sound to serve as a beacon for rescue personnel.
Personne ne sait qui c’est. Et pourtant, tout le monde l’a déjà vu. En affichant son visage littéralement partout à travers Paris, et le reste du monde, John Hamon défend, depuis 15 ans, le « degré zéro » de l’art. Pour lui, c’est la « promotion qui fait l’artiste ». Pour cause, ce parisien, après avoir collé des milliers d’affiches le représentants, s’est mis à projeter ses portraits sur les plus grands monuments. Des performances amusantes, qui interpellent sur l’art contemporain et la marketisation à l’extrême du monde de l’art. Un grain de folie, beaucoup d’originalité, et un projecteur très (très) puissant sont à l’origine de cette série pour le moins unique.
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