Sonos is seeking a designer to join our UX team. In this role you’ll work at the intersection of music and cutting edge technology to create delightful user experiences for the Sonos Home Sound System. Driving and executing against the roadmap, you’ll work with some of the brightest minds in the business on a smart speaker system that combines simple and engaging musical experiences with stunning audio quality and rock solid reliability.
Stov. is a 360 degrees, 500 watts far-infrared, electrical fire pit that is built to provide the household with a “hotspot”—a focal point in the house for the family to gather around.
Post-it Notes are an invaluable tool when it comes to effective brainstorming sessions and leaving reminders for yourself in the office. Heck, they even make it incredibly easy to leave passive aggressive notes for roommates and family members. However, the peeling ends in this image are something I’m sure all designers are familiar with:
While Post-its are a useful tool in the moment, their ability to stay put longterm is questionable, and their lifespan highly depends on what type of surface they’re stuck to. Post-it Brand recognized the need for communication in tougher conditions through the release of their new Post-it Extreme Notes. The notes, which feature 3M’a Dura-Hold™ paper and adhesive, seem to be more appropriate for people who demand more than the ability to stick to a white board, including designers, construction workers and engineers.
With designers in mind, we decided to give them a test run by sticking them to various surfaces and leaving them there for three days. Reporting live from the Core77 office, here are the cold, hard facts:
They stick to metal
The Post-it Extreme Notes stuck very well to our dusty metal lock.
Same goes for one of our metal chairs.
They stick to plants
Very minimal peeling on this large plant. You can really see the difference in texture between the Post-it Extreme Notes and regular Post-it Notes here.
They stick to plastic fish
Sticking them to large plastic fish was also effortless.
They stick to terracotta
We were happy to see the Post-it Extremes stuck to terracotta and ceramics well.
They do not stick to Aeron Chairs
Don’t bother trying to stick them to your Aeron chairs, it’s not going to happen. In general, steer clear from fabric and fabric-like materials with these.
They stick to glass
We stuck one to the glass on our arcade game. We came back three days later so no peeling.
They stick to wood
Same goes for the painted wood on the arcade game!
And to our very old hardwood floors.
They stick to paper lamps
The Post-it Extreme packaging advises against using these on paper, but they did well on our paper lantern.
They can get wet
After leaving this one covered in water for over 20 minutes, both the adhesive and paper stayed strong. Just keep in mind to use waterproof ink if you know your notes will be getting wet.
There you have it, Post-it Extreme Notes do work on plenty of unexpected surfaces and conditions. We wish we could’ve tested these on concrete and brick ourselves, but alas, those materials aren’t on-hand here.
If you’d like to see some more intense testing, Post-it was able to get a little more extreme with the test conditions:
They’re available at most big retailers if you’d like to test them yourselves.
Founder and designer of the French luxury fashion and perfume house, Givenchy, Hubert de Givenchy has passed away at 91 years old. Famous for (among other things) the little black dress his muse and close friend Audrey Hepburn wears at the start of……
A tire concept unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show, Oxygene from Goodyear, proposes a ring of moss growing inside its sidewalls. Further, the entire tire will be 3D-printed from recycled tires. The goal here is to improve air quality for vehicles on……
According to local paper Times of Oman, the project had experienced delays, but construction is now progressing.
“We have faced delays. In projects of this magnitude you always have delays – I hope we’ll recover the delays we’ve had,” Mounib Hammoud, chief executive of developer Jeddah Economic Company (JEC), told the Times of Oman.
When complete, the skyscraper in Jeddah will rise at least 1,000 metres (3,281 feet), overtaking the 828-metre-tall (2,716 feet) Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is currently the tallest building in the world.
The Kingdom Tower by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture is due to complete in 2020
Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture first revealed images of the building, previously known as the Kingdom Tower, in 2011. Construction of the record-breaking project began in 2013.
The tower will contain a Four Seasons hotel, serviced apartments, office space, luxury condominiums and the world’s highest observatory.
Hisham Jomah, chief development officer at JEC, confirmed to the Times of Oman that technical issues with the concrete had meant that alterations to the design had to be made, which had delayed construction.
“Between theory and application, what has been designed and what is actually on site – that is quite another world,” Jomah said.
The skyscraper is being built by main contractor Saudi Binladin Group, with Mace and Arcadis acting as project managers. Construction had reached 63rd floor at the time of the last report.
The concrete structural core and external cladding is expected to be completed in 2019, with the building set to open the following year.
Skyscraper experts Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill established their firm in 2006. Before setting up the practice, the pair worked at SOM, working on projects including the Burj Khalifa, Trump Tower Chicago and London’s Broadgate Tower.
Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron has completed a residential tower north of Miami Beach, featuring terraces formed by extended concrete floor slabs.
Set to open officially on 16 March 2018, the Jade Signature development is located beside the beach in the Sunny Isles district and includes 192 condominiums.
The 57-storey concrete tower, which tapers gradually towards its top, features sculptural columns expressed on its exterior, between floor plates extended beyond the glass walls.
“Seen together, the walls and slabs – primary elements in the tower’s architecture – create a finely textured expression on the facade,” said Herzog & de Meuron in a statement.
“Concrete is both native to Miami’s construction industry and integral to the tropical modernism that is part of Miami’s architectural heritage.”
The terraces add 30 per cent more floor area to each residence and provide shaded spaces for outdoor living – popular in Florida’s tropical climate.
Column edges and the undersides of the concrete slabs are subtly patterned, and the glass handrails are tilted to minimise reflections.
Herzog & de Meuron chose a parallelogram footprint to minimise the skyscraper’s shadow on the beach to the east, and maximise the amount of direct sun the ocean-facing units receive.
Unlike many of its neighbours, the tower’s parking provision is located underground rather than housed in a podium at the base.
This enables residents to access the lobby directly from the street, and the swimming pool and beach from the same level.
A ribbon-like driveway takes cars from Collins Avenue up to the drop-off entrance on the west side, then becomes a winding route through the building’s amenities, which include a restaurant and a spa.
Herzog & de Meuron has designed some of Miami‘s most iconic contemporary buildings, including the 1111 Lincoln Road concrete parking garage and the Peréz Art Museum surrounded by hanging plants.
With Coventry set to be UK City of Culture in 2021, the destruction of the city’s post-war architecture needs to stop, says Owen Hatherley.
Every now and then, I go to a city that had the hell bombed out of it in the second world war, and find that what it did afterwards to replan, rehouse and reimagine itself became the story it would tell to visitors.
Take Warsaw, which was rebuilt as an emulation of 18th century landscape paintings, but also Rotterdam, a hyperactively over-developed city where post-war precincts are preserved as a reminder of the planned social democratic city it once was. In Dresden and Minsk, grand boulevards and classical squares are tended right down to the 1950s neon signs. Also Le Havre, where Auguste Perret’s reconstruction of the French port as a concrete metropolis, and the later additions to it by Oscar Niemeyer, far outnumber images of its 19th century remnants on postcards, magnets and books.
Of all of the great reconstruction projects of the first decade after 1945, there’s only one city that never seems to take possession of and pride in what it did: Coventry.
Post-war Coventry was much more famous in its time than the likes of Le Havre and Dresden
It’s puzzling, because post-war Coventry was a lot more fun than any of the cities mentioned above. And it was much more famous in its time, when the likes of Le Havre and Dresden were considered stiff and retrograde, and Rotterdam cold and technocratic.
Walk around the pedestrian precincts of the Midlands city and you will find a lot of obvious top-down scenographic planning. Everything is arranged around the vistas of the cathedral and church spires, with two later concrete high-rises added to provide new terminal points. But it’s also very much a city of the Festival of Britain style, where modernism was tempered with nostalgic signage, decorative details, mosaic panels, and integral reliefs and sculpture. This sort of attention to the attractive and eccentric is usually popular. It has fallen by the wayside a little in the cult of brutalism – it isn’t sexy or enigmatic and there’ll never be a Phaidon book on it. But maybe fashions will change enough as time goes on that it’ll be fashionable by, say, 2021.
That’s the year that Coventry will be the UK City of Culture – an event which, whatever else may be said about it, has had some success in focusing attention on neglected cities in Britain that have an enormous amount going for them, artistically and architecturally. In Hull, for instance, there’s the Edwardian city centre, where cash was lavished on rebuilding it as an imperial city of grandiose domes.
What Coventry has that can match up to that is the townscape of the two-level central precinct, the civic district around the old Lanchester Polytechnic, art gallery and town hall, the intriguing and original spaces of the Bull Yard and City Arcade, the International Style ensemble around the railway station, the Coventry swimming baths, the Belgrade Theatre, and of course, Basil Spence’s thrilling, rampantly sentimental transformation of the cathedral into a poignant war memorial and showcase of modernist art.
Of these, only the latter is really safe. All the others – even those which include listed buildings – are under threat from property development, or in the case of the Belgrade Theatre, have already been degraded by being surrounded by 10th-rate new buildings.
Coventry’s economic decline since the 70s has meant that it desperately courts developers
A Twentieth Century Society report just published highlights the proposed changes. The least controversial may be the redesign of the central precinct, which entails removing the appallingly clumsy green 1990s escalator that barges into the square, blocking the view of the cathedral, and removing the neo-Victorian crazy paving inflicted on the square at the same time. The plans show the view being restored. But to offset that, the original fabric of the buildings that do survive, escalator aside, will be ripped out and refaced with a glass approximation of their grids. To my eyes, it looks less insulting and philistine than the 1990s version, but it’s still some way from respecting the original idea.
Elsewhere, it’s pure destruction. The listed railway station is to be surrounded with orange-clad tat of shamefully poor design, the listed William Mitchell reliefs at the Bull Yard are to be moved elsewhere and the rest demolished, the civic square to be mostly demolished and the incredible “elephant” leisure centre is to be erased completely. These are not the moves of a city that is proud of its architecture.
The main obstacle to the public appreciation of these buildings is simple – they’re often dirty, covered in pigeon spikes and/or pigeon shit, neglected and worn. They’re mostly well built and easily repaired and cleaned, and if what was done with the civic buildings of Hull was done here, their reputation would change with similar speed. There are already models here of new buildings that integrate and enhance the qualities of the post-war city, like Pringle Sharratt Richards’s extension of the Herbert Gallery.
Another problem is the way that rules that are ruthlessly enforced on all other listed building types are often waived for modernist buildings – from Park Hill to Billingham Forum, listed works have been completely stripped out and redesigned, often invasively, because of a half-cocked idea that modern architecture is about structure rather than integrity.
Why not make being a City of Culture about pioneering a new civic culture for British cities?
But the real culprit in Coventry is something else – ownership. Aside from the Belgrade Theatre and the swimming baths, most of reconstructed Coventry, however much it conformed to a public plan, is just retail – something that set it apart from the more mixed-use approaches made in the 40s and 50s by Le Havre or Rotterdam. That means that it is effectively a giant mall, so it has to follow mall rules, which are, unfortunately, the sworn enemy of everything but the bottom line. The thing is, Coventry’s economic decline since the 70s has meant that it desperately courts developers, out of the terror that if they don’t invest, that decline will descend into full-scale freefall.
Maybe there’s another way. Other ex-industrial towns – most famously, Preston – have given up on trying to chase John Lewis, and have started to try to do things in-house, attracting local co-operatives to fill the gaps left by all the failed boomtown schemes. That’s where Coventry could be looking. Why should the central precinct be a mall? Why shouldn’t it be a focus for real public activity, for co-housing and co-working spaces, much-needed new social housing, for galleries and social centres? Why not make being a City of Culture about pioneering a new civic culture for British cities, rather than waiting around for developers to save us?
The caption reads: “Just received the prototype of my design in collaboration with @rapha for a new range of cross country ski gear. In time to test tomorrow for my 25th cross country ski marathon – weather forecast is absolutely terrible – warm and rain – going to be slow and hard!”
In the post, Foster is seen wearing the prototype ski wear, which is black with pink accents.
The phrase “do more with less” is written using perforated holes on the coats lining behind the zipper. This phrase is a key part of ephemeralization, a concept devised by architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, who collaborated with Foster in the 1970s.
The architect established the Norman Foster Foundation in 1999 to support the next generation of architects and designers. Photographer Jose Manuel Ballester recently took pictures of the foundation’s archive in Madrid for his book Spaces.
The archive includes a range of items, including a car once owned by architect Le Corbusier, models of the practice’s work and drawings by the architect, including his collaboration with Fuller on the Samuel Beckett Theatre.
“Two time Olympic medallist Bevan Docherty and Olympian Kris Gemmell treat us to one of the best sprint finishes in triathlon history. The 2005 New Plymouth ITU World Cup was the location for this epic battle of will.”..(Read…)
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