Hasta La Ideas

Fitting comfortably into the form factor of a dog-tag, the B2 blade from the guys at Bomber & Company literally hangs in its tag-shaped sheathe around your neck. The Nano-blade pocket knife remains fully concealed within the dog-tag shaped pendant and its lightweight, compact design makes it the perfect EDC because of its ability to be both a useful product and a fashion accessory.

The tiny sheepsfoot-style blade hides within its matte black metal casing, and can easily be deployed by unsheathing it and clipping it back into its holder with the blade facing outwards. When out, the small blade becomes a really handy piece of gear both indoors and outdoors. The 1 inch blade can do everything from cutting boxes to whittling wood and slicing through paracords. Its 440Carbon Black Stainless Steel makes it incredibly hard, measuring 58-60 on the Rockwell hardness scale… but weighing less than 2 ounces, giving it the distinction of being the world’s lightest, fully functional, 440Carbon black stainless steel tactical pocket knife.

The B2 embodies the true spirit of an EDC. Designed as less of a tool and more of a functional ornament, you can wear the B2 anywhere, pairing it with your clothes as a fashion accessory that holds the ability to discreetly transform into a useful tool to get out of fixes. Whether you use it to open envelopes or cut through wood, the B2 is that reliable, faithful EDC that’s always there to help… partly because it’s so portable and handy, but also in part that it comes with a lifetime warranty and should easily be your trusty sidekick for decades!

Designer: Bomber & Company

Click Here to Buy Now: 3 for $79 $120 (34% off). Hurrly, less than 24 hours left!

B-2 Dog Tag – Fully Concealed Nano Blade Pocket Knife

The Bomber & Company team is back with a complete redesign of the B-2 Nano Blade, this time concealed inside a discreet military style sheath.

Simply open the tag, remove the blade and fit it in securely.

Butterfly Lock: The B-2 Dog Tag uses a custom designed double-sided butterfly lock for safety. The lock is released by squeezing both sides of the B-2 Dog Tag and engaged automatically when let go. This makes the knife design much more robust than traditional smaller blades which are just folding with no locks.

Straight Edge Blade: The sharp flat ground straight edge is perfect for thin sharp precision slices and versatility of everyday use. The blade is also perforated to allow cutting and slicing of materials to not stick onto the blade itself. It provides a cleaner sharper cut.

Sizing: Discrete conceal-ability is the definition of the B-2 Dog Tag. The full opened length is only 3.7inches and when closed, it stands at 2.75inches in length and less than 0.2 inches in thickness. The miniature size of the pocket knife means it can easily be hidden in any coin pocket, wallet, or worn around the neck as a standard dog tag.

Weight: The ultralight weight of the B-2 Nano Blade comes in at less than 2oz making it the world’s lightest, fully functional, 440Carbon black stainless steel tactical pocket knife.

Materials: 440C black stainless steel allows B-2 pocket knives to be one of the strongest nano blades ever created by mankind. Rated at 58-60HRC the B-2 Dog Tag is extremely tough and will stay sharp for longer periods of use. 440C is a highly durable and corrosion resistant stainless steel. The B-2 Dog Tag can endure years of outdoor wear without extra maintenance to protect the blade from rusting.

Lifetime Warranty: All Bomber & Company products carry a full Lifetime Warranty. If it ever breaks, send it back to them. They’ll replace it free of charge.

Step-by-step instructions and details:

– UltraLight Weight: less than 2oz
– Length of Knife (opened): 3.7in
– Length of Knife (closed): 2.75in
– Materials (Blade and Body): 440Carbon Black Stainless Steel
– Hardness: 58-60HRC (Rockwell Hardness Scale)
– Color: Jet Black

And this one shows you how to turn your necklace in an EDC!

Click Here to Buy Now: 3 for $79 $120 (34% off). Hurrly, less than 24 hours left!

Advisor-collector Raquel Cayre, curator of “Chairs Beyond Right & Wrong,” is a small statured, young figure in a big, old old world of design. But the tunnels she’s drilling through that big, old world are geysering with freshness, as she mixes and matches art with design, design with art and back again. And as she makes extremely public these crossovers and the new, egalitarian burrows she’s created for them to be interacted with, she also revitalizes the fun-ness of design, skirting showroom settings for environments that offer broader value to broader audiences – both aspirational and buying.

Lucy Dodd, “Grandma Serpent,” 2017. Pigmented cotton on metal chair frame, mirror.

(Left) Rogan Gregory, USA, “Hermaphroditee,” 2019. Sitting environment in gypsum with upholstered cushion. (Right) Seth Price. “Chairs Beyond Right & Wrong,” 2017. Baked enamel CNC-routed aluminum; this work is the exhibition’s namesake.

Tribeca-based design gallery R & Company fits right in with this ethos. In fact, it was doing it first, and was the original tapper of young blood design talents the likes of The Haas Brothers and Katie Stout, to name just a couple. So, although she’d thought about presenting her chair-based show concept without institutional backing, when Cayre began conversations with the gallery it became clear it was a natural fit for both parties. (Evan Snyderman, who alongside Zesty Meyers is the gallery’s founding principal, was also involved in the curator’s 2018 “Raquel’s Dream House” project, a month-long experiential home design takeover that sold pieces out the wazoo, cementing the effectiveness of her model of experiential design presentation).

“This exhibition was four months of research and not telling anyone,” Cayre says of the early stages of its conception. “It started as me dissecting and funneling through the Vitra collection, going to the MoMA show” as well as other exhibits abroad, and “just nerding out and breaking down all the architects and designers making classic chairs.” In other words, she embarked on an obsession-fueled global inquisition on what role chairs play in art history and what they’re respectively up to these days: where the old chairs reside, who’s talking about them (and sitting in them), how they are being re-interpreted by new designers, how artists are interacting with them as subject and even medium, and what potential is left unfulfilled by their meaning as both function and formal art or design piece.

(Left) Peter Shire, USA, “Plasma Elephant,” 2018. Sculptural chair in steel, two-part polyurethane. (Right) Chair by Darren Bader.

Rob Pruitt. “Love American Style” 2019. Gold tape on love seat.

The curatorial process, for Cayre, was incredibly research-heavy. Aside from firsthand exhibition trips, archives, and a library of textual resources she’s curated as part of the exhibit display (viewable on a bookshelf en route downstairs to R & Company’s lower level, where “Chairs” continues), she cites Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) as monumentally inspirational.

Kosuth’s work – which is alluded to in her curator’s statement, a relatively abstract musing on the chair – is a display of a chair, a photograph of a chair, and a blown-up, written-out wall text definition of “chair.” So which one is a chair, as we choose to see it? “Chairs Beyond Right & Wrong” is provoking a similar question: What does a chair mean, and how malleable (or vulnerable) is that meaning? In other words, why do we subscribe to ideas of what a chair “means” or “is,” when its meaning and being have the opportunity to be radically more expansive.

One and Three Chairs (1965) by Joseph Kosuth. Image via the Museum of Modern Art. This art piece was an inspiration for curator Raquel Cayre.

The show is an investigation of these questions and preconceptions. “I didn’t want it to be a design show,” Cayre says. “I wanted this to be a thinking show.”

The tools for prodding visitors to think exist in the confrontational works themselves, all curated with historical precedences in mind, and mostly rooted in personal relationships, whether with the design and art-work as a collector or with the makers themselves. Cayre began inviting artists to participate in January – quite recently, in exhibition-planning terms – and provided them with guidelines about as abstract as her curator’s statement. The resulting interpretations of “chair” are what’s on display, from mediums spanning Plexiglas to painting to photography to fur coats to flora to textiles to typeface to bumper stickers to bronze and beyond.

Bunny Rogers. “Chairs (after Brigid Mason),” 2014. Rush-seated interwoven wood chairs. “Comedy Tragedy Horseshoe Neck Pillows,” Upholstery fabric, grosgrain ribbon, piping, stuffing. “Flag Rag Rug,” Cotton sheets, fabric dye.

(Foreground) Chris Wolston. “Chimichagua Chair,” 2019. Terracotta. (Background) Nate Lowman. “Broke Dick Dog Chair,” 2019. Oil on canvas.

(Left) Jim Lambie. Seat Belt (Ned Kelly), 2009. Steel, acrylic paint. (Middle) Martine Syms. “Aunty (10),” 2018. Painted steel chair, woven polyester strap. (Right) Reginald Sylvester II. “HEEL CHAIR (Judy),” 2019. Highly polished stainless steel/chrome.

Featured artists and designers include both more commercially known names, like KAWS and Nate Lowman, and classically recognized icons like Cayre’s famed Instagram’s namesake, Ettore Sottsass. And of course, the 40-plus other artists and designers featured in the concise exhibition of colorful, bizarre, sometimes grotesque and sometimes whimsical – but consistently eye-popping – “chairs.”

Ettore Sottsass, Italy, 1974. “Tappeto Volante” (Flying Carpet) armchair. Wood, fabric, velvet, and carpet.

Rob Pruitt. “Technicolor Chair #5 (Frederic Schwartz),” 2019. Purple tape on chair.

“Chairs Beyond Right & Wrong” is on exhibit at R & Company’s 64 White Street location through October 19.

All installation images are courtesy Nicole Cohen, via R & Company.

Monolithic blocks of stone mimic man-made quarry landscapes for Grupo Arca’s showroom and cultural centre in Guadalajara, Mexico, designed by Esrawe Studio.

The complex is designed to promote culture and education over business transactions, with a focus on Mexican architecture, design and fine arts.

Esrawe Studio split these two functions into separate buildings. Arts and learning spaces are found in the main, street-facing building in front of a large warehouse storing stone dealer Grupo Arca‘s collections.

Rectangular cut-outs on the building’s facade reveal a layer of ocean blue marble underneath the black concrete exterior cladding.

Visitors access the building through a small opening in the monolithic facade and are led down a narrow corridor to the central internal courtyard.

Called the Forum, its walls are lined with the same travertine from the facade, designed to create the sensation of being inside an excavated space.

“The character of the quarry is defined by the material,” said the studio. “The monolithic expression and the monumental scale of it makes it a one of a kind experience.”

Irregularly angled walls of the enclosing three floors above help carve out the stepped exhibition space within.

The sculptural walls allude the “manufactured landscape” of quarries, a term coined by Edward Burtynsky to describe the manipulation of organic landforms in the search for raw materials.

The upper levels protrude from and chisel into the Iranian travertine walls, with slim openings to look down into the space on the east and western sides.

On the ground and first floor, timber samples are slotted into a black frame and exhibited offset to each other, like a gallery installation.

Places for individual study are available on the second floor, adjacent to the Design Centre, where architects can meet with clients.

Visitors have free access to magazines and books by Grupo Arca on famous architects in a library located on the third floor.

A double-height space at the rear is planted with trees, separating the two buildings.

Unlike the stone used in the main building, the warehouse is designed as a neutral space to shift the focus onto the material collections available to buy inside.

Strips of lighting placed in between the trusses illuminate the stone samples below, against the black-painted walls.

Potential buyers are invited to browse the samples and use their mobile phones to scan QR codes for each product.

When scanned, the technology brings up additional information and costs and starts to build a profile of interests and future buying trends.

Mexican sculptor Jorge Yazpik was invited to exhibit his artwork in the Forum for the showroom’s opening night.

The space will be lent to various cultural events over the year including exhibitions, lectures and film screenings to build a connection with the arts scene in Guadalajara.

Elsewhere in the country, Esrawe Studio works with the aim of elevating Mexico’s status in the design world.

Dark, shiny tiles decorate the ceiling of the bar located inside the National Auditorium, whilst selected furniture and lighting projects were featured at Masa Gallery alongside other famed Mexican designers earlier this year.

Photography is by Genevieve Lutkin unless stated otherwise.

Project credits:

Creative director: Héctor Esrawe
Architectural concept: Esrawe Studio
Architecture, interior design and furniture: Esrawe Studio
Design team: Laura Vela, Antonio Chávez, María Santibañez, Jacobo Mendoza, Andrea Guillén, Brenda Vázquez, Fernando Carnalla, Tatiana Godoy, Fabián Dávila, Daniela Pulido, Javier García Rivera
Concept of experience in showroom: Esrawe + Cadena
Brand identity: Cadena+Asociados Concept Design
Renders: Yair Ugarte, Moisés González, Gael Félix
Technical collaboration: A-001
External advisors: CuldeSac, Alberto Martínez
Ilumination: Luz en Arquitectura
Landscape: PAAR Paisaje Arquitectura
Construction: CDM, Jaime de Obeso, Olmo Ernesto Godínez

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In an era where smartwatches tell us not only the time but also how much we’ve walked, eaten, our body temperature, our biometric details and at the same time allow us to respond to texts, make calls and basically anything else we can think of, it’s not surprising that the Vatican has decided to dip its toe into the vast pool of opportunities that is wearable technology.

The Vatican has launched ‘The Click to Pray eRosary’; an interactive and app-driven wearable bracelet, that can be used to learn how to pray the rosary. Comprising of 10 black agate and hematite rosary beads and accompanied by a silver smart cross, the device was launched by the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network and designed by GagdeTek Inc. The beads and the cross represent “the ever-enduring human faith”. Users need to make the sign of the cross on the interface of the smart cross to activate the eRosary.

Going beyond its aesthetics, the eRosary is also connected, logging the user’s progress and logs each rosary that is completed. You can sync the bracelet to its companion app “Click to Pray”, available on both iOS and Android. The app provides access to an audio guide, videos, and images, as well as “personalized content about the praying of the Rosary.” Three methods of prayer are offered to the user. They can either select the standard rosary, a contemplative rosary or thematic ones that are updated throughout the year in accordance with religious occasions and holidays. The Vatican did not neglect healthcare, and in fact added a feature wherein the eRosary tracks the user’s health data, encouraging users to “have a better lifestyle”.

“Aimed at the peripheral frontiers of the digital world where the young people dwell, the Click to Pray eRosary serves as a technology-based teaching tool to help young people pray the Rosary for peace and to contemplate the Gospel,” the Vatican said. They hope that this project “brings spiritual tradition and the latest technological advances together.” By incorporating technology with faith, it seems like the Vatican has taken a step towards inciting more participation and inclusivity when it comes to prayer activities. Though religion has been a part of our lives, will tracking people’s, especially the younger generation’s faith encourage them to be more involved in prayer and religion? Or will it just drive them away? With the independent attitude of the Millenials, it is quite hard to predict. A wearable device that records and tracks your daily prayers could lead to more inclusivity in faith, or it could prove to be a major stumbling block… that only time will tell.

Designer: GagdeTek Inc. (GTI) for The Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network 

Scribbles and paint-like splotches appear on this range of rugs that designer Faye Toogood has created in collaboration with Cc-tapis, currently being presented within the brand’s new Milan showroom.

The Doodles collection by Cc-tapis is comprised of six rugs, each crafted to resemble textural artworks that Faye Toogood has created over the past 18 months.

“Our intention was not to create photocopies of the original artworks but rather we wanted to try and capture the materiality and richness of each piece,” Cc-tapis’ art director, Daniele Lora, explained.

“We wanted to translate Faye’s expression created through the delicate use of colour and shading.”

The rugs – which are each hand-knotted in Nepal by Tibetan artisans – boast an array of organically shaped cutouts in muted tones of grey, blush pink, navy, sage green and sienna, stitched across with black squiggle-like markings.

Some of the coloured patches have been dyed to have a slightly blotchy appearance, emulating the consistency of watercolour paints that Toogood used in her original artworks.

Yarns of different thickness have also been used to create a mix of both shaggy and smooth areas across each rug.

Cc-tapis explains that these irregularities are also meant to nod to Toogood’s “preoccupation to tinker through her work” and incidentally create new designs.

“Though the rugs are independently idiosyncratic, they connect to each other through an overarching style of ready-made collage and handmade materiality,” the brand added.

The Doodles collection was presented in its entirety inside Cc-tapis’ new Milan showroom, which has a minimalist fit-out to keep visitors’ focus on the products on display.

Walls are simply covered with sandy-coloured plaster, while the floor has been inlaid with blocks of light-hued timber arranged in a herringbone pattern. Wooden beams across the ceiling have also been left exposed.

Arched openings or tall, rectangular doorways connect spaces throughout the showroom, some of which have been styled as living areas to show the rugs in a more homely context.

One room has been dressed with curved sofas from Piero Lissoni and a couple of marble tables by Jean-Marie Massaud.

Decor is otherwise restricted to Toogood’s fabric artworks, which have been mounted on small canvases and hung at intervals on the wall.

Cc-tapis offered a glimpse of the Doodles range in its recent brand campaign, where 52 rugs by a roster of international designers were presented against a vibrant kaleidoscopic set designed by Studio Milo.

Amongst Toogood’s creations were rugs by Maarten De Ceulaer, which feature an abstract mix of different bird feathers, and floor coverings by Studiopepe which take cues from the lunar landscape.

Photography is by Omar Sartor.

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