Designed to embody Mitsubishi’s slogan of ‘driving your ambition’, the Mi-Tech was unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show as a concept that explores new boundaries for the future consumer as well as the company. The small plug-in hybrid electric SUV features a battery right under the passenger seat, and even a gas-turbine engine-generator instead of a traditional gasoline engine. This gas-turbine is what sets the Mi-Tech concept apart, as not only is it power-efficient, it also runs on a large variety of fuels, from petrol to kerosene, to even flammable alcohol, depending on what’s really available. It does all this while keeping a clean exhaust, responding to any environmental concerns.
Mi-Tech comes with a four-wheeled drive, a signature feature that’s a part of Mitsubishi’s blood, and even features the MI-PILOT, a driver-assistance technology that works not just on paved roads, but even on off-road trails.
British-Israeli designer and architect Ron Arad has completed an office tower in Tel Aviv “inspired by an iceberg” with an angular glass exterior that widens in the middle.
Located in the Israeli city’s Nahalat Yitsak neighbourhood, the ToHA tower comprises 28 floors that step out towards the middle of the building, and then back inwards before the rooftop.
“The building itself was inspired by an iceberg,” Arad told Dezeen.
“The idea was to have minimal contact at the floor to create the smallest footprint ever, which meant the building had to grow towards the centre.”
ToHA is elevated on three legs that support the building above an outdoor plaza on the ground floor.
“There was a desire to touch the earth with the smallest footprint so we could create a new park in the city even though there was no land for a park,” said Arad.
Arad, who worked with local architect Avner Yashar of Yashar Architects on the project, has placed technical plant areas at the base, rather than on the roof so that this space can be used as a rooftop terrace.
The exterior of these lower levels is clad in Dekton, a man-made stone-like material by Spanish brand Cosentino.
The knitted design of Dekton provides ventilation as well as structure to ToHA. The material is also used inside as flooring, ceilings, interior walls and panelled coverings.
An entrance with a 30-metre-high atrium, planted trees and a skylight is incorporated into the office building, as well as a restaurant and various elevator lobbies.
Interiors feature light floors, white walls and feature walls clad in dark vertical panels. Floors plans vary and no two are the same.
The flexible floorplans are designed to be customisable depending on office tenants, and can contain either one company or be divided for up for seven tenants to share a floor.
ToHA is the first development on the site and a second 75-storey tower also underway.
The two buildings will be connected via an elevated walkway, and the taller will also be elevated on a slim support to maximise the open space on the ground floor.
The current tallest building in the country is Azrieli Sarona Tower built by Moshe Tzur Architects, which is very close to Arad’s ToHA in Tel Aviv’s Sarona area.
Completed in 2017, the skyscraper is 61 storeys and 238.5 metres tall.
Executive architect: Avner Yashar Architects Consultant structural engineer: Buro Happold, David Engineers Landscape architects: VOGT, TeMA Project lead: Asa Bruno, Paul Madden, Julia Almeida Team: Benjamin Dresner-Reynolds, Julian Gilhespie, Shalhevet Visner, Alan McLean, Adam Furman
Interior designer Tina Rich has turned a “white box” in New York City‘s Soho neighbourhood into a showroom and office for a women’s sports brand.
Local studio Tina Rich Design transformed a 2,500-square-feet (232-square-metre) space into the office and showroom for online brand Alala.
Rich’s firm had previously designed the first office of the company, following its establishment in 2014 with a focus on “high-end designer activewear for women”.
It was enlisted again to design a second, much bigger space to accommodate the growing team, as well as other activities.
“They wanted a larger, light-filled space for their creative studio where they design all their activewear and a showroom that was flexible enough to meet with buyers, host events, and have morning yoga classes for their growing team,” Tina Rich said.
The aim of the project was to bring a “downtown attitude” to a previously plain decor.
“The space was a white box so we worked on laying out the space to include the showroom, open office, fitting rooms and a kitchen,” the studio added.
Roughly finished concrete adds texture to the walls in the showroom, while changing rooms are fronted in patchwork nude curtains.
Darker details are provided by a metal clothing-rail that protrudes in three parts to hang the activewear and a black Faye Toogood Roly Poly chair, while other features include planting and handmade ceramics.
A long bench topped with nude cushions for customers to sit on forms part of a series of Japanese-influenced items in the space.
Others include the glass and wooden screens of the offices, which take cues from traditional Japanese partitions, and lantern lights that are arranged to hang above the meeting-room table.
“We also wanted to bring in some Japanese elements with the lantern pendants, wood partition-wall inspired by shoji screens, and the floating bench with linen cushions,” Tina Rich said.
The long, pale wooden table matches the tones of built-in cabinetry, while green chairs are arranged around the table to highlight hues of planting throughout.
Tina Rich also designed a kitchen for the Alala team that has black cabinets offset with a white, marble backdrop.
In the first major exhibition dedicated to 24/7 culture, Somerset House presents “creative responses to this modern malaise” by more than 50 artists and designers, including Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.
Called 24/7 and billed as “a wake-up call for our non-stop world” the exhibition brings together the work of more than 50 international artists and designers, many of them special commissions.
Awake by Tekja is one the projects featured in the exhibition
Of these contributors, 10 work at Somerset House Studios, including Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, who presented Machine Auguries, a work that artificially recreates the dawn chorus.
“Instead of thinking about how the 24/7 lifestyle affects humans, I wanted to think about how it affects other species, and then of course reflects back on us,” said Ginsberg.
“We looked at the dawn chorus and examined the effects of noise and light pollution on birds, who are singing louder and at a higher pitch and longer and earlier to try and communicate over the din of the city,” she continued. “Only those that can adapt survive.”
Tekja are a data visualisation studio producing digital experiences that reveal patterns in data
Ginsberg and her team fed thousands of real bird noises into a piece of AI, a generative adversarial network in order to generate thousands of fake bird calls.
From these they rebuilt a condensed ten-minute dawn chorus. It starts with the original version as heard in nature, takes the listener through an entirely synthetic chorus and then back to the real dawn chorus.
Tatsuo Miyajima’s Life Palace is a meditative isolation chamber which visitors can climb inside
The full series of works in the Somerset House exhibition, including Machine Auguries, all respond to society’s struggle to switch off, and the unrelenting pressure to produce and consume around the clock.
“This isn’t a show that’s designed to get you to throw your phone away, or other self help advice. It’s a show about how we share space and time, and it’s about us, now,” said director of Somerset House Trust Jonathan Reekie.
“We live in a way that many of us feel is a constant state of sleeplessness, distraction and endless work and this exhibition is about encouraging us to rethink the way we live, work and rest, our relationship to time, and I think most importantly our relationship to each other and the world around us.”
Douglas Coupland’s Slogans for the 21st Century are humorous posters inspired by the exhibition themes
The exhibition is divided into roughly five zones: day and night, activity and rest, the human and machine, work and leisure, and the individual and the collective.
“Each section represents a tension that we feel – being asleep or scrolling on our phone, or being isolated at work or being together,” explained exhibition curator Sarah Cook. “But it’s not so simple as those easy binaries might make it seem.”
Artist Mat Collishaw produced a new work The Machine Zone for the exhibition
British artist Mat Collishaw is showing a new work, The Machine Zone, that sees six animatronic birds moving inside glass boxes, based on psychologist BF Skinner’s experiments into conditioned responses.
“It’s a recreation of Skinner’s experiment and how these were later used by amongst others social media companies as a way of controlling and addicting us to our devices,” said Collishaw.
“The work I’ve made is not so much about the relentless clock ticking on the wall or the city that we’ve built for ourselves but the mechanisms inside our brain and how they become hijacked.”
Visitors can be wrapped in a copper blanket that acts as a Faraday Cage to prevent electro-magnetic waves
Other work on show includes Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s 6 Months Without, for which she lived for six months without access to the internet, Ubermorgen’s video work about bitcoin, Chinese Coin (Red Blood) and a set of Slogans for the 21st Century, created by Douglas Coupland in response to the exhibition’s themes.
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s Somnoproxy asks visitors to lie down on a bed and close their eyes whilst they’re read the fictional story of someone who sleeps on behalf of clients who are too busy to do it themselves.
Elsewhere Catherine Richards’ Shroud/Chrysalis I and II sees visitors lie down on a glass table where they are wrapped in a copper blanket that acts as a Faraday Cage, blocking electro-magnetic signals.
JooYoun Paek’s Pillowig allows the wearer to sleep anywhere
The exhibition was initially inspired by the 2013 book by art critic Jonathan Crary 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.
The curators also looked to research by broadcasting regulator OFCOM that showed that people in the UK now check their smartphones every 12 minutes on average over the course of a full day.
Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos’ Fifteen Pairs of Mouths is an immersive installation at the show
Meanwhile The Sleep Council reports that 48 per cent of Britons regularly go to sleep after 11pm each night.
Despite this we are all working longer hours. Since 2010 UK workers have added an average of a full working week (37 hours) to their working year, according to data from the OECD.
Sam Meech’s Punchcard Economy hangs above the gallery atrium
The exhibition doesn’t aim to provide any straightforward solutions, but looks at the creative responses that technology can offer, as well as the problems that it creates.
“Technology is often blamed for accelerating our lives, we often complain about longer working hours and the distinction between work, rest and play becoming more blurred,” said Reekie. “Trying to understand the truth in all this is unbelievably complex.”
Marcus Coates’ Self Portrait as Time is a video work that examines human’s lack of control over time
Ginsberg will be speaking at Dezeen Day about her work exploring how design can be harnessed to combine the natural world with emerging technology to create a better world.
Born in New York City, I’ve lived in four of the five boroughs. In none of them did I ever need to touch a chainsaw. But after relocating last year to farm country, where the main house has a wood-fired stove, it was one of the first new tools I had to learn how to use.
And learning the tool has taught me that “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is complete bullshit:
– This Leatherface guy is supposed to be a maniac–but he takes the time to accurately mix the fuel and oil at a 50:1 ratio?
– You’re telling me he starts the chainsaw on the first pull every time?
– He carries that stupid wrench/screwdriver thingy around with him, never loses it, and adjusts the chain tension correctly so he never throws a chain?
– He checks to make sure the bar oil reservoir is filled every time and never burns the bar?
– He never spills oil all over the handle and doesn’t have to wipe it off so he doesn’t lose his grip?
I bet 50% of the real Leatherface’s victims escaped because he flooded the carburetor. Another 40% died of boredom because he needed to gap the spark plug, couldn’t find his feeler gauges and spent several hours looking for them in various sheds.
Anyways I’m bringing this up because, while the movie is complete nonsense, the chainsaw’s ancestor actually was designed to cut…into the human body, rather than wood.
Specifically, human bone. This is an osteotome, a bone-cutting instrument that was invented centuries ago and is still used today:
Way back in the 1820s, a German physician and bone specialist named Bernhard Heine looked at the standard osteotome, and had a crazy idea: What if the cutting teeth were on a chain that rotated? It took him several years to finalize his design, but by 1830 he had developed the chain osteotome:
I know, gross.
By the 1850s the Heine Osteotome was being produced by a French company called Charriere, and it came in this snazzy case.
It’s pretty impressive that they were able to make something this intricate way back then.
I’m particularly impressed by the knurling on the handle. To achieve a wraparound texture on an organic 3D shape must have been quite the challenge.
Lastly I’ll say: I wouldn’t recommend buying the Stihl MS210 C you see in the topmost photo. The “EasyStart” feature is nice, but the thing leaks oil like a sieve, I had to replace the carburetor when it was only two months old, and it’s just gone out again. So much for Stihl quality!
Artificial claims: readers disagree with designer Sebastian Errazuriz who made the controversial claim that ninety per cent of architects will lose their jobs as artificial intelligence takes over the design process.
“Everybody just calm down,” said Steve Hassler. “Designers will still have to set all the parameters and make sure all criteria are met. This should be a useful tool to help streamline the process and allow the exploration of many more variations toward the best ultimate design. We’re not going anywhere. If anything, this will be empowering.”
Graeme Doctor agreed: “An app may be able to ‘design’ a building but the architect’s job is to deliver that building too – I don’t foresee an app being able to do that anytime soon. We were told a century ago that the home of the future would roll off a production line like a car but that never came to pass.”
“Call me when that app can deal with client feedback like ‘yeah I like but not so sure’ or ‘mmm I don’t know if I love it if I am completely honest’ or ‘I love it but can you just change this, and that, and yeah all that…'” continued Donacio Cejas Acosta.
“The only architects that are doomed are the ones that won’t adapt,” concluded Zane Gray.
This commenter noticed a flaw in the AI-designed plan:
“There’s a narrative explaining how they got to this point. Nouvel has delivered a large number of high profile projects worldwide, this is the first story like this to be associated with one of his buildings. I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt,” said Heywood Floyd.
Chris agreed: “I very much doubt this is Jean Nouvel’s fault. As a very experimental building, the client knew very well what they were getting into. Blaming the architect and not the greedy developer – and I suspect overpaid contractors – is probably the fault here.”
“A prime example why the world is losing trust in architects, two years late and three times over budget is completely unacceptable,” said Jay in disagreement. “I’m sure many of the problems were the result of the French government and possibly beyond the reach of Nouvel, however, it is inexcusable to be that late and that over budget.”
“I saw this building last week and assumed it must have been teleported from the 1980s,” said Alfred Hitchcock. “I suppose it’s not that bad though, considering it’s just a small part of the architectural freak show which the City of London has become over the last 15 years.”
“Why are London towers so awkward?” asked Rd in agreement. “Are they all trying to be contextual?”
“In comparison to the old place near London Bridge, the new building is something of a void, it lacks personality,” said Mr Walnut Grey.
Petros felt similarly: “It all started with the museum’s move to its new premises. From a somehow modest building in a convenient location to a cold building with an enormous ‘Instagrammable’ lobby and a relatively small free permanent collection.”
“I’d argue the location is not ideal,” continued KH. “It’s a trek from East/North London where I imagine a lot of their potential audience lives and works.”
“It’s all quite sad to be honest,” lamented Sam. “The old building was understated yet has a warmth and a presence that communicated design from the UK, it was a place where designers not architects felt at home. The new premise is all about architecture at the expense of design.”
This reader was also frustrated by the move:
Why do you think fewer people are visiting London’s Design Museum? Join the discussion ›
Here’s a next-to-last-mile problem. Back in the day, after all of the considerable design, engineering, manufacturing, sales and marketing work that goes into producing a new car was completed, automakers faced a logistical problem: How to get the product from their centralized factories to the consumers scattered across the country. In the early days of the automobile, when buyers were few, it was a viable option to stick two autos in a train boxcar and ship them off.
But as demand began to grow, the shipping capacity had to match. Sometime in the 1940 America’s auto manufacturers, in collaboration with the railroads, developed a special car-carrying boxcar that would utilize the overhead space. At 50 feet in length, it had ten extra feet on the standard 40-foot boxcars of the time.
Loading the thing was a pain in the neck, as a car was manually pushed inside, then jacked up towards the ceiling at an angle to accommodate a car coming in underneath it. (While I initially assumed the illustration above was incorrect in depicting the cars’ orientation within the boxcar, it is in fact accurate as the automobiles had to be loaded in via a sliding door in the middle of the boxcar.)
By the ’50s and ’60s, two- and three-level “autoracks,” primarily open-air auto-carrying traincars similar to what you’d see today, were developed. They were logical, economical and frankly, kind of boring.
Of far more interest is the strange experiment GM embarked on starting in the late ’60s. As they prepared to launch their Vega—a truly awful, hideous, forgettable stain on Chevrolet’s past meant to mark their entry into the compact car market—they developed a novel way to ship them: Vertically.
Vegas were short enough in length that they could clear the roofline of train car when placed straight up-and-down. So a special train car was designed where the sides flipped down to form ramps. The car was driven onto the ramp, secured, and then a special forklift folded each ramp closed, with the cars hanging off of them inside.
In this manner, dubbed the “Vert-a-Pac” system, they could cram thirty Vegas inside a then-standard 89-foot-long train car. This went a long way towards keeping the Vega’s shipping costs down and subsequent sticker price lower.
As most of you know, cars aren’t meant to be vertical, not with all of those fluids inside. And interestingly enough, the Vega was specifically designed to deal with this unusual form of transportation. As the Car Lust Blog explains,
In order to be able to travel nose-down without leaking vital fluids all over the railroad—one of the design specifications was that the car had to be loaded straight off the assembly line, and drivable the moment it was unloaded—Vegas destined for transport by rail were equipped with the “VK5” option package. This consisted of a baffle in the oil pan to keep the #1 cylinder from being flooded with oil, a special wiper fluid bottle mounted at a 45-degree angle, a battery with off-center filler caps, and an extra hose in the fuel system. There was also a plug in the fuel tank vent and some plastic spacers reinforcing the motor mounts which were supposed to be removed by the dealer before delivery.
Like the Vega, this method of shipping—and of designing a car to deal with vertical storage without creating a fluids-based disaster—eventually fell by the wayside.
Collé au siège de la voiture, le photographe Eric Van Nynatten, basé à Brooklyn, nous transporte dans les rues authentiques et touristiques de la vieille Havane, à Cuba. La série, intitulée “Havana Observations”, retrace un voyage effectué en 2017. L’artiste grimpait alors dans la voiture de locaux pour faire le tour de la ville, ou arpentait les rues à pied. Dans cette série, le photographe joue avec les ombres et les façades colorées, et nous embarque dans un road trip au cœur du quartier historique.
Voice Blox was awarded in several categories in the 2019 Core77 Design Awards, including the top Student Winner prize in the Interaction category.
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Mandarin, the official language of China, is spoken by over 730 million people across the world. From 2009 to 2015 alone, Mandarin education efforts in the United States doubled; and in 2014, over 100 million non-native Mandarin speakers were reported to be using the language.
The tonal distinctions Mandarin requires are incomparable to what we as English-speakers (at least, presumptively, English-readers) are familiar with. As the engineer and design team behind Voice Blox – made up of Yang Gao, Matthew Rice, Dougie Mann and Wilhelmina Crolius – has described, Mandarin is tone-sensitive; that is, its words are each characterized by one of four tones, which then signifies its meaning. “For non-native Mandarin speakers, achieving accurate tonal variation and accent is a big challenge,” they say, citing being able to aurally recognize your mistakes and shift your pronunciations, the lack of intelligent technologies, and the difficulty of access to good language instructors as a few of the roadblocks to successfully learning Mandarin. “We are creating the first engaging, hands-on experience of practicing speech, based on the untapped strength of multimodal learning.”
Voice Blox, the learning language tool the team designed, allows users to explore their accents with their hands. Not currently employed by classrooms (digital or physical), the multimodal, haptic learning system is the first of its kind. “Using simple shapes to guide a learner’s hand,” the interface “capitaliz[es] on the close connections of the auditory and motor networks of the brain,” embodying pronunciation in a simple, physical form.
Through an analog, two-block design, speakers can easily and immediately compare ideal pronunciations with their own, concurrently self-correcting by comparing the two tactile blocks in order to at once see, feel, and hear themselves relative to correct tones.
As Mandarin becomes increasingly relied upon to communicate in the international business sector, the designers recognized that quality education on a larger scale will be required to keep pace. “We are in the process of fitting our functional technology [to] a single consumer product,” the designers say, and have plans to integrate it “with a software-based curriculum.
Themselvesa multinational, multidisciplinary team, Voice Blox’s engineers and designers (a native Mandarin speaker among them) are final-year students in the double masters program Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. By the time they graduate, the numbers of Mandarin speakers across the world will be higher, and the need larger for better instruction of the increasingly global language.
Voice Blox’s prescient use of design to facilitate this education leaves us, ironically, speechless in admiration.
Glazed walls, a large metal roof and a vast central atrium feature in an academic building designed by architecture firm Foster + Partners for an emerging medical campus in Ohio.
The Sheila and Eric Samson Pavilion is located just beyond downtown Cleveland. Encompassing 478,000 square feet (44,408 square metres), the educational facility brings medical, dental and nursing programmes under one roof.
Marking “a significant investment in the future of health education”, the building is operated by two leading institutions – Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University.
Foster + Partners – a British firm with offices worldwide – was tasked with producing a flexible building that could adapt to new technologies and evolving areas of research. The facility also needed to engender collaboration among the different disciplines.
“The growing interdisciplinary nature of education and research requires more informal meeting and debating spaces,” said the firm’s founder Norman Foster.
“We have designed a building that encourages collaboration and builds a platform for practical learning and knowledge sharing.”
Rectangular in plan, the four-storey building is surrounded by large lawns and relatively low-scale buildings. Facades consist of glass walls and white aluminium spandrels, while the overhanging roof is made of stainless steel.
Entrances are found on the east and west, while indoor gardens line the north and south elevations. Each discipline has its own distinct zone within the building.
“Key elements of each school are arranged around a large internal courtyard, maintaining the schools’ own identities, but with a series of layered shared spaces,” Foster + Partners said.
These shared spaces include teaching lecture halls, administrative areas and recreational facilities.
At the heart of the building is the expansive courtyard, where the ceiling rises 80 feet (24 metres). Linear skylights enable ample daylight to fill the atrium.
A close analysis of sunlight and climatic conditions informed the design of the roof covering the courtyard. The region’s heavy snowfall influenced its structural design.
“Trusses are pitched to allow the snow to naturally slide off the glass and onto the solid infill roof around the courtyard, ultimately melting into the channels along each side of the roof,” the team said.
Within the courtyard, ficus trees form an avenue and help create a calming atmosphere. Furnishings by Foster + Partners adorn the space.
“Furnished with oak tables, benches and planters designed by the practice, the space is meant for informal work meetings, chance encounters and sharing a coffee from the nearby cafe,” the firm said.
“The practice has also designed bespoke furniture pieces for the library, meeting rooms, deans’ suites and other working spaces in collaboration with the Clinic.”
The Samson Pavilion is the first building to rise within an 11-acre (4.4 hectare) health campus run by Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University. Several year ago, Foster + Partners developed a master plan for Cleveland Clinic.
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