UK charity Art Fund has released photos of filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, England as part of its fundraising campaign to prevent the renowned house and garden from being sold.

Art Fund’s campaign is seeking £3.5 million to save the deceased filmmaker and gardener’s former home for the public.

If the money is not raised by the 31 March 2020 deadline, the property will be offered for sale to a private individual on the open market.

Jarman was a filmmaker, artist and activist, who died in 1994 of complications arising from the Aids virus.

He moved to the Kent coast following his diagnosis and created a world-renowned house and shingle garden in the shadow of the nuclear power station.

“Prospect Cottage is a living, breathing work of art, filled with the creative impulse of Derek Jarman at every turn,” said Art Fund director Stephen Deuchar.

“It’s imperative we come together to save the Cottage, its contents and its extraordinary garden as a source of creative inspiration for everyone.”

Deuchar announced the campaign launch with a series of rewards from celebrated artist supporters that members of the public receive if they donate a particular sum.

Pledges start at £5 with funders who spend £100 will receiving a colourful A4 print of the cottage by Michael Craig-Martin.

Artist Wolfgang Tillmans has offered signed prints of an agave plant that features an extract of a John Doone poem that can be found on the cottage’s wall, for £650.

The most expensive pledge at £3,000 is for a private tour of gardener Dan Pearson’s own garden in Somerset, England.

Major grants have come from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund, the Linbury Trust, and private donations, with the remaining funds being raised by the general public.

If successful, the money will cover the cost of the property itself and its upkeep through a permanently funded programme, ensuring it can remain open and free to the public.

At the time of writing, 51 per cent of the overall target has been reached, with 63 days to go.

The managing partnership of the Art Fund, Creative Folkestone and Tate intend to establish artist residencies as well as providing guided visits.

Jarman’s archive from the cottage, including his sketchbooks and plans for the garden, will be made available for public access at Tate Britain.

The cottage is being sold following the death in 2018 of Keith Collins, Jarman’s close companion in his final years, who he left the cottage to when he died.

Recently, several holiday homes on the beach in Dungeness have been designed by architects, including Pobble House and Pump Station.

The post Art Fund campaigns to save Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage from private sale appeared first on Dezeen.

A great way to design useful products is to cut the fluff by removing items that aren’t completely essential to the product experience. In the Circular Smart Ring’s case, that’s practically everything you’d associate in a smart wearable. The Circular Smart Ring is a deceptively tiny smart wearable that tracks your fitness, monitors your sleep, and delivers notifications. Weighing just 4 grams, the Circular Smart Ring sits on your ring finger, with a form factor that makes it look more like a fashionable ring rather than a clunky wearable. On the inside, however, is a 3-axis Accelerometer, an Infrared Optical Pulse Sensor, an on-board computer, a Bluetooth module, and a battery that gives the Ring 2 days of usage on a single charge.

By reducing the clutter, the Circular Smart Ring retains an impressive amount of functionality in a ridiculously small form. It does so, mostly by shifting a lot of the load to your smartphone. The Circular Smart Ring connects to your phone via Bluetooth, giving you all your data in a neatly collated dashboard. During the day, the ring captures your activity, blood oxygen levels, energy levels, calorie burn count, among other metrics, while at night, the ring ambiently tracks your circadian rhythm and records your sleep quality, heart-rate variability, sleep disturbances, REM cycles, and sleep and wake times. Using pretty state-of-the-art data processing and machine-learning technology, the ring, its app, and the app’s assistant Kira help you collectively better understand your health and give you bespoke advice on how to improve it. The interface on the Circular app can either summarize your readings or spread them out into detailed stats. Additionally, the app even has its own smart-alarm function that calculates the best time to wake you based on your sleep cycles, so you’re well-rested and energetic throughout the rest of your day. The ring uses subtle vibration pulses to coax you out of your sleep. These vibrations can even be customized to give you notification alerts when your phone is ringing, or when you get a message, DM, or email, and the ring comes with an in-built button that allows you to control it and its functions from muting calls to playing and pausing tracks.

This crystal clear focus and economy of function allows the Circular Smart Ring to be an incredibly sleek, fashion-forward wearable that bridges jewelry and tech. The lack of a screen, or a host of apps, music, images, calendars, clocks, and other ‘unnecessary fluff’ even enables the Ring to have a remarkably better battery life of 48 hours with continuous usage. Designed to be worn everywhere and all the time, the Circular Smart Ring comes with a water-resistant, scratch-proof design that weighs a mere 4 grams (that’s the weight of 4 paper-clips, if you’re looking for a comparison). It comes with a slick, titanium outer cover that can be swapped based on your fashion sense or preference. The titanium cover, available in matte black, silver, gold, and rose gold, reinforces the Ring, making it sturdier and impact-resistant, while allowing it to weigh as little as it does.

Ultimately, it’s worth giving the Circular Smart a hat-tip for doing all this without sacrificing its vision of creating technology that’s ‘beautiful’. The ring could easily be a couple of millimeters thicker, or even worse, could have a wraparound OLED screen, but Circular’s conscious choice to marry aesthetics with function and what Google refers to as ambient-computing is what’s really worth noticing. Outwardly, there’s little to diss about the Circular Smart Ring. It’s significantly smaller than its competition, weighs less, works for longer, looks fashionable, and performs all the functions expected from a fitness wearable. Besides, its creators say that the Circular Smart Ring is future-proof too, being completely hardware ready for any over-the-air updates that may roll out in the future.

Designer: Circular

Click Here to Buy Now: $199 $338 (30% Off). Hurry, only 300/500 left!

Circular – The Most Advanced Wellness Smart Ring

The Circular is a discreet smart ring that tracks your fitness, monitors your sleep, and delivers notifications.

On the outside, Circular is sleek, seamless, and discreet. On the inside, it’s powered by advanced mechanical customization and intuitive AI.

24/7 Activity Tracking

Quantify your physical activities with empowering metrics. Circular keeps track of your daily activities at all times so you can ensure you’re performing at your best.

Heart Rate Tracking

Know your body’s limit (and push them). Monitor your heart rate, HRV, RHR and SpO2 to perform at your best.

Sleep Monitoring

Circular analyzes your body signals during your sleep to help you keep track of its efficacy and make improvements.

Discreet Notifications

Circular discreetly lets you know when you’ve received a new text, call, or social notification so you never miss out on important communication.

Personalized Insights

Get real-time recommendations to optimize your daily habits. From poor sleep habits to activity slumps, Circular can help you figure out where you’re going wrong and how to fix it.

Smart Controls

Control your surroundings with a single touch. Phone ringing in the middle of a meeting? Silence it discreetly with a touch of your ring. Need a more upbeat track for your morning jog? Skip to the next track with a single tap.

Meet Kira

Meet Kira. She’s an integral part of the Circular experience, and her whole goal is to make your life easier—from helping you make improvements to letting you know when it’s time to step it up.

Get real-time, personalized recommendations. Control your ring, visualize your progress, meet (and compete with!) your wellness community, and get impactful recommendations through the Circular app.

Through the Circular app, you’ll be able to:

– Control your ring.
– Measure and visualize your progress through our sleep and activity scoring system.
– Meet (and compete with!) your fitness community.

Circular Never Sleeps But You Will

That’s because what Circular does best is synthesize and analyze your body signals (night and day!) for unique recommendations and advanced wellness correlations to improve your well-being.

Circular Tracks:

While designing Circular, the goal was to create a device that would assist us in responding to our body signals in a healthier way—helping us make optimal daily activity choices instead of just measuring the metrics. With Circular, you can learn about the effect of your sleep on your daily performance and the effect of your activities on the quality of your sleep and your future wellness.

They have spent a whole year working with sleep and activity specialists, doctors, and PhD. students to develop algorithms that effectively analyze your body signals in line with laboratory equipment.

The Design

When working out, you don’t want to wear a device made of precious gems; neither do you want to wear a plastic-looking device to an elegant event. They believe that wearables should seamlessly blend into our everyday lives, and that’s exactly what Circular does.

It’s scratch-resistant, water-resistant, and you can switch up your style to fit the occasion with interchangeable outer shells. Made in 7 sizes from US6 to US12.

The Power

Need a charge? Connect on-the-go with our mobile charging solution.

The Technology

The Circular ring connects via Bluetooth to your iPhone or Android device. Setting up the ring is as easy as downloading the app onto your phone, and all software updates are wirelessly transmitted to your Circular ring.

Built-in intelligence: There’s no on/off button on the ring; it knows whether you are wearing it or not. There is no need to notify the app nor the ring about what you are going to do. Circular knows when you go to sleep and when you do activities, and it uploads the subsequent data to your phone automatically. If your phone is not available, it can collect and store detailed data for up to 7 days.

Body Signal processing: The ring collects the body signals it needs using its dual sensors (Heart Rate Sensor and Accelerometer). Circular contains a built-in processor that will process the data and send it by Bluetooth to the Circular mobile app for analysis. The Circular app uses machine learning to better understand your habits and offer a personalized experience.

Wave free during your sleep: Although the 2400 MHz to 2485 MHz radiation output of a Bluetooth device is negligible to your health, the Circular ring automatically goes into “sleep mode” when it detects a sleeping state⁠—meaning that it is functioning without Bluetooth during your sleep while still capturing your body signals. It will synchronize with the app when you get up.

The Sensors:

– A precise 3 Axis Accelerometer
– An Infrared Optical Pulse Sensor

Having infrared LEDs means that there are no blinking lights on the ring to disturb your sleep because our eyes cannot see infrared wavelengths of light.

“How-To” Videos Below:

The Live Heart Rate

The Alarm Clock Feature

The Circles Feature

The Charging Solution

Click Here to Buy Now: $199 $338 (30% Off). Hurry, only 300/500 left!

Now in its eighth year, the Lexus Design Award always stirs the imagination with new proposals for future-facing design solutions. Similar to last year’s batch, the 2020 finalists that were announced today center their projects around environmental and social consciousness, with a focus on innovative fabrication techniques.

The six finalists are entering the next phase of the competition: working with a group of four mentors to further refine their proposals as they gear up to present in front of the final jury during Milan Design Week. The Lexus-selected mentors this year are Joe Doucet, Bethan Gray, Philippe Malouin, and Shohei Shigematsu of OMA (who was also a mentor last year). The illustrious panel of final judges includes Paola Antonelli, John Maeda—both of whom served on the panel last year as well—and Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang.

Check out the winners below:

Bio.Scales

LA-based designers Paul and Garrett Sutherlin Santo created Bio.Scales, carbon-sequestering filters made from 3D printed biopolymer scales. The system they devised is modular and adaptable, designed to improve air quality in any space.

Feltscape

The result of a fabrication process that combines haute couture techniques and robotic additive manufacturing, Feltscape is described as a “breathing felt cloud” that can be used in interiors to control acoustics and lighting qualities. Designers Salvatore Cicero and Theophile Peju developed their research and prototype while studying at London’s Bartlett School of Architecture.

Flash Pak

Yaokun Wu’s Flash Pak is a survival apparatus designed for flash flooding situations that inflates into a flotation device and also includes a haptic navigation system with LED lights to guide users to safety.

Lick

Russian designer Irina Samoilova was inspired by animal behaviors when she developed Lick, an aptly-titled portable body cleaner to be used by those who don’t have access to a bath.

BellTower

BellTower is a Kenyan collective using open-source technologies to solve a range of problems. Their entry is Open Source Communities, a proposal outlining an efficient way of designing communities in developing countries based on open-source plans.

Pursewit

Aqsa Ajmal created Pursewit, an accessible sewing machine for the visually impaired. The Pakistan-based designer hopes the tool will simplify the sewing process and empower users with new, revenue-generating capabilities.

Work has halted on the 45 Broad Street skyscraper in Downtown Manhattan by New York architecture firm CetraRuddy, which was expected to become the second tallest building in the area.

Developer Madison Equities said that the construction of the supertall building, which began September 2017, was stopped due to “short-term conditions in the Lower Manhattan market”.

When asked for clarification and the expected date to restart, Madison Equities declined to comment.

“Due to short-term conditions in the Lower Manhattan market, we have decided to delay on constructing the building in the near future,” the developer told Dezeen.

Initially planned to reach 1,115 feet (340 metres), 45 Broad Street will now reach a lower height of 1,115 feet (340 metres) and 64 storeys when construction resumes.

Madison Equities said the skyscraper was reduced to 80 feet (24 metres) to accommodate Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations. Department of Buildings (DOB) plans have been filed for the design, with a full New Building (NB) permit.

45 Broad Street’s new height still places the tower in the supertall category, which ranges from 980 feet (300 metres) to 2,000 feet (600 metres). Local construction company Pizzarotti is also no longer involved, Madison Equities said.

CetraRuddy‘s Downtown Manhattan design was unique in comparison to other glazed high-rises as it features thin bronze lines that stretch up its glass facades, in reference to the art deco movement.

The design was chosen to relate to art deco skyscrapers nearby, such as 70 Pine Street and 1 Wall Street, which were built in the 1930s and formed part of a backlash against glass dominating the tower construction in the city.

The news of the project stalling comes as reports reveal that sales of luxury units in Manhattan’s Financial District area fell in 2019, according to local real estate publication The Real Deal, while the New York Times has predicted that the city as a whole will struggle with selling its oversupply of expensive, luxury apartments in the coming decade.

Manhattan is bursting with high-rise, luxury towers like the world’s tallest residential skyscraper Central Park Tower, and One Vanderbilt is rising beside Grand Central Station by Kohn Pederson Fox.

Other architects currently building residential skyscrapers in the city include BIG, Thomas Heatherwick, David Adjaye and Álvaro Siza.

Rendering is by CetraRuddy.

The post Construction on CetraRuddy’s supertall tower in Downtown Manhattan is postponed indefinitely appeared first on Dezeen.

The trouble began in 2014. What was then called the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, established by the American architect in 1940, received some unwelcome news: The Higher Learning Commission, an agency that accredits colleges and universities, had implemented new rules that would negate that school’s accreditation.

Without that accreditation, graduates of the school would lose their eligibility to take the Architectural Registration Examination; in other words, they could not become licensed architects.

The new rule the HLC was implementing was that “accredited institutions must be separately incorporated from sponsoring organizations,” John Hausaman, the HLC’s public information officer, told USA Today.

Taliesin West, site of the school’s Arizona campus

Since the school relied on the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation for funding, incorporating separately meant they’d have to sever the Foundation’s governing link, while still needing to retain the Foundation’s cash flow for operations. Unsurprisingly, FLWF President Sean Malone found this unpalatable. “The school would not only have full control of the money and the governing, but the foundation would be required to guarantee well over seven figures [to keep the school running] and have to guarantee this funding with no direct government or operational control,” Malone said at the time.

The school complied, managing to raise $2 million from outside contributors and meeting the HLC’s 2017 deadline to split from the Foundation. They also changed their name to the School of Architecture at Taliesin as part of the split.

Taliesin West, site of the school’s Arizona campus

In my understanding, this split did not preclude the flow of money from the Foundation to the school, just the decision-making aspects of what could be done with the money depending on whose account it was in. Despite the $2 million in donations the school had managed to secure, running an architecture school is expensive, and it appears they were still propped up by the Foundation. As ArchPaper reported, “As part of the agreement [to split], the foundation will loan the school classroom and residential facilities at Taliesin and Taliesin West. The FLWF will put $1.4 million over four years towards the operating costs of the school, in addition to a $7 million investment over the same period.”

That arrangement was apparently unsustainable. Yesterday Archinect broke the news that the school would shut down in June, following an rift with the Foundation:

An announcement from the school states: “The School of Architecture at Taliesin will cease operations after this semester, after a gut-wrenching decision by its Governing Board on Saturday. The School of Architecture at Taliesin was not able to reach an agreement with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to keep the school open.”

Here’s what the rift was about, according to Arizona newspaper The Scottsdale Independent:

Foundation officials say the School of Architecture “unequivocally did not have a sustainable business model.”

As a result, leaders of the separate boards of the two organizations had developed a proposal that would have allowed the school to continue operations on the Foundation’s two campuses — use of which was donated to the School of Architecture — by the Foundation since it became an independent organization — through the end of July, 2021.

During that transition period, the organizations would have worked collaboratively to develop alternative programs for which accreditation was not needed.

“The Foundation had reached an agreement with the leaders of the SoAT Board that would have allowed for second- and third-year students to complete their education at Taliesin and Taliesin West, and we are disappointed that it was not approved by the full SoAT Board,” said Stuart Graff, president and CEO of The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

However, Foundation officials say in light of the SoAT announcement, the foundation will maintain and expand its impact on the field of architecture and design by advancing Mr. Wright’s legacy through its educational programs, K-12 through adult ongoing education.

So it looks like Frank Lloyd Wright’s teachings will continue to be spread; they just won’t have any official, on-paper value.

As for the current, final crop of 30 SoAT students, the school is reportedly negotiating with The Design School at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design to allow the students to transfer their credits and earn their degrees there.

Taliesin West, site of the school’s Arizona campus