The Mini Speaker is a speaker that promises to take you to a place where the past and present collide! Not only do they collide, but they merge together to create one incredible audio experience. Unlike your regular Bluetooth speakers with their sleek futuristic forms, the Mini Speaker takes inspiration from the retro vinyl record players!
Shaped after a vinyl record player, the speaker features a little platform and a turntable as well! And here’s where it gets even more interesting, this speaker is in fact…mini. Showcasing a compact minute structure, the speaker is extremely portable, something you could carry along in your pocket! Attach a chain or string to its nifty handle, and carrying it about becomes even easier. Rolling mechanisms on either side of the handle, allow you to switch the device on and off, as well as control the volume.
The Mini Speaker is perfect for all the audiophiles who would love a bit of nostalgia but find the regular vinyl record players too cumbersome and hectic to manage. The Mini Speaker promises to take you down memory lane, in the most efficient and portable manner ever.
Available in interesting shades such as a butter yellow, mint green and a neutral black, the Mini Speaker is a fun retro-esque way to listen to music, simply connect it to your smartphone, and listen to your music on the go!
A sweeping, white-brick pavilion in Southwark Park in London by architecture studio Bell Phillips curves along the park‘s historic pathways.
Housing a cafe, offices and public amenities, the single-storey pavilion is one element of a wider masterplan for the area by Kinnear Landscape Architects.
With a loosely triangular plan, the pavilion’s three convex elevations face three different areas of the park.
There’s a lake to the west, a nearby cricket oval to the southeast and the neighbouring building of the Southwark Park Galleries to the northeast.
“The pavilion is a discreet element with three wings which extend out into the park, creating triple-aspect views,” said Bell Phillips.
“The organic form is derived from the curved geometry of the park’s historic pathways, the Oval playing fields and the adjacent lake edge. This results in a form that extends into the landscape and welcomes users from all directions.”
Towards the lake, a panoramic strip of glazing opens onto a small terrace area for the café, providing views out over the water.
A block of public toilets occupies the the windowless northern tip of the pavilion, and a small office area sits in the southern tip, where more privacy is possible.
The white brick finish of the structure was chosen to create a continuity with the nearby building of the Southwark Park Galleries.
It also makes for a contrasting backdrop for the surrounding greenery and the shadows cast across its form by trees.
A series of special long and smooth brick elements were created for the corners of the pavilion.
This crisp edge against the backdrop of the park further increases the play of light and shadow across the facades.
“From afar the form of the pavilion appears modern, minimalistic and planar, avoiding clustering or obscuring the skyline,” explained the architects.
“Close up, however, the delicacy of the form becomes apparent; in this manner it recalls the picturesque modernism of the pavilions, porticoes and grottos of the historic Ranelagh and Vauxhall pleasure gardens.”
While these historic references trace tha pavilion’s lineage, the architects wanted the curving form and bright exterior to communicate that the Southwark Park pavilion is “not about exclusivity or elitism, rather inclusivity and enjoyment for all.”
DRIFT: About Nature, Technology and Humankind features site-specific installations that explore the intersection of nature and technology
DRIFT: About Nature, Technology and Humankind features site-specific installations and video presentations of projects by the Dutch artistic collective.
Suspended from the ceiling in Carpenters Workshop Gallery is the interactive piece Flylight, an installation made up of 300 cylindrical glass tubes, each intended to represent a flying bird.
The piece incorporates software that responds to stimuli in its immediate environment to simulate the behaviour of a flock of starlings flying through the sky as a collective unit.
Among these is Flylight, an installation is made up of 300 cylindrical glass tubes that are intended to represent a flying bird
It comprises glass tubes filled with a sensor and lights that sense visitors as they approach and triggers the light will follow them around them – similar to movement pattern used by swarms of starling birds.
“It consists of delicate glass tubes that light up in an unpredictable way, partially responsive to external stimuli,” Studio Drift said. “The patterns, in which the installation lights up, is not pre-programmed but has an interactive compound: just like a real flock of birds.”
Also on display is the Dutch studio’s Fragile Future III – a thin copper frame structure decorated with 1,200 dried dandelions seeds handpicked from fields. Each dandelion is placed over an LED light to act like a diffuser.
The piece uses a sensor that responds to stimuli in its immediate environment to imitate the behaviour of a flock of flying birds
“It is based on the fact that the dandelion is seen as a weed and it spreads very easily,” the studio added.
Franchise Freedom, a video of a performative sculpture premiered at the 2017 Art Basel in Miami, is also on exhibit. It shows video footage of flying drones that mimic the flight patterns of birds.
“This performative sculpture translates the majestic flight patterns of birds, both as singular animals and as a flock, into sweeping movements of a fleet of autonomous drones, inviting viewers to experience the natural phenomena of birds in motion through a 21st-century lens,” Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery said.
DRIFT: About Nature, Technology and Humankind is on view from 17 January to 30 April 2020 at the Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery in San Francisco. The exhibition also features works by Maarten Baas, Aldo Bakker, Sebastian Brajkovic, Johanna Grawunder, Joris Laarman, Mathieu Lehanneur, Robert Stadler and the Verhoeven Twins.
“DRIFT: About Nature, Technology and Humankind seeks to identify and learn from the underlying mechanisms of the natural world in an effort to reconnect humanity to the environment it inhabits,” Carpenters Workshop Gallery said.
Fragile Future III combines thin copper frames decorated with 1,200 dried dandelions seeds handpicked from fields
“In an era when environmental concerns are top of mind, this exhibition brings together artists who, in the words of historian William Meyers, ‘make an effort to understand and materialise the nature of nature.’ “
Studio Drift was founded by Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta in 2006 and is located in Amsterdam.
It has completed a number of works that explore the link between nature and technology – including an installation of 3,000 blue blocks that represent the plastic used to make a single grocery bag and an artificial tree that responds to the movements, heartbeats and brain activity of visitors.
The dandelion acts as a diffuser of the LED light
Carpenters Workshop Gallery was founded in London in 2006 by Le Gaillard and Julien Lombrail in a former carpenter’s workshop.
The Wave Catcher was designed to combine the best parts of a drone and a GoPro. The action camera basically packs a drone’s mechanical gimbal and object-tracking capabilities in a grounded, water-proof format that can be strapped to a speedboat’s Bimini top, or even to the side of the boat via suction. Wave Catcher’s innovation doesn’t, however, lie in its camera, but rather, lies in its wearable. Designed to be strapped around the wrist of the subject, the wearable acts as a beacon for the camera, constantly telling the lens to keep it in the frame. As a result, the Wave Catcher always has its subject in the frame, no matter what. This bracelet-tracking technology proves to be even more effective than facial-tracking, given that with waves, water splashes, and tonnes of sporting gear, it may not be entirely possible for the camera to efficiently keep an eye on its subject.
The Wave Catcher’s wearable also allows you to interface with the camera with a button that lets you alternate between photography and video. Designed specifically for water-sports, the action-camera gives you the best combination of features that makes it possible to capture the action without needing an extra cameraman. Its externally located gimbal and stabilization system (as opposed to the in-body stabilization found in most action cameras) gives the Wave Catcher a better edge over other action cameras by always keeping its subject in the frame… and the fact that it performs object detection using a wireless beacon bracelet makes it much more efficient than a drone… and with a much better battery life!
Perhaps the newest and purest way to enjoy an old favorite
Dandelion Chocolate, one of our favorite collaborators and bean-to-bar makers, continues to inspire us with their dedication to crafting chocolate that’s simple to understand though oftentimes complicated to create. Their new Two-Ingredient Peanut Butter Cup (which could very well be the world’s first) is made of just 100% Ecuadorian Camino Verde cocoa beans and roasted Valencia peanuts. That’s it. There is no added sugar and, like all of their chocolate, you won’t find any soy lecithin, emulsifiers, cocoa butter or other additives.
They partnered with Feve Chocolates, also in San Francisco, to create this peanut butter cup that tastes subtle and natural, yet still delectable. It’s a punch of 100% cocoa and peanuts, an uncomplicated taste sensation that we’re (sadly) not very used to. For fans, purists and chocoholics $5 per piece is a small indulgence for a uniquely simple and satisfying treat.
Becker intends to create a boutique hotel and conference centre that celebrates the design of the tower, which modernist architect and designer Breuer completed in 1970.
“It’s such a wonderful sculptural building with great potential for reuse,” Becker told Dezeen. “I had thought that it would have been reused by now.”
“We’re looking to develop this building that really celebrates the heritage of the Bauhaus, but also meet this growing need in the marketplace for hospitality and leading space,” said Becker.
Boutique hotel to be zero net energy
Becker, who studied architecture at Yale University in New Haven, intends to make the hotel zero net energy – meaning that the amount of energy used would equal that created on-site. He intends the hotel be “all-electric” and the first in the US certified with low-energy design standard, Passivhaus.
“We’re planning to generate all the energy on-site by using photovoltaics on the rooftop and also solar canopies in the parking areas,” he said.
Breuer completed the brutalist concrete building to provide the US headquarters of Armstrong Rubber Co. In 1998, Italian company Pirelli purchased Armstrong Rubber, giving the building its name, but sold it shortly after.
Photograph is by Alcmaeonid from Wikicommons
The adaptive reuse project will maintain the exterior of the top-heaving building, which is separated into a two-storey portion at ground level and the four-level section above. The top structure is held up by three large concrete volumes and slender pillars.
Changes to the structure will be mostly internal, but Becker plans to create a new office space on the top storey where there is a 16-foot-high (4.9-metre-high) penthouse space.
“Breuer originally designed five stories in the upper portion but it turns out that the Armstrong Rubber Company didn’t really need that much office space,” he said.
IKEA purchased Breuer building in 2003
IKEA purchased the vacant structure in 2003 and built one of its large furniture outlets on the site adjacent. It then received permission to convert the building into a hotel from Hartford’s City Plan Commission in November 2018. The company has been in talks with Becker since according to the New Haven Independent.
“I’ve had my eye on this ever since I was a student at the Yale School of Architecture back in the 1980s, but it’s been abandoned and has really been neglected,” Becker said.
“Only because of my fascination with it, I started about two years ago to put together a plan to redevelop it into a hotel, which I was fortunate to persuade IKEA to embrace.”
Breuer was born in Hungary and studied at the Bauhaus school, before moving to the US to practice design and architecture. He has completed a number of projects in the brutalist style – an architectural movement that was popular in the 1960s and 1970s and has seen a surge in interest in recent years.
Other works by Breuer include a Connecticut house he built for himself that was renovated by Toshiko Mori in 2016. He also designed the former Whitney Museum in New York, which was purchased by the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then reopened in 2016 as an exhibition space named after the architect.
Photography is by Gunnar Klack from Wikicommons, unless stated otherwise.
Playful but precise and poignant, the Playmode exhibition (curated by Filipe Pais and Patrícia Gouveiaat and on now through 17 February) at Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology features works by David Shrigley, Mary Flanagan and plenty of others. The work range from dark and conceptual to entertaining and emotionally informative, and span visual art and gaming to form coherent narratives about life and death, international relations, gun violence and more. For example, David Shrigley’s ping-pong table doubles as tragic tale of being tossed between parents and protective services, while Joseph Delappe’s piece is a modified version of the video game Grand Theft Auto which conveys the gun violence epidemic unfolding in real life in the US. See more at designboom.
Though octopuses and squids are not capable of seeing in 3D, cuttlefish do boast depth-perception, recent research studies at the University of Minnesota confirmed. When donning 3D glasses, the cuttlefish could not only detect a shrimp (which comprised of projected images in two different colors and at two different distances), but also actively position itself for an attack. After identifying the shrimp, the fish backed up, aimed, and fired its tentacles at the silhouette. Later, thanks to a bit of trickery, the shrimp appeared farther away. The cuttlefish creeped toward it and lunged, suggesting it could tell that the silhouette seemed farther away, despite not being able to discern the digital from the physical world. Read more at The New York Times.
It’s worth noticing how the OO Stool does such a great job of combining sustainability along with technology and a pinch of heritage. Made from a single board of bamboo plywood, the stool is CNC machine-cut in a way that integrates every single aspect of the stool into its design. Everything you need to build the OO Stool sits within that flat-packed jigsaw-puzzle of bamboo pieces, minimizing waste by using as much negative space as possible. The legs form the outside, while the dual-layered seat of the stool sits on the inside, with the negative space being filled by tiny rectangular pieces that help lock the stool in place, and even a bamboo hammer to help assemble the stool! The OO Stool uses absolutely no glue, screws, or nails… just really smart designing and Japanese joinery techniques.
The two curved leg-components lock right into each other to form the four-legged base of the stool, while it takes mere minutes to gently hammer the seat in, piece after piece. Once constructed, the joineries are conveniently hidden away right under the seat, while the hammer itself could be used to disassemble the seat if you ever find yourself needing to move houses.
We’ve featured the work of self-taught woodworker Chris Salomone quite extensively over the years. One of his recent projects began as a drawing made by his six-year-old son that Salomone decided to turn into a real piece of furniture. The result reminds us of Gianluca Gimini’s drawings of bikes from memory—off-kilter but inspired.
“The trick with this build is that I didn’t want to just do a really quick and bad job,” Salomone explains. “Even though in the end it has to look kind of weird and messed up, it has to look like it was done on purpose.” To achieve that look, “my idea was to build it really nice and square similar to how I would build any piece of furniture, and then after…remove material to achieve that…drawn look.”
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
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