Hasta La Ideas

British producer TEED explains what an isolation party looks and sounds like right now

This week, British producer/DJ/singer Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (aka Orlando Higginbottom) shares two remixes of the Lastlings song, “Take My Hand.” The double-release—comprised of an “Earth” and “Sky” version—features spacey sounds that elevate the Australian-Japanese duo’s dark pop sensibility. Along with this cosmic rave party, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (TEED) put together a happy hour playlist for COOL HUNTING—complete with a heady tune by Brian Eno, an ethereal track by Jacques Greene and more. We also spoke with him about creating party vibes, even in isolation.

How has your approach to making or listening to music changed when first making these remixes vs listening to them now in isolation?

I finished these just as I was having an inkling that things were going to get heavy, and now of course everything feels very different. I’m glad I ended up doing two remixes, the “Earth” mix was made for my DJ sets that aren’t happening this summer, and the “Sky” mix was more about listening, driving in my car. I love that music changes meaning with time.

How do you know a song belongs on a happy hour playlist?

Right now, happy hour is the time of the day when I finally admit to myself how crazy I feel and cut loose. So I’m looking to be pushed and pulled, taken somewhere else, something more aggressive than usual. I’ve been drinking and putting on records for such a long time, and honestly I think you can’t really go wrong… please drink responsibly.

Describe what “virtual happy hour” looks like for Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. 

Currently a horrific amount of FaceTime, asking friends to pose as I draw them badly, learning how to salsa from YouTube, planning a brighter future and sipping on whatever I can find in my fridge. Quite a lot of old drum’n’ bass mixtapes from my early teens.

What are you drinking?

On New Year’s Eve I accidentally poured my Johnny Walker Black into someone’s iced green tea. It was 6/10. Next week I’m having a mezcal week, watch this space.

Image by Dan Medhurst

This taco restaurant in Vancouver, designed by local studio September, is filled with fibreglass Eames chairs and stools, lush plants and curvy black tables.

Located in the city’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, the Mexican eatery occupies a former factory building that Australian architect H H Simmonds completed in 1942.

September designed the restaurant called Tacofino Ocho to riff off the existing industrial space.It features concrete floors, walls rendered in cream-coloured plaster and others covered in grey square tiles.

Steel-frame factory windows bring natural light into the 2,800-square-foot (260-square metre) space, while volumes of gridded metal panels hang from the ceiling.

“The industrial quality of the space is emphasized through the use of minimal and unfinished materials such as concrete, steel, plaster and wood paired with a muted colour palette of greys, greens and black,” September said.

There is roughly 100 moulded fibreglass dining chairs by mid-century designers Charles and Ray Eames in a variety of green and yellow colours. Other curved details, including rounded edges on tables and pony walls, reference the shape of the chairs.

September sought to strike a balance between the building’s industrial past with the eatery’s Mexican menu and opted to reference the 1960s countercultural movements with a floral motif.

“The intention of the project was to reference both the existing spatial condition, that of the heritage industrial building, and contrast it with the non-traditional ethos that characterises the client and their food,” said the studio.

“These rough materials and minimal colours are contrasted throughout the space by the use of a formal flower motif,” it added.

The motif references “flower power” and is represented in the shape of a tabletop around a circular concrete planter. Smaller black tables repeat this flowery outline.

Foliage plays an important role in balancing between decoration and function, and large dragon trees fill the large urn.

“While there is always a tension between experimenting with form and providing the functionality and durability that is required in a restaurant, much like in folk-art the approach here was to integrate the ornamental and utilitarian,” September added.

The studio was founded by Brendan Callander and Shiloh Sukkau in 2019. Before creating September, Sukkau also designed another outpost for Tacofino in Vancouver called Tacofino Oasis.

In addition to Tacofino Ocho, Vancouver is home to a number of restaurants, including Caffè La Tana by Ste Marie, Studio Roselyn’s pita shop Superbaba and Como Taperia tapas joint also by Ste Marie.

Photography is by Vishal Marapon

Project credits:

Project architect: MGBA
Contractor: Pacific Solutions Contracting
Graphic design: Courtney Presber

The post Green and yellow Eames chairs fill Tacofino Ocho restaurant in Vancouver appeared first on Dezeen.

For thousands and thousands of years a purple-blue ink known as folium was used to color all kinds of books, cheese rinds and more, but its formula was lost until a team of researchers recently deciphered the recipe through three ancient texts. It’s long been confirmed that the dye comes from the fruit of chrozophora tinctoria, but this isn’t a complete assessment. By poring over the manuscripts (one from the 12th century, another from the 14th century and a 15th-century manual literally called The Book on How to Make All the Colour Paints for Illuminating Books), scientists found that the fruit needs to be carefully soaked in a mixture of methanol and water, before further steps are taken. Maria João Melo (a scientist and co-author of the study) says “They were able to produce paints that last centuries. We don’t have such paints now. So this is part of our research—to know as much as possible about this material that was completely lost with the advent of the synthetic dyes.” Find out more at Atlas Obscura.

Ahead of Monday’s collaboration between Virtual Design Festival and reSITE , the Prague urbanism conference has shared a video of a lecture by Michael Sorkin, in which the late architect and critic quashes the lure of glamorised future city proposals.

In the talk, which took place at the 2015 reSITE conference, Sorkin highlighted problems of the idealistic representations of future urban plans.

“We have a tendency to look at representations of new cities and quarters as a kind of pornography, the gaze that maligns and entraps,” Sorkin said.

“For many years, these representations have often come in a protective, dystopian wrapper, reinforcing the idea that the visionary is ipso facto evil.”

Sorkin was a “fierce and brilliant critic, perhaps the best”

Sorkin, who died last month of complications due to coronavirus, was regarded by many as the most important architecture critic of our time.

“I am heartbroken. This is a great loss,” tweeted New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman on hearing news of Sorkin’s death.

Financial Times architecture correspondent Edwin Heathcote described Sorkin as a “fierce and brilliant critic, perhaps the best”.

In his reSITE lecture Sorkin, who was director of the graduate programme in urban design at City College of New York (CCNY), recounted asking students to bring in visuals of ideal cities.

“Images of undeniable graphic power but ultimately completely sinister meaning”

He said he became concerned when a number chose dystopic, science fiction films, like Blade Runner, which presented a heavily controlled, futuristic Los Angeles in glamorous cinema.

“There was a long and troubling period when a very large percentage of them brought in an image from Blade Runner, the Fifth Element or similar,” Sorkin continued.

“Images of undeniable graphic power but ultimately completely sinister meaning,” Sorkin added. “I think this reflects both the incompetence and bad motives of authority and a kind of negative celebration of popular empowerment.”

“One of the bugaboos of the politically correct is the idea of the masterplan”

Sorkin said that beyond these idealistic visuals, plans for cities are also associated with the idea of the all-powerful planner and authority.

“One of the bugaboos of the politically correct is the idea of the masterplan,” he explained.

“Stinking of patriarchy, authoritarianism, insensitivity and the hubris of every kind of overreach, this territory of expressive inquiry is simply too suspect.”

To contrast the dystopian and authoritarian examples, he cited Eutopic and historic city plans that pervaded his youth and early start in architecture. The “formidably planned Washington DC” where he grew up, a Kibbutz and a model he created of Brasília are among his references.

“My first architectural model sometime in grade school was a Brasília,” he said. “Unable to think of another way of constructing a dome, I used a half grapefruit for the Congress Hall, an obvious early example of my commitment to green architecture.”

Sorkin developed proposal for a self-sustaining New York City

Sorkin focused on the masterplan to provide a backdrop for projects created by his non-profit research group Terreform and his eponymous architecture studio.

The examples he cited are a self-sustaining New York City and Weed, a prototype for “a small sustainable, post-industrial, post-automotive city” in Arizona.

Sorkin headed architecture firm Michael Sorkin Studio and was president of Terreform. He had also taught at a number of institutions including London’s Architectural Association and American schools Cooper Union, Harvard University and Columbia University.

He death on Thursday 26 March 2020 triggered shock and an outpouring of warm tributes from architects, critics and writers around the world.

Sorkin’s talk took place at the 2015 reSITE conference called The Shared City.

On Monday 27 April, reSITE will take over Dezeen’s Virtual Design Festival, presenting a series of highlights from its 2019 REGENERATE conference including talks by Ravi Naidoo of Design Indaba and Chris Precht of Studio Precht. For full details see the VDF schedule.

The post “We have a tendency to look at representations of new cities as a kind of pornography” said Michael Sorkin appeared first on Dezeen.

I’ve been poring over the website of technical illustrators Beau and Alan Daniels, the guys who did those daytime/nighttime cutaways of the cruise ship. One of the illustrations on their site is a cutaway of an RV, and because they show you the steps required to get to the finished product, you can get a sense of their process–and understand the labor required.

They start off with a clean, client-supplied photo of the vehicle, in something close to an isometric view:

Image by Beau Daniels

They then retouch it into the desired configuration, with the door open, the steps deployed, and the slide-out portions pulled out:

Image by Beau Daniels

Next they’ve got to produce the line art. (As someone who used to do this step quite often in my ID career–on far less complicated objects–I can tell you this tracing step is nowhere near as fun nor straightforward as you might think it is.)

Image by Beau Daniels

After the exterior line art, they painstakingly do the line drawings for all of the interior parts. This would be the part of the project where I’d wonder why I didn’t try to become a doctor or lawyer instead. I can guarantee you their Layers window looked like the waiting list to get into Harvard.

Image by Beau Daniels

Adding the color. This step has got to be satisfying because it’s the beginning of the end.

Image by Beau Daniels

Finally, the finished product. There’s still plenty of judgment required at this step, as they have to decide how much to reveal and how much to obscure; if they got this part wrong, it would be too confusing and incomprehensible for a layperson to make sense of.

Image by Beau Daniels

And with the hard work out of the way, changing the colors is a snap.

Image by Beau Daniels

Check out more of the Daniels’ work here. (I especially dig their Product Technical Illustrations section.)