Take a glance at the Gont vase and it’s easy to tell what it’s inspired by. The vase comes with a layered plywood construction and a pattern that closely resembles a pinecone, giving the vase a nice touch of bio-mimicry while also making it as pretty and alluring as the plant you place within it.

The Gont’s raw, edgy, wooden design is perhaps best suited for small, non-flowering trees. The vase comes with its signature wooden outer, and a cylindrical sheet-metal inner container to actually hold the plant. At a little over a foot tall, the vase is ideal for keeping on mantelpieces… preferably ones that get a lot of light so that it can then catch those beautiful sharp shadows thanks to its multiple pinecone-inspired facets.

Designer: Michael Samoriz

Ian Schrager’s decadent hotel in New York’s Times Square is closing just over one year after it opened due to financial issues causes by the pandemic.

Bloomberg has reported that The Times Square Edition – which opened last year as a partnership between the legendary hotelier and Marriott International – will close on 13 August.

The news comes as the drops in business during the pandemic resulted in a cash shortfall that put the hotel’s developer Maefield Development in default of its contract with Marriott International, according to the report.

It added that the pandemic exacerbated financial difficulties the 452-room hotel was already facing – in December 2019 a group of lenders led by Natixis SA tried to foreclose on the project after issues with payments from Maefield.

Closing Public hotel temporarily was “an agonising decision” says Schrager

The Times Square Edition had been temporarily closed since late March when New York governor Andrew Cuomo placed the entire state on “pause” and ordered all non-essential businesses to shut.

Along with The Times Square Edition, this impacted Schrager’s other hotels including the Herzog and de Meuron-designed Public. At the time, Schrager said the temporary closure of his Public hotel was “one of the hardest things” he has had to do in his career.

“This has been an agonising decision for me and one of the hardest things I have had to do in my entire career,” said Schrager. “Not only because it is against everything I personally believe in, but because staying open to serve our guests is in our DNA and what we live for.”

“However, in this case, closing is the only ethical, moral and humane thing to do in order to contain this illness and protect everybody.”

Hotel industry “severely affected by the global crisis”

Hotels across the globe have also been affected by coronavirus lockdown measures.

“Our industry has been severely affected by the global crisis,” Ace Hotel said when the brand closed all its global outposts in early April.

“We’re assessing the situation in real-time as it relates to our other properties, and will be updating any announcements on our websites,” it added.

“This decision was difficult, emotional, and one we took very seriously, knowing the acute impact it will have on our teams.”

Coronavirus lockdown measures are gradually easing elsewhere in the US, allowing hotels to reopen. The Santa Monica Proper Hotel in California is expected to reopen tomorrow, while regions in the New York State are slowly reopening as they meet targets.

The city will currently remain on pause until 25 May.

The Times Square Edition designed by Yabu Pushelberg

It is yet to be seen if the hotel business can and will return to normal following the pandemic. UK architecture studio The Manser Practice has outlined how hotels will be adapted to allow social distancing when they reopen, and how future designs will be impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Designed by Yabu Pushelberg, The Times Square Edition was the latest outpost of the Edition chain that Schrager launched with Marriott International, following other locations in London, Miami and Hawaii.

It included a series of public spaces alongside the hotel, such as the Paradise Club nightclub and performance venue inspired by Schrager’s infamous Studio 54 nightclub, restaurants and outdoor terraces.

Photograph by Nicolas Koenig.

The post Ian Schrager’s The Times Square Edition hotel to close permanently appeared first on Dezeen.

You have to admit that Microsoft under Satya Nadella’s CEO-ship has really gained a whole lot of perspective. They aren’t just the OS company anymore. Nadella’s vision for Microsoft was to always make it as ubiquitous as the air you breathe, which is why we now have elements like Microsoft Azure, OneDrive, Outlook, Skype, Windows, Teams, LinkedIn, embedded deep into everything we do. Wherever you go, if there’s an enterprise involved, Microsoft has a solution somewhere allowing it to function seamlessly… and that ability to cross the T’s and dot the I’s is what makes Microsoft’s products great. In fact, they’ve got a thriving hardware setup too, and the reason why Microsoft’s hardware works so great (unlike its failed acquisition of Nokia under Steve Ballmer), is its ability to be a holistic software powerhouse. Take for instance Microsoft’s Surface Headphones. In a market flooded with headphones (and pretty competitively priced ones too), Microsoft’s Surface Headphones have a crystal clear vision of their purpose.

Unlike every other pair of wireless headphones out there, the Surface Headphones 2 aren’t just built for music… they’re built for work too. Given that we’re in an era dominated by Zoom and Skype meetings, the Surface Headphones 2 also focus on the ‘conference’ aspect with the same emphasis as the music aspect. They come with a comfortable design that allows them to be worn for hours (because meetings can go into overtime), have a day-long battery life, pack a whopping 13 levels of active noise cancellation in, so you can drown out sounds like the living-room TV or your kid screaming in the hallway… and perhaps the most mindful feature yet, a dedicated microphone muting button that allows you to quickly alternate between talking to your colleagues and yelling at your kids to keep the noise down.

Obviously Microsoft didn’t know a pandemic would upend businesses, forcing everyone to work from home (I refuse to entertain the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates was in on the COVID thing all along)… but the Surface Headphones 2 come at a perfect time, allowing people to conference more effectively from their home-offices. The headphones boast of the same clean design from last year, and feature 40mm Free Edge drivers to produce stunningly immersive sound that’s perfect for listening to music. The headphones come with dedicated ring-dials on the outside that allow you to control the volume and the noise-cancelation, so you can either completely drown external sound out, or blend them in, allowing yourself to be immersed in audio yet aware of your surroundings. Like all smart headphones, you can tap, hold, and swipe on the Surface Headphones too, performing activities like controlling playback, answering calls, or summoning the voice assistant… and if you’ve got an active Microsoft 365 subscription, you can even dictate text to the Headphones hand have your laptop type it out in Word, Outlook, or any of Microsoft’s other surfaces… Pretty clever, eh?

Designer: Microsoft

New from Yellow Days (aka UK singer/songwriter George van den Broek), the retro-tinged “Love Is Everywhere” is described by the artist as “upbeat existential millennial crisis music.” Steeped in nostalgia, the song’s ’70s vibe can be attributed to crisp percussion, a funky bass line and a little cowbell. Van den Broek also says, “The track is funky as hell… This is really my first record where I can let it fucking all out.” Watch the Kevin Lombardo-directed music video below, and stay tuned for A Day in a Yellow Beat in August.

Whether trying to keep the lights on after a hurricane or build pop-up hospitals in the wake of COVID-19, humanitarian and disaster-relief organizations face a common challenge: getting portable power to where it’s needed most urgently.

Eli Harris saw this first-hand working on public safety projects as a founding member of DJI’s Enterprise Drone team—then set out to make a clean-tech power storage company to help address the need. He soon found his challenge would be scaling production to make the devices truly affordable, and so his team developed a product that would be just as useful for campers, photographers, drone enthusiasts, or families safeguarding against home power outages as it is for global disaster relief initiatives.

His first Kickstarter project, for the DELTA generator, went out not just to thousands of backers but also ad-hoc hospitals in Wuhan. His latest Kickstarter campaign, for the EcoFlow R600, moves the company even further along with its mission to bring affordable power to everyone.

The EcoFlow R600 is live on Kickstarter now.

Tech to the rescue—so long as it’s charged

Harris first saw how important portable batteries can be while working on emergency and disaster relief projects at drone company DJI. Over two years, he traveled to more than 15 countries researching and testing how drones could support projects like search-and-rescue missions.

“I met with firefighters and search-and-rescue teams, and we did mock missions with drones in the mountains, seeing how we can efficiently map large areas of land with drones to look for missing persons,” Harris says. “With drones’ thermal cameras, you can see through smoke, you can find people at night, because their body heat, especially if they’re in snow or water, will show as a stark contrast. But one thing I realized through all these collaborations was that the use case is so different from a consumer hobbyist flying a drone for 20 minutes taking a selfie. If you’re trying to look for a missing person, you’ve got to keep the drone in the air for hours, and battery life becomes a huge issue. On these mock sites, there usually was a command station, and they used these gas generators that were really hard to even get out there in the first place, were loud, smelled bad, needed fuel, and can’t run indoors. So if you’re on an avalanche rescue team, to use the power you have to be out in the snow, you can’t bring the generator in the tent.”

His team started building a drone recharging hub with DJI’s Battery R&D team to solve the problem. And the more they learned about generators, the more they saw how a clean, solar-charged battery could apply to a much wider market. “It could be critical for running all the equipment in these disaster tents,” he says, “and by using a battery instead of a fossil fuel, you’re not only being environmentally conscious, you’re actually making the product much more versatile, because the use of the gasoline products are limited.”

Eventually Harris and Bruce Wang, the director of battery R&D at DJI, split off to develop the technology further as EcoFlow. “We wanted to build a product that would dethrone the gas generator, and that’s still what we’re trying to do, to make this product as ubiquitous, and affordable, and accessible as a gas generator—and even more effective.”

Clean energy for all

Ubiquity, affordability, and accessibility tend to be a package deal. To realize their vision of serving disaster relief efforts and the public good, the EcoFlow team saw they’d need to create affordability through scale.

So over the course of their two Kickstarter campaigns, they’ve worked toward creating modular, flexible power units that can serve photographers, campers, electric car owners, and well-prepared families as well as disaster relief groups.

The EcoFlow Kickstarter video addresses potential consumers; the ultimate aim is to make the product affordable for disaster relief orgs as well.

“We’ve made it a really low barrier to entry,” Harris says. “The base product stores a significant amount of energy, almost 400 watt hours, and can output 600 watts, but you can customize it with our products or with any third-party products. So we’re trying to make it as easy as possible for people to use battery energy storage and renewable energy, and the R600 is our most affordable product to date.”

Scaling for impact

“We’re trying to hit a certain scale, so that we can be more philanthropic as a company,” Harris says. He hopes that releasing products to the wider public, like he’s doing now through his Kickstarter campaign, will help the company get units into disaster preparedness kits and do more philanthropic projects.

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, they donated 45 units to prefab hospitals. This spring, they were able to donate 200 units to pop-up hospitals in Wuhan, the original center of the COVID crisis. Harris hopes to be able to expand their impact further over time—and despite the horrors of the pandemic, he sees this as an opportunity to redefine business in more human terms.

“I think there needs to be a fundamental change in human behavior after this,” he says. ” I think there’s going to be a more evolved human consciousness in terms of how we interact with each other, with the environment, and I’m hopeful that this really tragic pandemic is going to create a lot more awareness that companies do not exist for their own profit. They exist to scale technology that can improve people’s lives, to solve societal problems in a sustainable way, to scale with intention and create a better world,” he says.

EcoFlow R600 is live on Kickstarter through June 26, 2020.