Hasta La Ideas

A small Danish company created the most compact, lightweight and durable portable chair. The high back seat (43cm 17″) is a feature not found in any other super portable chairs, while it weighs less than a kilo!

View the full project here

Salad bars are big business. According to Bloomberg, they’re lucrative, have high profit margins, drive store visits and more than 90% of supermarkets have them. On the downside they take up a lot of floor space. More importantly, ever since COVID-19 hit no one wants to use them anymore.

A California-based company called Chowbotics may just be in the right place at the right time. They’ve been working on Sally the Fresh Food Robot, a sort of vending-machine-plus that workers load up with individual ingredients.

Customers then spec out what they want and in what portions using a touchscreen (there’s also an option to use your smartphone, avoiding another public touchpoint).

The machine then assembles your meal for you.

This is a great design, and more sustainable, for several reasons. Number one is that it can cut down on the need for packaging. At your typical supermarket, you’ll see a section like this with prepackaged salads:

Having a Sally-‘bot would eliminate the need for those, while freeing up the shelf space. And customers would undoubtedly enjoy the perception that their salad is fresh, being ready-made.

Secondly, of course, is the hygiene issue. The pandemic has put people off of wanting to touch serving utensils handled by the masses. Having your salads made by a sealed robot that can’t get sick will undoubtedly be more attractive.

Thirdly, with a 3′ x 3′ footprint, by the machine is diminutive, compared to a salad bar.

One downside is that the machine’s throughput is slower than ant-like customers raking over a salad bar, with one estimate at 30-35 salads an hour. Even still, at $35,000 the machines are expected to start turning a profit in under a year.

Here’s a look at the machine’s impact on a college campus:

If you haven’t yet seen these at a supermarket near you, I suspect it’s just a matter of time.

While most sneaker manufacturers use injection-molded EVA foam for their midsoles, a Beijing-based company called LuxCreo is going with 3D-printed midsoles.

LuxCreo says that these midsoles are “mega resilient” compared to EVA, with no loss of compression over time; the company makes the bold claim that the millionth step in one of their kicks offers the same level of cushioning as the first step.

The company says the uppers are made from “AirMore multi-layer fabric,” which in conjunction with the open-lattice design of the midsoles makes the shoes both waterproof and breathable. I’d never heard of AirMore and looked into it; it appears to be this stuff from Chinese manufacturer Yie-Cheng Textiles. I couldn’t find any meaningful information in English on their site, other than that the material is “either knitted or woven” and the aforementioned breathable/waterproof claims. LuxCreo says the material makes their sneakers easy to clean.

The 3D printing method they’re using is DLP (Digital Light Projection), a competing technology to SLA. LuxCreo’s brand name for their DLP process is LEAP, for “light enabled additive production.” Incredibly, they write that LEAP “enables printing speeds 100x faster than traditional 3D printers,” though it’s not clear what they mean by “traditional.”

Curiously, despite the customization benefits of 3D printing, the company is offering the sneakers in just two colorways, and only in half-sizes.

The Bisca360 sneakers are currently up on Kickstarter:

At press time they had $30,201 in pledges on a $5,000 goal, with 16 days left to pledge.

French President Emmanuel Macron has ended speculation over the future of Notre-Dame by stating that the cathedral’s spire will be rebuilt exactly as it was before last year’s devastating fire.

Macron has announced that a replica of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc 93-metre-high spire, which was added to the 13th-century cathedral in 1859, will be built as part of the reconstruction.

“The president trusts the experts and approved the main outlines of the project presented by the chief architect, which plans to reconstruct the spire identically,” said a statement from the Elysee Palace.

The decision ends speculation over whether a contemporary structure would be added to the French landmark.

Viollet-le-Duc spire to be reconstructed

The decision to reconstructed Viollet-le-Duc’s spire aligns with a bill passed by the French Senate last year that stated that the cathedral’s rebuilding must be faithful to its “last known visual state”.

However, it seems to be a change of direction for the French president who had previously called for “an inventive reconstruction” and said that he planned to “rebuild the Notre Dame so it is even more beautiful than it was”.

Following these statement’s French prime minister Edouard Philippe announced that there would be an international competition to design the cathedral’s next spire. At the time he said: “As is often the case in the evolution of heritage, we should endow Notre-Dame with a new spire.”

Designers created many alternative spires

These announcements sparked a huge number of proposals from architects and designers for both the cathedral and its spire.

Designers, including Vincent Callebaut, Miysis Studio and StudioNAB, proposed creating a glass roof to replace the one lost in the fire, while more far-fetched proposals included turning the building into a car park, a swimming pool or a McDonald’s restaurant.

There were also a huge variety of alternative spires that could be built to replace Viollet-le-Duc’ structure. Italian architecture practice Studio Fuksas suggested creating a spire from Baccarat crystal that would be lit up at night, and French designer Mathieu Lehanneur proposed topping the building with a golden flame.

Macron’s decision to support the reconstruction of Viollet-le-Duc’s spire was due in part to his desire to see the cathedral rebuilt quickly reported the BBC.

Following the fire, he announced that he wanted the restoration to happen within five years so that it was complete by the 2024 Olympics, which is due to be staged in Paris.

This proposed time scale was challenged by more than 1,000 architecture experts who wrote an open letter to the president urging him to reconsider.

Notre-Dame cathedral in central Paris was largely built in the 13th century and underwent a substantial restoration lead by Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century. A large fire on the 15th April 2019 destroyed much of the building.

Main image is by Clem.

The post Notre-Dame spire will be reconstructed “identically” appeared first on Dezeen.

On auction through Sotheby’s, A.R. Gurrey Jr’s hand-assembled book mixes print photography, poetry and action

Wildly influential though mostly unknown, A.R. Gurrey Jr was born in Kansas in 1874. By 1900, as a trained civil engineer, he relocated to Hawaii. There, he surfed, declined a role within his father’s insurance business, and began working to open and operate an art gallery. In 1914, he published at least one edition of The Surf Riders of Hawaii—a hand-assembled book comprising mounted gelatin-silver photographs, poetry and titles in his own typography, all on heavy brown wove paper housed in stiff mottled wrappers. And though there were others who documented surfers before (usually from ashore or at local spots) it was Gurrey Jr who first compiled his images into a book—pioneering the intersection of art and sport. Eight of Gurrey Jr’s photographs exist inside the edition of The Surf Riders of Hawaii up for auction by Sotheby’s now.

Poetry by Lord Byron also graces the pages of the edition. The excerpt, taken from the second-to-last verse of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818), praises sport in the sea: “And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy / Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be / Borne like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy / I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me / Were a delight; and if the freshening sea / Made them a terror—’twas a pleasing fear, / For I was as it were a child of thee, / And trusted to thy billows far and near, / And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here,” Byron writes.

This rare collector’s item slipped from sport’s lore until the early 2000s, Ella Hall—Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts Specialist—tells us. It’s being offered now, at a starting bid of $26,000, as part of Sotheby’s two-part auction series of seldom-seen books, manuscripts, newspapers and other printed materials. While Gurrey Jr’s release falls under “books” categorically, his idea predated and established the formula for surf and skate zines, action photography, and even video compilations.

“There is earlier known surf photography, I think even going back as far as the 1890s, but this is the first book,” Hall tells us. “He was also the first photographer [of surfing] who was himself also a surfer. He approached the project with a real understanding of the sport. And we believe this was the first photography that was all really water-shot—he was in a canoe alongside these famous surfers, often getting drenched as he was attempting to take these high-octane sport photographs. It’s this nice intersection of his position as a surfer himself and the way that photography as a medium had developed to allow for something like this from a technical standpoint.”

It establishes a kind of visual vocabulary, at least for surf photography

“This is a kind of legendary surf rarity,” Hall says. “It’s quite early, and in any collecting field collectors are generally looking for primacy—the idea if the first something to do something. This is the first book-length treatment on surfing. That’s important in and of itself. And then it also establishes a kind of visual vocabulary, at least for surf photography. It’s a really important visual language.”

Looking beyond the contents, The Surf Riders of Hawaii also stands as an impressive printing feat. From the dense brown wove paper to the iridescence of the imagery, and the twine-bound spine, there’s evidence of talented craftsmanship on display here. The son of an artist (his father was a talented landscape painter) and the husband of an equally successful photographer, Gurrey Jr likely devoted years to this project.

“It’s hard to recapture the material magic of holding the original object,” Hall says. “But interestingly enough, in this lot there is included a centennial edition that surf scholar Timothy T. DeLaVega did in 2014. It was limited to 50 issues where he really tried to increase the accessibility of this work. He reproduced it to the best of his ability using the copy we are selling. He spent a number of years tracking down this book and it became the basis for the facsimile that attempted to recreate the magic of the original object.”

There is just a handful of copies of Gurrey Jr’s book out there, and the other known editions feature fewer photographs and aren’t in as good condition. Sotheby’s speculates that the original negatives for the book and an abundance of additional copies were destroyed in either a flood or a fire—both of which Gurrey Jr and his wife endured at their Hawaii home.

“It’s lovely to be a part of reestablishing his name as an important early documentarian because his name really does deserve to be recorded,” Hall tells us. “You can tell when you’re looking through the book, he really did contribute in fundamental ways to recording this sport.”

The Surf Riders of Hawaii, 1914, by A.R. Gurrey Jr is available at auction until 21 July. The starting bid for the lot including the original copy and its centennial reproduction sits at $26,000 at the time of publish.

Images courtesy of Sotheby’s