Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen promotion: art marketplace Fine Art America has curated a collection of photography by Slim Aarons and made it available to purchase as wall art and prints.

Entitled The Complete Slim Aarons Collection, the Fine Art America series makes 923 images taken by American photographer Aarons available as ready-to-hang prints with a range of framing options.

The late photographer Aarons, born George Aarons, is best known for giving a rare glimpse of the luxury lifestyles of the rich and famous during the twentieth century.

He developed his skills while working as a combat photographer in World War II, before moving to California to fulfil his ambition to document “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places”.

Among the photographs in Fine Art America’s collection are those that he took while on assignment for the likes of Holiday, LIFE, Vogue and Town & Country, which enabled him to travel the world.

This includes some of Aaron’s most famous and recognisable photos captured of people at poolside, such as the Poolside Glamour that was taken in 1970.

Poolside Glamour documents the wife and friends of American businessman Edgar Kaufmann at his desert house in Palm Springs, which was designed by American-Austrian architect Richard Neutra.

Other examples include the 1960s Penthouse Pool, a photo of young women at the poolside of a luxury apartment in Athens, and Sea Drive, an image of film producer Kevin McClory and his family driving an Amphicar – an amphibious classic car.

Each photo can be purchased as a canvas print, metal print, acrylic print, wood print or poster. Fine Art America has also made them available with various framing options in seven different colours, ensuring the photo’s mount echoes the shapes and furnishings of the room in which it will be used.

Fine Art America is the “world’s largest art marketplace and print-on-demand technology company”, founded in 2006.

While making the works of leading photographers and brands available to purchase, the company also helps emerging artists sell wall art, home decor and apparel.

See the company’s full collection of Aaron’s work at fineartamerica.com/collections/slim+aarons.

The post Slim Aarons’ photography made available as prints by Fine Art America appeared first on Dezeen.

Food science is a very intriguing part of the culinary arts and plays an important role in how you interact with what you eat. Colors like red and yellow have proven to make people feel more hungry (it’s no surprise why McDonald’s literally has it as its color scheme), and most experts will say a white plate makes food taste much better because they allow the colors on your plate to truly stand out. Now, father-son duo Ken and Cameron Davidov, are taking that science to another level with a spoon they claim helps enhance flavors by stimulating your taste-buds.

It’s safe to say that Ken and Cameron Davidov have literally dedicated their lives to spoons. They helped invent a folding two-piece snap together spoon that came with yogurt containers (and eventually with instant-ramen cups, and even pioneered the award-winning spoon-in-lid system that General Mills used with their yogurts and Haagen Dazs, with their ice-creams. The SpoonTEK is a culmination of virtually decades of work in this domain, but it isn’t a simple redesign of your regular hand-held scooping device… it looks at food and how we eat it on a molecular and cellular level.

In theory, the SpoonTEK works just like a pair of binoculars. Eyes aren’t programmed to see something that’s a quarter of a mile away, but put a pair of lenses in front of them and the eyes can see much further than they originally could. Think of the SpoonTEK as a device that does the same thing, but for your taste-buds. Using a patent-pending ionic charging stimulation technology, the SpoonTEK has a way of conducting your body’s own energy through the spoon and into the food on it. This microcurrent is enough to stimulate your taste-buds into making the food feel more flavorful. Chocolate ice-cream feels more chocolatey, soup tastes more flavorful, macaroni-and-cheese feels more cheesy, and yogurt tastes better too, without that sour, pasty aftertaste. I wish I understood the material science behind the spoon, but according to the Davidov duo, the spoon’s strategic metal electrodes on the top and bottom help conduct these microcurrents to enhance taste as well as aftertaste. The spoon targets the parts of your tongue that taste the different categories of food, making sweet food taste sweeter, savory food taste more savory, and helping enrich the overall notes in the food you eat.

Cameron and Ken Davidov hope that SpoonTEK will change the way we perceive food. Its ability to tantalize tastebuds means more than just making regular, boring food taste good… it holds the potential to help people consume less sugar or salt on a daily basis by making food taste more sugary or salty. Low-calorie alternatives to food could potentially taste better, and people on diets could find themselves enjoying their food much more than they would with a regular spoon. Moreover, if the SpoonTEK really claims to enhance flavor, it may just be a boon for people recovering from the Coronavirus, who’ve probably experienced a loss in smell and taste. Obviously, I’m no medical expert, but a spoon that could stimulate your tastebuds to potentially enrich flavors would really help these people taste and enjoy food better.

The SpoonTEK, according to its designers, works great with ice-creams, soups, and yogurt (semisolid or liquid foods in general) because of the way these foods easily come in contact with the electrode on the top. The spoon doesn’t just enhance taste though, it makes sure you’ve got a great aftertaste too, so the food tastes good long after the spoon leaves your mouth. The SpoonTEK’s been under development for three years now, and the Davidovs are finally at a stage where their food-changing game-changing spoon can make its way into homes, mouths, and even the dishwasher after you’re done eating!

Designers: Cameron & Ken Davidov

Click Here to Buy Now: $29 $89 (67% off). Hurry, only 1/270 left!

SpoonTEK – A Smart Spoon that Elevates Taste

Using patent-pending technology, the SpoonTEK uses mild electric current to excites the taste buds on your tongue for enhanced flavor, heightened taste and improved after-taste.

SpoonTEK Overview

The human tongue can process five flavors at once: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory. The taste receptors within the taste buds activate while eating so the senses take over. Ultimately, the brain determines the final perception of flavor and taste.

SpoonTEK science combines the power of advanced electronics with tongue sensory and the brain for a one-of-a-kind eating experience.

How Does it Work

Customer Testimonials

Their spoon works best on yogurt, ice cream, soup, healthy foods with less sugar & salt.

Comes in 3 colors.

Click Here to Buy Now: $29 $89 (67% off). Hurry, only 1/270 left!

Seattle architecture studio Wittman Estes drew on ancient Chinese landscape paintings and principles of garden design for this black house in Washington.

Wittman Estes designed Yo Ju Courtyard House for a plot on a busy street in the Clyde Hill neighbourhood that forms part of the wider metropolitan Seattle area. Yo Ju translates as “secluded living” in Mandarin Chinese, a key premise for the design.

One of the courtyards fronts the house to provide a barrier to the noise of and people on the street, while the other at the rear offers a space for the client’s three children to play.

A stained-black cedar fence runs along the front Yo Ju Courtyard House, screening the street. The house, whose walls are also clad in blackened cedar, is set back behind the garden composed of grasses and a Japanese Maple tree interwoven with a concrete path.

Glass walls at the back of the house meanwhile are intended to make it more open to a courtyard planted with a tree, and the back garden.

Because the property is flanked on either side by the gardens, its footprint takes up less than a third of its 10,125-square-foot (941-square-metre) site. Wittman Estes said it aimed to give the illusion that the compact interiors are larger by allowing vistas through the house.

The concept draws on the technique of the three distances of high, deep and level distance found in Chinese landscape paintings. In Yo Ju Courtyard House, the firm aimed to translate the same idea with three distances in the view from behind the stairway through the living room to the garden.

“The concept of three distances works in the house in the layering of spaces,” studio co-founder Matt Wittman explained.

“Moving from the busy arterial road inward into the private courtyard in the back of the house- these ‘distances; are visual and spatial layers that move further and deeper into the house.”

“From the kitchen, living and dining area of the house, layers of trees, planting, and casework increase the depth and layers of space and privacy, creating the illusion that the space is deeper and further away,” he added.

Functions are separated into either the communal or private zones, which the firm said follows on from a concept in ancient Chinese garden designs.

“The house uses programme zones to shape layers of privacy and community that were inspired by an ancient Chinese garden design principle known as ‘Big Hide’, Wittman added.

“The communal spaces open up in the center of the house while the private ones are situated at the front of the house on two levels.”

The ground-floor dining room, living room, a kitchen and children’s play wrapping around the rear garden and central staircase, forming the communal zone.

Cast-in-place concrete pads of the patio also meet with exposed concrete flooring in the kitchen and dining room to help further blend indoors and out. This muted material palette continues in the hues of the cabinetry created by US furniture maker Henrybuilt, oak stairs and pale walls.

A garage, a guest bedroom with an en-suite bathroom and a gym placed to the front of the ground floor are in the private programme. This zone continues upstairs with the parent’s bedroom wing, the children’s bedroom wing and a guest bedroom.

This first floor of Yo Ju Courtyard House is designed around an art studio where the owner teaches the children crafts, with oak cabinets for storing tools art and a large steel wall for displaying drawings.

Wittman founded Wittman Estes in Seattle in 2012 with landscape designer Jody Estes. The firm previously added a Chinese-inspired courtyard to a 1940s residence in a dense Seattle neighbourhood, with the aim to show how to maximise an urban lot.

Its other recently completed projects in the state of Washington have made the most of natural surroundings, including an elevated extension to a 1940s beach house and a holiday home tucked into a coastal forest.

Photography is by Andrew Pogue.

Project credits:

Architect: Wittman Estes Architecture+Landscape
Design team: Matt Wittman, Jody Estes, Ashton Wesely
Structural engineer: Malsam Tsang Structural Engineering
Builder: DME Construction
Kitchen: Henrybuilt

The post Gardens bookend Yo Ju Courtyard House in Washington by Wittman Estes appeared first on Dezeen.

Running sneakers wear out way too quickly–in the city I was going through a pair a year, and I’m not even a runner–and there’s been no easy way for a manufacturer to pull them apart and recycle the individual materials.

Adidas has correctly identified that that problem is created at the design level. Their proposed solution is the UltraBOOST DNA Loop, a 100% recyclable and monomaterial running shoe made with no adhesives. The designers started by using just a single material for the entire shoe (bar the laces)–100% reusable TPU–and avoiding glue. “It’s spun to yarn, knitted, moulded and clean-fused to a BOOST midsole,” the company writes. There’s no further details provided on what the “clean-fused” process is, so we’re guessing that’s the secret sauce.

Once the shoe is spent and returned to Adidas, “they are washed, ground to pellets and melted into material for components for a new pair of shoes, with less waste.”

The UltraBOOST DNA Loop shoes that they’ve just unveiled are actually the third iteration; you’ve not likely heard about Gen 1 and Gen 2, because they were tested in-house with small groups of 200 end users for each batch. Now, having tweaked the Gen 3 design, they’re seeking public volunteers to take a pair–for free–and put them through their paces to develop feedback.

“1,500 Creators Club members will be invited to take part in a beta test of a specially designed digital experience through the adidas app….

“The 1,500 members will be given the shoes for free by adidas and become part of a sustainability microcommunity who will co-create with adidas in a true open source fashion to further shape and fine tune the experience. The 21 week program will be driven by the adidas app with the communities actions and feedback helping futureproof the engagement model. By signing up for the raffle they are making a commitment to return the shoes to be grinded, shredded and turned into something new.”

To join this “Creators Club,” you need to download Adidas’ app, and “prove [your] sustainability credentials by taking part in a quiz. Everyone who completes the quiz will be entered into a global raffle and randomly selected for the experience” for free, the company says.

You can get started by registering here.

Space seems closer than ever before. The previously rocky commercial space tourism industry is now becoming more of a reality, and new forms of storytelling – from social media to streaming – are giving more access to the universe around us in ways that would have seemed inconceivable several generations ago. It’s clear that interest hasn’t abated, with people still on a quest for fascinating imagery that piques their imagination.

Paolo Nespoli and Roland Miller have tapped into this collective appetite with their new book, Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of the International Space Station, which is being published to coincide with the 20^th anniversary of continuous human life aboard the ISS.

Roughly the size of a football field, the ISS modules were initially launched in 1998, before the first long-term human residents arrived on 2 November 2000. The ISS has been occupied by people on a continuous basis ever since then, surpassing the 13 years (ten of which consecutive) that people have inhabited the Russian-Soviet space station Mir, according to Justin P Walsh in one of the book’s essays. The ISS is set to be abandoned in 2024 and decommissioned in 2028.

Nespoli, a former astronaut and aerospace engineer who retired from the European Space Agency in 2018, took over half a million photographs during his space missions. He collaborated on the book with Miller, who has photographed launch and test facilities around the USA.

While the book, as the title suggests, predominantly covers the labyrinthine interiors of the space station, the images also give a glimpse into the training facilities back on home turf, as well as giving us glorious outward-facing views of Earth from the ISS.

Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of the International Space Station is published by Damiani; damianieditore.com

The post Photo book marks 20 years of human life on the International Space Station appeared first on Creative Review.