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Will Alsop‘s La Frègate cafe in Jersey has been granted Grade II-listed status following a campaign led by architectural charity Twentieth Century Society.

The cafe was listed following a campaign launched after plans to demolish the boat-shaped structure to make way for a large waterfront redevelopment led by the Jersey Development Company became public.

Built in 1997, La Frègate cafe was designed by Alsop & Störmer in collaboration with Jersey-based architect Derek Mason. It is Alsop’s first structure to be listed and according to Twentieth Century Society (C20) is now the youngest listed building in the British Isles.

“It is the first building by former RIBA Stirling Prize winner Will Alsop to be listed and we believe it to now be the youngest listed building in the British Isles – overtaking Nicholas Grimshaw’s Western Morning News building in Plymouth, which was listed Grade II* in 2015 after a successful C20 campaign,” the Twentieth Century Society (C20) told Dezeen.

“C20 is thrilled that our application to list La Fregate has been successful and we look forward to working with the Jersey Government, Jersey Heritage and the developers to secure the future of the cafe within any new scheme for the St Helier waterfront,” it continued.

“Alsop and Störmer’s La Fregate is a fun, imaginative design, that fits within a rich tradition of playful seaside structures. Yet it’s also of outstanding architectural and historic significance and richly deserves this recognition – something Jersey residents should rightly be proud of!”

Alsop, who died in 2018, was one of the UK’s best-known architects. He designed bold buildings including Peckham Libray in London, The Public in West Bromwich and The Sharp Centre for Design at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Canada.

The La Frègate cafe was based on a drawing by Alsop that was informed by an upside-down boat. It is a 33-metre-long building that is clad in Western red cedar with randomly arranged rectangular windows punctuating its exterior.

Inside 24 concrete columns support the interior beneath a curved curving roof that was fitted with a glass roof, which runs the entire length of the building.

“The unique exterior of the building is of special interest for its architectural design, and it could be argued that La Fregate has become a landmark building, enhancing its architectural interest,” said Jersey Heritage in a report about the building.

Although the structure has achieved Grade-II listed status, it does not necessarily protect it from changes, however, any planning decisions that would affect the building must consider its status as a protected structure.

Earlier this month, Jersey Development Company chief executive Lee Henry told local newspaper, Bailiwick Express, that it would explore looking into moving the structure to a suitable location.

“We would obviously adhere to any listing requirement, but it is possible the building could move to a more suitable location, while still retaining its link with the sea,” said Henry.

“It would have to be dismantled because it was not built to be simply picked up and moved,” he continued. “Rebuilding it could be an opportunity to include a mezzanine floor, which featured in the original plans but was not built because it had no disabled access.”

In other protected building news, Westminster planners recently approved controversial plans to remodel the Grade I-listed Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery in London.

The photography is courtesy of Twentieth Century Society.

The post Will Alsop’s upside-down-boat cafe becomes British Isles’ “youngest listed building” appeared first on Dezeen.

A concert in a headset, is essentially what this India-based audio startup wants to deliver…

Have you ever listened to good music on TWS Earbuds? It sucks, frankly. That small driver is incapable of delivering the kind of audio you’d expect from great speakers. Headphones are a marginal improvement, but they really don’t get your heart thumping the way being at an actual concert does. The reason is simple, tech startup Sonic Lamb explains… our ears are well tuned to higher frequencies, but not so much with low-end frequencies like bass. Instead of hearing the bass, we ‘feel’ the bass through our body- this is why you can feel the drumbeat or bass drops in your chest when you’re at a concert. Earphones can hardly deliver that experience, and headphones can only do so much with their marginally larger audio drivers. The solution, Sonic Lamb says, is to enable users to not just hear music through the ears but also FEEL it through one’s body. Good bookshelf speakers and home theater systems reproduce this experience through dedicated audio drivers for mids and highs and a subwoofer system that moves air to create that powerful and immersive bass… As audiophiles and engineers with prior experience working on hearing aids and audio systems for helmets, the folks at Sonic Lamb decided to make headphones that deliver a theater-like experience in headphones using their Hybrid Driver technology.

Designers: Navajith Karkera, Jagath Biddappa, Sudesh Acharya & Mohammed Fadil

Click Here to Buy Now: $189 $299 (37% off exclusively for YD readers only). Hurry, only 25 left!

Powered by the world’s first and patented Hybrid Driver Acoustics.

Sub-wooder now in a headphone.

The headphones come with a patented hybrid-driver architecture, featuring a pair of full-range drivers for the mids and highs to mimic loudspeakers and a proprietary impulse driver that emulates a sub-woofer system by converting audio signals into corresponding mechanical motions that are then directed to your body. Using a method not too different from bone conduction, this headphone relies on audio waves and actual vibrations to help you both hear as well as feel the music you listen to. The resulting experience is nothing short of feeling like attending a concert, with a part of the music flowing right through your body. The Sonic Lamb Headphones are perhaps the only pair of cans mad enough to integrate sub-woofers into their architecture, and surprisingly enough, have low listening fatigue because the bass is directed to your body rather than to your ears.

Loud and clear.

Forget fidgeting with EQ controls.

The over-ear headphones are built with a bunch of high-end features, including the ability to charge and simultaneously play studio-grade 24-bit audio at 96kHz thanks to direct USB-C input, and Bluetooth 5.1 for handling wireless audio. A twin-mic array also gives the headphones ambient noise suppression and vocal enhancement abilities. Instead of fidgeting with EQ controls, you can personalize your listening experience by performing a quick 2-minute hearing test on Sonic Lamb’s app, or better still, use the Multimode dial to cycle through the multiple listening modes on the headphones by turning the knob built into the cans.

Multimode for personalization.

Sonic Lamb offers four immersive modes to choose from, ranging from the relatively milder ‘Feel’ mode for melodious music genres (in which case the subwoofer just purrs), to the ‘Beast’ mode (for a fully activated subwoofer that delivers the most powerful and immersive bass response) that’s well-suited for action movies, gaming and for absolute bass-heads who want nothing short of peak eargasm. These modes obviously affect the Sonic Lamb’s overall battery life too, with the Hear mode providing 24 hours of use, and the Beast mode giving you a solid 6 hours of eargasm on max volume.

Replaceable earpads and silicone headband liner.

The headphone’s design and build are well in line with premium headsets too, with two-tone color finishes that sit well on the headphone’s sleek body. There are 6 color variants to choose from, all with their own replaceable ear pads and silicone headband liners to ensure that the headphones last longer. The headphones also come with detachable boom microphones, turning them into great video-chatting headsets or perhaps the most immersive gaming headsets on the planet, as well as USB charging and audio cables. The Sonic Lamb headphones start at a pretty modest $189 for the first 25 early bird backers (the price bumps up to $199 after that) and come along with a travel case, a soft pouch, and a tamper-proof box.

Click Here to Buy Now: $189 $299 (37% off exclusively for YD readers only). Hurry, only 25 left!

The post These headphones promise an ‘eargasm’ by using a Hybrid Driver that lets you FEEL the music first appeared on Yanko Design.

As an EDC and knife enthusiast myself, I have to say I haven’t really been giving cheese knives their time in the sun. To be brutally honest, I’ve been using my regular kitchen knife to cut cheese, dice veggies, apply peanut butter, and do pretty much everything a knife is required to do, and I’m made to understand that’s a cardinal sin, not incomparable to drinking fine wine out of a plastic cup. In order to remedy my ways (and because I’m a cheese enthusiast who doesn’t appreciate struggling with cheeses that are too hard, crumbly, or sticky), I decided to look for the perfect charcuterie knife, only to find out that there are separate knives for hard cheese, creamy cheeses, crumbly cheeses, and other charcuterie elements like meat, bread, grapes, olives, etc. That is, until I stumbled across the Revel, an ever-capable cheese knife designed by 36-year-old French gastronomist Jérémy Laubriat. The Revel looks nothing like any knife you’ve got in your kitchen – primarily because it’s designed to handle literally every element of a charcuterie board, from cheeses to tough meats, sourdough breads, and even the occasional acidic fruit to cut the cheesy richness.

Designer: Jérémy Laubriat

Click Here to Buy Now: $150 $170 ($20 off). Hurry, only 31/50 left!

The Revel knife primarily accomplishes four broad tasks with its four different blade styles. A smooth edge with a curved profile works well for slicing through soft cheeses like brie and camembert, while at the heel of the smooth edge is an axe-style wider blade, designed for cutting through hard cheese. Rotate the blade 360° and you’ve got a serrated edge that works wonderfully with fragile cheeses like fresh mozzarella or feta, or even for slicing bread. To pick up the cheeses as well as pieces of bread, meat, or fruits like olives, the knife comes a forked tip that’s great for piercing and lifting items.

Cutouts in the blade work in a clever way by not only making it lighter (and giving you greater maneuverability with your wrist), but by also preventing the cheese from sticking to the knife as you cut through. In doing so, the Revel honors and respects the cheeses and meats by giving them the right treatment in a way that would truly appease the perfectionist culinarians of France and Italy.

The knife’s design was a year-long iterative process forJérémy, with his visiting Thiers, the capital of French cutlery to help create prototypes. Crafted by incredibly experienced artisans responsible for creating some of the world’s finest cutlery, the knife is forged from steel and treated for durability over time. Each blade comes with a full-tang extending all the way to the end of the handle, and is sandwiched between two pieces of olive wood that don’t just give the Revel knife its signature appeal, they’re also a tribute to the major role olives and olive oil play in the European gastronomic process. If you really want to elevate your fromage game, the Revel knife is also available with a buffalo horn handle as well as a pressed amber handle.

Click Here to Buy Now: $150 $170 ($20 off). Hurry, only 31/50 left!

The post Building a charcuterie board for your next house party? This all-in-one cheese knife is the perfect tool. first appeared on Yanko Design.

Smart gadgets rule our lives for the most part, and they need to be juiced up constantly to make our life seamless. In mind-boggling research, Forbes has found out an average US home has 20.2 smart devices. Now, because of changing lifestyles, these smart devices need frequent charging.

Relying on a power bank for active outdoorsy life can only go to a limit, and itself can go out of charge. Having no juice left in the mobile devices and your power bank in a secluded location can be tricky, and there’s got to be the last resort to save the day.

Designer: Pelin Özbalcı

Into the picture comes a hand-cranked power bank that comes loaded with a dynamo to charge the battery slowly when no other option is there. A smart accessory that fulfills the intended purpose without losing out on the minimalistic aesthetics of carrying it in your pocket. Last Resort power bank has a hand-crank mechanism hiding tactically in the power bank itself – ready for use whenever desperate situations arise.

The gracefully hidden hand crank blends into the design – giving off a slight peek to remind the users what it can do. Once taken out, the gadget transforms into a working dynamo as soon as the arm is reattached to the keyhole. Spinning the crank starts the charging indicated by the flashing orange lights. The battery percentage is indicated by the white lights on the power bank.

The front of the accessory has soft-to-touch material, and the back surface has a high-grade non-slip surface. This ensures you can crank Last Resort by keeping on the edge of an object without making it topple over. While there are many such accessories out there, this one edges ahead in terms of aesthetics and functionality. I just hope, the power bank can crank up enough charge to fuel high-end mobile devices of the current era.

The post This aesthetically designed hand crank power bank will never let you down first appeared on Yanko Design.

Singer-songwriter, musician and creative force behind Fleetwood Mac, Christine McVie has passed away at 79 years old. Born Christine Perfect, she was part of British blues-rock group Chicken Shack before marrying Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie and joining the band in 1970. She wrote some of the legendary band’s most beloved songs, including “Don’t Stop,” “You Make Loving Fun,” “Hold Me,” and “Little Lies.” Their 14th studio album, Tango in the Night (1987), features the gloriously glittery, buoyant track “Everywhere,” which McVie wrote and sang lead vocals on. A warm, soulful pop song, “Everywhere” possesses a certain naivety and allows McVie to truly glow. Her significant, expansive legacy will continue to inspire, influence and delight listeners and musicians alike.