Core77 has a bit of experience in putting together conferences for creative-types so we particularly appreciate the challenges of engaging UX connoisseurs. OTHR Agency recently produced Dropbox’s Craft Class of 2023 in Austin, TX — “two carefully curated days of art, inspiration, and celebration.”
The latest edition of our Dezeen Debate newsletter features the reveal of Tadao Ando’s plans for a concrete arts centre in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Subscribe to Dezeen Debate now.
Japanese architect Ando has designed Il Teatro at Aljada, a cylindrical performing arts centre for Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
The building will measure 24,155 square meters and contain a 2,000-seat auditorium, a boutique restaurant, and a gallery. It will also have space to host a variety of shows, including theatre performances, operas, dances, art exhibitions, festivals and films.
Readers flocked to the comments to share their thoughts. One praised the architect’s “remarkable vision” and noted that it “will be an interesting architecture when completed”. Another wasn’t as keen, saying: “his early work was so much better”.
Other stories in this week’s newsletter that fired up the comments section included another Ando design, his MPavilion in Melbourne, Australia, a playschool and apartment in East London designed by Sam Jacob Studio and a fibreglass-like chair made from sheep fleeces by UK-based company Solidwool.
Dezeen Debate
Dezeen Debate is sent every Thursday and features a selection of the best reader comments and most talked-about stories. Read the latest edition of Dezeen Debate or subscribe here.
You can also subscribe to our other newsletters; Dezeen Agenda is sent every Tuesday containing a selection of the most important news highlights from the week, Dezeen Daily is our daily bulletin that contains every story published in the preceding 24 hours and Dezeen In Depth is sent on the last Friday of every month and delves deeper into the major stories shaping architecture and design.
The post Dezeen Debate features Tadao Ando’s “remarkable” design for concrete arts centre in Sharjah appeared first on Dezeen.
When you don’t spend a lot of time outdoors and therefore you don’t get enough natural light, there are times when this can affect your mood or your mental health in general. Especially during seasons when the days are short and the nights are long, people get affected with things like SAD (seasonal affective disorder) and other conditions affected by lack of natural light. Light therapy is one of the things suggested by professionals and there are some products out there that are the next best thing to natural light if you can’t get it.
Designer: Bios
There are a couple of lamps out there called Skyview that can be used as part of your light therapy but are also aesthetically pleasing. Bios has designed these lamps according to “documented scientific research” which means it is able to simulate exposure to sunlight even when you’re just inside your home and the sun is not actually out. The way the lamps look are also more natural in a home setting so it doesn’t feel weird or out of place whether in your living room, bedroom, or your work area.
As the day progresses, the lamp can also be programmed to adjsut to the time of day and the natural light outside in terms of brightness and light temperature but at a more comfortable rate than when you’re actually outside under the glare of the sun. It is also able to adapt the spectrum of natural light with all its colors and even simulate the light when it shines above the horizon.
There are two models available for the Skyview lamps. One is a taller model at 20.7 inches and has a handblown glass globe while the smaller and cheaper one is at 11.6 inches and has a diffused polycarbonate globe design. Both have 1,302 lumens LED brightness and have a die-cast aluminum base. It is also able to have around 50,000 hours lifespan and has an 80 color rendering index score. The taller one or the Skyview 2 Pro is priced at $949 while the Skyview 2 model is available for $449.
The post Lamps that Simulate Natural Sunlight to Help You Cope with Seasonal Affective Disorder first appeared on Yanko Design.
New York design studio Stickbulb has launched Treeline, a series of lighting created using wood sourced from trees that had been removed from New York City’s “urban forest”.
The Treeline lighting series comprises long, wood-panelled fixtures that are suspended from each end by wire and range from four to eight feet (1.2 to 2.4 metres) in length.
Made from pin oak, one of the most prevalent trees in New York City, the fixtures were fabricated by the studio in the city.
They were made using wood collected from trees removed from the city’s green spaces and streets through a collaboration with NYC Parks Department and Brooklyn wood supplier Tri-Lox.
“[Treeline] was specifically designed to be a product of a new supply chain in New York City, which is taking the wood waste from the urban forest operations, proving that it can be used locally and made into beautiful products,” Stickbulb co-founder Russel Greenberg told Dezeen.
“It’s all about reducing waste and raising the profile of salvage – and trying to mainstream it.”
New York City, which contracts outside parties to do maintenance on its trees, removes more than 10,000 from the seven-million strong stock of trees in the city each year.
Typically, the wood collected from the trees, which are downed for various reasons like disease and storms, ends up being mulched or sent to one of the local landfills.
According to Greenberg, the studio was made aware of this waste and decided to try and save the wood.
“Some of it is beautiful old-growth wood with really tight grain,” Greenberg said. “This is the smartest, lowest-carbon material we could possibly be working with.”
Because of the inconsistent size and quality of the wood, the studio has also set up a depot where it stores wood bought from the city.
At the depot, the Stickbulb team can ensure its stock of wood for further production as well as evaluate the wood, removing metal and other debris from the supply.
It was important for the team to raise awareness of the usefulness of the wood, without relying on an aesthetic that made the salvaged nature of the material obvious.
“Normally, when someone thinks of salvage, they think of something that has a lot of rustication, that screams salvage when you look at,” Greenberg said. “For us, that’s not the case.”
He noted that as only a single design is currently in production, the wood type needed is very specific, but in the future hopes to scale up the project to include more of the salvaged wood.
Greenberg hopes to expand the pilot so that the money for production could also go towards a more robust forestry program in the city.
This could create a circular economy around wood that also incorporates the deaths of trees, which Greenberg noted is usually overlooked in favour of planting and maintenance.
“No one wants to talk about trees getting removed or dying in the city,” he said. “Everyone wants to talk about how are we going to plant more trees – both of these are important conversations to have.”
“But if you’re not thinking about the full lifecycle, which includes death, you’re not thinking about the whole thing,” he added.
Stickbulb has worked with salvaged wood from other sources in the past, including a line made from wood recovered from a water tower. Other studios to use reclaimed wood include Ptacek Home, which created a line of decor with wood from trees downed by storms.
The post Stickbulb creates light fixtures using wood from salvaged New York trees appeared first on Dezeen.
New York design studio Stickbulb has launched Treeline, a series of lighting created using wood sourced from trees that had been removed from New York City’s “urban forest”.
The Treeline lighting series comprises long, wood-panelled fixtures that are suspended from each end by wire and range from four to eight feet (1.2 to 2.4 metres) in length.
Made from pin oak, one of the most prevalent trees in New York City, the fixtures were fabricated by the studio in the city.
They were made using wood collected from trees removed from the city’s green spaces and streets through a collaboration with NYC Parks Department and Brooklyn wood supplier Tri-Lox.
“[Treeline] was specifically designed to be a product of a new supply chain in New York City, which is taking the wood waste from the urban forest operations, proving that it can be used locally and made into beautiful products,” Stickbulb co-founder Russel Greenberg told Dezeen.
“It’s all about reducing waste and raising the profile of salvage – and trying to mainstream it.”
New York City, which contracts outside parties to do maintenance on its trees, removes more than 10,000 from the seven-million strong stock of trees in the city each year.
Typically, the wood collected from the trees, which are downed for various reasons like disease and storms, ends up being mulched or sent to one of the local landfills.
According to Greenberg, the studio was made aware of this waste and decided to try and save the wood.
“Some of it is beautiful old-growth wood with really tight grain,” Greenberg said. “This is the smartest, lowest-carbon material we could possibly be working with.”
Because of the inconsistent size and quality of the wood, the studio has also set up a depot where it stores wood bought from the city.
At the depot, the Stickbulb team can ensure its stock of wood for further production as well as evaluate the wood, removing metal and other debris from the supply.
It was important for the team to raise awareness of the usefulness of the wood, without relying on an aesthetic that made the salvaged nature of the material obvious.
“Normally, when someone thinks of salvage, they think of something that has a lot of rustication, that screams salvage when you look at,” Greenberg said. “For us, that’s not the case.”
He noted that as only a single design is currently in production, the wood type needed is very specific, but in the future hopes to scale up the project to include more of the salvaged wood.
Greenberg hopes to expand the pilot so that the money for production could also go towards a more robust forestry program in the city.
This could create a circular economy around wood that also incorporates the deaths of trees, which Greenberg noted is usually overlooked in favour of planting and maintenance.
“No one wants to talk about trees getting removed or dying in the city,” he said. “Everyone wants to talk about how are we going to plant more trees – both of these are important conversations to have.”
“But if you’re not thinking about the full lifecycle, which includes death, you’re not thinking about the whole thing,” he added.
Stickbulb has worked with salvaged wood from other sources in the past, including a line made from wood recovered from a water tower. Other studios to use reclaimed wood include Ptacek Home, which created a line of decor with wood from trees downed by storms.
The post Stickbulb creates light fixtures using wood from salvaged New York trees appeared first on Dezeen.
“I watched Loki,” writes 3D modeler Jack Wang, “and I really liked [how the production design] combines retro and futuristic in the show, so I rendered a detailed enhanced version of a multifunctional computer.” Loosely based on what you might see on a desk at the show’s TVA, here’s his creation:
Wang’s got a video here where he walks you through the modeling, though it’s in Mandarin (Wang’s based in China).
Owning a second fridge has become a pretty popular and common trend, that has slowly made its way to homes in the past few years. However, fridges tend to be pretty large and occupy a substantial amount of space wherever they’re placed, hence accommodating them in smaller homes and apartments ends up being an issue. But this is where the Super Smart Fridge comes in. Designed by Rocco co-founders Alyse Borkan and Sam Naparstek, the Super Smart Fridge is a compact and stylish refrigerator that looks more like a piece of furniture than a kitchen appliance.
Designer: Rocco
The Super Smart Fridge is a mix between a small fridge and a dedicated wine fridge. The good-looking fridge features a modern and contemporary design, which includes a smart exterior paired with a fluted glass door. The modern exterior is further accentuated by the compact and small size of the fridge which allows it to seamlessly merge with the rest of the home decor and furniture in the room. This makes the Super Smart Fridge an ideal fit for not only your kitchen but also your living room or bedroom.
Measuring 16 inches in depth, the compact fridge is designed to be subtly pushed against a wall, allowing the fridge to further blend in with the furniture and the space surrounding it. If you look at the Super Smart Fridge, it looks more like a bar cart than a kitchen appliance! It is built using a powder-coated steel frame which is available in a wide range of colors, so you can pick the color that perfectly suits your aesthetic and home. The fridge features walls that are 3x thicker than anything available on the market today and boasts the same compressor as the Sub-Zero.
The Super Smart Fridge functions efficiently and smoothly in any living space, without causing any kind of excessive noise. It is covered by a 10-year warranty and has a unique technological feature that enables you to connect the fridge to your phone, via an internal camera system called Sight System. This allows users to glance into their fridge to see if anything needs to be restocked or purchased – pretty cool, eh?!
The post The Super Smart Fridge Is The Compact & Stylish Furniture-Like Kitchen Appliance For Your Living Room first appeared on Yanko Design.
I found “Loki” to be a must-watch show for the production design. Largely set within a bureaucratic complex known as the TVA, the sets are mostly practical and contain an amazing mish-mash of everything you’d see in a History of 20th Century Design class. As the characters move from space to space, you think of Brutalism, then Breuer, then Brasilia, then the Barbican; you think of Olivetti and Art Deco; you think of Soviet-era control rooms, New Deal architecture and American Big Oil headquarters; a DMV as designed by the Bauhaus, an automat Eero Saarinen might have designed for the TWA terminal.
A number of the spaces feel, for lack of a better term, cheerfully oppressive. It’s the strange dichotomy you achieve by brightly lighting a gloomy space, then adding dashes of color to intentionally confuse the mood.
Then there are the objects, as seen on desks and counters, hanging from ceilings, mounted in walls or worn by characters. Everything is wonderfully analog, ranging from steampunk-mechanical to maybe 1985.
My favorite space on the show is the Repair Department, which must have been incredibly fun to design and populate. It’s just masses of senseless shelves, Akro-Mils storage drawers, cathode-ray tubes, early computers, pre-digital business machines, order-ticket spikes, a gigantic pneumatic tube system hanging from the ceiling.
I’ve learned that the Production Designer, Kasra Farahani, was actually an Industrial Design major at ArtCenter. After graduating in 2000, Farahani found work in Hollywood art departments, rising through the ranks to become a concept artist, art director and eventually production designer.
As for where the design inspiration came from, below is an excerpt from an interview with Farahani by The Art Newspaper:
AN: Were there specific examples of Modernist architecture and design that you were looking at when you started working on the series?
Kasra Farahani: So many, everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Breuer, to Mies van der Rohe to Paul Rudolph—you have a shot in the John Portman building—to Oscar Niemeyer. And then a lot of Eastern European, Soviet-influenced Modernism played a big part in it as well. I can honestly tell you that my first and foremost inspiration was Modernism. Part of that is because the TVA (Time Variance Authority) is a bureaucracy and I think, archetypically, so much of what we know a bureaucracy to be is that post-war, highly funded institutional look….
I was also looking a lot at Brutalism and the Modernism in former Soviet states, that are heavily influenced by Socialism and Soviet architecture, and where scale is such a big driving force of the design.
The TVA sets themselves, which were almost entirely full 360-degree sets, were very much designed as an intentional paradox between the stoic, large-scale Brutalism form language, and the surfacing and palette and whimsical patterning, which is very much taken from American mid-century Modern. Those two things create these spaces that feel at once super intimidating and then uncomfortably inviting and warm at the same time.
AN: That’s kind of the irony of a lot of Modernism, Brutalism especially, it had these utopian ideals of creating affordable social housing, but then a lot of the people found it really oppressive to live in.
Kasra Farahani: Yeah. Modernism has been that way the whole time—it was designed to be super cheap and utilitarian and routinely it ends up being the most expensive kind of architecture.
The rest of the interview is here.
Second in the series of Casio G-SHOCK collaborations curated by John Mayer for Hodinkee is this clever watch designed by Online Ceramics. Loved for their Dead & Co t-shirts and started in 2016 by Elijah Funk and Alix Ross, Online Ceramics has risen in popularity without compromising their style as epitomized in this piece. “Mushroom House Haunted Wagon” and “Sun Watch Moon Time” are among the messages embedded in the strap and then there’s the reminder that “Love Grows in the Sunshine” that appears when the backlight is illuminated. A limited edition made in Japan, this G-SHOCK includes all the standard functions and its resin case and strap promise durability that will transcend space and time.
Designer David Taylor has created Knuckle, a duo of lighting designs for Swedish furniture brand Hem that are characterised by their crimped corners made by forcibly bending square aluminium tubing.
The Knuckle collection – which has been shortlisted in Dezeen Awards 2023‘s furniture design category – consists of a table lamp and a linear chandelier.
Despite their differing sizes and shapes, the two lights are united by their distinctive composition that features crimped square metal pipes.
Bends were made in the metal tubing not by cutting and welding the pieces together, but by bending them with a powerful press.
“No two bends in the Knuckle series are alike,” the studio said. “Coercing metal into a form that it is specifically designed to resist is challenging at best.”
“The payoff is a streamlined process of forming aluminium tubing without the need to weld corners and angles.”
The aluminium used in the pieces contains 73 per cent recycled content, according to Taylor, whose goal is to eventually increase this to 100 per cent.
Conventionally, this type of tubing is used in the construction of shelving, storage, window frames, door frames and fencing.
“Square aluminium piping is a ubiquitous construction material,” Taylor told Dezeen.
“It is standardised in size, it has a number of alloys for given applications, it’s light, strong, cheap, available everywhere and infinitely recyclable with great green credentials,” he added.
“Aluminium pipe could possibly be the world’s most anonymous material but that doesn’t mean you can’t make outstanding work from it.”
Taylor applied a brushed effect to the metal’s surface to soften the sharp corners and flat planes, an effect that is furthered by their frosted, globe-shaped bulbs.
The table lamp has one orb-like bulb and the chandelier has eight, all of which were designed to emit a warm, soft glow that would contrast their industrial bodies.
“We wanted an object that was strong and confident enough to tell its own story regardless of its surroundings,” Taylor said.
“Knuckle is built to the highest quality specs using the best material available with an ambition to become a sought-after example of early 21st-century design for the antique buffs of the 22nd century.”
Other inventive lighting published on Dezeen include a lamp shade made from mushroom mycelium by Myceen and a solar-powered lamp by Sunne that converts sunlight into mood lighting.
The post David Taylor forms “the world’s most anonymous material” into aluminium lighting appeared first on Dezeen.
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