Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Wire: historians and campaigners are warning that the 358-year-old Taj Mahal near the city of Agra in northern India will collapse in two to five years if urgent action is not taken to maintain rotting wooden foundations – The Daily Mail

Dezeen Space: design graduate Clinton Sheldon brings a series of products made of components salvaged from the factory of British furniture company Ercol to our micro-exhibition Dezeen Platform at Dezeen Space today.

The pieces are made using redundant components that would otherwise be destined for Ercol’s factory furnace.

One piece is wrapped in a red electrical cable, leading to a light bulb.

Another piece is a rocking chair that utilises discarded pieces from the factory’s wooden chairs.

Other stories on Dezeen featuring discarded materials include a sledge made from a leftover Christmas Tree, a cabinet made from reclaimed floorboards and an animated pond made of 60 discarded computer monitors.

Each day, for 30 days, a different designer will use a one metre by one metre space to exhibit their work at Dezeen Space. See the full lineup for Dezeen Platform here and see all our stories about the work on show here.

There’s more about Dezeen Space here.

Dezeen Space
17 September – 16 October
Monday-Saturday 11am-7pm
Sunday 11am-5pm

54 Rivington Street,
London EC2A 3QN

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Today at Dezeen Platform: Roger Arquer	Today at Dezeen Platform: Manuel Netto	Today at Dezeen Platform: Fraser Ross

You are what you read. You read, therefore you are. The Frankfurt Book Fair is a meeting place for the
industry’s experts. Be they publishers..

Designers Not Tom have created an installation where coloured dye rises by capillary action out of paint tins and along tree branches wrapped in wool.

Dyed in The Wool is a collaboration between Not Tom and Loui Thomas for the Wool Modern exhibition at La Galleria on Pall Mall.

The movement of dye along each branch resembles the natural movement of water up trees.

The result is a gradient along each branch between the natural wool and the coloured dye.

Wrapping the 150 sticks and tree branches in wool took almost a month to complete.

The paint tins that the wool-wrapped branches sit in are arranged around the edges of the room. They are also installed in the gallery’s windows and can also be found in the windows of Pringle of Scotland’s shop on Sloane Street, London.

Other Dezeen stories involving wool include a system for mending holes in woollen fabric, knitted safety vases and wrapped furniture.

Following a successful exhibition from 7 to 28 September for Wool Modern at La Galleria the installation is touring the world for the next year. It is currently at Galleria KaufHof, Alexanderplatz, Berlin.

Harry Osborne from Not Tom gives some more information on the project here:

The show is part of Woolmark’s campaign for wool and coincides with Wool Week.

Not Tom was commisioned by Woolmark and show curator Charlotte Lurot to create an original piece for inclusion in the Wool Modern exhibition in La Galleria, Pall Mall.

Our response to the brief for a wool themed installation to surround a room was our piece “Dyed In The Wool”, created in collaboration with Loui Thomas.

The outside edges of the room are lined with assorted paint tins filled with various coloured dyes. Stood in each jar, and set at random angles are large sticks and sections of tree branches completely wrapped in natural wool top. If the wool is dampened, capillary action causes the coloured die to rise up the sticks, eventually forming a gradient from the natural colour of the wool to the bright colour of the dye.

The full effect of the installation is that of a strange woollen forest, with a subtle, colourful glow around the bottom of the room. We liked that the mummification in wool of the dead branches is juxtaposed by the capillary action re-creating the natural movement of water up a living branch. Meanwhile it acts as a demonstration of dyeing processes.

It was an arduous task to hand wrap the 150 sticks in wool, taking nearly a month to complete (and calling in lots of favours!) but we think the overall effect has been worth the effort.

The sticks have become something of a totem for the Campaign for Wool, with them also being installed in the gallery windows, the windows of Pringle of Scotland’s Sloane Street shop and included in the promotional video for the exhibition in association with Harrods.

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Ink Calendar by Oscar Diaz	Dejection-moulding by Manuel Jouvin	Avifauna by Maarten Kolk & Guus Kusters

If we’ve learned anything from the recent opening of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, it’s that it takes a long time and a lot of work to get a national monument up and standing in Washington DC (and even once it’s standing, all those labors and controversies don’t necessarily immediately dissipate). In a move this week to perhaps help smooth that rocky road, Frank Gehry has introduced a few changes to his Eisenhower Memorial, his first monument in the city. Having landed the commission two years ago, at which time we were told that his plans might not just change the way we think about memorials, but of Gehry’s talents as well, the architect has undergone a handful of skirmishes with the National Capital Planning Commission, having to revise his original plans several times in order to meet their exacting standards. Yesterday, Gehry met with the NCPC to introduce the idea of forging a sort of engraved tapestry onto the large pillars that make up the memorial. No word on what exactly the images will be yet, but as the Washington Post speculates, they are likely to include pieces from the former President’s life, from growing up in Kansas to commanding military forces in World War II. This being government, we’re certain the NCPC will need some time to think this new plan through (the next design review meeting is scheduled for “late 2011 or early 2012″). What’s more, on top of that, we’re assuming that the commission and the architect are still working through the revisions proposed earlier this year, which focused on trying to make the memorial block less of the view of the nearby Capitol.

Update: Looks like things didn’t go as well as Mr. Gehry might have hoped.

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