The latest in a string of products designed by Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson for the (RED) charity auction is this one-off aluminium desk.
Australian designer Marc Newson and Apple‘s Jonathan Ive covered the surface of the thin desk with a pattern of 185 interlocking cells.
The blade-like legs and top were machined from solid pieces of aluminium by Californian company Neal Feay Studio. The unique piece is inscribed: “Designed by Jony Ive & Marc Newson for (RED) 2013 edition 01/01”.
The auction will take place at Sotheby’s auction house in New York on 23 November and the proceeds will go towards helping to fight malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS.
Mineral crystals grown on thin threads form the shape of a chair in this installation by Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka.
Tokujin Yoshioka created the Spider’s Thread sculpture of a chair by suspending just seven filaments within a frame that was sat in a pool of mineral solution.
The solution was drawn up the threads and gradually formed into crystals around them, fleshing out into the shape of a piece of furniture.
“Spider’s Thread applies the structure of natural crystals in an advanced way aiming to produce a form even closer to the natural form,” said Yoshioka.
The designer says this iteration references a traditional story by Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa. “The Buddha takes a thread of a spider in Heaven and lowers it down to Hell so that the criminal can climb up from Hell to Paradise,” explains Yoshioka. “In the story, the thread of a spider is a symbol of slight hope and fragility.”
The piece is on show as part of a solo exhibition called Tokujin Yoshioka_Crystallize at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo until 19 Janueary 2014.
There are three crystal chairs in the exhibition to show the different stages of growth.
Opinion: in his latest column, Kieran Long argues that product designers should learn from architects and tackle civic issues like surveillance and security rather than “hide in their studios making something lovely.”
When was the last time you met a designer whose work is about justice or love, or truth? Universal values, ones that bear on the meaning of our lives, seem to be beyond the creative register of most designers of objects and things. In product design, I’m struck by how small the concerns of its practitioners tend to be.
I began thinking about this while teaching at the Royal College of Art in the Design Products department in 2011/12 with the designer Sofia Lagerkvist from Front Design. Our students were great and we loved working there, but when we set a brief that asked our students to work in north-east London libraries after the riots, there was noticeable resistance. There was a sense of some (not all) students imagining that this was not what they came to the RCA to do, and that it was not what they wanted their careers to be.
The conflict was certainly my fault. I found it difficult to have this conversation with them, because I’d never encountered this line of thinking in many years of teaching in architecture schools. It seemed self evident to me that such a brief was valuable. Architects do actually spend time thinking about a higher meaning for their work beyond the commercial and outside the simple “I like/I don’t” like paradigm of individual taste.
For architects, their education (ideally) gives students a sense of certain (yet often very vague) responsibility to the city itself and therefore that the citizen is important.
Architects will almost always speak about their higher role if given the chance: about their responsibility to provide a setting for civic life, to make a place meaningful for people and so on. Our cities might not be better because of it, but the conversation is there.
I’m not saying architects are uniquely civic minded in their work, either. We can think of plenty of works of digital design (games, websites, even interfaces) that take as their themes issues of access, citizenship, or even life or death. Graphic design does, too, through political posters and publications and many practitioners’ interest in the graphic culture of the streets.
In product design, however, sometimes it feels that its most important practitioners just want to be left alone to whittle away in their studios making something lovely, periodically being wheeled out to tell the story of their whittling.
The obvious retort to this is probably that product design is indeed the field most in bed with fast-moving consumer capitalism. The Ron Arads and so on of this world give salesmen new, beautiful and desirable things to sell, and that machine is necessary. Also, the media around design – with its systems of awards and juries and the institutions (like mine) that honour the good and great – are not all that interested in the world of design beyond the decorative. Honourable exceptions include the work of people like Justin McGuirk in the Domus of recent years. In the main, the role models we promote are those engaged with consumer products.
I know many designers whose work articulates our everyday experience in ways that are meaningful, that help us to understand and enjoy our daily lives. It is enough for good design to be things we cherish because they are beautiful, well made, or a pleasure to use, but it seems to me that our daily lives are dominated by barely competent and sometimes downright sinister works of industrial design, and I do not understand why designers don’t spend more time chasing down these opportunities. I mean, I hate the yellow plastic pad that I have to slide my Oyster Card up against when I get on the tube in the morning, and the ugly yellow system of handles and railings on London buses. I hate the incompetent way that cathedrals integrate gift shops into their lobbies and the excessive bulk of the common-or-garden wheelie bin.
More important, though, is whether there are any Dezeen readers whose work involves designing bits of the Ring of Steel terrorist defences around the City of London, or truckproof bollards, crowd-management barriers, riot-police shields, the casings for CCTV cameras, or the plastic spikes that they stick on top of the CCTV cameras to stop birds shitting on them.
The whole infrastructure of security and surveillance that dominates our experience of the city today (to take just one example) has gone untouched by the field of product design in any meaningful way. These are works of design that take justice and trust as their topic, and they make it pretty clear how those in power think of us as citizens.
Architects are often thought of as terrible snobs, but loads of them spend their days thanklessly trying to redesign low-cost housing for grasping, couldn’t-care-less developers or vainly trying to improve the standard of big-shed retail. Perhaps product designers dislike getting their hands dirty.
If the best we can say of a designed object is that they people can either buy it or not buy it, then the piece is nothing. It is worse than nothing, it just exists to make the wheels of a corporation turn, to encourage consumption and so on. Let’s be honest about that. I know that we all depend on this system working, it pays most of our wages etc etc, but let’s not pretend it’s why we get out of bed in the morning. Design could be so much more important than that. I just wonder if designers have the passion and desire to go out and design the things that define our lives as citizens and human beings.
Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.
New Graphic Design: The 100 Best Contemporary Graphic Designers has been compiled as a guide to the latest work by upcoming and influential designers.
It encompasses visual communication designs for websites, apps, packaging, exhibitions and branding campaigns.
Images of recent projects are displayed next to text about the work written by their creators, with a short designer bio. Interviews with a selection of designers also feature.
The compendium is written by Charlotte and Peter Fiell with a foreword by writer and critic Steven Heller, and published by Goodman Fiell.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “New Graphic Design” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.
You need to subscribe to our newsletter to have a chance of winning.Sign up here.
Competition closes 7 November 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
Sou Fujimoto told the Architects’ Journal (£) that the campaign was set up because Zaha Hadid‘s building will be “too big” in relation to its surroundings, which include Kenzo Tange’s iconic 1964 Olympic stadium.
“I hope that this protest is successful in shrinking the design to fit the context,” he told the magazine. “I’m not fighting Zaha. The competition for the stadium was very rigorous and we can’t overturn everything. But the design could be better.”
The symposium, entitled Re-thinking the New National Olympic Stadium in the historical context of Gaien, takes place tomorrow and will be streamed live via the Ustream website. Other architects involved include Hidenobu Jinnai, Taro Igarashi, Shinji Miyadai and Tetsuo Furuichi.
Zaha Hadid won a competition to design the stadium in November 2012, seeing off competition from 10 other finalists including Japanese architects SANAA, Toyo Ito and Azusa Sekkei. The judging panel included Tadao Ando, who commented: “The entry’s dynamic and futuristic design embodies the messages Japan would like to convey to the rest of the world.”
Stone, designed for Italian brand Nava, comes with three interchangeable leather straps, allowing the wearer to easily customise the look of the watch.
The distinctive, irregular shape of the dial is inspired by the smooth contours of weather-worn stones and pebbles and is complemented by a minimal face that is designed to be read at a glance.
The asymmetric dial and off-centre hands reference Guidone’s playful approach to time telling, a concept the designer first explored in the Ora Unica watch, which won the Aam O’Eva Creations international design prize in 2008.
Stone is available with a black or white face, and three straps: black, ash grey and taupe. Other features include a stainless steel case topped with a scratch-resistant mineral lens and Miyota 2025 movement. The dial and all three straps come in a presentation box. Buy Stone by Denis Guidone for £150.
News: Dezeen has been shortlisted for two more journalism awards to add to the three we’re already up for – and our editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs has been nominated for The Hospital Club 100 list of most creative people (vote here!).
Fairs has been nominated in the Art and Design section of this year’s The Hospital Club list of the 100 most influential people in London and you can vote for him here.
He’s also made the shortlist for Multi-Media Journalist at the International Building Press (IBP) awards, while Dezeen is in with a chance of scooping the Digital Service prize.
A textured wall of 22,000 wooden sticks has been installed in this Stuttgart boutique by Swiss architecture firm ROK (+ slideshow).
The minimal interior by Rippmann Oesterle Knauss (ROK) for menswear store MRQT features white walls and a concrete floor to contrast with the wall of wooden rods.
Extending in various directions and to different lengths, the beech wood sticks create the illusion of a single flowing form.
CNC-drilled holes define the direction of each stick.
A range of menswear is hung on metal rails against the backdrop of the textured wall, which references moving fabric. “The installation refers to the flowing forms and delicate texture of textiles and cloth,” said the architects.
A full-height mirror lit from behind hangs in the centre of the feature wall.
Display stands and shelving are all made from the same beech wood as the sticks.
Balconies covered in tropical plants and contoured surfaces based on rock formations surround this Singapore hotel by WOHA, which topped the hotels category at the Inside Festival awards last week.
Singapore studio WOHA designed the PARKROYAL on Pickering hotel as an extension of Hong Lim Park, a new green space located next to the site in the centre of the city’s business district.
By adding plant-covered balconies and terraces around the exterior, the architects were able to create 15,000 square metres of greenery – around double the area of the site – and give every guest a garden view from their room window.
These green spaces are complemented by the contoured surfaces that make up the building’s podium. Modelled on the topography of natural landscapes, these surfaces break through the glazed outer walls and continue through the reception spaces at ground level.
Other details such as hanging vines, pools of water and raw stone continue the natural theme, while mirrors line the walls and ceilings to reflect light through the space.
The top of the podium accommodates a terrace for guests, complete with infinity-edge pools and pavilions shaped like giant birdcages.
A total of 367 rooms are contained in the upper levels of the building. The architects were also responsible for the interiors of these spaces, but dropped the garden theme in favour of clean bright spaces with bespoke furniture and fittings.
Designed as a hotel and office in a garden, the project at Upper Pickering Street is a study of how we can increase the green replacement in a high-rise development in the city centre and multiply it in a manner that is architecturally striking, integrated and sustainable.
Located in central Singapore, the site is at a junction between the CBD and the colourful districts of Chinatown and Clark Quay, and faces Hong Lim Park. A contoured podium responds to the street scale, drawing inspiration from a combination of landscaped bonsai arrangements that are modelled, chiselled and spliced to mimic natural landscapes and mountain rock formations as well as that of the contoured padi fields of Asia. These contours are precast concrete elements of modular radii, allowing the complex, sculptural podium to be put together from a basic ‘kit of parts’.
On the ground the contours create dramatic outdoor plazas and gardens which flow seamlessly into the interiors. Greenery from the park is drawn up in the form of planted valleys, gullies and waterfalls. The landscaping also conceal openings to the above ground carparking while allowing in air and natural light. The top of the podium is a lush landscaped terrace housing the development’s recreational facilities, with infinity edge pools opening up unobstructed views of the city. Birdcage cabanas perched over the waters add interest and delight.
The crisp and streamlined tower blocks harmonise with surrounding high-rise office buildings. They are attenuated into an open-sided courtyard configuration, breaking down the ‘wall of buildings’ effect and maximising views and daylighting into the building. Blue and green glass create a patina that recall the waters of Singapore River adjacent. Lofty 4 storey sky gardens which bring lush greenery directly to the rooms and breaks down the scale of the building. Corridors, lobbies and common washrooms are designed as garden spaces with stepping stones, planting and water features which create an alluring resort ambiance with natural light and fresh air, instead of being 24-hour energy guzzling air conditioned spaces. Tall overhangs work together with leafy foliage to screen these spaces from the weather and direct sun.
A total of 15,000m2 of skygardens, reflecting pools, waterfalls, planter terraces and green walls were designed; this is double the site area or equivalent to the footprint of Hong Lim Park! A diverse variety of species ranging from shade trees, tall palms, flowering plants, leafy shrubs and overhanging creepers come together to create a lush tropical setting that is attractive not only to the people but also to insects and birds, extending the green areas from Hong Lim Park and encouraging bio-diversity in the city.
These landscapes are designed to be self-sustaining and rely minimally on precious resources. Rainwater collected from upper floors irrigate planters on the lower floors by gravity supplemented by non-potable recycled Newater, which will also be used for all water features. Photovoltaic cell arrays on the roof will power grow lamps and softscape lighting, making these Singapore’s and perhaps the world’s first Zero Energy Skygardens!
This project is awarded Singapore’s Green Mark Platinum, the nation’s highest environmental certification. The hotel officially opened in January 2013.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
