Hasta La Ideas

Competition: we’ve teamed up with the organisers of the eVolo Skyscraper Competition to give away five copies of their book, which collates 300 of the best entries from the past six years.

The projects are arranged into six categories: Technological Advances, Ecological Urbanism, New Frontiers, Social Solutions, Morphotectonic Aesthetics, and Urban Theories and Strategies.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “eVolo Skyscrapers” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers.

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Competition closes 31 January 2012. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions.

Here are some more details from eVolo:

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS BOOK

Established in 2006, the eVolo Skyscraper Competition is one of the world’s most prestigious awards for high-rise architecture.

The contest recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the implementation of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations.

Studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution are some of the multi-layered elements of the competition.

It is an investigation on the public and private space and the role of the individual and the collective in the creation of dynamic and adaptive vertical communities.

Over the last six years, an international panel of renowned architects, engineers, and city planners have reviewed more than 4,000 projects submitted from 168 countries around the world.

Participants include professional architects and designers, as well as students and artists.

This book is the compilation of 300 outstanding projects selected for their innovative concepts that challenge the way we understand architecture and their relationship with the natural and built environments.

The projects have been organized in six chapters that describe the current position and the future of vertical architecture and urbanism. The first chapter, Technological Advances, is an investigation on the use of digital tools and computing fabrication.

Ecological Urbanism explores sustainable systems, including new materials and clean energy generation processes to achieve zero-net-energy buildings.

Projects that analyze the reconfiguration of existing cities and the colonization of new environments, such as underwater cities and floating habitats, are part of New Frontiers.

The improvement of our way of living is the topic of the fourth chapter, Social Solutions, which is a collection of ideas that respond to social, cultural, and economic problems.

A more experimental approach to architectural design is exposed in Morphotectonic Aesthetics, with proposals that use fields of data and self-regulating systems to respond to internal and external stimuli -the results are fascinating explorations of function and form.

Finally, Urban Theories and Strategies is a group of projects that establish new methods to alleviate the major problems of the contemporary city, including the scarcity of natural resources and infrastructure, and the exponential increase of inhabitants.

The eVolo Skyscraper Competition is a forum for the discussion, debate, and development of avant-garde architectural design in the 21st century. eVolo is committed to stimulating the imagination of designers around the world – thinkers that envision the future of our cities and a new way of life.

Get your copy at www.evolo.us/shop

Title: EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS
Cover: Hardcover
Size: 9″ x 11.5″ x 2.5″
Pages: 1224
ISBN: 978-0-9816658-4-9
Limited edition: 500 copies
Price: $120 (Includes shipping to any place worldwide)
Purchase it exclusively at www.evolo.us/shop

A private collection of erotic photographs from the famed designer and architect

Everything we know of Carlo Mollino hints to a man of insatiable tastes. The Italian architect and designer indulged in a life of downhill skiing, stunt flying and race-car driving, augmenting his artistic pursuits with fiction and photography. The extent of his most personal obsession was discovered after his death in the form of some 1,300 Polaroid exposures of girlfriends, prostitutes and other women seduced on the grounds of his Turin residence. Carlo Mollino: Un Messaggio dalla Camera Oscura reveals the figure through images of his erotic portraiture.

The hugely talented son of a wealthy engineer, Mollino led a prodigious career before taking a seat as professor of architecture at the University of Turin. Throughout his life, he became known for his elegantly styled furniture as well as a number of large-scale architectural endeavors. He published a book on alpine ski technique as well as a novel called “Vita di Oberon,” which revealed his preoccupation with myth, allegory and classical influences. His endeavors were universal, an array of preoccupations that collide in his secret photographs.

Staging his women in fake hair and erotic costumes, Mollino’s reveals an aesthetic of contrast. Raging against an atmosphere of gilded interiors and lush fabrics is a primitive sexuality that approaches the statuesque. The faces are often expressionless, bodies lightly decorated in lace, gold chains and other opulent materials. Best known for the modernist-styled Teatro Regio of Turin, Mollino’s work is best classified as “streamlined surrealism,” blending embellishments with stark abstraction.

The book features a series of essays on Mollino’s life and work in addition to pictures of the man, his buildings and interiors. As an architect, he often looked to the female form for inspiration, using it to inform the lines on everything from luxury automobiles to lounge chairs. His work exhibits the strangulation he felt from the rationalist strictures of modernist forms, which fueled his interest in surrealism. “Mollino did not advocate purely functionalist formalism,” writes Gerald Matt in the foreword, “but a style that approached the organic and placed the human being at it’s center.” The erotic models reflect the fantasies and subconscious exploration that informed his designs.

“Carlo Mollino: Un Messaggio dalla Camera Oscura” drops 29 February 2012 and is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Massoud Hassani’s Mine Kafon is a wind-powered device for clearing land mines

The Design Museum has announced its longlist for the Designs of the Year 2012 exhibition and, as with previous years, the difficult task of showcasing a whole year in design reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of such a process…

The Comedy Carpet in Blackpool by artist Gordon Young and Why Not Associates

This year’s selection of work from architecture, digital, fashion, furniture, graphics, product and transport naturally includes a host of varied projects – from Barber Osgerby’s Olympic Torch and David Chipperfield’s Hepworth Wakefield museum, to the BBC’s homepage and the Comedy Carpet (above) by artist Gordon Young and Why Not Associates.

Perhaps the most bizarre design is Massoud Hassani’s Mine Kafon, a wind-powered land mine clearing device, constructed from a ball of sprung bamboo sticks which are attached to a plastic core. As the ball is deployed over terrain where landmines are known to have been hidden, it explodes any in its path and tracks its route via GPS.

United Visual Artists’ High Arctic installation at the National Maritime Museum in London

Designer Yves Béhar has work nominated for a fourth time (he won the inaugural competition in 2008 with the One Laptop Per Child initiative) and there are three electric cars, a defibrillator, an exhibition by the illustrator Noma Bar, plus copies of Bloomberg Businessweek, a promo sample of GF Smith papers and the album cover art for Join Us by They Might Be Giants among the selected work. (The full list of all the nominated projects is copied below.)

Anomaly and Unit 9’s One Thousand Cranes for Japan project

As Eliza pointed out in her look at last year’s show, exhibits from the furniture and transport sections usually come across particularly well, simply by virtue of how much space they command compared to, say, paperback books or websites.

Textile Field at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, fabric by Kvadrat. Photo © Studio Bouroullec & V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum

And in that lies the ongoing problem with the competitive aspect of the show: just how do you compare a dress with a car, or a website with a house? And is there any point? Individual categories produce their own ‘winners’, where like is compared with relative like, but the final showdown between disciplines still seems a little confusing.

Homeplus: Tesco Virtual Store, Seoul, South Korea

But as we’ve seen since 2008, the overall winners do tend to emerge from the social/useful camp, with the aforementioned One Laptop Per Child project, Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster, and Min-Kyu Choi’s Folding Plug all taking the top prize (OK, so last year’s Plumen lightbulb is a beautiful exception to the rule).

Life-Size Paper Monster Hearse by Paul Sahre, from the video for Join Us by They Might Be Giants

But regardless of the judged aspect to the show, which, after all, does stoke reinterest in the show itself, the Designs of the Year is a welcome attempt to capture the best of the year’s design work in one place. Exhibits are nominated for inclusion, thus there is a wealth of professional expertise on hand to highlight some of the most interesting projects within a specific field, and, on past visits, the displays within the Museum are also given a lot of thought.

The T.27 Electric Car by Gordon Murray Design

Last year’s exhibition, for example, imposed the themes of Home, Share, Play, City and Learn over all the work so that the projects were completely mixed up. For me, that’s a much more satisfying way of experiencing everything that the show’s notoriously wide remit brings in. For designers and non-designers surely that best shows how design is a fundamental part of the real world.

Designs of the Year opens at the Design Museum in London on February 8 and runs until July 15. More details at the DM site, here, and also at the dedicated blog, designsoftheyear.com.

Here are the nominations:

ARCHITECTURE

Butaro Hospital, Butaro, Rwanda
MASS Design Group

Folly for a Flyover, London, UK
Assemble CIC

Guangzhou Opera House, Guangzhou, China
Zaha Hadid Architects

Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK
David Chipperfield Architects

Home for Senior Citizens, Huise-Zingem, Belgium
Sergison Bates Architects LLP

Maggies Centre, Gartnavel, Glasgow, UK
OMA

National Park of Mali Buildings, Bamako, Mali
Diébédo Francis Kéré of Kéré Architecture

Moses Bridge, Fort de Roovere, Netherlands
RO&AD Architects

Olympic 2012 Velodrome, London, UK
Hopkins Architects

Spaceport America, New Mexico
Foster + Partners

The Iron Market, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
John McAslan + Partners

Youth Factory, Mérida, Spain
Selgascano, Gestaltskate and Jarex

2012 Olympic Velodrome
Hopkins Architects

Guangzhou Opera House, China
Zaha Hadid Architects

DIGITAL

BBC Homepage Version 4, London, UK
BBC

Beck’s Green Box project
Beck’s

Face Substitution, New York, USA
Arturo Castro and Kyle McDonald

Guardian iPad edition, London, UK
Guardian News and Media in consultation with Mark Porter

High Arctic, National Maritime Museum, London, UK
United Visual Artists

Homeplus Tesco Virtual Store, Seoul, South Korea
Homeplus Tesco

Letter to Jane, Portland, USA
Tim Moore

Microsoft Kinect and Kinect SDK
Microsoft Games Studios, Microsoft Research and Xbox, UK and USA

Musicity, London, UK
Concept by Nick Luscombe and Simon Jordan and designed by Jump Studios

The Stanley Parable, California, USA
Written and created by Davey Wreden

Suwappu, London, UK
Dentsu London, UK, in consultation with BERG

Homeplus Tesco Virtual Store, Seomyeon Subway Station,
South Korea

FASHION

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, USA
Andrew Bolton with the support of Harold Koda of The Costume Institute, New York, USA

The Duchess of Cambridge’s Wedding Dress, London, UK
Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen

Céline Autumn/Winter ’11, Paris, France
Phoebe Philo at Céline

Late Night Chameleon Café, London, UK
Store design: Gary Card, Creative director: John Skelton, Brand director: Dan Mitchell

Mary Katrantzou Autumn/Winter ‘11, London, UK
Mary Katrantzou

Melissa + Gaetano Pesce Boot and Flip Flip, New York, USA
Gaetano Pesce, Manufactured by Melissa, Brazil
Oratory Jacket, London, UK

Will Carleysmith, Head of Design at Brompton Bicycle Ltd
Suno Spring/Summer ‘11, New York, USA
Suno

Vivienne Westwood Ethical Fashion Africa Collection, Autumn/Winter ’11
Vivienne Westwood, London, UK

132.5, Tokyo, Japan
Miyake Design Studio

FURNITURE

Balsa Furniture, London, UK
Kihyun Kim

Chassis, Munich, Germany
Stefan Diez

The Crates, Beijing, China
Naihan Li & Co

Earthquake Proof Table, Jerusalem, Israel
Arthur Brutter and Ido Bruno

Harbour Chair, London, UK
André Klauser and Ed Carpenter

Hemp Chair, Berlin, Germany
Studio Aisslinger

Lightwood, London, UK
Jasper Morrison

Moon Rock Tables, London, UK
Bethan Laura Wood

Not So Expanded Polystyrene (NSEPS) , London, UK
Attua Aparicio & Oscar Wanless at SILO

Oak Inside, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Christien Meindertsma

Osso, Paris, France
Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec

Textile Field at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, fabric by Kvadrat

Tip Ton, London, UK
Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby

Waver, Munich, Germany
Konstantin Grcic

XXXX_Sofa, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Yuya Ushida

GRAPHICS

AA Files, London, UK
John Morgan Studio

Beauty is in the Street, London, UK
Four Corners Books, Cover designed by John Morgan
Book interior designed by Pierre Le Hors

Bloomberg Businessweek, New York, USA
Bloomberg Businessweek

The Comedy Carpet, Blackpool, UK
Gordon Young and Why Not Associates

Cover artwork and video for Join Us by They Might Be Giants, New York, USA
Paul Sahre

Cut it Out, London, UK
Noma Bar

Matthew Hilton identity and website, London, UK
Spin

Nokia Pure Font, London, UK
Dalton Maag

One Thousand Cranes for Japan
Concept by Anomaly and Unit 9, London, UK

Photo-Lettering, Yorklyn, USA
House Industries

Promotional sample book for GF Smith, London, UK
SEA Design

Stockmann packaging, Helskinki, Finland
Kokoro & Moi

Self Service
Editor-in-chief: Ezra Petronio

What Design Can Do!, Amsterdam, Netherlands
De Designpolitie

Your Browser Sent A Request That This Server Could Not Understand, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Koen Taselaar

PRODUCT

Ascent, London, UK
Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby

A-frame and Corbs
Ron Arad

Botanica, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Studio Formafantasma

Carbon Black Wheelchair
Andrew Slorance

Defibtech Lifeline VIEW^TM Automated External Defibrillator (AED), LLC, Guilford, USA
Defibtech

Heracleum, Schiedam, Netherlands
Studio Bertjan Pot

Hövding Invisible Cycle Helmet
Hövding

Jawbone JAMBOX, San Francisco, USA
Yves Béhar, Fuseproject

The Learning Thermostat, USA
Nest, Palo Alto

Mine Kafon, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Massoud Hassani

Olympic Torch 2012, London, UK
Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby

Orb-it
Black and Decker

Shade, London, UK
Simon Heijdens

Solar Sinter, London, UK
Markus Kayser Studio

Thixotrope, London, UK
Conny Freyer, Sebastien Noel and Eva Rucki of Troika

TMA-1 Headphones
KIBiSi

Totem, London, UK
Bethan Laura Wood in collaboration with Pietro Viero

White Collection, Finland
Ville Kokkonen

TRANSPORT

787 Dreamliner
Boeing

Autolib’ 3000, Paris, France
Bertrand Delanoë, Mayor of Paris, France

Bike Hanger – Bicycle Storage, New York, USA
Manifesto Architecture

Mia Electric Car
Mia Electric

Re-design for Emergency Ambulance, London, UK
Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and Vehicle Design Department,
Royal College of Art

T27 Electric Car, Surrey, UK
Gordon Murray Design

Taurus Electro G4
Pipistrel doo Ajdovscina

The extended deadline for the 2012 Creative Review Annual is Friday 13 January. If you’d like to enter your work into our showcase of the best in visual communications, you have until then

The Annual is our showcase of the best work produced in the preceding year. It’s a juried competition (judges details are here) in which all the selected work will appear in our special double May issue.

For full details, and to enter The Annual, please go here

Searle reports on Winston Churchill’s last Commons speech for Life. Image: Perpetua

Before I even knew what illustration was, I loved the work of Ronald Searle, who has died aged 91. To call him a ‘cartoonist’ somehow doesn’t do justice to one of our great satirists, artists and chroniclers of the best and very worst of life

Searle’s figures, whether crusty old majors, devious schoolboys or famous names from the stage or politics, had a fantastic rumpled, inky quality to them. All pointy shoes and sharp elbows.

Famously, Searle had been a Japanese prisoner of war during World War Two. In 1942 he was captured in Singapore and suffered the horrors of incarceration in the infamous Changi jail and forced labour on the Burma railway. Summoning the last of his strength at the end of each day, Searle sketched his fellow prisoners, hiding his drawings at great personal risk: “I desperately wanted to put down what was happening, because I thought if by any chance there was a record, even if I died, someone might find it and know what went on,” he told the Guardian in 2010. Searle saw himself as an ‘unofficial’ war artist but his drawings, now held by the Imperial War Museum (see here), are as powerful a portrayal of the horrors of conflict as any.

While a prisoner, Searle also worked on his St Trinian’s cartoons – the anarchic and mischievous schoolgirls who, after the war, would become wildly popular first in print, then as a series of films for which Searle created title sequences. For Searle, the success of St Trinian’s was double-edged: he came to loathe the cartoons and the films they spawned, fearing that they overshadowed everything else. For while in Britain he will always be linked with gymslips and hockey sticks, his work encompassed so much more.

Holiday cover, July 1959. Image: Perpetua

Portrait of Papa Doc Duvalier for Status magazine, New York, 1968. Image: Perpetua

Searle illustrated Punch’s theatre column during the 1950s. Image: Perpetua

After moving to France in the early 60s to escape his new-found fame, Searle worked extensively for American magazines, illustrating almost 40 covers for The New Yorker, as well as contributing cartoons for Life and a number of portraits of political figures for various titles. Also for Life and for Holiday, he produced some superb reportage work, including commissions to record Churchill’s last Commons speech, the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Israel and JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign. Searle also worked extensively in advertising, making full use of his gift for characterisation in campaigns including one long-running series of posters for Lemon Hart rum.

Image: Perpetua

Later in life, Searle produced acerbic cartoons for Le Monde as well as travel books, animation and film posters. Unfortunately, much of this work went unnoticed in the UK, St Trinian’s, as Searle suspected, overshadowing everything else.

This 2000 piece from The Guardian explains far better than I could the breadth, depth and appeal of Searle’s work. But on a personal level, when I think of Searle it will always be as the man who brought to life the self-styled ‘gorilla of 3B’, Nigel Molesworth. To a comprehensive schoolboy like me, large parts of Down With Skool!, How to be Topp, Whizz for Atomms and Back in the Jug Agane – the series of Molesworth books Searle produced with writer Geoffrey Willans in the 50s – were virtually incomprehensible. I’d never heard of ‘prep’, had no idea what a matron did and the idea of studying Latin was baffling. I had nothing in common with the world of St Custard’s, Molesworth’s boarding school, but I was enthralled and delighted by the characters that inhabited it. The teachers were psychopaths, the pupils a distinctly unhygienic mix of “oiks, wets and weeds” as Molesworth would say, and the whole place in danger of imminent collapse in great clouds of chalk dust and spiders. And I loved it.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, the word ‘cartoonist’ seems wholly inadequate to describe Searle – he preferred the term ‘graphic satirist’ which is more like it. If you know little of his work beyond naughty schoolgirls and scowling ‘young Elizabethans’ I’d recommend Russell Davies’s biography, the Imperial War Museum site, the fantastic archive of almost all Searle’s work on the Perpetua blog, his Illustrated Winespeak which pokes gentle fun at the arcane language of wine snobs and, doing the same for book collecting, Slightly Foxed but Still Desirable.

Plate featuring one of Searle’s wine cartoons ‘Fullish body but beginning to fade’. Available here

CR in Print

If you only read CR online, you’re missing out. The January issue of Creative Review is a music special with features on festivals, the future of the music video and much much more. Plus it comes with its very own soundtrack for you to listen to while reading the magazine.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK,you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.