On a misty LA morning, the act of sipping a warm cup coffee out of a Ben Medansky mug at Go Get Em…
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Après le projet Swimming Pools, le photographe français Franck Bohbot basé à New York, revient avec sa série « Cinéma » à travers toute la Californie. Les moulures, les fresques, les motifs et les plafonds sont impressionnants. Des effets symétriques forts dans des cinémas vides et calmes à découvrir.
The Crest Westwood II in Los Angeles.
Brava Theatre in San Francisco.
Alameda Theatre I in California.
Alameda Theatre, Lobby.
Orinda Theatre II in California.
Orinda Theatre I.
Orinda Theatre Lobby.
Orinda Theatre, Untitled.
The Crest Westwood Theatre I in Los Angeles.
The Grand Lake Theatre I in Oakland, California.
The Grand Lake Theatre II in Oakland.
The Castro Theatre in San Francisco.
Egyptian Theatre in American Cinematheque in Los Angeles.
The Four Star Theatre II in San Francisco.
The Four Star Theatre I in San Francisco.
The Fox Theatre I in Oakland.
The Paramount in Lobby II in Oakland.
The Paramount Theatre I in Oakland.
The Paramount Theatre II in Oakland.
The Paramount Theatre Lobby I in Oakland.
The Paramount Theatre, Living Room.
The Green Room in Oakland.
Le Studio O+A à San Francisco, a fait le design des bureaux de la start-up « Evernote », située à Redwood City en Californie. La décoration est colorée et boisée avec le slogan inscrit sur un tableau noir à l’entrée et le logo en bois : un éléphant. Plus de photos du lieu et des bureaux dans le suite de l’article.
The Ace Hotel chain has opened its newest outpost inside a 1920s tower in downtown Los Angeles, complete with a 1600-seat theatre.
Ace Hotel‘s in-house design team worked with local firm Commune Design to restore and renovate the building formerly used by film studio United Artists, located in LA’s Broadway Theatre District.
“While the theatre’s original design was a lush interpretation of the Spanish Gothic style, the tower’s facade hid a minimalist poured concrete structure,” said Atelier Ace. “Therein lies the basis for the concept at Ace Hotel’s newest home – the marriage between… 1920s Hollywood glamour and modern minimalism.”
As a contrast to the tower’s Gothic exterior, the guest rooms are kept minimal and maintain their original poured concrete ceilings.
Commune Design referenced twentieth-century architect Rudolf Schindler’s West Hollywood residence when designing the decor.
The furniture in the rooms is made of dark grey-tinted MDF, while splashes of colour are provided by the upholstery and artwork. Bathrooms fitted with brass fixtures are separated from sleeping and living spaces by steel and glass windows.
Public spaces in the tower include a coffee bar, a restaurant and a mezzanine lounge, which have also been stripped back to reveal the original concrete surfaces.
The Spanish Gothic-style theatre has had intricate wall and ceiling mouldings restored and provides 72 square metres of event space. A range of suites and a private screening room are also available to hire out for meetings or parties.
Last year Ace Hotel added a venue in Shoreditch by Universal Design Studio to its list of locations.
Each Ace Hotel is located in an emerging neighbourhood and is designed to reflect its character. The concept by the company’s founder Alex Calderwood centres around fitting out old buildings using a modest budget and utilising industrial salvage. Calderwood sadly passed away in November last year and this hotel is the first to open since his death.
Photography is by Spencer Lowell.
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in downtown Los Angeles appeared first on Dezeen.
Employees meet in octagonal timber gazebos at the San Francisco headquarters of technology company Cisco by local interior designers Studio O+A (+ slideshow).
Studio O+A created the interior for Cisco‘s primary San Francisco workplace, after the company acquired WiFi firm Meraki in November 2012 and needed more space.
Located in the city’s Mission Bay neighbourhood and overlooking the waterfront, the 110,000-square-foot office is split over two floors. It was designed to maximise daylight and provide communal areas based on feedback the designers received from staff.
“O+A surveyed Meraki’s employees to find out what they liked about their old, much smaller headquarters,” said the designers. “A consensus emerged for natural light, plenty of collaboration space and preservation of the company’s tightly-knit culture.”
Wood-frame pavilions that are partially enclosed with triangular panels provide intimate meeting spots and break up the large floor plate.
Timber-clad walls feature padded niches in which individuals can recline with their laptops.
Seating areas are sunk beneath floor-to-ceiling windows to prevent them blocking the light into the deep open-plan areas.
Giant whiteboards and blackboards give the employees opportunities to write and sketch ideas over the walls, while notes and memos can be pinned to cork panels.
Levels are connected by a wide open staircase, which has wooden stadium seating integrated at its base.
The mix of flooring types includes carpet, wood and astroturf, and a varied palette of colours is used for walls and furniture.
Green electricity cables run up the white corridor walls and across the exposed concrete ceilings to power the overhead lights.
The hallways are wide enough for workers to cycle or skateboard between zones.
A large roof terrace provides views across San Francisco bay towards the baseball stadium, the Bay Bridge and downtown.
Studio O+A has designed offices for quite a few technology companies around California. The studio completed both Facebook and AOL‘s headquarters in Palo Alto, as well as the Silicon Valley HQ for Evernote.
Photographes are by Jasper Sanidad.
The text sent to us by Studio O+A follows:
The panoramic view of San Francisco’s waterfront visible from Cisco’s new offices in some ways sets the theme for O+A’s design. From almost any angle the visual impact is of light, spaciousness, bright colour, long sight lines.
Meraki, which was recently acquired by Cisco Systems, makes wireless routers—and takes pride in the elegance of their design.
O+A sought to build the space the way Meraki builds its products – with an emphasis on simplicity and seamless ease of use. But it was also mindful of the importance to the company’s identity of the Cisco-Meraki merger.
Located in the rapidly changing Mission Bay neighbourhood, Cisco’s 110,000-square-foot suite of offices now becomes the company’s principal San Francisco location.
At the outset O+A surveyed Meraki’s employees to find outwhat they liked about their old, much smaller headquarters. A consensus emerged for natural light, plenty of collaboration space and preservation of the company’s tightly-knit culture.
The size of the new space and the prominence of its floor-to-ceiling windows made collaboration and natural light relatively easy bills to fill.
O+A’s design offers a variety of meeting spaces formal and informal, indoor and outdoor, many of them bathed in the crystalline light of San Francisco Bay.
The scale and the light support both a rich palette of colours and design elements tailored to the broad canvas: a wide staircase with integrated stadium seating at its base, a meeting room showered from above with hanging tillandsia plants, an outdoor deck with views of the baseball park and Bay Bridge.
Maintaining Meraki’s cozy ambience in the hangar-sized complex proved more challenging. O+A’s solution was to create a medley of small gathering spaces within the large footprint.
Sunken seating brings intimacy to horizontal common areas while preserving broad sight lines. Yurts, cabanas and phone rooms offer varying levels of enclosure. And throughout the office informal lounge spaces allow passing colleagues to sit down and talk.
Despite the richness of the finishes and the wide array of typologies deployed, this is not a project that feels overly “designed”. One of O+A’s goals was to give Cisco a canvas on which to paint their own pictures.
In lieu of pervasive branding graphics, O+A provided ubiquitous chalkboards, whiteboards and corkboards so that Cisco’s employees could sketch, write and pin-up graphics meaningful to them.
As might be expected of the company’s strongly do-it-yourself culture, mobility and adaptability were big factors in the selection of furniture and workstations. These are people who like to move things around.
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wooden meeting pavilions appeared first on Dezeen.
News: scientists at the Google[x] research facility in California are working on contact lenses containing tiny electronics that could constantly monitor glucose levels in the tears of people with diabetes.
“We’re now testing a smart contact lens that’s built to measure glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturised glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material,” said Google in a post published on its official blog.
The contact lenses would be able to generate a reading every second, making it possible to instantly identify potentially dangerous changes in the patient’s blood sugar levels.
“We’re also investigating the potential for this to serve as an early warning for the wearer, so we’re exploring integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain thresholds,” the company explained.
As well as minuscule chips and sensors, the lenses could also incorporate an antenna thinner than a human hair that would communicate with apps so patients or doctors could view the measurements on a smartphone, tablet or computer.
Diabetes patients are currently required to test their blood sugar levels at regular intervals throughout the day by pricking their finger to draw a tiny amount of blood that can be analysed. The process is painful and time-consuming and can discourage people with diabetes from checking their blood glucose as frequently as they should.
“The one thing I’m excited about is that this is a device that people wear daily – the contact lens,” project co-founder Brian Otis told the BBC. “For us to be able to take that platform that exists currently, that people wear, and add intelligence and functionality to it, is really exciting.”
Google stressed that the technology is at a fledgling stage in its development but added that it will be seeking out potential partners who could help it refine the hardware and software required to turn the concept into reality.
“It’s still early days for this technology, but we’ve completed multiple clinical research studies which are helping to refine our prototype,” Google claimed. “We hope this could someday lead to a new way for people with diabetes to manage their disease.”
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diabetics monitor blood sugar levels appeared first on Dezeen.
In 1984, then-garage-based brand Oakley introduced the Eyeshade, an innovative sunglass design for professional cyclists derived from the O-frame snow goggle. A few years later, the Razer Blade was introduced, followed by the Frogskin, setting the…
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According to the American Apparel & Footwear Association report released last week, 97.5% of apparel sold in the United States is made internationally. For the past two years, this number has been in decline (albeit in…
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Some 60 years ago the Golden State saw a golden era for surfing and climbing. Offering a spot-on retrospective look at the period of innovation spanning from 1948 to late 1958, newly published “California Surfing and…
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American artist Phillip K Smith III has added mirrors to the walls of a desert shack in California to create the illusion that you can see right through the building (+ movie).
Entitled Lucid Stead, the installation was created by Phillip K Smith III on a 70-year-old wooden residence within the California High Desert.
Mirrored panels alternate with weather-beaten timber siding panels to create horizontal stripes around the outer walls, allowing narrow sections of the building to seemingly disappear into the vast desert landscape.
“Lucid Stead is about tapping into the quiet and the pace of change of the desert,” said Smith. “When you slow down and align yourself with the desert, the project begins to unfold before you. It reveals that it is about light and shadow, reflected light, projected light, and change.”
The door and windows of the building are also infilled with mirrors, but after dark they transform into brightly coloured rectangles that subtly change hue, thanks to a system of LED lighting and an Arduino computer system.
“The colour of the door and window openings are set at a pace of change where one might question whether they are actually changing colours,” said Smith.
“One might see blue, red, and yellow… and continue to see those colours. But looking down and walking ten feet to a new location reveals that the windows are now orange, purple and green,” he added.
White light is projected through the walls of the cabin at night, revealing the diagonal cross bracing that forms the building’s interior framework.
Read on for a project description from the artist:
Artist Phillip K Smith, III creates Lucid Stead light installation in Joshua Tree, CA
After the long, dusty, bumpy, anxious trip out into the far edges of Joshua Tree, you open your car door and for the first time experience the quiet of the desert. It’s at that point that you realise you are in a place that is highly different than where you just came from.
Lucid Stead is about tapping into the quiet and the pace of change of the desert. When you slow down and align yourself with the desert, the project begins to unfold before you. It reveals that it is about light and shadow, reflected light, projected light, and change.
In much of my work, I like to interact with the movement of the sun so that the artwork is in a constant state of change from sunrise to 9am to noon to 3am to 6pm and into the evening.
With Lucid Stead, the movement of the sun reflects banded reflections of light across the desert landscape, while various cracks and openings reveal themselves within the structure. Even the shifting shadow of the entire structure on the desert floor is as present as the massing of the shack itself, within the raw canvas of the desert.
The desert itself is as used as reflected light…as actual material within this project. It is a medium that is being placed onto the skin of the 70-year old homesteader shack.
The reflections, contained within their crisp, geometric bands and rectangles contrasts with the splintering bone-dry wood siding.
This contrast is a commonality in my work, where I often merge highly precise, geometric, zero tolerance forms with material or experience that is highly organic or in a state of change…something that you cannot hold on to… that slips between your fingers.
Projected light emerges at dusk and moves into the evening. The four window openings and the doorway of Lucid Stead all become crisp rectangular fields of colour, floating in the desert night.
White light, projected from the inside of the shack outward, highlights the cracks between the mirrored siding and the wood siding, wrapping the shack in lines of light. This white light reveals, through silhouette, the structure of the shack itself as the 2×4’s and diagonal bracing become present on the skin of the shack.
The colour of the door and window openings are set at a pace of change where one might question whether they are actually changing colours. One might see blue, red, and yellow… and continue to see those colours. But looking down and walking ten feet to a new location reveals that the windows are now orange, purple and green.
This questioning of and awareness of change, ultimately, is about the alignment of this project with the pace of change occurring within the desert. Through the process of slowing down and opening yourself to the quiet, only then can you really see and hear in ways that you normally could not.
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makes a desert cabin appear transparent appeared first on Dezeen.
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