Hasta La Ideas

From left to right, plates designed by Lee Broom and Ben de Lisi. (Courtesy Livingetc)

Despite the best efforts of the Franklin Mint, Americans have never had much of a craving for commemorative plates. We prefer to memorialize iconic events as nature intended, with silk-screened t-shirts. Meanwhile, across the pond, souvenir sellers are stocking up on plates to celebrate the royal wedding, and Livingetc decided to get in on the action. The British shelter magazine has partnered with nine designers—including Jonathan Adler, Lee Broom, Ben de Lisi, Donna Wilson, and Thomas Paul—to create a series of plates for the imminent nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The contemporary takes on royal memorabilia will be auctioned to benefit Shelter, a housing and homelessness charity.

“The UK is steeped in history, but also has very strong street culture,” says Broom, who looked to meld the two influences in his Banksy homage, while de Lisi nodded at the tabloid sensation of it all with “Royal Headline,” a ransom note on porcelain. Adler was more ambivalent: was this a job for quirky subversion or mod celebration? “At first I replaced the ‘A’ in Kate with an anarchy symbol,” says the designer. “But then I realized I am not feeling punk rock about this, I’m just happy.” Adler’s plate is encircled by 20 blue corgis (the queen’s favorite breed). All nine plates will be be available to view here starting Thursday, and e-mail bidding will be open through April 29.

The plate designed by Jonathan Adler and a matched set from Donna Wilson.

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Where can you attend a conference keynoted by architect Rem Koolhaas, sample locally brewed kombucha under a colorful canopy, take a flashlight tour of metal plates engraved by Italian masters, see Chinatown by bike, check out a new mural by Mary Heilmann, and leave with a rooftop garden ready for planting? The Festival of Ideas for the New City, a collaborative initiative announced today by the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the hundreds of downtown New York organizations that have signed on to participate.

“Three years ago, when we moved to the Bowery, we witnessed a dramatic transformation of this neighborhood,” said New Museum director Lisa Phillips at a press briefing held this morning at the institution’s SANAA-designed home (which somehow manages to look even cooler beneath a steady drizzle). Conversations between Museum staffers and neighboring organizations including the Architectural League, the Cooper Union, the Drawing Center, and Storefront for Art and Architecture soon developed into the two-year planning process for a festival that would, according to Phillips, “harness the power of the creative community to reimagine the city.”

Artists, writers, architects, engineers, designers, urban farmers, and the public are invited to take part in the free festival, which will run from May 4 through May 8 in locations around downtown Manhattan. Things kick off with a three-day slate of symposia, lectures, and workshops exploring “big ideas that change the course of a city.” In addition to Koolhaas, the organizers have secured computer scientist Jaron Lanier and Antanas Mockus, a former mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, to give keynote addresses. Other panelists include architect Elizabeth Diller, Urban Genome Project founder Pedro Reyes, and Pennsylvania politician John Fetterman, who was recently dubbed “Mayor of Rust” by The New York Times Magazine. “Interestingly enough, he’ll be driving here, which I think is kind of great,” said New Museum curator Richard Flood at today’s press briefing.
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Now existing comfortably in their new Stamford, Connecticut headquarters, Design Within Reach is continuing their push toward renewal after a rocky couple of years. And where does one go to feel alive again? France, of course. The company has announced that it has signed an agreement with the French furniture company, Tolix, for the exclusive rights to not only sell their products, but “distribution rights on the sale of Tolix to hospitality, corporate, educational, health care, and institutional design customers.” A nice get, considering how many designers and firms had been upset with DWR during those last few years before the company underwent a massive turnaround and began apologizing to people like Alan Heller and others. Here’s a bit about the new agreement from DWR’s CEO, John Edelman:

“We are extremely proud to partner with French brand Tolix. Its widely recognizable chairs and stools have been furnishing French homes and businesses for more than 70 years, and its iconic A Chair is widely considered to be the cafe chair in France. As the exclusive provider of Tolix furniture for contract sales in North America, we look forward to expanding its presence.”

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If we’ve learned anything from watching Philippe Starck over the years (other than how wonderful it is to be an insane Frenchman), it’s that sometimes it’s okay to take a break from all the altruistic, design-for-the-betterment-of-humanity-and-the-world stuff and just build a gigantic, multi-million dollar yacht. Such is the case this week with Yves Behar, though not with an absurdly big boat, but an absurdly expensive phone. Taking time off from his swoon-worthy project of late, like electric car chargers, free glasses for the impoverished, and even more earth-friendly underwear, Behar has teamed with the newly-formed Copenhagen-based company, Æsir, to develop a cell phone, aptly named +YvesBehar. While the phone looks roughly the same size as Apple’s iPhone 4, it’s missing all the bells and whistles when it comes to apps and, well, operating system bells and whistles. It is, however, meticulously designed as a physical object, its keypad a beveled beauty. The kicker is that the stainless steel version will set you back around $10,000. If that isn’t enough for you, there’s also the one that comes in gold. For that you’ll only need just shy of $60,000. Here’s a bit from Behar with an introduction to the phone:

With the Æsir phone, I wanted to show an alternative to the sea of smartphones and their deluge of features. In an age when the industry seems to think that phones aren’t for speaking anymore, I wanted to focus on the idea of voice, clarity and simplicity.

The central tenet behind the +YvesBehar is to literally craft the visual details, craft the functional tactility, and craft the user interface. This level of resolution for every touch point was achieved using a European-centric approach to manufacturing, assembly and design, partnering with the best makers in Switzerland, France and the Netherlands. The +YvesBehar champions the idea of craftsmanship in an age that’s obsessed with more and making last year’s products obsolete. Instead we propose better and long-lasting as our starting criteria.

Someone out there buy one and take a photo of it with your Leica M9, okay?

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As everyone gears up to either attend or hear all about the upcoming Salone Internazionale del Mobile design fair in Milan, one specific planned exhibition has been making the rounds this week. DuPont has partnered with Disney to bring to life “Tron Designs Corian,” which is exactly as it sounds. Though we suppose if you don’t know what Corian is, that part wouldn’t make sense. Here’s DuPont’s website all about the colored solid surfaces. Strangely though, for this odd pairing between the recent reboot movie and mold-able surfaces, there really isn’t much color involved, as you can see in this series of renderings the company has put up on Flickr. Though we suppose maybe the “mold-able” part is what they’re wanting to show off in this case. It’s all a bit odd, and we don’t think we’d want to live in any of the spaces (we’d be too afraid of getting it dirty), but we’d love to see it, if just outside of computer renderings of what they’re hoping it’ll look like come April when the fair kicks off. For further reading, we recommend checking out Designboom, who has lots of great details about the various designers who were hired worked on it.

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