Hasta La Ideas

Hot off the heels of the insanely fast redesign competition for the President’s Park South and the opening of the forever controversial Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the move to spruce up Washington DC’s most visited areas continue at a healthy clip. Just before the weekend, the Trust for the National Mall launched the National Mall Design Competition. Writing that the Mall “has been loved to death” and is struggling to keep up appearances since its last major preservation effort nearly 40 years ago, the competition has put a call out for redesign plans for three sites in particular: Union Square, the Washington Monument grounds at Sylvan Theater and Constitution Gardens. Unlike the aforementioned President’s Park South competition, which seemed as though it was started and finished in around an hour and a half, the Mall project will be taking its time (pdf), blocked out in a series of stages, with potentially eight teams picked between now and December, renderings out in April of next year, and winners named in May of 2012. The budget for the restoration is currently estimated at $700 million, with half coming from donations and the other from matching federal funds. Former First Lady Laura Bush, now no stranger to landscape-centric capital campaigns after overseeing her husband’s presidential library in Texas, has signed on as the Honorary Chair to help raise the money. Here’s a list of the problems that propelled the Trust into action:

The National Mall has been loved to death.

With more than 25 million annual visitors and 3,000 annual permitted events, the National Mall is the most visited park in the NPS system.

Pierre L’Enfant, who designed the National Mall in 1791, could not have anticipated this magnitude of use. The National Mall is not equipped to withstand this level of use or engage so many visitors.

The National Mall now requires more than $400 million for critical deferred maintenance and an estimated $300 million for restoration and improvement projects.

The last time the National Mall received adequate resources was for the Bicentennial celebration in 1976. These decades of neglect have left the National Mall in need of repair.

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Dramatic innovations from students around the world help shape the future of supercar design

Ferrari invited us to their headquarters in Maranello, Italy to see the work of the seven finalists in their year-long World Design Contest.

The contest tasked the students with devising a concept car design with the brief to reduce fuel consumption and the car’s overall weight in order to increase driving pleasure. The teams used Autodesk’s Alias industrial design software, completing concepts first in renderings before generating 3D models. Each team displayed three different designs.

Beating out 299 schools and taking home first place was the Transportation Design team at Seoul’s Hongik University, who developed a “hyper efficient” two seat Ferrari. Dubbed Eternità, the carbon-fiber super barchetta features a layered carbon powertrain, physical flywheel energy storage system, superconductive motor and a hydrogen generator.

Inspired by wind, second place winner (from Torino’s Istituto Europeo di Design school) Samir Sadikhov’s Xezri concept positioned the wing of the car horizontally on the roof, which raises to cool the engine down when the car exceeds 200km/h. (pictured above) The third place winners from the Royal College of Art Vehicle Design Department created a racing car designed for the frozen riviera, called Cavallo Bianco. The turbo-charged four-cylinder engine runs on bio-ethanol to generate electrical power, which gives it “maximum grip in icy conditions.”

An impressive array of student work and the potential future of Ferrari design, see more images from the World Design Contest in our gallery.

All images by Evan Orensten

David Byrne is among our favorite design-minded, art-loving, musical multitaskers, and UnBeige HQ is home to the bulk of his discography (have you discovered the myriad joys of Uh-Oh, his 1992 solo album, for example?). So we’re particularly pleased to relay the glad tidings that our friends at New York cultural center Exit Art are preparing to raffle a bicycle bedazzled by Byrne. Underneath all those sparkles is a Biomega Copenhagen Bike, the first internationally available shaft-driven bicycle. The integrated transmission makes it durable and easy to maintain, leaving the rider free to focus on more important things, such as keeping the frame all a-shimmer and finding new, subtle ways to tell the world that this bike was encrusted with tiny crystals by David Byrne. Ready to win this thing? Simply point your browser here and purchase a raffle ticket, available through Thursday at noon for $20 each or $100 for six. In addition to the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with knowing you’re supporting Exit Art’s swell programming (Autotopia, for example), a ticket will get you an invitation to the party at which the raffle drawing will take place, but as Richard Nixon once said, “You do not have to be present to win.”

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We told you the National Capital Planning Commission was quick, and not that we needed it, but now we have the proof to back that up. Just two short weeks ago, the NCPC announced its finalists to redesign the President’s Park South, the open area directly south of the White House. The competition aimed to make the area, now a bit bland, more warm and inviting, even if it did include “beautify[ing] the security components,” which is short for “where the heavily armed guards stationed there hang out.” Unlike many design competitions where the wait between shortlist and winner can take eons, just a few short days later and the NCPC has announced that New York-based Rogers Marvel Architects has landed the commission (pdf). You can see their submission on this page and here’s a description from the announcement of Marvel’s plans for the space:

Rogers Marvel’s design defines the edge of the Ellipse by adding a seating wall with integrated pedestrian lighting, while subtly raising the grade of the Ellipse. This establishes a security feature, reinforces the Ellipse as an event space, and minimizes the visual appearance of adjacent parking. This bold, elegant move allows for a larger, unobstructed interior public area. The design culminates in a new E Street terrace that joins the enhanced space of the Ellipse with the White House South Lawn. The terrace provides another prominent space for public gathering. Should threat conditions change in the future, this design could also accommodate re-opening E Street, NW without requiring significant changes.

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Earlier this year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art issued a call for photos that highlighted a detail of a single work of art from its permanent collection, setting off an epidemic of close-looking (who knew Edouard Vuillard‘s canvases were so mesmerizing in extreme zoom?). Having yielded hundreds of submissions—and a gorgeous Tumblr—the “Get Closer” contest has concluded with the announcement this week of five winning entries, including this intriguing close-up taken by Ruth Rogers. We like the elementary school science bookishness of it, teasing the viewer as to its appropriately scaled identity. Is it a colonial textile? The braid of one of Ghirlandaio‘s girls? A intricate rendering of wheat? Nope, it’s the tightly wrapped torso of the Mask of Osiris mummy (305–30 B.C.), acquired by the Met in 1944 from one Mrs. Goddard DuBois. “I can sense the artisan’s hand in this work,” wrote Rogers in her entry. “Look how perfect this wrapping is, thousands of years later. The time, the effort, still projects through time and space.”

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