Reporting from the International Home + Housewares show in Chi-town, we recently showed you Alex Bottle’s new stainless steel bottle and Kor’s Vida and Delta models. All three are consumer products, things we can tote to the office or gym.
The next level up in portable hydration is the higher-capacity, wearable, durable and flexible bladders worn by hikers, long-distance runners and mountain bikers.
I’ve lived in four out of five of NYC’s boroughs, and even though two were as a child when I had no say in the matter, I always thought this a fairly rare achievement. But in terms of New York coverage, here’s a far better achievement (in progress): Australian illustrator James Gulliver Hancock, now Brooklyn-based, wants to singlehandedly draw “All the Buildings in New York.”
photos by Melissa Murphy
For this year’s Armory Show, the massive NYC-based art fair, Ligne Roset teamed up with the creative trio of Rich, Brilliant, Willing to create their VIP lounge. Rich, Brilliant, Willing are also the designers of the inaugural Core77 Awards Trophy!
The team paired high-end Ligne Roset furnishings with found construction grade materials for the temporary space, [resulting] in a relaxing, comfortable and delightfully surprising environment in a 5000 sq ft garage at Pier 92 and 94. Inspired by a forest canopy, Rich Brilliant Willing created multiple levels in the space, playing with light and shadow as it passes through the green and yellow snow fence. The low end, ready made materials provide a rich contrast to the luxurious leather and felt upholstery of the Ligne Roset Ottoman collection by designer Noe Duchaufour-Lawrance.
Here’s some seriously beautiful and ballsy furniture from Camiel Weijenberg and Talenia Phua Gajardo, the design duo known as MAKEMEI. With a collective background in architecture, interior design and furniture design, MAKEMEI does residential projects, interiors and custom furniture, with an emphasis on “pushing the structural boundaries of [a variety of] materials.”
We’ve all heard of Jay Shafer’s Tiny Houses, but it’s one thing to see the founder espousing his design and quite another to see a non-affiliated couple actually building the thing.
Last June, an otherwise anonymous guy and girl named Evan and Gabby became taken with the idea of tiny houses. Writes Evan,
I love ’50s propaganda films, everything from the amusing claims that run counter to our 2011 science, to the contrived lighting, to the soothing, friendly-yet-authoritative tone of the narrators. This 1950s factory seems like a very pleasant place to work, the operative word being “seems:”
This video is a clip from a 1953 documentary called “Greater Goal: Human Dividends from American Industry” (embedded in its entirety below), sponsored by the now-defunct American Textiles Information Service. It looks at America’s post-war textile industry and paints it as “a hotbed of enlightened industrial progress.”
Factory-as-fantasyland footage aside, the entire 20-minute documentary does give an interesting look at the state of the textiles industry 60 years ago, when a variety of fabrics that we now take for granted — velvet, satin, canvas duck — were still wondrous materials. It also glorifies a species now facing extinction: The American Factory Worker, “Master of Production.” I know it’s just a Monday and you’ve got work to do, but do bookmark this page and queue it up for when Friday starts to drag.
When you drop the blade all the way, your average 7 1/4″ circular saw will cut through two pieces of 3/4″ wood stock at a time; so when cutting repetitive shapes like shelves, any DIY’er worth their salt will double the pieces up to halve the amount of cuts they’ve gotta make.
This little trick is of course used in factory production on materials other than wood, as you’ll see in this fascinating Discovery Channel vid of how jeans are made. They take a huge roll of denim — 1,500 square feet, larger than most of our apartments — and after cutting it into squares, cut the patterns for 100 pairs of jeans at a time.
The variety of special production machines required to put a simple pair of jeans together is pretty astonishing. And check out the cool vacuum-type thingy that turns them right side out around 4:00.
I’d recently heard that high school kids don’t wear watches anymore. A gross generalization to be sure, but the gist of the argument was that everyone uses their cellphones as timepieces and watches are viewed by the younger generation as superfluous.
Baby boomers, on the other hand, never can seem to get over those Dick Tracy comics they read as a kid, where the titular detective used his timepiece as a talkie. So once again we have a hi-tech watch concept being advanced, this time by Hewlett-Packard and Fossil. The MetalWatch concept, presented by HP’s CTO Phil McKinney, below, is intended to be the “aggregation point” for a variety of technological tools we use: E-mail, social networking, printers, etc. Unfortunately the video seems aimed squarely at the Boomer generation, as it’s a lot of talk with none of the de rigueur images, renderings, or video that typically accompanies a product concept:
So what do you think, is this something we’ll see in the future, or is the watch starting to lose its relevance?
And by the way, if it is true that the younger generation sees watches as a lapsed technology, the name “Fossil” is not doing that company any favors.
What time is it?
Recently I discovered a blog written by an American woman in her 80s or 90s; she chronicles her life in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s and it’s fascinating. One thing that surprised me was how peripatetic Americans were in the 1940s; this country was apparently crisscrossed by a comprehensive rail network (now mostly dismantled, sadly) and Americans rode the hell out of it.
The future of rail will clearly be in China, which has an enormous landmass to cover, and they’ve already got the world’s fastest train in the Harmony Express: It makes the 1,069 kilometer Wuhan to Guangzhou run, which normally takes 11 hours, in just three hours.
Nearby Japan, which has been running bullet trains since 1964, is having an exciting train day tomorrow: Saturday will see the first trip taken by the Hayabusa (peregrine falcon), their next-generation bullet train.
It’s a bit slower than China’s — 180 m.p.h. top speed vs. 217 m.p.h. — but it’s still a big deal in train-crazy Japan, where tickets sold out in just 20 seconds, and one lucky scalper auctioned one of them off for nearly $5,000.
That’s a far cry from what Dee, the aforementioned lady blogger, probably paid for her train rides:
When I was growing up the best way to get around was by trains. The interstate Highway system had not yet evolved and you could go everywhere on the trains for a small cost….
Read more from Dee here.
Italian industrial design powerhouse ItalDesign Giugiaro has released an iPad app that’s essentially a picturebook of their history. The simple, cleanly-designed app presents a timeline dating from 1968 to present day, and tapping a year brings up that year’s portfolio.
The app is pretty straightforward and unfussy, and my only gripe is that the loading screen must be sat through every time you open the app (though at least they fill the time with a random Ken-Burns-effected slideshow of their work), and die-hard ID historians should note that it’s mostly individual pictures with little in the way of description, so determining context will require going elsewhere. But overall it’s a great way to visually check out ItalDesign’s work, from cars to cameras to kitchens, and you can’t beat the price: Free.
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