I had the pleasure this summer of living with a friend of mine whose father, Brian MacKay-Lyons, is an architect from Nova Scotia. Check out more of Brian’s work after the jump.
Featured in Monocle, his work is defined by its fusion of traditional maritime building materials with modern simplicity. For more on his projects check out his site.
See that parking lot beside Disney Hall? It’s the future downtown L.A. site of Eli Broad’s contemporary art museum.
As Willy Wonka (in the earthly form of Gene Wilder) said when regarding a young, rotund Augustus Gloop lodged in his chocolate-filled plumbing system, “The suspense is terrible. I hope it’ll last.” That encapsulates our enduring fascination with billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad‘s protracted plan to build a contemporary art museum. The site (Beverly Hills? Santa Monica? Los Angeles?) and architect (Rem Koolhaas? SANAA? Herzog & de Meuron?) of the place have been the subject of rampant speculation, whispering, and gossip since Broad’s 2008 announcement that he would not be donating his or his foundation’s art collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for which he had just funded a $56 million Renzo Piano-designed addition. The rumors we told you about a couple of months ago are true, and now it’s official: the museum will be located in downtown Los Angeles and will be designed by New York architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Gensler will be the executive architect on the project, which will deplete Broad’s personal bank account by an estimated $300 million.
The approximately 120,000-square-foot museum will be located on Grand Avenue, next to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the exuberant steel swoops of Gehry’s structure factored into his decision to go with Diller Scofidio + Renfro. “We didn’t want it to clash, but we didn’t want it to be anonymous either,” said Broad yesterday. “Diller Scofidio prevailed by focusing its design attention not on sculptural form but on a smart if showy conceptual clash between public and private visions of L.A. culture,” writes architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne in today’s Los Angeles Times. “The most dramatic element of the firm’s proposal—its wow moment—is a lobby space that will bring pedestrians entering the museum from Grand Avenue face to face, through glass, with drivers on their way down to the museum’s parking garage.” Groundbreaking on the building is slated for October, with the goal of opening to the public in late 2012. Here’s hoping that Broad launches a global contest to dole out coveted places at the grand opening. Golden tickets, anyone?
Previously on UnBeige:
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Geometry and shiny metal surfaces in a new magnetic jewelry line
Science meets art in Klik Klik, Al Kelly and and Kellar Williams’ new magnetic jewelry kit. Setting themselves apart from similar brands that came before them (like Magnetik Distractions and the gift set), Kelly and Williams take form as seriously as function, introducing new shapes and perfectly-engineered magnetism for a playfully nerdy accessory with all the geometric-pattern appeal of Vena Cava.
Each kit comes with 300 nickel-plated neodymium magnets in three different shapes—216 polished metal spheres, 56 cubes and 28 wands to be exact. Mix and match at will, or follow one of the provided patterns, to create custom bracelets, anklets, necklaces, chokers, armbands, rings and more.
When Klik Klik’s Brooklyn-based masterminds stopped by our offices recently they explained that part of their goal is to empower creativity by making it fun for people to design their own patterns. The instructional posters help out with a little inspiration, showing six design suggestions, ranging from easy to more difficult and requiring varying numbers of the metal pieces. For those who want more, there are over 500 designs available at Klik Klik’s online gallery, with step-by-step videos detailing how to make the Bella, Gemma and Dahlia bracelets.
While the concept came easily to Kelly and Williams, the real hard work was the time-consuming process of sourcing the right supply of metal finishes and strengths to find the best combination possible. Williams describes their path as one mostly about education, involving extensive testing to see which shapes worked well with others and which looked most appealing. Ultimately, the pair emphasize that the most important part was “getting the highest quality magnets.”
See more of Klik Klik’s stylish designs on their site where kits sell for $65.
Top photo credit to Eva Kolenko
This residential building for the riverbank in St. Petersburg by Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat has been approved for construction.
Called Moika Krukov, the six-storey building will have stone horizontal, vertical and diagonal bars criss-crossing in front of the plaster facade.
The windows in this plaster layer will increase in size towards the building’s rounded corners.
The block will contain twenty apartments of varying size and completion is due for 2011.
Here are some more details from Erick van Egeraat:
St. Petersburg approves high end residential project by Erick van Egeraat
The urban planning council of St. Petersburg Russia, approved Erick van Egeraat’s concept design for Moika Krukov. Moika Krukov is a six storey elite residential building located along the historical Moika river embankment in the centre of St. Petersburg. It faces the New Holland Island, and has visual links to the St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the famous Mariinsky theatre. The client, a leading St.Petersburg developer, aspires a high class building with high standards regarding architecture.
The project comprises of twenty high-end apartments varying in size, including two large luxurious penthouses with roof terraces overlooking the city centre. An underground parking garage provides for 42 parking places for the residents.
“The building blends in with the unique architectural qualities of the historic centre of St. Petersburg”, Erick van Egeraat says. “The design of the façade is an interpretation of the classic façade principles found here along the Moika river embankment. It is a regular aperture pattern, an accentuated plinth and roofline and decorative framing of window openings and entries”.
The façade consists of two separate layers: a plastered inner layer with a regular pattern of openings, gradually changing size to open up wide at the rounded corners and an outer layer which consists of stone-clad horizontals, verticals, and diagonals in an irregular pattern. The juxtaposition of these two layers creates a façade which is both contemporary and contextual.
The building is scheduled for completion in 2011.
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| VTB Arena Park by Erick van Egeraat | Budapest City Hall by Erick van Egeraat | Grave City Hall by Erick van Egeraat |
The controversy continues in Jerusalem over the planned Museum of Tolerance there. After years of a variety of groups fighting the project because the land it’s being built on was previously a Muslim cemetery (it was most recently a parking lot), construction had begun to move forward. While the project’s managers had promised from the start that they would being careful not to disturb any human remains they found, a particularly damning report published by Haaretz was released, detailing quite the opposite, finding that the developers had changed their tune and didn’t care what they uncovered and demolished en route. Now there’s news of another twist for the project, with Israeli officials saying that many of the graves were faked. Claiming that activists against the building secretly added hundreds of new grave markers to make the project appear as if it were destroying far more vast burial grounds. Officials even went so far as to get the new grave markers analyzed and confirmed that they weren’t real. The opposition has denied the allegations, saying the graves were there from the start. Here’s a bit:
The new gravestones, typically constructed with old stones set in fresh concrete, also scrambled the physical record at an important historical site, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which termed the graves “fictitious.”
The Islamic Movement‘s Abu Atta said all of the markers were constructed atop genuine graves, though in some cases nearly nothing was left of the original. He also indicated that the precise location of the graves was beside the point.
“If you dig a few meters down anywhere here you’ll find bones,” he said. “We just want to guard the cemetery.”
Once again, faced with all this continuing controversy, we’re sure Frank Gehry is plenty pleased that he removed himself from the project earlier this year.
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pThis is so freakin’ rad: The A HREF=”http://mytechnologyworld9.blogspot.com/2010/08/complicated-mechanisms-explained-in.html” World of Technology blog has posted a series of GIFs/A showing how common mechanical mechanisms work. I’m in awe of whatever genius developed the Maltese Cross mechanism, which turns smooth circular motion into segmented second-hand motion for clocks:/p
pimg alt=”mKw1y.gif” src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/mKw1y.gif” width=”320″ height=”240″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” //p
pI have no idea what a Constant Velocity Joint really does, but I can’t stop staring at it:/p
div style=”align: right;”img src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/2010/08/PnhN0.gif” width=”320″ height=”240″ alt=”PnhN0.gif”//div
pThen there’s the crazy bi-level elevator that loads shells and gunpowder, separately, into enormous battleship guns:/p
div style=”align: right;”img src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/2010/08/swGxT.gif” width=”700″ height=”600″ alt=”swGxT.gif”//div
pAnd for the first time, I finally understand how a sewing machine works (though admittedly this one took me the longest to grasp):/p
div style=”align: right;”img src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/2010/08/1WAyD.gif” width=”371″ height=”387″ alt=”1WAyD.gif”//div
pIf anyone out there is qualified and so inclined, we’re begging, begging you to produce a series of GIFs that show industrial design production methods. I think something simple that showed stamping, blow molding, vacuum forming, et cetera, would go a long way./p
pvia A HREF=”http://kottke.org/10/08/how-machines-work” kottke/Abr /
/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/gifs_that_explain_basic_mechanisms_17220.asp”(more…)/a
pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/lZn_bGvCMdB6nTBCXZ2rEdfmkC8/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/lZn_bGvCMdB6nTBCXZ2rEdfmkC8/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/
a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/lZn_bGvCMdB6nTBCXZ2rEdfmkC8/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/lZn_bGvCMdB6nTBCXZ2rEdfmkC8/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/p
For those in the northern hemisphere, just 28 days of summer linger on the calendar. Before the cool days of fall and winter set in, now is the time to finish up warm-weather uncluttering projects that remain on your to-do list.
Whatever tasks remain on your summer to-do list, schedule and take on those tasks now before the weather keeps you from doing them.
Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.
The work of “communists” or “tea-drinking fancy pants Limeys”? The reaction to studio Dowling Duncan‘s submission to the Dollar ReDe$ign Project proves that even speculative work on currency design is guaranteed to provoke strong opinion…
The studio’s designs for the $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills were submitted earlier this month to the Dollar ReDe$ign Project, the ongoing open submissions scheme organised by New York designer Richard Smith to rebrand the US dollar.
But Dowling Duncan’s designs, where each image directly relates to the value of each note, have put a fair few Republican noses out of joint – see here and here, for example – with some bloggers annoyed at British interference (despite the fact that the company is a bipartite studio with offices in Newark, England and San Francisco).
Aside from featuring the five biggest native American tribes ($5); the first 10 amendments (aka the Bill of Rights) to the US Constitution ($10); the 50 States ($50); and highlights from 20th Century America ($20); the designs proving the most controversial are, understandably, those with a more political bent.
Dowling Duncan’s proposal for the $1 bill features President Obama (the link to the note’s denomination is through Obama being the “first” African American president). And the $100 note acknowledges President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office, where his passing of unprecedented legislation attempted to combat the effects of the Great Depression during the first half of 1933.
Did the studio expect the designs to generate such a reaction? “No, not really,” the designers maintain. “We wanted to challenge people’s perceptions about what the dollar should be or could be, but putting Obama on the $1 bill seems to be the major talking point.
“The general feedback about the design and content has been great, but there have been some who have reacted badly to it all. We appreciate people being extremely passionate about this and to change something which has been around for a such a long period of time takes some getting used to… We’ve had direct emails from people voicing their dismay and disappointment and messages left on our studio answer machine from people saying they would rather leave the States if our notes ever saw the light of day. The reaction personally towards Obama has taken us a bit by surprise.”
The set of six notes is unashamedly celebratory: the $20 bill celebrates 20th century America and features Buzz Aldrin, the grille of an old Ford, an early radio, for example. But, while speculative, clearly the other ‘achievements’ aren’t to everyone’s taste.
“When we researched how notes are used we realised people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally,” Dowling Duncan explain. “You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.”
Dowling Duncan’s notes are also sized more like the Euro (the bigger the note the higher its value) and while the Greenback also currently sports that big purple digit (as reproached here by designer Michael Bierut) the studio’s redesigns are brightly coloured, decidely modernist and, perhaps of particular annoyance to some US bloggers, rather European looking.
“I think people appreciate our concept, like the design, format and general look of the bills,” say the designers. “But it’s our choice of two democratic Presidents, whom some believe have not helped the US economy enough in it’s time of greatest need that has got people’s backs up – unintentionally we might add. Also some aren’t happy that a couple of ‘tea drinking fancy pants Limeys’* (as we were described) have had a go at redesigning their currency.”
*The eloquent Southern Beale blog nicely (and ironically) summed up the kind of reaction such designs might receive from more conservative bloggers, as being the product of “tea-drinking fancy pants Limeys”.
But has there been any feedback from Obama himself as yet?
“No, we’ve tried desperately to get to him but as you can imagine he is a hard man to reach,” say the studio. “We’ve been told by some good sources that he would have seen it, but for him to comment on it would really ignite the debate and bring Richard’s project to the forefront and into the mainstream. Also, he’s on holiday at the moment!”
You can submit your redesigns of the US dollar bills at Richard Smith’s website for the Dollar ReDe$ign Project. The submissions form is here. Deadline is 6 September.
More of Dowling Duncan’s work is at dowlingduncan.com.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
