Hasta La Ideas

Speaking of China, as we were in that last post, currently making the rounds this week is a story out of Spiegel about a small mountain town in Austria named Hallstatt that has found itself the muse of a Chinese architecture firm. However, not wanting to merely create something inspired by the sleepy, waterfront hamlet, the firm has decided that it will make an outright recreation of the town, just located “in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.” Spiegel reports that the town’s residents aren’t happy about the prospect, but perhaps even more likely to shut the project down is that Hallstatt is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and already that organization is looking into the legality of such a thing:

…creating an exact duplicate of a city may not be legal, according to Hans-Jorg Kaiser from Icomos Austria, the national board for monument preservation under UNESCO. “The legal situation still needs to be examined,” he said. Building new structures based on photographs is legal, he explained, but owners must give their permission for them to be measured.

Archinect reminds its readers that this isn’t the first time a Chinese firm has gotten interested in recreating a European town. They cite Thames Town, a small village outside of Shanghai that it a recreation of “classic English market town styles.”

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Although announced a few months back and originally slated to already be open, or at least nearer to it, this week has seen a resurgence in talk about Club Silencio, a new nightclub in Paris designed by director David Lynch and based upon the club of the same name in his film, Mulholland Drive. The space, packed into a building that already houses another popular nightclub, and was a century ago the home of one of France’s most famous newspapers, was set to open this month, but has been pushed back, for reasons unexplained (it likely either wasn’t creepy enough for Lynch’s liking or was too creepy). Instead, the new open date has now be set on September 11th. Here’s the Independent‘s early description of Club Silencio:

Lynch has designed the entire interior of the club, including some striking pieces of furniture. A surreal wooden-speaker stack seems to resemble a nightmarish appropriation of the face of a child’s cuddly toy — the eyes being the two circular speaker cones. He’s also designed several bespoke chairs and an asymmetrical double sofa, footstool and side-table combination.

…The club will also feature a private film screening room. As you might expect from a Lynch project, much is still shrouded in secrecy. Those involved with the club reveal little, saying information will be released nearer to the opening date. But this cloud of obfuscation hasn’t stopped Lynch’s devoted fanbase from excitably posting leaks, titbits and photographs on internet forums and Facebook. Club Silencio, it seems, won’t stay quiet for long.

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(Photos: UnBeige)

When Bingo Bango, an inflatable character who resembles a cheerful mitotic cell, waves his red-mittened hand at you, it is impossible not to smile. And so it was a grinning group that gathered on Tuesday evening to celebrate the opening of Section 2 of the High Line, New York’s elevated freight rail turned sky park. Installed in the shadow of the new section, which runs from West 20th Street to West 30th Street on Manhattan’s West Side, is Rainbow City. The 16,000-square-foot wonderland of 40 inflatable structures—including a mushroom-shaped bouncey house, a 40-foot-tall figure who occassionally emits a puff of steam from his cylindrical nose, and massive striped orbs that several of the youngest partygoers declared the “funnest punching bags ever”—is the colorful creation of FriendsWithYou, the Miami-based art and design team of Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III (pictured below), and is presented by AOL as part of its ongoing creativity-boosting initiatives. Borkson and Sandoval were inspired by Holi, the Hindu spring festival during which revelers throw colored water and powder at one another, to create what they describe as “a vibrant landscape of responsive, air-filled sculptures that addresses the potency of interaction, ritual, and play.” Think Tinkertoys meets Candyland crossed with a whole lot of hot air. The installation is open to the public through July 5, and those who want to take home more than memories (and a photo with Bingo Bango and friends) can pick up Rainbow City merch at the on-site shop designed by New York-based architecture firm HWKN.

(Photos from left: Billy Farrell Agency and Erika Velazquez)

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This writer has been out in Washington DC for the past week for reasons completely unrelated to anything design (and contrary to rumors, he’s also not here testing the waters for a possible run at the GOP nomination). But of course, wherever we go, there’s something interesting and design-based. Such is the case with the news that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has re-hired super-designer Lance Wyman, the designer who created its original transit system map more than thirty years ago, to add a new rail line to the map and make other, smaller additions and changes along the way. And even though Wyman created the original, the Washington Post says the this new, updating task is “fraught with peril” and the designers they spoke to for a story about the designer’s new challenge is “the equivalent of trying to make a new label to replace the distinct red and white of the Campbell’s soup can.” The thing we’re most concerned with is the friend we had breakfast with yesterday morning (at Georgetown’s own Chadwicks), who after our meal said he was on the hunt for a new shower curtain, one he’d seen at another friend’s house, which featured the iconic Metro map. Now we wish we’d told him to hold off for a bit, as it’s soon going to be out of date. Here’s some video of Wyman talking about the original:

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In a bizarre turn of events, it feels like we’ve suddenly been thrust into a world where the situation with John Galliano, who heads to court next month in Paris for his racial slurs and claims to love Adolph Hitler, never happened. First, and making the rounds like wildfire this week, was director Lars von Trier at Cannes, who didn’t seem to be able to control his babbling as he stumbled through an awkward few minutes of a press conference, wherein he said things like, “[Hitler] is not what you would call a good guy, but, yeah, I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit” and ended with a what-have-I-done, “Ok, I am a Nazi.” He was flanked by actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst, who both appear in his latest film, both of whom seemed understandably uncomfortable (here’s video of the scene and for more careful review, a great page full of animated gifs of Dunst’s reactions as the horror show played out). Second, the organizers behind the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia are catching some heat this week after rolling out a new campaign featuring illustrations that critics have described as “neo-Hitlerite” and “like something from a Leni Riefenstahl film” due to its use of “an Aryan-looking snowboarder and an ice-skater gazing into the middle distance.” While certainly one could argue that old fascist and communist era iconography has long been used to ironic effect (see: Shepard Fairey, the multi-million dollar industry of Che Guevara merchandise, etc.), the Guardian reports this particular instance is a bit different, in that the design firm behind the campaign, the St. Petersburg-based Doping-Pong, has used swastikas and Nazi flags in some of their work, and have frequently collaborated with the artist Katya Zashtopik, “who is known for her sympathies with the ultra-right” and who recently wished Hitler a happy birthday on her blog. The firm is now playing defense, claiming they had no intention to support Nazism through the ads, nor did they work with Zashtopik on them. They’ve also claimed that the press is itching to read more into this than is there (and upon seeing their site and the context for which things are used, particularly the Guardian‘s aforementioned, seemingly very devious claim that they’ve used “a swastika as one of its online ‘banners’” we’re inclined to agree with their defense to some extent, because once you see what they’ve done, it makes more sense than just that one, evil-sounding sentence). But in the end, it’s all up for you to decide: Did von Trier just get tongue tied or did he spill a bit more than he should have? And is this campaign a nod to Nazism or just the media trying to dig a story out that might not really be there?

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