Lord Huron: Lonesome Dreams Lord Huron delivered “part one in an exciting series of adventures” with their video for “Lonesome Dreams,” the third track on their album of the same name. Cleverly, “Lonesome Dreams” is also…
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Given my proclivity for anagrams, I couldn’t resist the congruence of a certain superstar designer’s surname and the slick art/design/fashion editorial platform that recently took a tour of his London home.
A space-age aesthetic dominates at casa Newson, an unlikely look for a period building but one entirely reflective of the superstar designer’s streamlined visual language. The futuristic interior gives way to mock-Victorian details such as a wood-paneled library, one of several flourishes authored by Newson’s wife, fashion stylist Charlotte Stockdale.
Of course, Marc Newson has turned up on Nowness several times before—we posted the beautiful manufacturing video of the Ikepod hourglass—his suffice it to say that the high production value does justice to his immaculate, movie-set-like abode.
In Australian-born Newson’s most celebrated work—cabins for Qantas Airways and the Ford O21C concept car, for example—his finely honed eye for materiality reigns supreme; here that is reflected in the marble that lines his bathroom, the massive wall of river rocks from Nova Scotia (a “big deal” to achieve, he confesses) and the composite linen that forms his giant dining table. His passion for metal is betrayed by a small display of unusual knives in the library: “I trained as a jeweler and a silversmith,” he explains. “I love the way metal is worked, and certain techniques and processes are best illustrated in objects like knives, which are, essentially, tools. They display an incredible level of ingenuity and skill.” After Taschen’s recent publication of his complete catalog of designs, “Marc Newson. Works,” Newson’s next projects will be a private jet interior for a member of the Qatar royal family and a fountain pen for Hermès. “What holds my attention is variety,” says the consummate aesthete.
Indeed, Newson touches on several of these projects in the short promo video that Dezeen produced on the occasion of “Marc Newson. Works” last fall.
But if you have about an hour to spare, it’s well worth revisiting the 2008 episode of BBC’s “Imagine” that covers all things Newson. We posted the first of five parts with links to the rest, but the going really gets good in Part 2, which starts with a shop visit to Aston Martin, followed by colorful commentary from collector Adam Lindemann, and ends with Newson’s take on rapid prototyping when Alan Yentob asks about the Stratasys Prodigy—a prosumer-level 3D-printer that dates back to 2000—in the studio. And to compare/contrast with the Nowness short, Newson actually conducts a short tour of his Paris home in the third part, in which he expresses his ambivalence towards the the prototype of his wooden chair design for Cappellini (which turns up again in the Nowness clip).
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Bonobo: Cirrus Interview Magazine checks in with Simon Green, the British musician better known as Bonobo, to glean a little insight into his newly-released album, The North Borders. The NYC-based solo artist talks about the therapeutic aspects of recording, the globalization of music,…
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To accompany their just-released SS13 accessories collection, Brooklyn-based design outlet The Hill-Side created a dynamic lookbook of 10 cheeky gifs animating exploding neckties, swirling scarves and peeping pocket squares as…
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Photos courtesy of Ines Brunn
Air quality aside, Beijing has a long history of bicycle culture, and the vagaries of globalization have inevitably brought what is euphemistically known as ‘urban bicycle culture’ to China’s capital. Bike messengers in New York and San Francisco have long known the advantages of riding a fixed gear bicycle in dense, ever-congested city centers, and given their cultural cachet, it should come as no surprise that these oft-maligned suicide machines have caught on amongst Chinese youth, literally leaving the iconic Flying Pigeon in the dust.
I never had a chance to ride in China myself, but I hope to do so in the near future, especially after seeing John Prolly’s travelogue as he tours the mainland with the folks from Mission Workshop and Factory Five. Which is a very long way of introducing Ines Brunn of Beijing fixie outpostNatooke, who I had e-mailed her about renting a bike last time I was in town (I didn’t end up doing so). It turns out that Brunn is a German-via-U.S.-expat who holds a Masters in Physics… and, if you’ll excuse the pun, a mastery of physics, given her acrobatic ability as a trick cyclist.
It looks like she’s running a 1:1 gearing ratio, which means that her ride is essentially a unicycle with two wheels (see also: the previously-seen bicymple), though that doesn’t detract from her skills in the least. Here’s a continuously-shot alternate routine; check out the upside-down-reverse mount at 1:38 or so:
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For their first venture in a new series exploring the intimate side of a designer’s life, Nowness takes a look at the alpine-obsessed artist Rolf Sachs and his Olympic Stadium-turned-holiday home in St. Moritz. The dynamic London-based designer spent much of his youth in Switzerland, and since shifting his…
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Following our first installment last week, we continue to chart our musical findings at CH with ListenUp, a recap of the songs we Tweeted throughout the week. Young Dreams: First Days of Something Oslo-based director Kristoffer Borgli lends his distinct cinematic touch to “First Days of Something,” a song off…
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Apropos of the New York City Department of Transportation’s recent announcement of fresh street signs courtesy of Pentagram, a short film by Robert Hooman documents the actual process of fabricating the signs. It’s a fascinating inside look at the Maspeth Sign Shop, a 22-person operation that is responsible for signs throughout all five boroughs of the city.
Although there’s no sign (so to speak) of the new designs in the video, it dates from about a month ago and was likely shot in the fall, so rest assured the fab shop in Queens is diligently cranking out the latest signage as we speak. (I assume they also produced the signs for the DOT’s curbside haiku campaign from just over a year ago, a few of which recently drew criticism on Streetsblog.)
Via Alissa Walker
Just prior to the release of Rizzoli’s “Cinelli: The Art and Design of the Bicycle” last October, Antonio Colombo sat for a rare interview on the occasion of the Milan edition of the 2012 Bicycle Film Festival. As the president of Cinelli since Columbus tubing bought it in 1978, Colombo has overseen the continued growth of Cino Cinelli’s eponymous company—founded in 1948, upon his retirement from the pro race circuit—through the contemporary cycling boom.
In the subtitled video interview, Colombo covers many of the same points that he mentioned at the Designers and Books Fair last fall, where he spoke as part of a panel on bicycles and design, concluding that “good design is good not only for the company that makes the product but [also for] the whole of society.”
As for the book itself (Colombo kindly signed my copy after the talk), a pair of three-star reviews on Amazon note that the book—per its title—is largely focused on the current incarnation of the company, featuring high-resolution, full-bleed images of the company’s innovations since 1979 at the expense of the technical nitty-gritty of, say, Cino’s bivalent hub. This is a fair assessment, more a caveat emptor to fans looking for a full history of the company than a critique of the book itself. While it’s not perfect—frankly, I was a little put off by the proportions of the text within the layout—it’s certainly an outstanding visual compendium of the aspirational cycling brand (especially for those of you who are familiar with the work of Garrett Chow). It so happens that Cinelli has also posted a short promotional video of the book along with the interview..
Image via Wikipedia
The Internet is a pretty big place, a veritable universe of ideas and images, at once an inventory of just about everything that exists in the natural world and an ever-expanding cosmos in and of itself. Yet as a medium of representation, the ‘net borrows much of its source material from real life, and I was duly captivated by this recent short film about the final frontier.
On the 40th anniversary of the famous ‘Blue Marble’ photograph taken of Earth from space, Planetary Collective presents a short film documenting astronauts’ life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from the outside—a perspective-altering experience often described as the Overview Effect.
Although I found the first half of the film to be absolutely riveting, I felt that it dragged a bit in the middle; nevertheless, the remarkable footage is poignant throughout. If the takeaway message of “Overview” rings clear and true, even the less universal aspects of orbit bear further consideration. Commander Sunita “Sunny” Williams’ 25-minute tour of the International Space Station makes for a felicitous companion piece to the Planetary Collective short, something like a home video… in space (Kottke calls it the “nerdiest episode of MTV Cribs”).
Similarly, the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine has just posted a detailed account of the final mission from July 2011, a worthy document of the end of an era. Between Felix Baumgartner’s world record freefall, last year’s successful Martian reconnaissance mission and more recent news of habitable planets, our species’ abiding obsession with space travel not only as a symbolic endeavor but also a commercially viable enterprise… if not an altogether necessary one.
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.
