Transmaterial, the online companion to Blaine Brownell's similarly titled book series, has just been relaunched as a highly searchable database of the latest in "materials that redefine our physical environment", designed to better facilitate access to critical developments in the field.
Via: Core77
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
New Transmaterial Website Launched
Monday, July 27, 2009
100 Years of Design Manifestos
Today I came across this fantastic list of design manifestos and I had to post them.
The following list was complied by John Emerson.
Since the days of radical printer-pamphleteers, design and designers have a long history of fighting for what’s right and working to transform society. The rise of the literary form of the manifesto also parallels the rise of modernity and the spread of letterpress printing.
* 1909 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, F.T. Marinetti
* 1914 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, Antonio Sant’Elia
* 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto, Walter Gropius
* 1922 Manifesto of the Painters’ Union, Taller de Grafica Popular
* 1923 Topology of Typography, El Lissitzky
* 1923 The New Typography, László Moholy-Nagy - a call for design against the bourgeois, in support of the proletariat.
* 1959 The journal "New Graphic Design," though not explicitly a manifesto, called for a radical rethinking of design along more scientific lines.
* 1964 First Things First, Ken Garland
* 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
* 1971 La coscienza del designer, Albe Steiner
* 1978 Atlante Secondo Lenin - not so much a design manifesto, as a designed manifesto. The innovative infographics visualize theories for gaining power.
* 1979 Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development
* 1983 The Free Software announcement, later clarified in 1985’s GNU Manifesto
* 1987 Design memorandum. Dall’etica del progetto al progetto dell’etica.
* 1987 Ten Rules of Good Design, Dieter Rams
* 1989 Carta del progetto grafico
* 1990 A Scandinavian Design Council Manifesto on Nature, Ecology and Human Needs for the Future
* 1991 The Social Role of Design, Pierre Bernard
* 1991 The Munich Design Charter
* 1996 Viewer's Declaration of Independence
* 1998 Ne Pas Plier statement
* 1998 People's Communication Charter
* 2000 First Things First update - not just about advertising this time, but setting new values.
* 2000 Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, Bruce Mau (though I thought Dean Allen did a tidy job of demolishing this.)
* 2001 AIAP, diseno etica e comunicazione
* 2001 Socialist Designer's Manifesto - a series of ideologically driven limitations along the lines of Dogme 95.
* 2001 Designers Against Monoculture, Noah Scalin
* 2002 First Declaration of the St. Moritz Design Summit
* 2004 The Free Culture Manifesto
* 2006 The Public Role of the Graphic Designer
* 2006 Free Font Manifesto, Ellen Lupton
* 2006 Owner’s Manifesto, The Maker’s Bill of Rights
* 2007 The Designer’s Dilemma and subsequent Designers Accord
* 2007 1000 Words: A Manifesto for Sustainability in Design, Allan Chochinov
* 2008 White Night Before A Manifesto, Metahaven
* 2009 The Repair Manifesto from Platform21
Via: Social Design Notes
Heatherwick’s Paperhouse Kiosks Open for Business in Kensington
By Amanda Birch
Project: Paperhouse kiosk
Designer: Heatherwick Studio
Structural engineer: Tall consulting structural engineers
Location: The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea
Newspapers have to work harder than ever to get themselves sold. Yet in London, they are often purchased from ramshackle newsstands positioned near most London Underground stations. Their frequently makeshift appearance was cause for concern for Kensington & Chelsea Council’s deputy leader Daniel Moylan.
Moylan, who has been spearheading a campaign to de-clutter the borough’s streets and make them cleaner, commissioned Heatherwick Studio to design an alternative kiosk that was more distinctive and ergonomic. The solution was a cold-patinated bronze-clad kiosk with a mild steel and plywood frame and a glass fibre roof floating over a polycarbonate clerestory window.
Two of the 2.5m-tall Paperhouse kiosks were installed earlier this year — one outside Earls Court Tube station and another at Sloane Square, transferred there from a pitch outside the Victoria & Albert Museum during last summer’s London Festival of Architecture. Two more have been built and are being fitted out at subcontractor 2D:3D’s workshop in London’s Park Royal.
Stuart Wood, a designer at Heatherwick Studio, explains that while the ambitious base model design, costing £30,000, is a constant, each kiosk is modified to match its vendor’s individual needs. For example at Sloane Square, the kiosk vendor wanted refrigerators incorporated into the interior, while the Earls Court vendor wanted extra display space for newspapers and magazines.
Toby Maclean, director of structural engineer Tall, says: “The form follows the geometry of the tiered shelves on which the magazines and newspapers are stored and displayed, and the doors themselves rotate open to reveal yet more shelving.”
“In operation, the Paperhouse is open and welcoming and when out of use it remains a sculptural object in the street scene.”
When conducting early research for the design of the kiosks, Heatherwick and Wood visited the vendors early in the morning to gain an understanding of their needs. They discovered that it took about an hour for the vendors to set up every morning and to pack up at the end of the day and there was little protection from inclement weather.
Heatherwick Studio’s response is a structure that is permanent. Each morning the vendor simply unbolts the padlock to the doors and slides them open. The newspapers, cigarettes, food and drinks are already arranged in the plywood shelving so the vendor doesn’t have to spend time setting up.
The kiosks have a flat back so that they can either be leant against a wall or left free-standing. They are designed to be stable without having to be fixed down to their sites, and are delivered on the back of a lorry, placed on the site and plugged into the electrical mains. If the pavement is uneven, six screw legs fixed to the structure’s underside can be adjusted
Standing inside the kiosk, it feels secure, and vendors have a good vantage point as the platform in the kiosk where the vendors stand is at a higher level than the customers.
David McDonald, conservation and design team leader at the borough of Kensington & Chelsea, which project-managed Paperhouse, says there has been a mixed reaction from the public. “People do remark on them, but perhaps this is more to do with the shock of the new,” he says.
The planned sites for the next two Paperhouse kiosks are still to be decided by the council, though McDonald says South Kensington tube station is a likely location.
The Structure
Toby Maclean, director at Tall Consulting Structural Engineers, says that the structure of the two-tonne Paperhouse is driven by its geometrical form.
“The structural analysis included every component of the kiosks, including the rotating door mechanism which opens with car body panel precision and just millimetres to spare on tolerance between parts,” he explains.
The kiosks’ structure comprises four main steel ribs CNC cut from 15mm-thick flat steel, and profiled to the form of the external walls. These are fixed to a rigid base or grillage of steel beams and connected at the top by the roof frame which cantilevers out 1.5m over the door mechanism.
Steel sheet, 2mm-thick, was then welded between the ribs to form a diaphragm and provide the shelves for the newspapers. The steel sheet is clad internally with plywood and externally with 1mm-thick brass sheet glued and riveted onto the structure.
Each door runs on two nylon wheels which track along a curved beam in the kiosk’s base. By their nature, the doors have a tendency to fall outwards. They are kept in place by ties and struts at the top and bottom connected back to pivots concealed in the roof and floor.
“When one considers that the bottom wheels of the doors are on cantilevered axles, that the top restraint ties are cranked around the stepped roof form, and the roof itself has no vertical support under its entire front half, it is apparent that achieving the necessary stiffness was paramount to the success to the door mechanism,” says Maclean.
He says the complex geometry has meant that in some places the available tolerance for manufacture, assembly and deflection was in the order of 5mm.
Since the footprint of the structure is 2.4m x 1.9m, another concern for the engineers was ensuring the structure was made stable. Extra weight in the steelwork of the base was added to prevent overturning forces from wind and accidental impact.
Photo Credits: Cristobal Palma
Via: BD Online
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Launch of the new EcoMag
EcoLabs gives us EcoMag — “a magazine about art, design & sustainability. Each issue will focus on a theme while investigating issues lying at the root of the ecological crisis”.
Where EcoLabs differs from other players in our field is our focus on the systemic causes of our unsustainable lifestyles. Rather than place the blame on individuals and work to get everyone to change their light bulbs and turn down the heat we focus on how communities can design sustainable systems and initiate the change to put this into effect. We aim to inform systems literacies & transition culture through communication design and artwork.
The theme of the first issue is ‘Future Scenarios’ which can be downloaded as a PDF file here.
via: Visual Culture
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Daniel Libeskind at TED
Daniel Libeskind builds on very big ideas. Here, he shares 17 words that underlie his vision for architecture -- raw, risky, emotional, radical -- and that offer inspiration for any bold creative pursuit.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Microsoft Vision for 2019
Microsoft's Vision for 2019 from Jonas Wisser on Vimeo.
How will emerging technology improve our productivity in the years ahead? What opportunities will arise from evolving trends and global change? Microsoft has collaborated with customers, partners, and thought leaders across multiple disciplines to develop scenarios that explore how long-term trends, customer challenges, and emerging technologies might converge to improve our lives, both at work and home.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Rem Koolhaas: The architect planning for the future
The Story:
Rem Koolhaas revolutionizes city landscapes with distinctive and cutting-edge buildings.
Responsible for the iconic CCTV headquarters in Beijing the Dutch architect was named one of "The World's Most Influential People" by Time magazine.
via: CNN
Monday, June 22, 2009
Spanish Documentary on b720
b720 architects – architectures in process from francisco dulanto on Vimeo.
This short Spanish documentary on b720 that shows inside of the studio and some collaboration projects with Jean Nouvel and David Chipperfield. The video is in Spanish, but I think most of you can make out what their about.Thursday, June 4, 2009
KLAUS: Cartooning the GSD
Take some time to look over these hilarious cartoon interpretations of life at the GSD. I absolutely love his candid depiction of the typical GSD bullshit. Can't wait to see more.About the Blog...
KLAUS was born somewhere in the North of Spain at some point in the mid seventies. For some years, he suffered from a syndrome called architecture, from which he has not yet recovered. Showing an early passion for drawing, he was introduced to comic books at a young age by his family and educators, to their later regret. As an illustrator, Klaus has always believed in the importance of having a distinctive style, which explains why he has been systematically copying the styles of the most distinctive comics artists, such as André Franquín. Only his complete lack of success in doing so has prevented him from being effectively sued for plagiarism. Klaus’s works in this blog show a clear improvement in this sense.
I mean, this time he will be sued for sure.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
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