Swedish producer Zero has launched this new wall lamp called 'Stitch' designed by Mattias Ståhlbom.
The construction and the appearance of the lamp are inspired by the construction principle of an embroidery frame. When attached on the wall or in the ceiling it is possible to adjust the frame in different angles.
eVolo has announced the winners of the 2010 Skyscraper Competition.
The Jury selected 3 winners and 27 special mentions among 430 entries from 42 countries.
Globalization, sustainability, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution, were some of the multi-layered elements taken into consideration.
Vertical Prison The first place was awarded to a project for a vertical prison designed by architecture students Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, and Beh Ssi Cze, from Malaysia. Their project examines the possibility of creating a prison-city in the sky, where the inmates would live in a “free” and productive community with agricultural fields and factories that would support the host city below.
Water Purification Skyscraper in Jakarta The recipients of the second place are Rezza Rahdian, Erwin Setiawan, Ayu Diah Shanti, and Leonardus Chrisnantyo, from Indonesia, whose project ‘Ciliwung Recovery Program’ aims to purify and repair the Ciliwung River habitat. The building is designed as an ingenious habitable machine that would collect garbage, purify water, and provide housing to thousands of people that live in the slums along the river.
Nested Skyscraper in Tokyo The third place was awarded to Ryohei Koike and Jarod Poenisch, from the United States, for their project ‘Nested Skyscraper’ that explores robotic construction techniques for a novel structure of carbon sleeves and fiber-laced concrete. The building is a system of multiple layers of composite louvers which thicken and rotate according to solar exposure, ventilation, and materials performance.
Among the special mentions there are skyscrapers used as bridges that link different territories, cities in the sky powered by renewable energies, instant deployable buildings for disaster zones, skyscrapers that purify and desalinate sea water, or high-rises that commemorate historic dates. Other proposals create new pedestrian layers for existing cities. Some use the latest building technologies and parametric design to configure environmentally conscious self-sufficient buildings, while others create city-like buildings where different programs are mixed in one structure.
Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organization. The award seeks to discover young talents whose ideas will change the way we understand architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.
Arkitekturmuseet presents the first major retrospective exhibition on Swedish-American designer and architect Greta Magnusson Grossman. The exhibition includes architectural commissions in Sweden as well as Northern and Southern California and designs for the many companies she worked with including Barker Brothers, Ralph O. Smith and Glenn of California. The exhibition also includes exemplary pieces of furniture and lighting, prototypes and textiles, original drawings and photographs, film clips as well as a 1:1 reconstruction of an interior.
Greta Magnusson Grossman (1906-1999) maintained a prolific forty-year career on two continents, Europe and North America, with achievements in industrial design, interior design and architecture.
( Portrait c 1950)
In the late 1920s Grossman finished a one-year woodworking apprenticeship in her hometown of Helsingborg, Sweden and was awarded a scholarship to enroll at Konstfack (then known as Högre Konstindustriella Skolan), the renowned Stockholm arts institution. At Konstfack she excelled in her mastery of technical drawing and focused her original design work on furniture, textiles and ceramics. In 1933 Grossman received second place for furniture design from the Stockholm Craft Association , becoming the first woman to receive an award in that category. In 1934 the Swedish Society of Industrial Design awarded her a scholarship to travel throughout Europe and she filed reports of her observations on interior design and architecture for the “Women and Home” section of the Swedish paper Nya Dagligt Allehanda.
In 1933 Grossman and Konstfack classmate Erik Ullrich opened Studio, a store and workshop, at Sturegatan 12 in Stockholm. From Studio, Grossman took on numerous commissions designing unique furniture and interiors, garnered abundant press attention and accolades and exhibited frequently at Galerie Moderne, a cultural mecca in Stockholm at the time.
'Good Design' chairs, USA 1954
The unique approach to Swedish modernism that she brought with her when she moved from Stockholm in 1940 proved to be incredibly popular in the United States. She opened a much-publicized shop in Beverly Hills in 1940 selling her own designs billed on her business card as “Swedish modern furniture, rugs, lamps and other home furnishings.” She attracted celebrity clients such as Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine and Gracie Allen and began making connections that would lead to a number of projects both from her own shop and from Barker Brothers’ Modern Shop launched in 1947, for whom she was designing exclusive pieces and taking interior design commissions.
'Cobra' table lamp, USA, 1948-49
In the late 1940s Grossman designed a groundbreaking and successful line of lamps for Barker Brothers, later produced by Ralph O. Smith.
'Grasshopper' floor lamp, USA, circa 1947
Over the next twenty years she produced work for companies like Glenn of California, Sherman Bertram, Martin/Brattrud and Modern Line. The work for Glenn of California is arguably her most sophisticated and best known. These pieces were characterized by the materials she used, such as rich, colorful textiles and woods like California walnut paired in surprising and elegant combination with black plastic laminate and wrought iron. The uniquely petite proportions and asymmetrical lines of her furniture also set her work apart.
Desk, USA, circa 1952 - Designed for Glenn of California
Grossman’s most enduring work in Los Angeles came in the form of her built architectural commissions. Between 1949 and 1959 Grossman designed at least fourteen homes in Los Angeles, one in San Francisco and one back in her native Sweden. Of these, at least ten are still standing. The homes were often perched on stilts at the top of a hill, overlooking a canyon, with magnificent views through curtain walls of glass. The homes featured extensive built-in shelving and the uniquely open and free flowing floor plan popular at the time. She worked several times with celebrated landscape architect Garrett Eckbo on the outdoor spaces. Grossman’s houses are designed to the diminutive scale of the Los Angeles based Case Study House program—most of them have a footprint of less than 1,500 square feet (ca 140 square meters).
Her architectural work, as well as her design work, was featured extensively in Arts & Architecture, the magazine edited by Case Study program founder John Entenza.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Grossman’s designs were included in numerous international exhibitions and exhibited at institutions such as The Nationalmuseum (Stockholm, Sweden), Röhsska Museet (Gothenburg, Sweden), Museum of Modern Art (New York, United States), Museum of Industry and Science (Chicago, United States) and the de Young Museum (San Francisco, United States). Articles about her work were published during her career in American, British, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Polish and Swedish magazines and newspapers. In 1952 the United States Department of State distributed an article about her in 75 different countries to present “a true picture…of the American way of life.” In the 1950s Grossman taught industrial design courses at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. She retired from design and architecture in the late 1960s.
Exhibition: Greta Magnusson Grossman Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm, Sweden From February 10 to May 16 2010
Cambridge Consultants announced the launch of the ‘Syreen’ syringe, a new concept that demonstrates the cost benefit and supply chain disruptions made possible by sustainable product design.
Instead of glass, Syreen syringes are made with COP (cyclic olefin polymer) plastic, which has enabled Cambridge Consultants to shed the need for secondary packaging altogether, a first in this medical device arena.
The United States alone produces 6,600 tons of medical waste per day, equaling well over two million tons per year—approximately 85 percent of which goes to landfills throughout the country. The Syreen eliminates the need for wasteful fillers such as cardboard and styrofoam, reducing the packaging weight by 30 percent and volume by 50 percent from today’s standard packaging. After delivery, with a simple snap, the user ejects the needle into the sharps bin allowing the user to potentially recycle the plastic capsule.
Swedish designer Matti Klenell has designed two bird families for Iittala: the Harakka (Magpie) family and the Korpi (Deep Forest) family, both with two generations of members. Both families have five members – Mommy, Daddy, Brother, Little Sister, and Baby – each with their own distinctive character and their own story to tell.
Birds by Klenell collection is a celebration of glass technique and colour. The black-and-white Harakka family combines black, white, and clear glass, and depends on a range of moulds and traditional tools to make them possible. The Korpi family, in contrast, is very colourful, combining pink heads or beaks and dark blue bottom sections, or green, black, red, and white, with colour drawn on the surface in bands or blown into the body of the glass. In the process, he has given his glass birds a practical use alongside their aesthetic one – drawing on the varied skills of the glassblowers and craftsmen at Iittala’s Nuutajärvi glassworks.
Klenell’s birds comprise two or three parts, which adds to their sculptural qualities. They also include a functional feature that is unique in the Iittala Birds collection, as the hollow bottom sections of his birds can be used as handy little containers to keep treasures, such as jewellery, notes, and memories, just like the magpie.
Glass is a familiar material to Klenell and one in which he excels, as his exhibition of unique glass pieces in Stockholm in 2008 showed. Working with the craftsmen at Nuutajärvi gave Klenell the opportunity to continue his exploration of what glass can offer.
The METI school (Modern Education and Training Institute) building was built by experts and volunteers from Germany and Austria together with craftsmen, teachers, parents and students from Bangladesh from September to December 2005.
In order to create jobs and to build up a capacity for producing sustainable architecture it is essential to include local workers in the building process. Training through “learning by doing” should help the local craftsmen to improve the standards and condition of the rural housing in general.
Thick walls assure a comfortable climate on the ground floor of the building. Sunlight and ventilation can be regulated through the use of shutters. The vertical garden façade shades the openings in the walls and protects the natural earthen walls from erosion through rainfall and helps reduce the indoor temperature through evaporation...
To test the construction techniques, joints and bearing strength of the ceiling, a 3 m long test section was built as well as small part of the roof beam construction. These constructions were then tested and analysed in the laboratory to ascertain their structural capacity. The results of the tests led to modifications in the construction technique.
An extremely stable and easy to mount table designed by Roderick Fry for French producer Moaroom.
Pi is a flat-packing table, which helps minimizing carbon footprint during shipping. The table is simply assembled by inserting a tabletop, without any screws or Allen keys.
It is very easy to slide a wooden board in the superior angle (natural wood, plywood, old floorboards or even old wooden doors) and to block the board by repositioning the feet on the floor to insure a maximum stability.
Though dealing with being stuck inside a burning building is a very uncommon scenario, there is now an invention that could help you survive such an event. The Dang Jingwei Firescuba was conceived just for that very scary scenario. A fairly basic design using cardboard and carbon filter, it creates a pocket over your nose and mouth to allow easy breathing until emergency services arrive.
Though The Dang Jingwei Firescuba seems like nothing more than a French fry container, it is sure to give you those extra essential minutes of survival until the fire department comes.
Its strength is gained by cross laminating layers in the seat. The method makes possible a cantelivered surface and robust structure. A series of laminated ‘bridges’ complete the form. The chair is also stackable and without the additional two legs of conventional chairs it can be suspended on a table for easy cleaning.
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