London Design Festival 2012
September 14, 2012 § Leave a comment
Beginning today, Friday September 14th, London will play host to ten days of annual design-based events across the capital, showcasing leading movements in the cultural, the commercial, and the creative. With a remit of courting design democracy, London Design Festival is open to all and largely free of charge, and with the launch of its Global Design Forum this year to mark its 10th anniversary, the focus is very much on emphasising the importance and impact of design within socially and economically-sensitive contemporaneity.
Encompassing talks, trade stands, installations, press events and parties, this celebration of design creativity will see some of London’s best-loved venues and public spaces devoted to pushing this global sphere and London as a hub within it. Among the hundreds of events on offer from the 14th – 23rd, a few of the usual and important design suspects will be Decode (celebrating its fifth year this year,) Tent London and Design Junction, all of which I will be attending, imbibing the best of contemporary design.
EARTH-RISE T-Shirt Design By Brian Kyle
August 23, 2011 § 1 Comment
Currently out of stock but generally available to you at a price of $25.00 spent over at Public Domain Clothing, this Brian Kyle-designed t-shirt, EARTH-RISE, is a fabric-featured fusion of two of my favourite things – astronauts and skulls.
Fuglsang Kunstmuseum By Tony Fretton Architects
May 9, 2011 § Leave a comment
Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, Denmark, by award-winning London-based architectural team, Tony Fretton Architects.
Photography by Hélène Binet
Converging Separatism: The Carapicuiba House By Angelo Bucci And Alvaro Puntoni
May 6, 2011 § Leave a comment
For Brazilian architects, Angelo Bucci and Alvaro Puntoni, a site topographically unusual for its depression became more advantageous than problematic in relation to meeting the clients’ brief for a live/work environment. Utilising the abrupt drop in ground level, Bucci and Puntoni responded to the need for separatism of these two existential necessities by elevating the 3mW x 25mL tubular office area by two reinforced concrete supports, the only section visible at street level.
Connected to the office space by a steel bridge, but nestled below the street level, the two domestic storeys of the house in Carapicuíba, Brazil, lay in distinct, desired separation. But just as the site encourages this brief to be so surprisingly well-realised, so, too, does its geography allow for great incorporation of indoor and outdoor space. Woods, valley, gardens and pool surround the home storeys, merging with living spaces through sliding glass doors onto a terrace and patio. Similarly, the windows at either end of the office structure allow for a unique aerial viewpoint of the green spaces, thus offering further converging separatism within the property.
Working with the site’s geography and landscape, to allow its unusual topographical dictates govern the realisation of the project, has not only created distinct living and working environments and a merging of nature with structure, but has also meant simplicity of materials. Built from two material elements – concrete and glass – Bucci and Puntoni were less constrained by budget and more able to focus on the build itself. The result is exemplary of the great design and wellbeing that can and should be derived from environmental attentiveness.
Photography by Nelson Kon.
The Razor: Artfully Cutting Through The Property Market
March 27, 2011 § Leave a comment
“Open up a structure to the undulating space of sky, landscape and view, and the building becomes an ever-evolving organism” – Wallace E. Cunningham, architect.
What do you get when you cross a Wrightian-schooled member of the AD 100, a client whose brief is akin to a Warhol-style fluctuating artwork, a plot of land widely considered unsuitable for building, and a $32,000,000 price tag? Answer: the Cunningham-designed home of philosophical merging extraordinaire, The Razor, is on the market.
“Nature is not static, nor should be the efforts of man.” Cunningham has, no doubt, brought forth an appreciable continuum of the Wrightian ‘Organic’ ethic, and a remarkable response to working harmoniously with both the environment and the clients’ own wishes. The resultant reactive structure, deeply embedded within the steep and difficult plot, is in perpetual response to its environment and therefore more living sculpture than inert structure. The clients in question, a couple for whom the La Jolla, California, situation afforded them good opportunity to flow internal to external, requested a residence that would be active and reactive; a building which, rather than dominate or compete with the incredible view, would not only compliment it, but act as a sort of passive viewpoint to the landscape itself.
With the advantageous position, lightness of materials, and an approach to design that is “more intuitive than intellectual,” Cunningham took the clients’ brief and returned a property that is of the sharpest adherence to all necessary components, carrying it to a transcendence of its own materials and into a true work of art.
But if you find yourself salivating at the sight of this highly glorified concrete and glass lookout and with a readily-spendable £32,000,000 (or the seemingly more digestible figure of approximately 20,000,000 if you make your acquisitions in Great British Pounds), then The Razor could be the residence of your reality.
Eclect Elect 