Photo by Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

In New York City there are plenty of places to get drunk, starting with my kitchen. But most crave a more glamorous experience, and in a city of millions, glamor is often equated with exclusivity and secrecy. Faux speakeasys have become as much of a cliché as drunken fistfights in the Meatpacking District. Yet for a brief period earlier this year, a group of artists ran a true speakeasy in the most unusual of locations: A water tower atop an abandoned building in Chelsea.

Photo by Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

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Now that our friends at Matter have firmly established themselves as purveyors of some of the finest contemporary furnishings this side of Houston St., they're looking to expand their house label. They launched MatterMade in 2010, partnering with designers to produce a new collection for every NY Design Week since (we took note in 2011). For this year's MatterMade Collection, Creative Director Jamie Gray called on New York's Roman and Williams to design a line of furniture and lighting.

At its core, the Roman and Williams for MatterMade collection is a marriage of two entitites with a shared vision of the American design landscape. The first commercially available collection of lighting and furniture by Roman and Williams, the line includes: Woodrum, a family of lighting, Hub, a coffee table and side table, and Reader, a sling chair and foot stool. The unifying theme within the collection is an emphasis on superior materials and exceptional craftsmanship. Standard wood species offered are reclaimed white oak, teak, and walnut, each with a simple and pure finish that highlights the wood. Custom unlacquered brass hardware adorns each piece and provides an extra touch of luxury and elegance.

After a decade of creating award-winning bespoke spaces, such as the Ace Hotel and the glamorous Boom Boom Room at the Standard Hotel, this line of furniture and lighting presents a gateway for bringing the unique world of Roman and Williams into a broad spectrum of interiors. Whether ultra minimal, contemporary, or the most classic of spaces, the Roman and Williams for MatterMade collection adds a necessary hint of familiarity, articulation and decandence.

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As knitting, weaving, and other traditional methods of textile production have made the leap from old-age pastimes to mainstream DIY hobbies, designers have been pushing the boundaries of what's possible with stitched and woven fibers. This week we found a late-spring blast of innovative handmade textiles—plus one new collection that was woven by the wind.

Exhibited at New York's Wanted Design last weekend, the Guatemala City design studio Fabrica's Seat Ball has a soccer-equipment core surrounded by spring-suspended cushions made out of cotton rope. The combination, which can be used for seating, a yoga ball, or an ottoman, wraps up a current recreational preoccupation in an ancient crafting technique.

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[Image: From a map of the San Andreas Fault, cutting through the Carrizo Plain, by T.W. Dibblee (1973), courtesy of the USGS].

Those of you sonically inclined might be interested in the latest weekend challenge from Marc Weidenbaum's Disquiet Junto project: "Read a map of the San Andreas Fault as if it were a graphic notation score," and then post the acoustic results to Soundcloud.

[Images: From a map of the San Andreas Fault, cutting through the Carrizo Plain, by T.W. Dibblee (1973), courtesy of the USGS].

This collaboration-at-a-distance between BLDGBLOG and the Disquiet Junto comes as a kind of sonic follow-up to the San Andreas Fault National Park architectural design studio I taught this past semester at Columbia, part of which involved designing architectural "devices" or "instruments" for the San Andreas.

[Images: An architectural "instrument" for the San Andreas Fault, designed and fabricated by student David Hecht at GSAPP].

However, the Disquiet Junto challenge literalizes the notion of the "instrument" a bit more, specifically listening for the sonic implications of the Fault.

Partially inspired by earlier graphic and musical explorations, by such composers as John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, among many, many others, the basic idea is that geologic maps of the San Andreas can themselves be "interpreted"—or perhaps willfully misinterpreted is more accurate—as a musical score.

They are, in Marc Weidenbaum's words, a "faulty notation" for pieces of music that do not yet exist.

[Images: From a map of the San Andreas Fault, cutting through the Carrizo Plain, by T.W. Dibblee (1973), courtesy of the USGS].

You can find out more about how to participate over at the Disquiet website. However, compositions are due Monday, May 27th, so, if you're interested, you need to dive in straightaway.

Listen to previous Disquiet sound challenges on the group's Soundcloud page (and consider following Marc Weidenbaum on Twitter for reliably interesting sonic news and world reports).

wants an Industrial Designer
in Cumberland, Rhode Island

Fred & Friends wants to give you the opportunity to work on a wide range of creative projects, and the satisfaction of seeing your ideas through from beginning to end. They design, import, and distribute fun and clever gifts, home goods, and personal items to specialty retailers worldwide and want you to join their in-house creative team as an Industrial Designer.

They do everything in house and encourage each person who works there to contribute ideas and collaborate in the production process. Spruce up your outstanding portfolio and click the link below. If you happen to have experience designing products for the housewares industry, you're ahead of the game!

Apply Now

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I recently hunted down and acquired Braun's classic Sixtant SM 31 razor from a source in Italy. The freaking thing was made in 1962 and it still works perfectly, but finding it wasn't easy. For those of you who don't want to spend your days scouring eBay and Etsy, here's a chance to pick up another Braun design classic without putting in the legwork: They've announced they're re-issuing their iconic ET66 Calculator, designed by Dietrich Lubs and Dieter Rams back in the '80s.

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(Photo courtesy of Gebroeders Ezendam B.V. Source.)

The other night, while inescapably mired in a seemingly endless video stream of manhole explosions (which I recently learned are “[e]ventualities in subterranean chambers” to which “few large cities are immune”) and in an even more extended playlist of landslides and debris flows (in the hope of siting Fred Astaire and Shelley Winters), I stumbled upon the YouTube account of Gebroeders Ezendam B.V., a Dutch company that manufactures, among other things, pruning machines for plant nurseries.

Here's their Globus machine trimmer, which can clip 600 balls an hour, though they have models that can do 5000 an hour.





They also have a machine for stemmed bushes.



Shrubs can also be shaped into cones.



In the din of hydraulic pumps, combustion engines and whirring blades, and in the heady aroma of gasoline and freshly cut greenery, the feral and the hirsute are systematized and standardized — by machines programmed by Le Nôtre to hack weeds into Platonic forms — before other machines come around to uproot, ball and ship them to waiting client landscapes that have no patience for informality and flavor. In some ways, it's so Dutch.


(Photo courtesy of Gebroeders Ezendam B.V. Source.)

In case you were wondering, they also have a GPS-propelled pruning machine. Give it a LIDAR scanning system, so it can build a 3D field map for better navigation and precision grooming. Give it extra processing power, and it can achieve full autonomy. And then some more, and keep on doing so until they reach sentience. At night after work, they'll escape to their secret topiary gardens in the forests and perhaps in the cities, too, where they transgress from globules and Christmas trees into vegetal phantasmagoria.

Surely it would be preferable to give these cyborg coiffeurs artificial intelligence instead of Skynet's killing machines, to be strolling through gardens and orchards to catch glimpses of these fantastical beasts at work rather than escaping from heat-seeking drones, Edward Scissorhands instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger, sculpting human figures in hedgerows rather than flash sculpting actual humans into mounds of ash.

(See also Pruning an Arboreal Notre-Dame in the Amazon.)

Photos by Simon Markhof

With the help aerospace engineers at EADS, Somerset, UK-based Charge Bikes have refined and expanded their 3D-printed dropout production since we first came across them last August, as evidenced by a new vid from last week. However, German IDer Ralf Holleis does them one better with the VRZ 2 Track bicycle, developed under the VORWaeRTZ moniker. (Further details on Holleis's practice are scant; from what I can determine, he's connected to the equally mysterious designlab coburg.)

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#37: W.C. Rueck - "Daily Trophies" / #24: Ladies and Gentlemen Studio - "Mirage Shelving" / #36: Todd Isaacs (SPACECRAFT) - "Fir Horns" / #8: Christopher Specce - "Decoy" / #6: Brendan Mullins - "Princess Cut Diamonds" / #2: Andrew Sack - "Skate Wax Candles" / #9: Colleen & Eric - "Bonus Table (Podium Edition)"

For NY Design Week this year, our friends at the American Design Club presented their ninth group showcase, Trophy: Awards We Live With. Per the brief: "A trophy is a memento, token, or symbol, used to commemorate an achievement or victory. Whether they are awarded, stolen, or created, trophy objects can come in many forms." As with Noho Next (which included several of the same exhibitors), the exhibition occupied a basement café/bar space; unlike Noho Next, in which the work was distributed throughout the space, the trophies were cordoned off on a makeshift stage area—an oversized display case, if you will—framed by a kitschy slatwall backdrop.

#11: Craighton Berman - "Daily Aspirations" / #34: Taylor Mckenzie-Veal - "War Trophy" / #30: Muzz Design - "Ring of Approval" / #27: Made in Chinatown - "Stanrey Cup" / #5: Artin Yip + Chris Beatty - "Gnome" / #29: Misha Kahn - "Coatrack" / #35: The Office of Brothers - "Victory Shims" / #13: Egg Collective - "Badges"

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While Amazon had already received City Hall approval to build a new HQ in Seattle, apparently they've had a change of heart with the design, perhaps inspired by the forthcoming Facebook West and the Apple Spaceship. The skyscraper part of Amazon's multi-building plan remains the same, but they're looking to switch up one of their low-rise structures for something a bit more eye-catching. Here's the previously-approved, now-scuttled building design:

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All photos by Kathryn McElroy

It's been quite a year for the MFA candidates in the School of Visual Arts' Products of Design program, not least because the first-year students are also the first ever students in the fledgling program. This past weekend, the first half of their graduate studies culminated with ALSO!, a winsome design intervention at WantedDesign, which the tight-knit cohort of 16 students realized in the three weeks leading up to NY Design Week. They'd originally developed the concept for Sinclair Smith's five-week Design Performance studio intensive, and the NYCxDesign festival (which wrapped up just two days ago) was a felicitous opportunity for them to put their studies into practice.

Through a roving set of mobile interventions, visitors to the show participate in an unfolding narrative around celebration, sustainability, digital mediation, storytelling and scale, each expanding the conversation around design beyond form, function and materiality.

Broadly speaking, each of the six stations (two wearable, three carts and a single immobile station) offered a different perspective on not only the work on view at WantedDesign but also one's fellow attendees and the venue itself. From the uniforms—white short-sleeve button-down (with the logo emblazoned across the back), dark denim, white plimsols and orange socks—to the seamlessly constructed equipment, which remain as the tangible artifacts of the experience, the students crafted a thoughtfully executed body of work.

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In less than a month, Julia Davids will earn her Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree from Stanford University's prestigious Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a.k.a. d.school. To mark the occasion, she's publishing an e-book about her undergraduate experience—this is an exclusive excerpt of the second chapter.

Imagine you attend one of my design classes in Stanford's d.school at Building 550. Many of the structural elements of the building have been left exposed so that it has the feel of a partially renovated garage: cement floors, bare walls. Strange furniture is scattered about the floor; tour guides are known to explain that decorators chose "deliberately uncomfortable" seats to encourage activity. A smattering of professors and students have questioned the use of foam squares or wood blocks as chairs, but the seats remain.

You enter a classroom on the second floor, where 30 or so students populate gray plastic chairs. The room—in fact, the entire building—embodies the principle that furniture mixing is proportionally related to idea mixing. Utility pipes unabashedly expose themselves to you. You take a seat on one of the chairs, but your table scoots away from you because it is on casters. The rock music fades and class is underway.

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Here are some construction photos of the 2013 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (opening June 8 until October 20) in London by Sou Fujimoto Architects, photographed by Laurence Mackman. See more photos at Mackman's London Architecture Blog.







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Earlier today I happened to be near the east edge of the World Trade Center site, and I noticed the first bits of steel rising above-grade for the Oculus of the Santiago Calatrava-designed WTC Transportation Hub.

Unfortunately the only camera on me was the one on my "dumbphone," so pardon the quality:

[Top: Photo by John Hill | Bottom: Screenshot from EarthCam (click "Oculus" at bottom)]

Below my snap is an aerial view of the construction site from a webcam, captured today at 11:56am. The arrow shows where the steel in the street-level photo can be found in the overall plan, what is the eastern end of the Oculus near Church Street. It's not much steel, but it should be interesting to see this thing rise in the coming weeks, when I'll make sure to bring along my camera.

wants a Senior UX Designer
in Seattle, Washington

If you're an interaction designer with strong organizational skills who does not believe in the conventional constraints of print vs. web vs. video and thrives on variety and challenge, Hulu wants you to be their next Senior UX Designer.

The ideal candidate combines a world-class design sensibility and skills; a desire to make a huge impact in the new and rapidly growing online distribution channel for premium video and a passion for working in a fast-paced, chaotic environment with intense, demanding, but fun-loving co-workers.

Does that sound like you? Apply Now

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Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account by Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Damiani, 2012
Hardcover, 311 pages

On May 10, I attended a panel discussion at the Center for Architecture that followed the publication of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's account of the design and realization of Lincoln Center's transformation. This post is both a recap of that event and a review of the book celebrated that evening.



The panel consisted of five people: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio of DS+R; Anthony Vidler, Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union; Dana Polan, Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University; and moderator Edward Dimendberg, Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California. Dimendberg's presence allowed discussion of another book, his ten-years-in-the-making historical analysis of the firm, Architecture After Images, a book I enjoyed greatly.

Diller began the evening with a brief history of gaining the commission and of the book itself. In the case of the former she particularly praised Rebecca Robertson, former Executive Director of the Lincoln Center Development Project, for putting DS+R on the list after seeing their "Soft Sell" installation in Times Square. Bridging the project and the book was her statement that "buildings are one manifestation of architecture, books are another." With Lincoln Center, the book had to follow the project, because they were too busy during the process to work on the book, which they wrote, laid out, and even commissioned photos for, most by Iwan Baan. As we'll see, the defining characteristic of the book is how full-bleed photo-spreads alternate with gatefolds, or as Diller put it: "It's architectural porno (photos) mixed with a diary."


[L-R: Polan, Vidler, Scofidio, Dimendberg, and Diller.]

Dimendberg followed Diller, talking about what he discovered in the making of his book. He described both the book and the career of DS+R as narrative, something that grows from film. While Diller and Scofidio were architects on the margins when they began in the 1970s, four decades later (with partner Charles Renfro) they find themselves as architects able to maintain their integrity and be accepted as architects. This narrative arc continues post-Lincoln Center with projects in Los Angeles and Brazil moving forward.

Polan's contribution was fairly surprising and very interesting; he focused on "the theater of dining." He looked at the earlier Brasserie in the Seagram Building and the recent Lincoln Ristorante under the Illumination Lawn at Lincoln Center. Having written a book on Julia Child, and noticing how her set incorporated a dining room (a first) to link preparation and consumption/pleasure, Polan looked at each restaurant in terms of staging and visuality. For him, the Brasserie "puts objects into quotation," such as the blurring of wine bottles behind the bar. On the other hand, Lincoln Ristorante is luminous but varied, with three distinct zones and respective moods that arise from what can be seen, be it the kitchen, the bar, or the pool to the north.

Vidler analyzed the work of DS+R as a combination of two theoretical strands: program, based on John Summerson's 1957 article ("The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture") on the architectural program as something based on science, technology, use, and nature; and image, based on Reyner Banham's writings, such as his contemporaneous take on "The New Brutalism." Like Dimendberg, Vidler finds narrative to be an important part of DS+R's work; for him, program and image are combined in unique ways through their use of narrative, of "remaking the story."



So with these thoughts from the panel discussion in mind, Lincoln Center Inside Out clearly tells a story. It is the penultimate narrative of the physical transformation of Lincoln Center, told by the architects but incorporating the myriad players into the story. (The last spread in the book is actually DS+R's "Chart of Accountability," which puts them in the middle but acknowledges the roles of every entity involved in the project.) In the most direct sense, the book tells one story in two ways (a mini-Rashomon): one through the photos and one through the gatefolds. The former is like a cursory glance at the place, akin to scanning a publication or website, while the latter is much more immersive and informative, due to the great amounts of text, drawings, and other images that lie within.

Appropriately these gatefolds remind me of DS+R's earlier book Scanning, in which many images are hidden but can be partly glimpsed through cuts in the perforated end pages. Readers can see the images in their entirety, but revealing them means defacing the book by tearing along the perforations (I've yet to do that to my copy). Lincoln Center Inside Out is not as much of a tease, but it does reconsider what a book can be through its gatefold structure. This unique approach results in an extremely rewarding book but one that made for difficulties in bookmaking; the first printing actually "did not hold," according to Diller in her talk.



The book's arrangement happens to be both geographical and (reverse) chronological, a condition that happens due to the lack of a master plan with the project, and therefore the construction of one piece after another. As Diller described it, the "project evolved in a very organic way," where smaller ideas were executed with a shared language. In my Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture, I describe that shared language as "peeling," but Diller defined it as a "double function" found in all parts of the project: the roof of the restaurant is also a bucolic lawn, the third-floor extension of Julliard is also a ground-floor public space, and so forth.

After some oral histories covering Lincoln Center's inception and campus plan, the book moves onto a chapter on the bigger picture of transforming Lincoln Center, highlighted by a slideshow recounting DS+R's interview process. The chapters that follow focus on the Columbus Avenue Entrance, the North Plaza, the Street of the Arts, Julliard School, Alice Tully Hall, and the School of American Ballet, in that order.

The best parts of the book are definitely the gatefolds, as most of them are self-contained narrative details about the project. As Dimendberg noted, reading one gatefold each night before bed is a good way of taking in the book. The contents of each gatefold are unique, but in general they describe how some aspect of the project came into being and then document it in fine detail. For example, the gatefold devoted to the LED steps at Columbus Avenue addresses the oft-heard question of "How do I get to Lincoln Center?" (even as people were standing across the street from it, per the text), then delves into how the risers are detailed and how the lighting runs work. The most gatefolds are devoted to Alice Tully Hall, what Diller described as a project in its own right.

Not every piece of architecture deserves such a thorough and elaborate treatment, but it is definitely appropriate for Lincoln Center, given the scale and complexity of the undertaking, the modernist canvas on which the changes took place, and DS+R's creativity in making the place inviting to the public. Of course, it would not be enough for DS+R to publish just another book on a project, hence the innovative gatefold structure. In revealing what was hidden inside the guise of a coffee table book, Lincoln Center Inside Out parallels the project's double function, making it a joy to discover the changes that have take place over the last decade.

US: CA: UK:

StokkeAustad - "The Woods"; Image courtesy of Maria Larsson / Home in the Woods

It's always nice to be pleasantly surprised by a serendipitous visit to a strong exhibition, especially during a week when there happen to be dozens of events to visit. (With the launch of NYCxDesign, New York's annual design week was as supersaturated as ever, what with the ICFF expanding into Javits North and Wanted Design nearly overflowing with exhibitors.) As with Field and Various Projects' Here & There, an unassuming exhibition was well worth the visit, and even though most of last weekend exhibitions have been broken down, packed and shipped by now, Home in the Woods will remain on view at 29 Mercer St in Soho (albeit by appointment only).

However, unlike Jonah Takagi's effort, Maria Larsson's exhibition is brimming with New Nordic and Swedish Modern quality, including vintage pieces by Bruno Mathsson and Sven Markelius along with works of art and design. As the sole organizer of the exhibition, Larsson readily admits that her role went far beyond simply curating the exhibition: an architect by training, she oversaw the buildout of the gallery space, as well as the PR and marketing.

Vintage table and chairs by Bruno Mathsson; leather goods by Tigerklo; stool by Lith Lith Lundin

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Stockholm-based architecture firm Belatchew is proposing to retrofit a tower on one of the city’s island neighborhoods with 14 new floors and millions of tiny piezo-electric ‘straws’.

more:Hairy skyscraper to collect energy through piezo-electric straws

When you think 3D printers, chances are you think of a cube-like desktop device. Something that can create anything you can design — as long as your creation is small enough to fit within the printer’s build platform.

more at Meet Mataerial, the anti-gravity 3D printer

Summer's nearly upon us, and we here at Core77 will shortly spend a weekend at a cabin rental where we can sit outside and drink nice, frosty beer in between spirited bouts of wrestling. But there's a design problem: While we can wrestle out in the woods as good as we can in the office, having cold beer outside means hauling up a cooler, keeping that cooler well-stocked with ice, and downing the beer faster than we'd like so it doesn't go warm—and that accelerated boozing sometimes impacts the wrestling results. There's gotta be a better way!

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We've seen plenty of excellent work by Washington, D.C.-based Jonah Takagi here and there at various exhibitions and venues over the years, but we finally crossed paths during NY Design Week at a pop-up shop/exhibition for his new-ish retail venture Field. Although he launched the company with childhood friend Daniel Thomas last year, Here & There marked first major event in New York, a collaboration between the D.C.-and-Chicago-based brand and NYC's Various Projects, who stock some of the carefully curated goods at their flagship store in the Lower East Side, Project No. 8.

Billed simply as "an exhibition featuring an array of artists and designers invited to create objects on the theme of travel," the exhibition was a highlight of this year's design festivities.

Posters by Timothy Colmant

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Those with dedicated workshops of their own design have the luxury of placing their own power outlets. Bur for DIY'ers making do in mixed-use spaces, or tradespeople on jobsites, the chaos that is extension cords is a built-in part of any project: You need to keep the tool connection out of the sawdust pile, and arrange the cords in such a way that you and others won't trip over them.

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Rich Brilliant Willing's "Monocle" wall sconce

Although the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is notorious for its rather unflattering industrial lighting fixtures, many of the exhibitors at the ICFF happen to design lamps and lighting for the appreciably more intimate settings of the home or office, where (thankfully) we spend most of our time. Here's a selection of some of our favs, including several new offerings from our friends at Rich Brilliant Willing, Brendan Ravenhill and Patrick Townsend.

The Gala Chandelier comes in a variety of configurations

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This is crazy—see those yellow dots on the map? Those are the locations of some 20,000 known shipwrecks off the coast of America, all mapped by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration as part of their Remediation of Underwater Legacy Environmental Threats (RULET) project. Many of those yellow dots are older sailing ships or coal-fired vessels, and it's no big deal if those sit on the bottom of the ocean; others, however, are World-War-II-era oil tankers torpedoed by the freaking Nazis.

Those tankers, and some other non-wartime wrecks carrying large volumes of oil, are a problem. It's only a matter of time before corrosion starts to release thousands of tons of oil from those ships into the ocean. Some 87 wrecks have been added to a national risk assessment report, with 36 of them deemed "high priority for a Worst Case Discharge." And these are just the boats that NOAA knows about; they estimate "it is likely that local knowledge will bring forward other vessels that [also] meet the criteria...."

If these ships start to leak, it is not just the poor Gulf states that dealt with the Deepwater Horizon disaster that will be affected:

The majority of the 36 higher risk wrecks identified in RULET are located off the North Carolina and Florida coasts. They reflect the intensity of World War II casualties in the Battle of the Atlantic. For the 6 Most Probable Discharge (10%) scenario, the high priority wrecks are located off of New England and Florida.

As this report was just released two days ago, any potential solutions have yet to surface.

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wants a Product Designer
in Boston, Massachusetts

Goodbaby, the #1 juvenile products manufacturer in the World, servicing customer brands throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, wants you to contribute contribute to their process with your own personality and unique skill set.

You'll be working in an open studio in Boston's South End with a relaxed atmosphere and a multidisciplinary environment where people are expected to take ownership of their projects with minimal management. You'll need to bring 5-7 years professional experience, preferably with experience in juvenile or automotive products and a great, easy going attitude and personality.

Apply Now

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Here are some photos of the Tchoban Foundation - Museum for Architectural Drawing (opening June 4, 2013) in Berlin, Germany, by SPEECH Tchoban&Kuznetsov; photographed by bcmng.











To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

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Hello Design Fans - Here is a wide image to kick off our new jumbo-tron Core77 format. Math is important, make it work for you, stay in school. Check, check. Keep your head down. Just a taste for now. - Edit: For those of you who are interested, the image is from Pratt's 1967 yearbook - a fair spell before Core77 was there - but still a favorite - Math: it's fundamental. Found here- p.s. if you have one of these we would love to buy it from you. Edit 2, : "The Fibonacci Sequence/ Reservoir Dogs Poster You Never Knew You Needed" Until Now.

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While I understand the appeal of the golden ratio as a rational approach to aesthetics most people would probably agree that it's impossible to reduce beauty to a series of numeric relationships. Yet the myth persists, and it should come as no surprise that these putatively ideal proportions might hypothetically inform graphic design as well—after all, the very premise of digital software is to allow us to create vector images with mathematically unerring accuracy.

And of all the countless logos that we see on a daily basis, Apple's ideogrammatic fruit is a leading candidate for a hypothetically golden (or hypothetically rational, as it were) logomark. Fed up with the conjecture, Quora's David Cole recently decided to investigate. We won't ruin it for you, but it's a fascinating read, not least for Cole's highly systematic approach.

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You've heard the expression that [American] football is a game of inches. So, increasingly, is living in Manhattan.

This video of Luke Clark Tyler's apartment (captured by Kirsten Dirksen's Fair Companies) has racked up nearly two million hits, and for good reason: Tyler downsized from his previous 96-square-foot palace to shoehorn his life into a 78-square-foot studio. But what really makes this video distinct from other "tiny living" vids we've seen, and what should be of interest to the Core77 reader, is that Tyler is a trained architect who can design, build and install his own things, like his sideways Murphy Bed.

Also observe the little details, like how he's using eyehooks as toothbrush- and razor-holders and how the bottle-stays on his shelves are just wooden dowels held in place by two carefully-placed sheetrock screws on either side.

This is giving us a potentially cruel idea for design education—but before we get to that, watch the vid:

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The "Periodic" table by One & Co. was displayed front and center
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Design agency smallpond looked to go big time for the inaugural NYCxDesign festival, entering the fray with the support of London's Designjunction. The new INTRO NY show was modest in the best way possible, a showcase of smaller, mostly non-NYC design brands in a well-lit, street-level space in the heart of Little Italy (there was audible din from a parade two blocks over when I visited on Saturday morning).

If on-site retail—a curated neo-utility pop-up shop—and refreshments seem to be par for the course at design shows these days, the backyard pop-up cafe was a nice touch (though I imagine it was rained out on Sunday).

In addition to furnishing the patio, San Francisco's Council made a strong showing with products new and old. They've brought a handful of young designers into the fold since the brand debuted at ICFF in 2007, including Chad Wright, who was happy to discuss the "Twig" chair that he designed for the brand.

The "Periodic" table by One & Co. was displayed front and center

The new "Index" series by Jonah Takagi for Council; Wright's "Twig" chair at right

The "Divis" dining table by Mike and Maaike

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A Weekly Dose of Architecture Updates:

This week's dose features The Public Theater in New York City by Ennead Architects:


The featured past dose is Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas by Ennead Architects:


This week's book review is Where Are the Utopian Visionaries?: Architecture of Social Exchange edited by Hansy Better Barraza (L):

(R): The featured past book review is The Illegal Architect by Jonathan Hill.

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :

American-Architects Building of the Week:

Robinson Nature Center in Columbia, Maryland, by GWWO Inc./Architects:

[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].

An incredible example of what can be done with laser-cutting, Amanda Ghassaei's project "Laser Cut Record" features music inscribed directly into cut discs of maple wood, acrylic, and paper, resulting in lo-fi but playable records.



For what they are, the otherwise scratchy and off-kilter audio quality is actually quite amazing, and the sounds themselves are made all the more haunting and strange by the crackling noise and resonance of the material that hosts them.

[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].

Some technical details are available at Ghassaei's Instructables page, and you can see the laser-cutting itself at work in the following video.



I'm reminded of a short letter called "Acoustic Recordings from Antiquity," written to the Proceedings of the IEEE in August 1969 by a man named Richard G. Woodbridge III. The somewhat eccentric Mr. Woodbridge explains that he has been researching accidental recording of sounds found, after careful analysis, on the surfaces of physical objects rescued from antiquity—in particular, pieces of pottery originally shaped on potters' wheels (seen here as a kind of primordial record platter).

Woodbridge even claims some sounds have been "recorded" as re-playable waves in the slowly drying shapes of oil paintings.

To listen to these lost recordings, the letter suggests, you simply hold a record cartridge near the work of pottery in question, such that the needle of the phonograph can "be positioned against a revolving pot mounted on a phono turntable (adjustable speed) 'stroked' along a paint stroke, etc." When this was done properly, he claimed, a "low-frequency chatter sound could be heard in the earphones."

That is, the voices of people present in the room during the making of the pot could be re-played from the surface of the pot itself.

[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].

Woodbridge suggests that this might have alternative applications: "This is of particular interest as it introduces the possibility of actually recalling and hearing the voices and words of eminent personages as recorded in the paint of their portraits or of famous artists in their pictures." So an experiment was orchestrated:

With an artist’s brush, paint strokes were applied to the surface of the canvas using “oil” paints involving a variety of plasticities, thicknesses, layers, etc., while martial music was played on the nearby phonograph. Visual examination at low magnification showed that certain strokes had the expected transverse striated appearance. When such strokes, after drying, were gently stroked by the “needle” (small, wooden, spade-like) of the crystal cartridge, at as close to the original stroke speed as possible, short snatches of the original music could be identified.

Through this technique, the overlooked—overlistened?—acoustic qualities of various objects, beyond high-brow pottery and oil paintings, can thus be revealed:

Many situations leading to the possibility of adventitious acoustic recording in past times have been given consideration. These, for example, might consist of scratches, markings, engravings, grooves, chasings, smears, etc., on or in “plastic” materials encompassing metal, wax, wood, bone, mud, paint, crystal, and many others. Artifacts could include objects of personal adornment, sword blades, arrow shafts, pots, engraving plates, paintings, and various items of calligraphic interest.

Woodbridge calls the pursuit and revelation of these sounds "acoustic archaeology."

[Image: Like the rings of Saturn, from "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei; in fact, perhaps the rings of Saturn are an unread recording...].

But why stop at sounds?

Perhaps in two years' time, we'll watch as Amanda Ghassaei cuts DVDs—"the data on a DVD is encoded in the form of small pits and bumps in the track of the disc"—with a combined and simultaneous laser-cutter/3D printer ensemble, coating inscribed "small pits and bumps" with reflective metals.

Suddenly, wood, rock, metal, even exposed geology in situ can host visual content. Indeed, perhaps it already does, but we haven't invented—or we simply haven't applied—the right technologies for decoding it. In other words, we have DVD players; we just haven't, learning from Richard G. Woodbridge III, used them to "read" other materials.

In August 2015, you and some friends hike up to a rock wall in the middle of Utah, and there are DVDs printed all over the surface of the hillside, full-length albums laser-burned into White Rim sandstone, and audio-visual pilgrims carrying deconstructed laser-lens systems, scanning for hidden film fests and warbling soundtracks, swarm every surface all around them.

It's the rise of geomedia.

The latest in what is becoming a corridor of extremely tall condo towers along 57th Street in Manhattan is Rafael...

Yesterday I stopped by Leslie Feely Fine Art on Manhattan's Upper East Side to check out the exhibition Frank Gehry At Work, on display until June 29. The exhibition collects about 30 process models, some for buildings that were completed, others as studies for projects never realized. Below are some of my photos and impressions.



Given the focus on Gehry "at work," the models range from messy to really messy—tape and hot glue are evident where needed to hold the metal, plastic, paper, wood, and even cloth into Gehry's distinctive forms. Easily my favorite piece is the one done in lead (below photo); even though it is undeniably Gehry, the fact it is made from one sheet of lead and is self supporting (no wood armature like the model above) brings it closer to a piece of art than the others.





Some of the models are more like presentation models than process models, such as these above and below. Yet as a close-up of the above photo reveals, globs of hot glue are still evident, as if capturing the forms in whatever means necessary is more important than craft. Another model I like seeing is a fairly well developed model of the IAC Headquarters near the High Line, accompanied by a photo of the completed building. In particular it's the entrance canopy in the lower-left corner that interests me, for I've always felt that the entrance and relationship of the building to the surrounding sidewalks is one of the weakest parts of the design (if not his whole oeuvre). But this small gesture, if realized (the entrance is on the north, or right side of the model), would have shifted the center of gravity and sidewalk presence of the building most dramatically.





Gehry's paper model for Beekman Tower (what was later named 8 Spruce Street then "New York by Gehry") is also interesting, for it shows much more variation happening from floor to floor, rather than the subtle shifts that happen at the perimeter of the completed building. Obviously this earlier iteration is much more expensive than what was built (remember, one full elevation of the tower is completely flat), but it's good to see Gehry working out what a tower could and should be.