When Frank Gehry teamed up with Tiffany’s to create a new jewelry line, it brought the world of architecture to jewelry design.
His jewelry peices are minature buildings in sculpture form using striking materials that he is so famous for like wood, opal, ebony, sterling silver, granite and gold. He is continually adding new items to the line…my personal favorite is the torque collection.
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Designers Thom Faulders of Beige Architecture and Design in Berkley, CA and Sean Ahlquist of Proces2 in San Francisco, CA teamed up to design a screen facade for AIRSPACE TOKYO, a four story multi-family dwelling with professional photography studios, designed by Studio M / Hajime Masubuchi in Tokyo. The concept of this new building skin was to emulate the foliage of the dense vegetation that inhabited the site prior to the new development. The designers conceived of a intersticial layer that performs with similar attributes of the trees and creates a new atmospheric space of protection. Thom Faulders states, “Airspace is a zone where artificial blends with nature: sunlight is refracted along its metallic surfaces; rainwater is channeled away from exterior walkways via capillary action; and interior views are shielded behind its variegated and foliage-like cover.” |
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Image: Tatsuo Masubuchi
http://www.beigedesign.com/proj_airspace.html
Perkins + Will, has collaborated with the Adopt a Room Foundation to design a prototype room, that opened this week in the University of Minnesota’s Children’s Hospital Fairview. Some of it’s special design features include:
This is so cool, it could rival a chic hotel room!
http://www.adoptaroom.org/seeourwork.html
SensiTile is a fascinating building product that incoporates technology allowing various materials to react to changes in light intensity and color. Using the same principle that makes fiber optics possible, the embedded light-conducting matrix in a SensiTile material either reconfigures the shadows that fall on it or redirects and scatters any oncoming light. In an environment with ambient light, any movement around the material that casts shadows will produce a set of “ripples” on the material’s surface; while in darker environments, any beam of light falling on a SensiTile is redirected to emerge from another part of its surface.
Swarovski Crystal Palace has become a staple at design fairs across the world displaying their spectacular chandeliers. And it’s a mark of the growth of the London Design Festival that Swarovski Crystal Palace not only showed five of their celebrated designs at the recently reopened Royal Festival Hall, but they sponsored the entire 2007 event.
A commission by Swarovski Crystal Palace to design a chandelier is proof for any designer that they’ve truly arrived on the scene. The five on display at the London Design Festival were Mediterraneo by Gaetano Pesce, Pandora by Fredrikson Stallard, Mini Voyage by Yves Behar, Prived Oca by the Campana Brothers and Tulsa 1 and 2 by Michael Anastassiades, curated by Phillips de Pury.
