Unfolding space

House D in Japan by Takeshi Hamada 

A 2-D surface turning into a 3-D building by means of structure, light and space...have a look:

House D located in a suburb of Osaka, Japan was designed by Takeshi Hamada for a young owner. Located in a mixed area where there are industrial factories, parking lots, and an elementary school. there isn’t much greenery around and so the building was constructed as a response to its environment.
From the architect:

Architectural Planning
In this planning, I call the garage in the building site “Light Well” and I deploy the building in L type around the garage. There is only road in the north side and I intentionally didn’t make a window in this side and planned that all rooms can take lights and air from this “Light Well.” I put Gal-Barium Steel Plate on the road side of the housing and it configures the feature of this housing with wooden doors.
Inside
I planned simple space structure that all rooms enclose “Light Well”. First Floor: Western Style Room *1 Second Floor: Living, Dining, Kitchen, and Bathroom Third Floor: Western Style Room *2, Free Space Second Floor: Living, Dining, Kitchen (LDK) The floor is lime stone, and we could feel at home of our families by open design of stairs. Second Floor: Bathroom and Toilet The floor is lime stone as same as LDK, and it’s open space faced with “Light Well”. I planned children room in the third floor, and it’s next to free space and separated by wooden sliding door. There is no wall in this floor so that we would arrange the space depending on the change of family structure in the future and daily intended use.

Architect: Takeshi Hamada
House Name: House D
Location: Daito City, Osaka, Japan
Construction: April 2010 – July 2010
Structure: Wooden
Site Area: 66.00 m2
Building Area: 38.88 m2
Floor Area: 100.53 m2 – 1F 30.87 m2 2F 38.88 m2 3F 30.78 m2

Have coffee

FUNITURE MATTEOGRASSI : DALÍ DALÍ - LOW TABLE Low tables with soft leather or coach hide covered top. Top: bent multilayer wood. Base: chipboard panels covered with black melamine. "This table, designed for matteograssi, is the result of simple, light shapes at the same time demonstrating a deep character. A Salvador Dali's masterpiece comes to life, with a leather sheet which seems to fly sliding on the floor. This simple and essential idea creates a light and elegant effect.  Thanks to the fact that you can buy a single table or easily place one table to another." Matteo Nunziati

Play off

Hektik Makes Adorable Kid Stuff

www.hektik.cc

Hektik Boutique is the e-shop for the Hektik brand products designed by two designers from Holland. Not only do I think they have an adorable collection of children’s clothing, toys and decor, but the new e-shop design is equally as adorable.

Find out

• British Art Show opens in London for first time in 21 years

Influential contemporary art exhibition held every five years opens at Hayward Gallery, featuring work by Roger Hiorns, Sarah Lucas and Wolfgang Tillmanns

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  Matthew Darbyshire at British Art Show: who would live in a display like his? - video
  Adrian Searle visits British Art Show 7 at the Hayward gallery and deconstructs Matthew Darbyshire's installation on consumerism
  
  
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/video/2011/feb/16/darbyshire-british-art-show-video?intcmp=239
  
  
  

• Mark Brown, Arts correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 February 2011 17.17 GMT
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Some visitors to the seventh British Art Show – staged every five years and one of the visual art calendar's highlights – will be correct: that is indeed a naked young man perched on a park bench watching a fire go out.

He will not be there all of the time, however, and most people will have to make do with looking at the bench. The work is by Roger Hiorns, one of 39 artists chosen to take part in what is intended as a showcase of the best contemporary art from the last five years.

Since 1979 the show, organised by Hayward Touring, has over the course of a year visited four different cities across the UK, this time opening to acclaim in Nottingham where it attracted 114,000 visitors. The Guardian's Adrian Searle, who has seen them all, called it "the best British Art Show I've seen".

Remarkably, it is has not been seen in London for 21 years. "It is an amazing survey of British art and it is crazy that London audiences have been deprived of seeing it," said Hayward director Ralph Rugoff. "It is long overdue – and we won't wait another 20 years."

The show opens today and includes work by well-established artists such as Hiorns, Sarah Lucas, Wolfgang Tillmans as well as less well-known artists, some not even attached to commercial galleries.

Curators Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton were thrown together two years ago in a kind of "arranged marriage" to seek out the most significant contributions to contemporary art over the last five years.

On their first meeting they both wrote down 10 artists they thought should be in the show. To their relief, nine out of ten were the same. They then agreed that they would agree on every single artist "otherwise you just end up horse trading", said Morton.

Le Feuvre added: "We very much wanted this to be 'an exhibition' rather than a survey. In the past some of the British Art Shows have tried to identify a movement or a trend and we feel really strongly that when you're doing something in the moment that it's happening, you can't do that, it's impossible.

"We're living in the present so all we can do is look, analyse and make a proposal for what we feel is really important."

Having said that, the pair have noticed 'tendencies' rather than trends. "An interest in history is one," said Morton. "Another is an interest in narrative, another is quite serious research-based work – a move away from the one-liner, a move away from the spectacular in any kind of obvious sense."

The show is a big deal for all the artists. "Lots of the artists in the show remember the British Art Show from when they were teenagers or at art school ... [It was] the first time they encountered a mass of art," said Le Feuvre.

• The British Art Show runs at the Hayward Gallery, London until 17 April and will be in Glasgow, 28 May-21 August, and Plymouth, 17 September-4 December.Art and design

Come in

Diogo Aguiar and Teresa Otto (Universidade do Porto, today: www.likearchitects.com) 

with the project Temporary Bar in Porto, Portugal

Temporary Bar, 2008

Photo: Sandra Neto

Short description

The temporary bar made of commercially available plastic storage boxes, designed by Diogo Aguiar and Teresa Otto of the University of Porto, was created for a competition. The task was to develop representative structures that could be realized quickly, simply, and inexpensively within the space of a week. The parallelotope consists of boxes with different depths that are illuminated by LEDs and mounted on a steel construction. The dimensions of the storage boxes (300 x 420 mm) serve as a raster for the entire project.

Jury statement
An appealing pavilion is made of simple, commercially available, inexpensive products. Mass-produced plastic boxes are innovatively used for purposes other than the intended ones and transformed into an unusual building material. The modular architecture consisting of ‘found’ products is flexible and variable and, thanks to the illumination with LEDs, is an interesting sculptural object. 

Step by step

http://www.archello.com/en/product/stone-and-modern-concrete-stairs

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No matter

The Matter of Things

http://www.stockholmfurniturefair.se/

Beckmans College of Design unveiled a new project this past week at the 2011 Stockholm Furniture Fair called The Matter of Things. A collection of pieces from 13 graduating Beckmans students worked together with second-year students in Advertising and Graphic Design to create the project with the goal to “let ideas, research and process be in focus.”
The exhibition pieces visually display the research done in the creation of each product and the way in which the object and materials interact, as well as how we communicate with the object.
The Advertising and Graphic Design students developed the concept of communication, print, exhibition design, digital communication and a documentary.
Here is a sampling of some of the pieces that were part of the exhibition:

The Matter of Bonding by Anna Glansén

The Matter of Everyday Moments by Elin Hedlund

The Matter of the Unintended by Hannes Lennartsson

The Matter of Symbiosis by Eddi Törnberg

The Matter of Human Impression by Hanna Billqvist

The Matter of Perspective by Gustav Carlberg
If you want more information check out the project website or read a beautiful article on the exhibition on Yazter.

Dress up

Envirosax Reusable Bag Dress by Amit Ayalon

Envirosax, the company that creates designer reusable bags, revealed a couture dress made by recent design grad Amit Ayalon, unveiled at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival Alive! Expo Green Pavilion. The patterns selected range from floral prints to Japanese and Bohemian designs. The motif consists of a jacket, Victorian corset, back scroll piece, bustle and skirt.
Amit, who was selected by Envirosax to create the dress, is a recent graduate from the Australian Institute of Creative Design and is an aspiring fashion and costume designer. Amit is also in the process of working on her couture design collection, Becoming Silhouettes by Amit Ayalon, which has released its first couture collection called The Neverland Collection. Inspired by fantasy movies such as Lord of the Rings and Avatar, The Neverland Collection gives the garments a dreamy feel showcasing a mixture of femininity and strength, the fairy and the warrior.

Dress well

A great inspiring blog: http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com 

SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 2011

On the Street...Moss Wall, Florence

THURSDAY, JANUARY 13, 2011

On the Street...Black, White, Red, Florence