For That Minimalist Interior: a Surfeit of Materialism
Sweden’s Michael Johansson takes all that (always originally much needed! useful! desirable!) stuff that has taken over our lives.
Then he forcefully gets it under control, compacting it tightly into packed cubes of stuff, like his Rubik’s Kitchen, shown above. His work was shown at Copenhagen’s ‘Meaning of Void’ at Galleri Christoffer Egelund last month.
In A Stroll Through Space and Time, and his other pieces, he meticulously stacks and interlaces the disparate items to create highly composed, compact volumes and narrative assemblages. Read the rest of this entry »
Benedictine Monastery Wins Highest LEED Platinum in USA
The Benedictine Women of Madison just received the highest rated LEED Platinum rating in the US (63 out of 69 possible points) for their new monastery, Holy Wisdom Monastery in Madison.
It was almost 100% recycled out of the former monastery there. Nine tons of building material were donated to Habitat ReStore, 8,628.6 tons were recycled, including the concrete which was crushed as a base for parking and paths and sculpted into berms, interspersed with porous concrete for capturing runoff rainwater. Only 12.5 tons went to landfill. Read the rest of this entry »
Design Dilemma: Decorating A Vacation Home
If you’re fortunate enough to own a vacation home, you may have already experienced the daunting question of how to decorate it. On one hand, you want your place to be comfortable and stylish. You also want furniture that is of high enough quality that it can withstand punishment from guests but not of so expensive that you’ll be worrying about stains and scratches every time someone sets a glass down. And if you rent out your vacation home, there’s another factor to consider: your decor has to appeal to people other than yourself.
So how do you handle this quandary? A few ideas:
1) Go for hardworking floors. Before you consider anything else, consider what’s under your feet. Whatever you find there will have a big impact on your life forever after. Floors need to be resistant to spills and accidents, impervious to high traffic, able to stand up to sandy shoes, sea water, slushy snow boots, or whatever you’re most likely to track in from the great outdoors. Tile and stone floors can be an excellent choice for both beach and mountain settings, as they are both easy to clean and resistant to water. Hardwood floors can also be a good choice. Avoid wall-to-wall carpeting, laminates and soft wood floors which don’t handle water well.
2) Make it personal. A vacation home is an excellent opportunity to indulge in whimsicality — after all, your second home is the backdrop to some of your most memorable times. Your decor should encourage that feeling of specialness, not detract from it. (Think of how inviting that generic motel look is.) Give your vacation home a spark of originality by shopping flea markets, adding in quirky antiques, hanging interesting artwork. It’s a bit like designing a stage set for a play. You want the design to say something about who you are and to suggest a specific ambiance which will hopefully help foster a relaxing, enjoyable vacation.
3) Keep it casual. Keep things informal by adopting a well-worn look that invites you to put your feet up. Who wants to be worried about watermarks on the coffee table and stains on the rugs? Distressed and weathered furniture alleviate stress as the time-worn look is part of the charm. Mismatched furniture suggests history and the passage of time, which can lend a sense of rootedness to a vacation home. While sleek and highly polished interiors are beautiful to look at, they can rarely stand up to the wear and tear that results from a happy vacation.
4) Keep it simple. A vacation home is not the place to display your collections. You don’t want too much furniture (other than a lot of chairs to accomodate big dinners), nor too much clutter. The goal is a restful feeling that gives you the mental space you need to relax. In addition, if you host many houseguests or rent your home out, less clutter means fewer objects to get broken! 
Images: Bravacasa.it
FSIGN’s Energy Breakthrough: Magic, Chic LED Lighting
By boldly embracing the inherent qualities of LED, and turning those into the feature, German design firm FSIGN has broken the “buy barrier” for truly energy efficient lighting with its new line shown at light+building this year.
The low construction height of LEDs makes it possible to create lights that seem like magic, they are so thin. At 10 watts each, they are magic.
Each of these individual little planar embedded LED modules take only 1/4 watt to run, this whole light set takes 5 watts.
FSIGN’s entire one.LED lighting family is made with an aluminium bonded body, which helps transfer the thermal energy created into light, for the absolute minimum of waste heat generation.
All LED lighting is far more energy-efficient than fluorescent lighting, and is even is more energy-efficient when compared to incandescent lighting. But till now most has been ugly and cold. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Scary Resort Architecture What Our World Needs Now?
Imagine taking a dip in this hotel pool. Not in the harbor. The pool is 55 stories up on the top of this precarious-looking connected rooftop of the $5.7 billion Marina Bay Sands Hotel mega-scale resort designed by Moshe Safdie, that just opened in Singapore. The buildings appear to totter slightly as if to suggest the carbon footprint is just almost too much to bear.
The planet does not need another gigantic wasteful resort for the rich. But here it is anyway, lording it over the harbor below, out of place, unstable, and frighteningly fragile. Read the rest of this entry »
Design Dilemma: In Search of Sustainable Design
We’ve written before about the inherent conflict between following decorating trends and living sustainably. It’s really quite impossible to keep up with the latest and newest in home design without trashing the earth. In a previous post, we discussed ways to decorate that are gentler on the planet, including buying secondhand, conducting furniture swaps with friends, and repurposing objects in your home from one use to another. Today we want to explore a slightly different but related concept: choosing furniture that offers a sustainable design to begin with. This topic has become a hot one in recent years, and was even the subject of a recent manifesto entitled “Time to Rethink Design” by Swedish designer David Carlson. He argues that we are facing a pandemic of ‘designed stuff’ and have reached a “contamination point” which he labels a crisis in design. He calls for a guerrilla war against ‘designerism.’ Part of designerism is designing objects that offer no new solutions (and sometimes even present added problems) to functionality.
As far as consumers on the other end of design go, we can take certain steps to ensure what we buy doesn’t end up in a landfill:
1) Buy simple. The beauty of simple furniture pieces is that they can adapt easily to many different looks. If you’re into country chic one year, but change to an urban sophisticate look later on, there will be a greater probability that simple furniture pieces with classic clean lines can make the transition.
2) Buy functional. It goes without saying that whatever you buy should serve its purpose well. Chairs need to be sturdy, sofas need to be comfortable, beds need to provide adequate support for your back, desks need to provide enough space for your computer and papers. In general, furniture needs to be easy to clean, able to adapt to varying color schemes and not too cumbersome to use for its stated purpose. If you’ve fallen in love with a gorgeous couch that’s uncomfortable and hard to keep clean, keep looking.
3) Buy with an eye to how things will look in five to 10 years. Sure, everything looks good when new, but not everything looks good with time. When shopping for new furniture, imagine how the piece will look worn and scratched rather than shiny and new. Often, this means you will be shopping for natural materials that age gracefully and take on a new alluring patina with time. Think of how beautiful a distressed leather chair, a worn oriental rug, or a scratched up farmhouse table can look. The same does not hold true of particle-board furniture pieces, that look scuzzy — not noble — with a few nicks and scratches.
4) Buy quality. What’s the best way from keeping your furniture from ending up in landfill? Buy high-quality furniture that won’t fall apart after a year or two of use.
5) Change your mindset. We instinctively seek out good deals, and many of us believe that if something doesn’t work out for us now, we’ll just ditch it later. Stop thinking of your furniture purchases as temporary until you can afford something better. Instead, imagine that you will keep what you buy forever and make your purchases accordingly.
A Shaker-Inspired Adjustable Peg Furniture System
A simple system designed by John Arndt and Wonhee Jeong from Oregon comprises assorted table tops and legs that can be assembled in a variety of ways to create different pieces of furniture. Their design firm Studio Gorm will show it at the Direktorenhaus art space in Berlin.
The two Oregon designers are inspired by the Shaker culture of simplicity and modesty to create a furniture system that exemplifies the waste-not-want-not lifestyle. They would be especially useful in a small space, making a small space adaptable for different uses over time. Read the rest of this entry »
‘Between Cathedrals’ Offers Eco Vision of Religious Architecture
Sited between two cathedrals in Cadiz is the sort of soaring serene space that usually is found only on private property.
But this is public architecture. Albert Campo Baeza has succeeded in creating a modern vernacular for a new kind of cathedral design.
As a public space, its marble floor is just sturdy, simple pavers. As a meditation spot, it succeeds. What surprises, though, is its juxtaposition.
The piece, entitled Between Cathedrals, is, well – between two cathedrals. Two much more pompous cathedrals, both with their backs to the view of the ocean.
Between Cathedrals is sited in what appears to be the tradesman’s area. Shocking in its humility.
But think about this: we live in a different age. Five, six centuries ago, when we built these giant edifices, we were more sure of of our moral imperative to conquer nature. We now live in an age when we have so much ‘subdued the world’ that it can barely support us.
We now have a moral imperative to find a new way to honor creation and to learn to live more lightly on the earth that is our home.
Human-Scale Bridge Encourages Low Carbon Locomotion
New York studio WXY Architecture and Weidlinger Associates Consulting Engineers have designed a unique bridge for Xinjin in the Sichuan province in China.
The two separated strands look almost like a Chinese character etched against the night. Indeed, the five oval rings formed by the lines of bridge decks are symbolic of the five rivers that converge at this spot by Xinjin.
One of the strands is for pedestrians, the other; for bicyclists. The charm of the meandering human-scale path elevates both activities to ones that are pleasant in themselves, with varying vistas along their journey, not merely a low-carbon way to get around. Read the rest of this entry »
Red Clay and Blue Solar Make a Powerful, Gorgeous Roof
Italy’s Area Industrie Ceramiche makes the Tegolasolare solar tiles that are cleverly designed to look every bit as traditional as antique clay tiles made in Tuscany. Providing clean electricity for people who object to the look of solar panels attached on top of a roof, this is a real aesthetic solution – looking as low-tech as anyone could want to buy.
In fact the combination of shiny blue tile and matte-finished lay terracotta tile its itself a traditional Southern Mediterranean color and texture combination widely seen in places like the Cote D’Azure, Algeria and Morocco.
Unlike many building integrated solar products, this one uses traditional solar monocrystalline silicon, not the newer thin film solar (which takes more space on the roof to make the same power). Read the rest of this entry »
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