Janelle Zara
Architecture & Design News

OBJECT LESSONS: Architecture & Design News

Posts Tagged ‘News’

Homeland Security on 3-D Printed Guns: “Limiting Access May Be Impossible”

We’ve been mulling/dreading the potential consequences of 3-D printing technology since we first heard about Defense Distributed, an organization committed to the unrestricted sharing and use of gun CAD files, last year. Months later, following the development of the Liberator, the world’s first successful entirely 3-D printed gun, and the Fed’s subsequent censoring of its digital blueprints, the Department of Homeland Security has officially declared the control of 3-D printing’s use in home gun manufacturing “impossible.”

A still from a recent video depicting Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson firing the Liberator, the world’s first entirely 3-D printed gun, via FoxNews.com

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Port Authority to Pimp Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center PATH Terminal

PARTY SPACE: The long-awaited hub, seen here in a rendering, won’t be for just transit users — it’ll also be available for private events.With its snowballing price tag (jumping from $2 billion to $3.8 billion, from four years of construction to six) and prominent position in the background of the new New York state driver’s licenseSantiago Calatrava’s forthcoming World Trade Center PATH Terminal, also known as the Oculus, is becoming the stuff of legend. To help recoup the cost of this legend, however, the Port Authority of New York in New Jersey plans to rent out the massive space for, undoubtedly, the city’s poshest parties.

The New York Post reports that the interior of the Oculus (“so large it can fit two-and-a-half Grand Central Terminals inside”) is getting outfitted with its own leasing agent, real estate broker Cushman & Wakefield, as well as a top-notch lighting and soundsystem so that top-earners can host their weddings, fundraisers, and exhibitions inside. That means in the future, you can point to your children’s driver’s licenses and tell them that that’s the place where you transferred during your commute, partied with Kanye, and married their father.

—Janelle Zara

photo courtesy the architects, via the New York Post

The Design Writers’ Wishlist: 3 Gems From the ICFF We’d Like to Go Home With

Newcomers to the International Contemporary Furniture Fair could best describe the gargantuan annual trade show as the design world’s fashion week. It’s got booths instead of runways and lasts four days instead of 10, but in many respects, it’s the same party, different crowd. The ICFF swept through New York for the 25th time this weekend with its satellite fairs, furniture fanatics, and cocktail hours in tow, providing the stage for thousands of new designs to make their global debut. And while it’s the innovators that help keep the ICFF relevant, on a purely human level (just as in fashion), it’s the shiny, pretty, comfortable things you want to take home with you. Here are just three of the pieces we fell in love with this weekend.

Neal Feay: Orange Void by Johanna Grawunder

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The New York Design Week Primer: 3 Essentials for the Unfamiliar

As behemoth design tradeshow International Contemporary Furniture Fair takes over the Javits Center this weekend, there’s going to be a flurry of satellite shows, talks, parties, and various other good times taking place throughout the city. They make up what is now known as New York Design Week, a bit of a misnomer since truly, it’s just one very long weekend. But the action packed into the next couple of days is so dense, you’re going to need help navigating. This is ARTINFO’s two cents about how you should spend Friday through Monday, whether you’re a seasoned design connoisseur or a curious newcomer.

A scene from Wanted Design 2012

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Brooklyn Architect Gia Wolff Takes Harvard GSD’s First-Ever Wheelwright Prize

Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design bestowed its first-ever Wheelwright Prize to Brooklyn-based architect, designer, and Pratt assistant professor Gia Wolf yesterday.

The award, an expanded offshoot of the 1935 Arthur W. Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship previously won by Harvard alums Paul Rudolph and I.M. Pei, has granted Wolf  $100,000 to travel the globe in order to realize her two-year research proposal, entitled “Floating City: The Community-Based Architecture of Parade Floats.”

“Gia, whose work is all about imagination, has identified the parade float—in such cities as Rio de Janeiro, Nice, and Goa— as an ephemeral form of architecture both laden with cultural exuberance and remarkable for the communitarian organization it requires,” according to a statement by Rice School of Architecture professor and jury member Farès el-Dahdah. Wolff’s proposal to study floats as an architectural and cultural phenomenal was chosen from a pool of 231 submissions from 45 countries. After working at Acconci Studio, LOT-EK, Adjaye Associates, and Architecture Research Office (ARO), the young architect (only 35 years old) now leads her own practice. Its focus, according to Wolff, is “performance and its use of space and objects to convey narrative, form, and emotion,” a description dually applicable to the interplay between a float and a city.

— Janelle Zara

Throwback Thursday: A Classic Castiglioni Reincarnated

Markus Johannson’s Cirrata lamp, named after a suborder of the octopus family

Beyond the obvious superficial resemblance — bulbous heads that instantly spark visions of drifting deep-sea creatures — Swedish designer Markus Johannson’s new Cirrata lamp has something better in common with Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s 1960 Gatto Piccolo. Like the Italian brothers’ novel use of sprayed resin as a means to softly diffuse light, Johannson’s lamp demonstrates an unexpected application for Corian®, a trademarked material typically found on kitchen countertops. The result is a free-standing floor or table lamp with fantastically eerie, bottom-of-the-ocean glow that can handle a scrub from a Scotch-Brite. [h/t Design Milk]

— Janelle Zara

Rem Koolhaas and Bjarke Ingels Compete to Design Miami Beach’s Much-Needed Facelift

While the Miami Beach Convention Center is the place to be in South Beach when major cultural events — Art Basel Miami Beach, for example — are in town, for the most part it sits as a “dead zone,” according to Rem Koolhaas, who says its “architecture is so harsh that instead of a positive effect it has a negative effect.” Having taken strides to correct the problem, the city is now in the wildly fortunate position of having Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture and Bjarke Ingels’ eponymous firm duke it out to redevelop the convention center’s 52-acre lot.

A rendering of BIG’s new Miami Beach Convention Center

Opening the site to year-round public use, designs for its planned reincarnation feature an expanded convention center, a new 800-room hotel, and an overhaul of the much-loved Fillmore Miami Beach at Jackie Gleason Theater.

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Hard to Watch: Movie Night With Marina Abramović and Daniel Libeskind

Do you ever wonder what the brilliantly avant-garde put on when they’re in front of the DVD player? Last night at the Morgan Library during Le Conversazioni, a film discussion series moderated by Italian critic Antonio MondaMarina Abramović and Daniel Libeskind met to discuss and share the films they’ve found to be the most impressionable in their lives. Enlightening as it was, it was an unquestionably dark romp through the freaky recesses of the Criterion Collection, much to the chagrin of the genteel Murray Hill audience (although we weren’t that surprised, given the generally provocative nature of their respective work).

© Mario Bucolo, PhotoSpotLand.

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A Token of Tax Evasion: Andy Warhol’s Gift to Studio 54 Founder Steve Rubell Finds Its Way to Design Gallery Lost City Arts

What happens at Studio 54 stays at Studio 54, although club co-founder Steve Rubell learned that the hard way. At the height of the nightclub’s popularity, one offhand comment on how only the Mafia could possibly be more making more money landed Rubell in prison for tax evasion in 1980.

An average night out: Warhol with Calvin Klein, a teenage Brooke Shields, and Steve Rubell by Adam Scull, 1981

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Design Fair Snapshot: Where Art and Nail Art Collide

At Collective .1, there’s inspiration in the walls.

Grey Area co-founder Kyle de Woody’s manicure, inspired by the strands of mirrored nickel of Michael Genovese’s “There’s Not One Split But 10,” 2013

— Janelle Zara