Low energy light bulbs didn’t have the best start in life, aesthetically speaking at least. But British designer Sam Wilkinson’s new prizewinning 001 bulb for Plumen is much more like it.
Archives for category: new technology
Rule: in life (and design), imitations are never better than the real thing. Though I suspect hi-res wallpaper ‘Scrapwood’ by Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek might just be an exception.
Like a moth to a flame, I keep coming back to these beautiful new pendants by London designer Samuel Wilkinson, where light bulb and shade share equal billing.
Bathroom scenes from the sparkling Patricia Urquiola designed Mandarin Oriental five star in Barcelona. No tricks, just understated luxury pure and simple.
With the on-off switch doubling as a dimmer control for the new-tech halogen globe, this limited edition shelf light is almost as versatile as it is cute. The work of designer Andreas Martin-Lof, the mix of materials is lovely. And with each component part lovingly sourced from the workshops of local Swedish suppliers, the A.M.L Clamp is a piece of home decor with a tail at least as long as its brilliant blue fabric flex.
As virtuous as they are beautiful, Arba are a new family of environmentally responsible lighting designed by Matteo Thun and Antonio Rodriguez for Belux. Choosing sustainable maple wood for both the shade and the base, Thun isn’t shy about highlighting the struggle many of us have with low-energy lamps, describing the aim for the project as creating light that is warm, natural and familiar, ‘despite state-of-the-art sources’.
The Japanese master minimalism all over again with the reopening of the Pleats Please Issey Miyake store in Aoyama. Light, surface, space as art, as just about only the Japanese can.
In an effort to kickstart the building sector, the Italian government is relaxing planning laws and encouraging its mainly apartment-dwelling populus to add a new room or two. Not the worst idea in the world granted, but with Prime Minister Berlusconi content to trust matters of design and aesthetics to the ‘good taste of the Italian people’, it did not take long for Piano Casa to raise the ire of architects and planners all over, including that of the venerable Massimiliano Fuksas.
So with all this in mind, the roof top ‘residential containers’ concept by Czech architects HSH seems like it might be a step in the right direction. The outside of the containers is left in the original rough steel finish – a deliberate ploy designed to neutralise the contrast with the architecture of the host building below. Interiors of course need suffer no such identity crisis. And, best of all, windows are simply cut in as required to frame the view.
Using ‘the most nothing building material they could find’, the creative types from Amsterdam communications agency Nothing have constructed their new office interior out of good, old, uncomplicated cardboard. Designer Joost van Blieswijk – a self-styled new generation artisan ‘more interested in designing chess sets than mobile phones’ – has used his trademark ‘no screw, no glue’ technique to fashion more than five hundred square metres of laser cut cardboard into a series of otherwise classically-styled partitions, workstations, meeting table and even bookshelves.
Four long years in the making, Vegetal designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and produced by Vitra is a chair with a very long tail… In fact, as the story goes, one that leads all the way back to the gardens of the 19th century, to a time when young plants were painstakingly trained to grow in the form of chairs… But this just released work by the French duo is much more ode than parody. With Vegetal it was important for the Bouroullecs and Vitra to create not just an evocative visual rendition of a chair inspired by plants but also to replicate their natural growth patterns within the very process of mass manufacture. (Suddenly the four year time line starts to feel reasonable.)
No doubt destined to be a Vitra centre piece in Milan in April, the intrinsic goodness of Vegetal, I think, makes it a very suitable new chair for such troubled times as ours…
