It's only the ninth of March and already we're having trouble keeping up with all this month's design news. If you're like us (harried, easily distracted, constantly hungry, etc.), then read on for a quick, painless recap of the month's biggest design news, so far.

President Obama Appoints Edward Tufte to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel

In his new role, the information-design guru (and vocal PowerPoint critic) will help track and explain the $787 billion in federal stimulus funds. "I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service," Tufte wrote on his Web site. "And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do."
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MIT's New Media Lab Building Opens

Fumohiko Maki's design draws on Piet Mondrian, George Seurat, and Japanese paper lanterns for a 163,000-square-foot exercise in transparency.

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As much as we love to read around here--and even though we rely on the printed word (and the e-printed word, or whatever you want to call it) for our livelihoods--by some Friday afternoons, we've reached our limit; it's all we can do to drag our text-saturated eyeballs across another line of type. If you're feeling about the same--and a quick nap isn't an option--then perhaps a video diversion will help. And we think we have just the thing: a collection of time-lapse architecture videos from around the Web. (more...)

In our running series on accessibility issues in buildings and cities, we’ve looked at some ways that New York City in particular may fall short when it comes to providing easy, well-maintained design for people with limited mobility. So when our publisher noticed what appeared to be a dearth of handicap-friendly design at a well-known restaurant--one that happens to sit in a landmarked building--we took it upon ourselves to investigate.

What we found was one small-scale instance of just how complex these issues can be. In this case, the restaurant blamed the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) for rejecting its request to install an exterior-stairwell hand rail. The LPC countered that it had never received such a request, and that it would almost certainly have approved one if it had. The restaurant’s architect had only worked on the interiors, and therefore claimed ignorance of the whole situation.

It didn’t seem productive to investigate the matter beyond this impasse—but we did want to take a closer look at the larger issues at play here. What interested us most about this case was the building’s historic status. How do city government and private owners reconcile the desire to protect the character of historic buildings with the need to promote accessibility?

In theory, the solution is pretty straightforward. When asked about accessibility features in commercial spaces, a representative from the LPC said, “We’ve never turned down a request for barrier-free access. Our job is to try to figure out a way to solve a problem without detracting from the historic building or diminishing its significance.” To prove the point, LPC provided us with a list of landmarked buildings where new additions had been approved. Where accessibility features like ramps or lifts are necessary, the agency works with building owners to mitigate the visual effect of those additions, sometimes suggesting an appropriate color or material palette or camouflaging the new design with landscaping.

But exploring the bureaucratic world of design regulation made us curious to know more about which buildings fall under what regulations—and since we’d already started, we decided to follow the rabbit hole of building code just a little further. Here, for those curious about how these things work, is what we learned: (more...)

What is happening in the murky video clip to your left? To be honest, I'm not entirely certain. All I can tell you for sure is that this is a preview of the new work by Joris Laarman Lab to be exhibited at Friedman Benda Gallery, in New York, beginning Friday.

Laarman is the young Dutch designer best known for creating the Bone Chair and Bone Chaise, among other bone furniture. For those limited-edition pieces, he used computer algorithms and a trademarked CAD casting method to mimic the growing patterns of bones in bizarre-looking aluminum or polyurethane seats.

His new work includes the Half Life Lamp, which again tries to imitate a biological process in a manufacturing setting. This is a case where it may be best to let the designer speak for himself. Here's an excerpt from a statement by Laarman:

This lamp Half life – it is half made of living organism and half made of non living material recently died. It was born on February 23 in a Dutch tissue culture laboratory. On the video Half life radiated brightly when it was in healthy conditions. The cells responsible for the emission of light in the hood of the lamp originally stem from a Chinese hamster. In 1957 these CHO cells were isolated from a hamster’s ovary and kept alive as a cell culture for research purposes. In the 1990s this cell line was enriched with the fire fly’s luciferase gene. Ever since than these hamster cells glow in the dark in presence of luciferine. According to present state of knowledge in the life science the development of bioluminescence systems in living organisms occurred naturally about 20 or 30 times in evolution. Well known examples of bioluminescence are found in bacteria, fire flies, and jelly fish.

So the above video illustrates this bioluminescence. And the final result? (more...)

Attention, New York artists and designers: the city's Department of Transportation just announced  that it is soliciting conceptual designs to refresh the new pedestrian plazas at Times Square. As you may recall, Mayor Bloomberg decided last month to make permanent the five plazas that DOT installed in the area last May. Now the DOT is looking for "a series of economical, temporary surface treatments" to keep these spaces looking good until it's able to implement a permanent build-out (currently slated to for 2012). Designs must enhance the pedestrian experience, improve the setting for Times Square events, and accommodate fire lanes, crosswalks, and other "use zones." The complete request for proposals is supposed to go up on the DOT Web site sometime today.

Update: Here's a direct link to the RFP.

For an enlightening and occasionally amusing glimpse of the arcane world of New York City landmarks preservation, point your browser to HDC@LPC, a new Web site by the city's Historic Districts Council.

As a nonprofit advocate for New York City's historic neighborhoods, the HDC reviews and comments on hundreds of applications for alterations to landmark buildings in the five boroughs. (In fact, it is the only organization to do so.) At weekly public hearings, it testifies to the Landmarks Preservation Commission about the appropriateness of the proposed changes. Now it's also posting that testimony online, making it easy for any New Yorker to tap into the behind-the-scenes conversation about the city's historic buildings.

This afternoon I spent some time perusing the most recent entries. One thing I noticed right away: the HDC is not afraid to play the neighborhood curmudgeon, giving a resounding thumbs-down to proposals that seem relatively innocuous to this casual observer.

For instance, you may think that installing a bracket sign on an old factory building in DUMBO would easily meet HDC's approval. You would be wrong. "Bracket signs gussy up the very simple, clean lines of Industrial neo-Classical style factory buildings like 72 Front Street, and after a while they lose their effectiveness, the clutter of signs all canceling one another out," the HDC wrote.

How about a rear-yard addition to a Greek Revival house in Brooklyn Heights? (more...)

Design activism is on the rise. The most recent and public expression of this movement can be examined at New York’s Center for Architecture. Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Saving Modern Landmarks recently opened to large crowds and runs through May 1. It chronicles efforts taken to save, or try to save, Modern architecture’s significant buildings. For me, the most inspiring of these initiatives is the ADGB Trade Union School (left), built in 1930 in Bernau, Germany, by architects Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer. (Meyer, you may recall from your history class, was the second director of the world-shaping Bauhaus design school where Wittwer was an instructor.) The activists in this case began working together in 2001, creating the kind of positive and sustained energy such efforts demand. Local government, business, and academia participated in devising a competition to save and restore the building. Now it’s not only a great place to learn, but a resource for the community as well as an inspiring case study for scholars and architects wanting to know more about the living, breathing buildings of the early Modernists.

Sadly, the record for saving Modernist masterpieces remains spotty. One of the most distressing losses to the cause is Paul Rudolph’s Riverview High School, built in Sarasota, Florida, in 1958 and demolished to make way for a parking lot in 2009. Our film, Site Specific: The Legacy of Regional Modernism (below) was chosen by the curators to be part of the show at the Center. It tells the story of innovative design followed by a willful resistance to new ideas and benign neglect. Though the local and international community of architects mounted a strong campaign to save Riverview—they convinced the World Monuments Fund to put it on its most endangered list—the building was in such bad condition that it was impossible for the school board and the public alike to imagine its rebirth, even though at least one proposed renovation scheme had great potential for bringing Rudolph’s design into the 21st century and creating a smart asset for the community.

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If you've ever wished you could take a peek at some of your favorite designers' off-the-cuff sketches and exploratory doodles, you'll soon have your chance. At this year's Salone Internazionale del Mobile, in Milan, the Italian National Trust and Moleskine will present an exhibition of 462 drawings by 150 international designers. Called The Hand of the Designer, the exhibition will be accompanied by a book of the same title containing reproductions of the designers' sketches; and, on May 13, the original drawings will be auctioned at Sotheby's Milan. (All the proceeds from the book sales and the auction will go to the Trust--and, in particular, its maintenance activity for the Villa Necchi Campiglio.)

The doodling designers include the Bouroullec brothers, Michael Graves, Hella Jongerius, Karim Rashid, Matteo Thun, and many others (a few of whom were also included in last year's The Hand of the Architect.) Check out several examples after the jump. (more...)

Last month, the Queens contemporary-art mecca P.S.1 announced the winner of its annual Young Architects Program, which chooses an emerging firm to remake the museum’s courtyard through a temporary installation-cum-party space. This year’s selection, Pole Dance, combines a circus aesthetic with a hint of existential vertigo. The structure consists of 100 pivoting fiberglass rods bolted to the ground and connected by bungee cords to a net suspended overhead. Visitors—quickly transformed into participants—move a set of multicolored balls that fill the net, setting the whole structure in motion. It is the creation of Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL), a Brooklyn firm founded by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu in 2007. Earlier this week, Idenburg spoke to me about the P.S.1 installation, architectural cynicism, and striking the perfect balance between whimsy and anxiety.

Why did your proposal take the form it did? What does it mean?

We take interest in the effects and workings of the immaterial systems we have created to organize our world, especially in relation to the way we organize our physical surroundings. We think people’s care and attention towards our physical environment could be reinvigorated by taking some of the qualities of the virtual into the architectural project. The idea of the structure as an “interface” —elasticity, instability, and connectivity—were ideas we tried to incorporate.

This sounds very serious. At the same time, it is an installation for a few months that needs to accommodate parties. We wanted it to be a really fun place, precisely through this interactivity. We are interested in creating spaces, not objects. We wanted it to be a total dynamic environment. (more...)

Last week, Parsons the New School for Design announced that it will begin offering an MFA in "Transdisciplinary Design" this fall. If you have no idea what that means, you're not alone--the program's chair, Jamer Hunt, recently made a short video to find out how some random New Yorkers would define the nascent discipline. (Watch until the end for a cameo appearance by MoMA's Paola Antonelli.) (more...)

If things go as planned, the Aircruise might just be the future’s slowest way to get around. For now, however, the 265-meter-tall airship isn’t a finished product; an announcement the other week billed it as a “visionary transportation concept.” Seymourpowell, the design firm working on the project, and Samsung C&T, the construction company helping to develop the idea, present the Aircruise as a luxury cruise, or a hotel in the sky. The decadent dirigible  would stay in the air using hydrogen and solar power. Since the physics of keeping such a structure afloat require a large volume with little weight, the concept necessitates vast spaces and few passengers: a recipe for luxury designed to “appeal to people looking for a more reflective journey.” Our bet is the design won’t get built anytime soon, but who knows--there’s always a chance it could get off the ground.

Related: Our 2007 profile of the French designer Jean-Marie Massaud included a look at his concept for a 700-foot-long airborne eco-hotel.

Update: The folks at Airships.net are denouncing the Aircruise concept for its proposed use of flammable hydrogen and its un-aerodynamic shape.

For the second year in a row, David Rockwell has taken on the set design for the Academy Awards—and, also for the second year in a row, it will feature an enormous cascading curtain of Swarovski crystals (92,000 to be exact). Otherwise, the 2010 set will eschew last year’s black-and-blue palette for a brighter, more streamlined look. The glowing white stage covered with circular patterns (and featuring a series of three rotating platforms) evokes, to our eyes, a modern take on a retro style—like a Sixties-era game show, but with considerably more bling. Check out one more rendering after the jump. (more...)

Images: courtesy Tata Motors

The Tata Nano, on display now through April at the Cooper-Hewitt, looks a lot like a Smart Car, though it’s sold for about a fifth of the price. The Nano is billed as “the People’s Car,” mostly because it retails for around $2,500, and while it’s currently designed, built, and marketed exclusively in India, Tata expects to roll out versions for the European market as early as 2011. It’s likely that the versions of the Nano sold in Europe, and eventually in America, will look more like the car displayed at the Cooper-Hewitt than the ones that have become popular in India; the yellow Nano in the museum’s lobby is the LX version, an upgraded model that has retained many of the features--air conditioning, leather seats, a music system--that were jettisoned to keep down costs in the original.  The luxury version is still relatively bare-bones, but a fuel economy of around 54 mpg might make the Nano attractive even to skeptical American consumers.

Quicktake: Tata Nano--The People's Car is on view in New York at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, until April 25.

View more images of the Nano after the jump. (more...)

Click the play button to watch Metropolis's editor in chief, Susan S. Szenasy, discuss this year's Smart Environments Awards.

The annual IIDA/Metropolis Smart Environments Awards recognize excellence in interiors that are in tune with 21st-century needs and desires--meaning that they are beautiful, sustainable, and accessible. Click here to read about this year's winning projects. For monthly coverage of the best in sustainable design, subscribe to Metropolis today.

In developing ideas for the What’s Next issue, we had a rather logical thought. The subject was “Landscape/Climate Change”--and the thought? We need to talk to a Dutchmen about this, for fairly obvious reasons. So we contacted Jan H. de Jager, a civil engineer and an expert on dikes and dams, who in the course of our conversation gave us a primer on the Dutch ways with water.
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Tell us how the Dutch approach the problem of rising sea levels. They’ve been at this for thousands of years.

Our coast is very soft and sandy, with a number of major rivers crossing into the North Sea. The country was actually formed by these rivers over the last one or two hundred thousand years. It’s a country built on sediments, which were brought in by the Rhine River. A couple hundred thousand years ago we didn’t even exist. Our ancestors have dealt with sea level rises in the past. And they had only modest means, so what they did was build little platforms, plateaus, where they built up their farms and houses. So when sea water would rise, they would run to their earth plateau and sit out the high water.

When the country got more inhabited, and now I’m talking about two thousand years ago, these practices were still in use. About one thousand years ago the population increased to such an extent that the people felt that we had to organize things. The water boards were an early form of democracy. Our oldest water boards' [jurisdictions] are over one thousand years old. They choose a chairman and a secretary. All the people living in a certain area had to contribute to the water board, whether in money or manual labor, or horses or cows to transport earth. And then we started to build dikes. Not the same sort of thing we consider a dike now. These were earth berms, which were extended over many kilometers to fend off possible high waters. The water boards evolved over the years. In the early days, there may have been one thousand water boards, in a country the size of Maryland. But up to sixty percent of the country is below the current mean sea level, which means most of the country is still being protected by dikes. The number of water boards has decreased. We now have less than one hundred, which is cheaper and easier to manage. People don’t supply the labor anymore. They just pay a bill every month. The inhabitants pay according to the size of land they own and the properties built on it.

That’s how they maintain the dikes?

Yes. And to maintain the water levels, because precipitation falls into these polders behind the dikes and we have to pump it out. We also have water seeping in from underneath the dikes that has to be pumped out. All those costs are borne by the water boards but paid for by the inhabitants of the area. (more...)

With snow blanketing the Northeast, and Presidents Day just around the corner, many of us can expect to have a little extra time on our hands this weekend. Maybe too much extra time—after all, you can only spend so many hours wrapped in your Snuggie sipping hot cocoa before cabin fever sets in. Which is why we wanted to take a moment to remind our readers of the numerous design competitions that are now accepting entries—including a few with deadlines coming up in the next week. If you need a project to work on this weekend, here are a dozen particularly worthy-sounding contests. (For a more complete, and frequently updated, roster of design competitions, be sure to check out our online Events section.)

Competition Competition 2010
Architizer.com is running a new kind of architectural award: one that chooses its winner from the losing competition entries of 2009. Every year architects submit thousands of projects to competitions without receiving recognition or compensation for their work; this award is a do-over. Entrants are only required to upload three images, a text description, and credit information for the entire team. Submissions will be evaluated solely on their architectural merit, not on the criteria of the original competition for which they were created.
Submission deadline: February 15

IDEA: International Design Excellence Awards
The IDEA program is a premier international competition honoring design excellence in products, eco-design, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research, and concepts. Entries are invited from designers, students, and companies worldwide.
Submission deadline: February 15

Your Great Green Places
The National Building Museum is calling on architects, planners, landscape architects, students, and the general public to grab a video camera, or even a cell phone, and document great green places in their communities. Films should be no longer than six minutes and should investigate what works as the local neighborhood’s “Great Green Place.” Selected videos will be screened during the D.C. Environmental Film Festival, in March.
Submission deadline: February 15

City of Dreams Pavilion Competition
This is an international competition to design and build a pavilion as a central gathering place on Governors Island, in New York. Entrants are asked to consider how they will construct this temporary structure in the most efficient and sustainable way possible. The goal is to create a pavilion that has net-zero impact and that serves as a prototype for a new, truly sustainable way of thinking about design and construction.
Registration deadline: February 16; submission deadline: February 23

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Last September, Steelcase hosted a symposium on the 100-year anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's Meyer May House, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At the event, Metropolis's Susan Szenasy asked leaders in the architecture and design community--including Jeffrey Bernett, Shashi Caan, Toshiko Mori, and Michael Van Valkenburgh--to consider both what makes Wright's architecture uniquely successful and what his designs can teach us today.

If you missed the event, you're in luck: Steelcase has just posted video clips of pretty much the entire conversation on its Meyer May anniversary site (including the above sample, in which several of the speakers talk about principles in design). Moreover, a live version of the symposium may be coming soon to a city near you; Steelcase is currently firming up plans to host similar events in major U.S. cities throughout this year. The first one will take place in New York on April 6, with Szenasy reprising her role as moderator. We'll keep you posted as the list of speakers in finalized, and you can always find the latest information on the Meyer May events page.

Previously: "Wright at 100"; (or read all our Frank Lloyd Wright–related blog posts)

Last year, the inaugural SHIFTboston Ideas Competition called on architects, designers, engineers, and others to submit provocative visions “to enhance and electrify the urban experience in Boston.” The competition sponsors weren’t necessarily looking for build-able schemes, but rather for inspiration—for ideas that would engage citizens and galvanize the local design community.

But the winning proposal, announced last month, actually doesn’t seem that far-fetched. The architects Sapir Ng and Andrzej Zarzycki—the former is an associate at Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, the latter an assistant professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology—envisioned a new use for the abandoned Tremont Street Subway tunnel, which runs underneath Boston Common. In their scheme, the tunnel becomes a network of underground cultural venues, including a theater, a cinema, art galleries, and a “media-infused trolley museum.”

What are the chances that such a thing could actually be built? Right now it’s simply too early to tell; according to a press release from Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, “[m]eetings to share details of the plan with politicians and policy makers are currently being scheduled.” Here's hoping those meetings happen, and that the city's politicians are canny enough (and/or jealous enough of New York's High Line) to take Ng and Zarzychi's proposal seriously.

Read more about the Tremont Underground Theater Space at SHIFTboston.org.

The Austrian manufacturer Wittmann has been making elegant upholstered furniture since the 1950s--but apparently its sofas and chairs would have looked just as good in the living spaces of the 1150s. At least that's the idea behind the company's new catalog, which Stefan Oláh shot at Schloss Ernstbrunn, a gorgeous medieval castle in Lower Austria. This is pretty much exactly how I plan to live once I find that winning lotto ticket. More photos after the jump. (more...)

Last week, the New York International Gift Fair arrived at the Javits Center with, as usual, a handful of terrific new products. Here's a quick look at a few of my personal favorites.

The Brooklyn-based distributor neo-utility was showing this elegant stainless-steel pen by Düller and the German designer Dietrich Lubs, of Braun fame. It's available as a ballpoint pen, a fountain pen, and a mechanical pencil.

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