Ezri Tarazi's installation of bamboo totems moves the dense landscape of China’s bamboo forests indoors, creating a domestic forest that supports a range of living arrangements. Photo: Udi Dagan

Round sections of bamboo hang from a metal structure to create a chair. Each section is suspended from a metal rod that allows the rings to turn.

Using FSC-certified plywood from Bolivia, Abbott Miller designed a chair whose components can be shipped flat and dry-assembled with a rubber mallet. Photo: Jay Zukerkorn

The chair design highlights the beauty of Bolivian wood, while also yielding three chairs per sheet of plywood, with a minimal amount of waste. Photo: Jay Zukerkorn

New York fashion designer Issac Mizrahi during a fitting session. Mizrahi used salmon leather to create an ensemble that includes a dress, jacket and shoes. Photo: Mackenzie Stroh

Yves Béhar meets with indigenous women who run an organic chocolate cooperative in Costa Rica. Photo: Serge Beaulieu

Béhar’s final design calls for stainless steel and sustainably-harvested Costa Rican hardwood. His chocolate shaving tool is designed to rest on the lip of a mug and resemble a twig. Photo: Dan Whipps

Not to be missed: Design for a Living World at the Cooper-Hewitt, organized by The Nature Conservancy, through January 2010.

Ten leading designers have been commissioned to develop new uses for sustainably grown and harvested materials in order to tell a unique story about the life-cycle of materials and the power of conservation and design. Projects include:
- Swedish industrial designer Yves Béhar’s chocolate shaving tool, designed to rest on the lip of a mug and resemble a twig, to benefit a Costa Rican women’s organic chocolate cooperative.
- Abbott Miller’s Bolivian wood chair design, which yields three chairs per sheet of plywood, with a minimal amount of waste.
- Stephen Burks Australian raspberry jamwood piece that allows for easy collection and processing of plant-based materials for use in the skincare line. He also created a complementary suite of jamwood containers to hold the cosmetics.
- fashion designer Issac Mizrahi’s unexpected Alaskan salmon leather-made dress, jacket and shoes.

The designers’ prototypes, drawings and finished products are all on display, along with video revealing their work behind-the-scenes. Design for a Living World is co-curated by graphic designer Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt. This is the debut venue in a national tour of the exhibition, organized by The Nature Conservancy.

The full list of featured designers and locales includes:

Yves Behar/Costa Rica; Stephen Burks/Australia; Hella Jongerius/Mexico; Maya Lin/Maine; Christien Meindertsma/Idaho; Isaac Mizrahi/Alaska; Abbott Miller/Bolivia; Ted Muehling/Micronesia; Kate Spade/Bolivia; and Ezri Tarazi/China.

Images courtesy of Cooper-Hewitt.

Surprisingly (but logically), Dutch photographer Desiree Palmen‘s “Camouflage” series (above) was inspired by a love of biology. While studying art at the Academie of Arts and doing post-graduate work at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (specializing in sculpture), Palmen says: “I maintained a special interest in biology, in particular the strange forms and behaviour and traits exhibited by mimics within the animal and plant kingdoms. I applied these concepts to my artwork, an exploration of human mimicry in urban environments using garments painted to resemble their background. Since 1999, I’ve mainly worked with photography and sometimes with video.”

Palmen lives and works in Rotterdam and Berlin.

Upcoming group shows include:
FOR SECURITY REASONS
28th August – 18th October
Showroom MAMA
Witte de Withstraat 29-31
Rotterdam
The Netherlands
Phone + 31 10 233 13 13

CAMUFLAJE – Camouflage
17th September – 1th November
La Casa Encendida
Ronda de Valencia, 2
Madrid 28012
Phone + 34 91 506 21 78

Delivery of new work in
Guest Pavilion of the National Museum of Ethnology
Steenstraat 1
2300 AE Leiden
Phone + 31 71 51 68 800

For more information, visit http://www.desireepalmen.nl/
Images courtesy of the artist.
H/T Toxel.com

I recently reviewed three great titles for Clear Magazine: Spacecraft 2, KarimSpace, and Marcel Wanders: Behind the Ceiling. Check out snippets from the reviews below!

Spacecraft 2: More Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts
Published by Gestalten / $75 / 280 pages
Pushing the limits of classical architecture and satisfying the changing spatial needs of modern life, the projects in Spacecraft 2 demonstrate innovation at its best…inspiring projects by young and little-known artists toy with conventional spatial design and reveal the genuine excitement and possibility that exist in architecture today.

KarimSpace
by Karim Rashid, forward by Daniel Libeskind
published by Rizzoli/ $86 / 256 pages
Karim Rashid is probably best known for his household designs for Umbra and Method. In KarimSpace, he shares real and conceptual interior projects for restaurants, hotels, residences, retail environments and public areas…his creative process and his ability to combine familiar shape and colors with unexpected materials…Sometimes space-age, sometimes almost biological, the work is always playful, and consistently lives up to Rashid’s definition of design as the “rigorous beautification of our built environments.”

Marcel Wanders: Behind the Ceiling
by Marcel Wanders
published by Gestalten /$70 / 320 pages
Wanders’ first monograph showcases a decade’s worth of provocative work: from personal art editions to textiles and furniture for clients like B&B Italia, Droog, Cappellini and Moooi, to architecture and interiors for Miami’s Mondrian South Beach Hotel and more. Photos, designer comments and sketches offer readers a first-hand account of Wanders’ world.

**Disclosure: links above are Amazon affiliate links.
To read the full reviews, visit book reviews on my Writing Samples page.

The latest installation by Pittsburgh-based artist Atticus Adams is called “Castles in the Air,” 2009. Set in Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory Museum this past May thru June, the installation – which for me simultaneously calls to mind elements as disparate as underwater plantlife, fashion and biology – is made of coated and uncoated aluminum mesh, monofilament, wire, grommets, and rubber. According to Adams, the project is based on a quote by Thoreau. And Adams – who was born in Oregon, raised in West Virginia, and, in his words, “cobbled together art and design classes from places like Tidewater Community College, Harvard University, The Rhode Island School of Design, and Yale School of Art for some creative experiences,” – cites Pittsburgh as his own Walden:

“I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with a license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”

To learn more about Atticus Adams, visit www.atticusadams.com
All images courtesy of the artist.

**Disclosure: book link above is an Amazon affiliate link.
H/T Sprayblog.

iukbox presents Better View blinds by Finnish designer Elina Aalto. The series of perforated black out roller blinds allow light to seep in through cutouts, creating images of the city by night. Four city patterns (limited editions of 1000 each) are available currently: Paris, Tokyo, Helsinki and Stockholm. This fall, iukbox and Aalto plan to launch a Berlin blind at the Galeries Lafayette in Berlin and at Maison&Objet in Paris.

iukbox is an art production agency that invites international artists and designers to invent new objects for interiors relating to a particular concept they call “Display.” Every collection is approached like an exhibition, and all products are limited edition and available online. For more information, visit www.iukbox.com

All images courtesy of iukbox

MTC facade corner

Australian design consultancy ARM continues to push the envelope down-under. Their latest projects, the Melbourne Recital Centre and  neighboring MTC Theatre, are turning heads round the globe, and recently earned ARM the Public Buildings category award from the Property Council of Australia Rider Levett Bucknall Innovation & Excellence Awards.

One eloquent judge described the projects as “understandable origami.” Looking at the new buildings, you can’t help but notice their strong angles, musical fluidity and theatrical color and shape – beautifully reflecting the spaces’ roles.

According to ARM, the complementary identities of the 1000 seat Recital Centre and 500 seat MTC theatre (both accessed from a landscaped civic plaza on Southbank Boulevard ) together “create an exciting new civic space within Melbourne’s vibrant arts precinct.”

The Melbourne Recital Centre was designed primarily as a chamber music venue. ARM’s design rationale considered the building itself as packaging for the valued music performed within, which led to its “box inside a box” structure. The Elisabeth Murdoch Hall seats 1000, while the Salon space seats 150 for pre-concert talks and experimental chamber music. The performance spaces feature timber panelling for ideal acoustics. Much of the multilevel foyer is visible from the exterior, allowing passersby a peak inside, and concert goers a view of Melbourne’s skyline.

The drama theatre is the first permanent home for the Melbourne Theatre Company. The Sumner Theatre seats 500 in a single tier, and the Lawlor Studio seats 150 for smaller productions. The building’s facade is composed of iridescent painted steel pipework and black aluminum cladding, creating a pattern that “challenges spatial perceptions through the blurring of 2 & 3 dimensional space – that which appears shaped is actually flat, and likewise, a 2 dimensional surface is actually 3 dimensional.”

For more information on ARM, visit www.a-r-m.com.au

Above:Photos by Steven Wohlwender

Photographer Steven Wohlwender’s latest personal series captures marathon runners’ emotions as they cross the finish line.  It’s a rich and beautiful moment. As Wohlwender describes it: “The idea is to catch runners at the very moment they cross the finish line of a full marathon (in this case the Grand Rapids Marathon), so my assistant and I stand just a few feet beyond the finish line and as soon as a runner crosses, my assistant raises a silk behind them, and I shoot. The whole process takes less than 5 seconds and assures they are still in the daze of exhaustion and emotion.”

For more information on Steven Wohlwender, visit www.stevenwohlwender.com

To read my PDN story on Steven’s moving series on Afghanistan, check out The Real Afghanistan on my writing samples page.

"Surf into Summer" by Mitchell Schorr

"Surf into Summer" by Mitchell Schorr

This July, the Fashion Center Business Improvement District (BID) displays Surf into Summer, a new series by artist Mitchell Schorr. A native New Yorker, Schorr is probably best known for his colorful murals (often placed in public spaces) and for a style and content consistently inspired by city life. Drawing from everyday scenes, Schorr’s work is energetic and vibrant, revealing a real sense of movement and love of color.

The paintings in this beach scene tableau installation depict surfers as they ride waves up to 60 feet tall. Says Schorr, “It’s like surfing a six-story building as it falls.”

Surf into Summer is on display in a street-level window at 215 West 38th Street through July 30th. The free exhibit is part of BID’s continuing series of public art exhibits, and is presented by the Fashion Center Space for Public Art, which celebrates the work of talented local artists throughout the year. BID, a not-for-profit corporation, was established in 1993 to improve the quality of life and economic vitality of Manhattan ’s Fashion District.

I Heart Public Art!

For more information on Mitchell Schorr, visit www.mschorr.com

To learn more about BID, check out www.fashioncenter.com

To read my interview with MItchell for BehindtheBurner.com from May ’09, visit Gourmet Groceries and Foodie Art.

Photographer Hugh Kretschmer is known for a one-of-a-kind, playful style, one that teases viewers’ imaginations. His eclectic photos appeal on multiple levels: Not only are they consistently surreal and fun, they’re also the result of a very unexpected hands-on process. Though the photos appear heavily Photo-shopped, they’re actually the result of a labor-intensive approach. I first encountered Kretschmer’s work in 2007, while I was the editor of Graphis, and I’ve loved his photography ever since.

For Kretschmer’s latest series, “Blustery Day,” (pictured above) he constructed dreamlike sets and shot models from above while they lay on the studio floor.  Says Kretschmer, “I was after a very whimsical and highly fanciful feeling. The scenarios were all very unrealistic, so I wanted the setting, styling and models to follow suit.”

Most of the elements we see in the final photo were constructed by Kretschmer himself, and were a real part of the studio’s physical set. Each of the three images above, says Kretschmer, is the product of “one shot with very little compositing.”

The clouds were made of foamcore, fiberfil, and muslin embroidered with yarn. The flowers were inkjet prints of flowers cut-out into the flower shapes, and the mountains were folded fabric with the “snow peaks” painted in. The kites were made with balsa wood, thread and tissue paper while the kite string was actually made of wire, so that it would hold its form.  The animals were little yard sculptures Kretschmer found at a prop house. The trees were made of plywood, chicken wire and Epson prints of bark, and so on. There was, admittedly, a little Photoshop tweaking (note the wine in the wine glasses in the top shot: the lawn is actually a wall with glasses mounted to it, so liquid was added in later).

Once again, Kretschmer seems to have made the act of photography just as fun as the art of it!

To read my behind-the-scenes profile of Hugh for PopPhoto.com, check out “Hugh Kretschmer Revealed.”

To see my interview with Hugh for Graphis, check out my writing samples page.

For more information on Hugh Kretschmer, visit  www.hughkretschmer.net, Bransch.net or Sharpeonline.com.