B. Alexandra Szerlip gives a free, public talk about her new book, The Man Who Designed the Future: Norman Bel Geddes and the Invention of Twentieth-Century America (Melville House).
A ninth-grade dropout who found himself at the center of the worlds of industry, advertising, theater, and even gaming, Norman Bel Geddes designed everything from the first all-weather stadium to Manhattan’s most exclusive nightclub, to Futurama, the prescient 1939 exhibit that envisioned how America would look in the not-too-distant sixties.
Experiences are intrinsically composed by the tangible and intangible architectures that trigger the senses. It is through this delicate exchange of sensory information that we create lasting impressions from space, objects and interactions. What new exchanges can we envision and suggest through meaningful design? We invite design thinkers to envision new modalities for exchange.
Propose an innovative “skin” in which humans could interact with their surrounding environments and everyday activities through the different intertwined senses. The proposed “skin”/ product could be at any scale and serve any function that the designer envisions.
Foster + Partners' Craft + Manufacture: Industrial Design exhibition is currently on display at The Aram Gallery in London. It is the firm’s first exhibition dedicated to the industrial design work they have created over the past fifty years. It shows how “the science, art, and craft of making things” has been the foundation of the firm, and how the “collaborative nature of the design team pioneered by Norman Foster” has been translated into their architectural practice.
Crafted from pure silver and standing at 40-centimeters-tall, the Loa and Vesu vases by Zaha Hadid Architects are as bold and dynamic as the firm's architecture. In this fascinating video, watch Austrian silversmiths Wiener Silber Manufactur handcraft the ornamental vases in their Viennese studio using a combination of traditional and modern techniques. Designed by Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher, and a team of four designers, the vases reference "the volcanic forces of expansion and compression, subtle fluctuations and distortions of ripples", and are both as functional as they are sculptural.
Grimshaw Architects' dual focus on industrial and architectural design will be celebrated this month in a featured exhibit at Milan Furniture Fair. In this article, originally published by Metropolis under the title "Down to the Details," author Ken Shulman presents the firm's evolution in the context of the exhibit, touching on the projects being presented and more intriguingly — on how they are being presented.
Shortly after he joined Grimshaw Architects, Andrew Whalley was tasked with putting together an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London. Titled Product + Process, the 1988 show was decidedly counter-current—a parade of pragmatic, largely industrial structures Grimshaw realized in the UK in the face of surging postmodern fervor. Featured projects included the transparent building the then 15-person firm designed to house the Financial Times’ London printing facilities, and a flexible, easily reconfigurable factory Grimshaw built for Herman Miller in Bath. But it wasn’t the selection of projects that caught the public eye. “We asked our clients to take apart pieces of their buildings, and then rebuild them for the exhibition,” says Whalley, now deputy chairman of Grimshaw. “This wasn’t a typical show of architectural drawings and models.”
