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Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

Cantone: Color-Labeled Beers Let You See What’s in the Can

24 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Products & Packaging. ]

color coded beer cans

Connoisseurs may look to artisanal naming conventions when selecting their brew, but some of us (like books via covers) judge beers at least partly by their colors.

beertone colored can design

A Spanish design agency named Txaber has matched brew types with Pantone hues to create a collection of color-coded labels, providing sneak peaks to potential drinkers.

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Thanks to the recent comeback of the can (versus historical preferences for bottles), these might just make it on the shelves. In turn, can designs give designers a broader canvass to work on, wrapping 360-degree cylinders. As a display strategy, these are striking alone as well as side-by-side as well.

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Similar project, dubbed “Beertone” by designers Alexander Michelbach and Daniel Eugster, provides RGB, CMYK and HTML code color values for a variety of extant Swiss beers, aided by the breweries.

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There is something accessible and yet artsy about this all, distilling a brew to its color and letting those of us who are more into lights and ambers (pilsner’s in particular, if you aim to by this author a six-pack) avoid mistakenly winding up with a brown or black.

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Shanghai Tower Timelapse Film Captures 4 Years of Construction

24 Mar

[ By Steph in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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The second-tallest building in the world seems to appear out of nowhere, shooting into the sky as if of its own accord, in this stunning time-lapse video of the skyline in Lujiazui, China taken over a four-year period by filmmaker Joe Nafis. The 2,073-foot Shanghai Tower is surpassed only by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and features a double-decker elevator offering the longest single elevator journey in the world at an amazing 1900 feet in under a minute. Its construction has made the skyline even more iconic, dwarfing all of the other buildings in the city.

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Every single shot taken by Nafis is a work of art – razor sharp, beautifully composed, dynamic – and seeing them all put together in the final video is breathtaking. The filmmaker spent 1,000 work hours taking and editing 350,000 photos to capture the process as each of the 128 floors is built.

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“Construction had already begun when I arrived in the city in 2009,” says Nafis. “The site was a large hole in the ground with construction crews milling around pouring concrete for the base. I began exploring the city looking for views and locations that would serve as groundwork for this video. In 2011, I secured a location with unobstructed views of Lujiazui where I could just glimpse the tower peeking behind the 185m (607 feet) Aurora Plaza.”

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“I maintained a camera there for the next 4 years until the tower was completed. In the meantime I took hundreds of thousands of photos from various viewpoints around the city filling up around 8TB in the process. In all, over 1000 hours were dedicated to this project in exploring, shooting and post-processing.”

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Power of Plywood: 15 Beautiful & Affordable Interior Applications

23 Mar

[ By Steph in Design & Fixtures & Interiors. ]

plywood student flat 2

Long considered a sub-material that should always be covered with something else, plywood has come into its own as a visually striking surface option for interior applications. An affordable alternative to solid wood, plywood is easy to shape, readily available and comes in textures ranging from the smoothest birch panels to mottled pressboard, and it’s getting a starring role in everything from micro apartments to cafes and modern offices.

Artist’s Studio in Tel Aviv

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Thin sheets of beautiful birch plywood make up a clever floor-to-ceiling arrangement of drawers, doors, cupboards and niches in this multifunctional artist studio by Ranaan Stern. The drawers are custom-sized to fit a collection of two-dimensional art pieces. The sliding door hides a folding bed, and features peg holes for displaying smaller works of art and hanging tools.

All-Plywood Tiny Student Apartment
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Created in response to a need for affordable student housing, this environmentally friendly ‘smart student unit’ is made from cross-laminated plywood and packs a surprising amount of comfort and function into under 100 square feet, including a kitchen, fold-down table, hammock, stairs leading to a sleeping loft, and even a private bathroom.

Modern Cabin Interior
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A striking, matte-black geometric cabin in the woods of Poland by Tomek Michalski looks dark and monolithic from the outside, but bright and cheerful inside. The designer used plywood for nearly all interior surfaces and built-ins, including the couch and bed platform.

Transformer Apartment
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This faceted geometric wall pushes out into the space within a 645-square-foot apartment by Vlad Mishin. Behind those plywood panels are books, a television, a kitchen and doors to the bathroom and bedroom.

Wall-to-Wall Shelving at Triangle House
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Raw plywood pressboard covers nearly all of the interior surfaces in Norway’s ‘Triangle House,’ from the stair treads to entire walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves.

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Power Of Plywood 15 Beautiful Affordable Interior Applications

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Ghost Loos: Visible Remains of London’s Underground Bathrooms

23 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

underground toilet

Tentatively titled “Toilets at Dawn,” this photo series documents the strange phenomena of underground public bathrooms of urban London, now deserted but many dating back to Victorian times.

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Photographer Agnese Sanvito has taken to capturing these abandoned urban relics in the best light possible, often by shooting them in early-morning hours.

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Living, at the time, in a cesspool of industry and publicly-discarded human waste, Victorian Londoners gladly paid a penny or two to get out of the streets and into subterranean restrooms. Though most of these were neglected in the years following World War II, their surface remnants still stand in many places.

abandoned bathroom entry space

“They’re part of the fabric of the city, but because they’re not in use no-one pays attention to them, they are forgotten spaces,” says Agnese. “At the moment, I have just photographed those in the area that are near to me. It’s a work-in-progress, I don’t know where it’s going. Now my friends call sometimes and say, ‘I’ve found another one.’”

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Once prominent and highly functional, most of these remainders go largely unnoticed in the bustle of the city, until you start spotting them, then searching out more.

abandoned alley bathroom entrance

Some are obscured trees, weeds or rubbish, but underneath you can still find gorgeous detailing and meticulous ironwork. Others have even been converted into everything from restaurants to private homes.

abandoned bathroom london victorian

Today, more conventional, above-ground, and generally less-exciting restrooms (some for free, others for a fee) have largely replaced these vintage curiosities.

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80,000 Tiles Tell Story of Amsterdam’s Growth in New Bike Tunnel

22 Mar

[ By Steph in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

bike path tiles

A 361-foot tunnel connecting the historic city center of Amsterdam to its revitalized industrial waterfront district symbolically links past and present with a stunning mural made up of 80,000 tiles. Design firm Benthem Crouwell used iconic Delft blue tiles to paint a picture of a fleet of ships on treacherous seas, taking inspiration from 18th century Rotterdam tile painter Cornelis Boumeester.

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Stretching the entire length of the Cuyperspassage tunnel, which is open only to pedestrians and cyclists, the mural bears a striking resemblance to Boumeester’s depiction of the Warship Rotterdam and Herring Fleet, completed in 1725.

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This traditional view of the Netherlands starts to shift and change the further you walk or bike into the tunnel. The illustrative style starts to get pixelated about halfway through, growing more and more abstract until it’s simply an arrangement of blue-hued tiles.

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It’s a beautiful way to symbolize the growth and change the city has experienced over the past few centuries, with the potential to become as large a part of the nation’s cultural and artistic identity as the work that inspired it.

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Mini Modernists: 15 Designer Toys for Young Architecture Fans

22 Mar

[ By Steph in Design & Products & Packaging. ]

mini modernist blokoksha 2

Foster an appreciation for fine modernist architecture and design from an early age with Bauhaus dollhouses, Eames block sets, mini Corbusier lounge chairs and urban planning board games. There’s a minimalist dollhouse that doubles as a coffee table, a Matryoshka-style set of paper modernist estates and of course, the pleasingly all-white Architecture Studio set by LEGO. Sure, you can get these architectural toys and games under the pretense that they’re for your kids, but we all know it’s really you who’ll be playing with them.

Home Puzzle, Babel Tower Game & Archiblocks by Cinq Points
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A 3D puzzle made up of 17 minimalist white pieces that fit together into a house shape, the ‘Home Puzzle’ by Cinq Points is greater than the sum of its parts. The individual pieces are made to resemble pieces of furniture as well as buildings in a town, so kids can use their imagination to change the purpose of each shape. The Babel Tower game is like an architectural version of Jenga, while the Archiblocks construction set is “designed to capture modularity, balance and composition, their form giving them an intergenerational appeal.”

Qubis House Modernist Doll House & Coffee Table
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Functioning as a modernist dollhouse for kids and a coffee table for adults, the Qubis Haus features sliding panels made of wood and perspex so the ‘architect’ can create various room layouts. Made of solid birch, it has clean modern lines honoring a period of architecture that’s not often seen in doll houses.

Dollhouse-Sized Modernist Furniture
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Not just any old furniture should be placed inside a modernist dollhouse. From the Vitra Design Museum Shop comes a series of iconic pieces in miniature form, true to scale and replicating the originals down to the smallest details including the materials, the grain of the wood and the reproduction of the screws. The collection includes chairs by Charles Eames, Marcel Breuer, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe.

Eames House Blocks

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Bring the famous Eames House and Studio to your coffee table or playroom with this “authentically engineered” set of 36 alphabet blocks created in direct collaboration with the Eames family. The colors were so carefully matched to the original, the block set requires 29 separate hand-pulled print passes when it’s being produced.

Blokoshka: A Modernist Architectural Matryoshka

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Rather than dolls, this nesting paper set reveals one modernist building after another, getting successively smaller and smaller as you pull them apart. The Blokoshka set by ZUPAGRAFIKA comes pre-cut and pre-folded so you can put them together and take them apart as many times as you like (or until the paper starts to disintegrate.) “Inspired by the former Eastern Bloc concrete modernist estates, Blokoshka is a playful tour inside out the ‘sleeping districts’ of Moscow, plattenbau constructions of East Berlin, Warsaw estates built over the ruins of old ghetto, and the panelak blocks in Prague.”

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Mini Modernists 15 Designer Toys For Young Architecture Fans

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Roadside Renaissance: Art Of The Painted Desert Project

21 Mar

[ By Steve in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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Conceived by photographer/activist Chip Thomas, The Painted Desert Project connects urban street artists with communities in the southwest‘s Navajo Nation.

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Chip Thomas (above) first set foot in Navajo Nation over 25 years ago when, as a newly-minted doctor, he decided the best way to repay his National Health Service Corps scholarship was by volunteering to serve a community with limited access to healthcare. Decades later, his roots are set deep into the stony desert soil.

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Somewhat of a Renaissance Man, Dr. Thomas displays a very different skill set when he “becomes” Jetsonorama – a street artist whose favored medium is blown-up black-and-white photos applied to a range of outdoor structures.

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Being as his home base is the Western Agency of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, Thomas’s subjects are the Navajo people and their traditional symbolism. “I’m just trying to reflect the positivity I have been allowed to experience from the people for the past 25 years,” explains Thomas. “It’s like I’m holding a mirror up and saying, ‘Thank you for letting me experience all this.’ And to the youth I’m saying, ‘Learn from this!’” Not corny at all, actually.

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Roadside Renaissance Art Of The Painted Desert Project

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Spherical Tires: Magnetic Levitation for Driverless Vehicles

19 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]

magnetic levitation sphere tires

The Eagle 360, a new tire design concept from Goodyear, is a rounded sphere held in place by magnetic fields and designed for a smoother ride in your future driver-free car.

The biggest advantage, of course, is omnidirectional steering capabilities, since the wheels have no orientation, unlike their forward-or-backward circular predecessors.

goodyear tire concept

An organically-patterned, 3D-printed tread is designed to adapt like a sponge to different road conditions, while built-in sensor relay surface measurements to the onboard computer. Faster response times and immediate reaction capabilities in multiple directions all work toward improving passenger safety and comfort.

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“By steadily reducing the driver interaction and intervention in self-driving vehicles, tires will play an even more important role as the primary link to the road,” said Goodyear’s senior vice president Joseph Zekoski.

goodyear maglev tires

“Goodyear’s concept tires play a dual role in that future both as creative platforms to push the boundaries of conventional thinking and test beds for next-generation technologies.”

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Beyond the Glass Ceiling: 14 Houses & Hotels Made for Stargazing

19 Mar

[ By Steph in Boutique & Art Hotels & Travel. ]

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Watch for shooting stars and identify constellations from the comfort of a warm and cozy bed in rooms designed to provide nearly unfettered access to the sky, with transparent roofs blurring the lines between indoors and out. From hotels in some of the world’s prime stargazing locations like Finland and Chile to homes equipped with observatories to a tree house that literally lifts its lid, these see-through structures flood the interiors with sunlight during the day and offer amazing views at night.

Starlight Room

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Set on faux skis, with a glass ceiling and walls, the Starlight Room looks out onto the Dolomites in the northern Italian town of Cortina d’Ampezzo for high-altitude views far from light pollution and noise. The tiny hotel room accommodates singles and couples, and contains little more than a double bed and television. Guests arrive via snowmobile or snow shoes, and room service is delivered, though it looks like exiting the cabin to go to the bathroom in the snow might not be the most pleasant experience in the middle of the night.

The Sky Den Literally Lifts its Lid

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The roof of this tree house by architect George Clark opens to the sky, enlarging the space so it can be used as a protected indoor shelter or an open-air observatory. Located in England’s Kielder Water & Forest Park, the Sky Den has flat-pack furniture built right into its movable walls, so guests can pull down and set up whatever they need to be comfortable, from beds to stools and benches.

Camouflage House
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A habitable greenhouse, Hiroshi Iguchi’s Camouflage House blends into the landscape, with an inner core of private spaces surrounded by a glass enclosure. Almost completely transparent, the house in Nagano, Japan incorporates an interior garden via openings that allow trees to grow straight up the angled roof from the courtyard.

Transparent Ceilings and Floors

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This four-story house in Shanghai by architect Yung Ho Chang of Atelier FCJZ features a glass roof as well as transparent floors on three levels, so you can see the interior of each floor in addition to the sky. Designed as a concrete box with no windows, the home gets all of its daylight from the ceiling. Talk about radical transparency – the toilet is even visible from just below the dining room.

Bob Hope’s UFO House
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Designed by John Lautner in 1973, the house Bob Hope lived in for decades with his wife Dolores features a dramatic oculus for daylight and stargazing. The bizarre-looking structure was nicknamed ‘UFO House’ and ‘Volcano Home’ for its unusual shape when viewed from afar. Lautner refused to claim the project as his own work, reportedly because Dolores Hope demanded changes to the interior that didn’t fit his artistic vision.

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Beyond The Glass Ceiling 14 Houses Made For Stargazing

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Fractal Architecture: 14 Intricate Ceilings of Historical Iran

18 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

inlaid iranian ancient architecture

Sharing his findings via Instagram, an architectural photographer in Iran has begun documenting schools, mosques and cultural centers around the country, with a focus on their most mesmerizing feature: the ceilings.

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Mehrdad takes viewers on tours of significant cultural complexes, some of which have been standing for close to 1,000 years as part of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

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Modestly-decorated and architecturally-muted facades often give way to incredible complex mural works, colorfully-patterned reliefs and mosaics that must be meticulously maintained.

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Buildings pictured here include the Hazrat-Masoumeh mosque in Qom, the Chaharbagh School in Isfahan and the Shah-e-Cheragh mosque in Shiraz.

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