Design
The return of Charles Pollock to industrial design is not unlike a resurrection of the dead. In the early '60s, Pollock devoted five years to the painstaking process of prototyping a chair for Florence Knoll, adjusting every minute detail by hand until he created what was, in her eyes, perfection. He made what we now know as the iconic...
Marina Abramovic can sit motionless for hours, days, and weeks on end, and now you can too! The Abramovic Method, being taught now at Milan's Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC) and in the future at the upcoming Marina Abramovic Institute, is a two-and-a-half hour course in endurance-based performance art...
Richard Branson has never been known for behaving conventionally; when he's not climbing Mount Everest or racing James Cameron to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, he can be found in the desert touching beaming down to his Norman Foster-designed spaceport. And even at cruising altitude, the air and space tycoon is full of surprises. He...
The ever-popular question, "What if you made furniture out of..." has been answered yet again, and in a new way, by Johnny Swing. For years, Swing has made a medium out of United States currency, using coins to create tables, chairs, bowls, and benches, as well as creating pillows and teddy bears out of dollar bills. His work has...
Prepare to see a slightly different side of the 20th century's most influential design movement. The objects in the upcoming Bauhaus survey "Art is Life" at London's Barbican are going to be "unfamiliar to people who think the Bauhaus is about tubular steel and gridded works," the institution's curator Catherine Ince...
Joris Laarman is navigating a noisy basement where a figure clad in a hazmat suit is blending custom-made cellulose behind plastic sheeting. Another worker is busy with power tools, and a third is manning an enormous mechanical arm that is polishing a new piece of furniture.“Do you know 'Breaking Bad'?” the 32-year-old Dutch designer...
Architect Zaha Hadid, the mastermind behind the surreal Guangzhou Opera House and troubled MAXXI Museum, has made it her practice's signature to create curvilinear forms frozen in motion, as if they had been thrown at a very high speed and suspended midair. Her latest venture into frozen industrial design, Liquid Glacial, possesses a...
Months ahead of the start of the games, the London Design Museum is already showing symptoms of Olympics fever. Adding to the fanfare surrounding the upcoming global sports competition, the institution announced yesterday its Design of the Year Award winners: Hopkins Architects’ Olympic Velodrome for Architecture and the Olympic Torch...
Pictured above is the Pebble, the watch that seems to do it all. Designed to sync to your iPhone or Android via BlueTooth, it downloads apps, displays incoming messages, monitors your golf swing, and even tells time. It also demolishes records: The Kickstarter-funded device, part watch, part remote control, part pedometer, has surpassed...
Green design has never been more in vogue, now that LEED certification is a badge to wear with pride, along with the amount of recycled materials a designer can incorporate (see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation campus or the Whitney's shipping container studio). Phaidon's new tome "Vitamin Green" offers 350 pages devoted to...
