Talo Acoustics Mark One Esscerion Tower Speaker

Every once in a while a creation comes along that is so in tune with the inner human spirit that interacting with it transcends the physical world into a visceral emotional experience defiant of complete logical understanding. It could be said that the Talo Acoustics Mark One Esscerion tower speaker, is an example of such a creation. The experience begins with its design, which in itself, is an example of form following function done the right way. The fluid shape of the body is the result of years of acoustic resonance studies resulting in a sound that is likely more full than any other tower speaker you have ever heard. The degree to which this blend of visual and acoustic art is holistically achieved within Esscerion is conspicuously absent within the world of speakers. How could something so elementarily self-evident take this long to come to us? Given this shape the primary build material of a wood composite would likely come as a surprise to many. It is achieved through the layering of about 80 robotically cut slices. The design would all be for nothing if it weren’t for the unbelievable sound quality and power. I suppose this aspect is what completes Esscerion’s emotional experience. When your favorite songs and movies come alive with this new level of realism, one cannot but help re-live the pain and joy of those memories as this sound pierces straight to the heart and soul.

A nice touch Talo Acoustics offers is custom metallic paint finishes. Rather than settle on black or some wood grain, they offer to finish your system with any color under the rainbow. An interior designer’s dream come true. Available now at TaloAcoustics.com for $1,800 a piece, but expect to wait. They are reportedly already under a 4 month backorder.

Talo Acoustics Mark One Esscerion Tower Speaker

Talo Acoustics Mark One Esscerion Tower Speaker

Talo Acoustics Mark One Esscerion Tower Speaker

Talo Acoustics Mark One Esscerion Tower Speaker

BIG with Kossmann.dejong+Rambøll+Freddy Madsen+KiBiSi have completed the Danish National Maritime Museum in Helsingør. By marrying the crucial historic elements with an innovative concept of galleries and way-finding, BIG’s renovation scheme reflects Denmark’s historical and contemporary role as one of the world’s leading maritime nations.

The new Danish National Maritime Museum is located in Helsingør, just 50 km (30 mi.) north of Copenhagen and 10 km (6.5 mi.) from the world famous Louisiana Museum for Modern Art. The new 6,000 m² (65,000 ft²) museum finds itself in a unique historical context adjacent to one of Denmark’s most important buildings, Kronborg Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage site – known from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is the last addition to Kulturhavn Kronborg, a joint effort involving the renovation of the Castle and two new buildings – offering a variety of culture experiences to residents and visitors to Helsingør.

Leaving the 60 year old dock walls untouched, the galleries are placed below ground and arranged in a continuous loop around the dry dock walls – making the dock the centerpiece of the exhibition – an open, outdoor area where visitors experience the scale of ship building.

A series of three double-level bridges span the dry dock, serving both as an urban connection, as well as providing visitors with short-cuts to different sections of the museum. The harbor bridge closes off the dock while serving as harbor promenade; the museum’s auditorium serves as a bridge connecting the adjacent Culture Yard with the Kronborg Castle; and the sloping zig-zag bridge navigates visitors to the main entrance. This bridge unites the old and new as the visitors descend into the museum space overlooking the majestic surroundings above and below ground. The long and noble history of the Danish Maritime unfolds in a continuous motion within and around the dock, 7 meters (23 ft.) below the ground. All floors – connecting exhibition spaces with the auditorium, classroom, offices, café and the dock floor within the museum – slope gently creating exciting and sculptural spaces.

Bjarke Ingels: “By wrapping the old dock with the museum program we simultaneously preserve the heritage structure while transforming it to a courtyard bringing daylight and air in to the heart of the submerged museum. Turning the dock inside out resolved a big dilemma: Out of respect for Hamlet’s Castle we needed to remain completely invisible and underground – but to be able to attract visitors we needed a strong public presence. Leaving the dock as an urban abyss provides the museum with an interior façade facing the void and at the same time offers the citizens of Helsingør a new public space sunken 8 m (16 ft.) below the level of the sea.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Parabola Chair designed by Carlo Aiello Design Studio in Los Angeles was recently named an “instant classic” by Fast Company Magazine. The chair won the 2013 ICFF Studio Award and has been recently selected by the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design for the exhibit New West Coast Design 2 opening on October 26, 2013.

If you are in Southern California, the Parabola Chair will be exhibited at the West Edge Design Fair in Santa Monica October 3-6, 2013. The show is open to the trade and public and is expected to become a major destination for design connoisseurs.

The design intention of the Parabola Chair was to create a simple and porous yet highly sculptural chair. The challenge was to achieve a single surface that serves as seating, armrest, and backrest supported by a minimal structure. Although the chair exhibits curvatures in two directions (hyperbolic paraboloid) all its components are straight and easy to manufacture. In order to achieve perfect comfort both curvatures were carefully calibrated to hold the body in the best position.

Material: Brushed stainless steel
Dimensions: W= 35″, L= 40″, H= 37″

The Parabola Chair is in production and can be order at: www.carloaiello.com Read the rest of this entry »

A design experience to engage, entertain and inspire with exhibits from leading names in the industry, plus educational programs & workshops, networking events and more.

WestEdge Design Fair makes its debut October 3-6, 2013 in Santa Monica, California at the Barker Hangar. This newest destination for modern design showcases a curated selection of over 150 leading national and international brands, many new to the West Coast. Attendees will find design inspiration, and be able to shop from leading manufacturers of furniture, lighting, kitchen, bath, outdoor furnishings and other products for the home. The show caters to trade, press and consumers alike, and offers a complete experience for attendees, including panel discussions and workshops, custom installations, a series of special events, and an opening night party to benefit Heal the Bay. Read the rest of this entry »

2018 Skyscraper Competition is open for registration.

The Morpholio Project unveils seven new and forward thinking design tools with the launch of Morpholio 2.0, the App Store’s number one portfolio app. The app re-imagines the portfolio as a design utility, moving it into the fast, flexible, at-your-fingertips device era. The project seeks to advance the ways that creatives access, share, discuss, and get feedback on their work from a global community of users.

Morpholio began as a research project by architects who simply wanted amazing tools for their devices. The group wondered, what would happen if the focus of software development shifted away from production alone and towards the need to cultivate and assess ideas. Designers have tools that allow them to generate millions of options, but few that help to select the right ones. “Aside from making design production easier, we wanted to know if better tools could make it smarter by integrating the wisdom of crowds and capitalizing on the power of the touchscreen to capture feedback,” says Anna Kenoff, Morpholio Co-Creator.

To achieve this, Morpholio had to become very sophisticated about all the ways that designers communicate – not just through language, but most importantly through their eyes and hands. Over the past year, the team of architects and programmers has collaborated with experts from various disciplines to build a robust design-centric workspace that could be used by anyone – from fashion designers to photographers, architects and automotive designers, even tattoo artists. It builds on research into human-computer-interaction to deliver innovations like a tool for image analytics called “EyeTime” and virtual “Crits” where collaborators can share images, and comment on each other’s work via notes or sketches. Human behavior data-mining is essential to offering these forms of powerful feedback, letting you know how your followers are interacting with your work. “These new tools are absolutely integral to the daily workings of any image driven process and have huge implications for both design and artistic practice,” says Co-Creator, Toru Hasegawa.

Morpholio’s cloud-based infrastructure is built from the ground up to amplify design thinking.   Drawing, commenting, sharing and analysis are built into and on top of the portfolio, creating the first completely integrated platform for designers.  “Creatives have a rich interaction with each other as well as their own work, which wasn’t being captured by existing software,” says Mark Collins, Co-creator. “With these new tools, Morpholio 2.0 becomes a powerful hub that reflects and amplifies the life of the creative – overflowing and abundant with inspiration, ideas and discussion.” Read the rest of this entry »

Terra Insola is an architectural workshop taking place this summer (2013) in Crete, Greece. This workshop will have four areas of development: theoretical, computational, material fabrication and film documentation:

• Research (material in situ expertise, know-how, political and cultural involvements, rituals, literature, mythology, extraction-transformation, symbiosis)

• Process – computation (logic of aggregation, scattering, staggering, stacking, with variable components, on Rhino Grasshopper and Python scripting)

• Material experiment (prototyping, test of resisting and decay, strategy of construction, machinism and robotic developments)

• Report (photography, recordings and film / stop motion during all the process of construction)

Instructors: Francois Roche, Ezio Blasetti, Stephan Henrich, Camille Lacadee, Danielle Willems, Andreas Theodoridis, Lydia Kallipoliti

The daily experience of the workshop will be balanced between computation and hands-on work in situ (local knowledge, memories and know-how knitted with global tooling, computation and machinism) as exogeneous-endogeneous apparatuses. A machine will be designed dedicated to a non-repetitive component, which is able to be re-introduced as a non-standard process to create the geometry of a shell-ter (specific “agencements” and assemblage in the pursuit of the ceramic ornamentation of the Minos Castle, embedded in a computation procedure). This project (design, process, researches, documentation, construction, etc.) will entirely emerge from the collaborative work of our group, as a unique and engaged realization. Blurring the limits between students and instructors, we will define together a strategy of co-responsibility and co-authorship. Read the rest of this entry »

The building is located on Tatarbeyi Sokak, is one of the most virginal and underdeveloped streets of the rapidly transforming Galata District under conservation. Comprised of eight 80-m2 studio flats and one 190-m2 penthouse up for sale, it has a total surface area of 1000 m2. The building is a residential project that extends beyond the conventional codes of the already-built environment, yet manages to reproduce these codes, respecting the existing architectural fabric. In this regard, it continues to find new solutions to the existing problems of architecture by utilizing contemporary technologies and taking into consideration the newly burgeoning socio-economic structure of the region, as well as the infrastructure, environmental conditions, climate, and solar movements.

The building is comprised of a wooden shell that covers the largely transparent living area in an uncompromising manner and set between two blind and extremely thing exposed concrete curtain walls. The wooden components on the front elevation run parallel to the glass façade that evolves into a saddle rood and entirely cover the front and back of the building. Perceived as a gigantic blind façade from one perspective, yet appearing as a translucent veil from the other, the wooden surface also functions as a sun filter. Comprised of parallel horizontal laths that angle at various points, the wooden element divides the façade into four as the middle segments expand outwards, towards the street; leaving the sides exposed, the wooden elements thus allow a view of the street and create a bay window effect that establishes a link between home life and life on the street. Read the rest of this entry »

This project designed by Giacomo Pala is the result of the contrast between elaborately formal and incoherent shape and program: a detailed investigation of real specific housing problems in relation to the expansion of the city of tomorrow and the issues of globalization.

The project is divided in two parts: the upper one is the housing block where 650 people can live.
There are four Typologies of apartments: 1. Apartments for singles or couples ( 60 %) 2. Apartments for four people ( 17 %) 3. Apartments for three people ( 17 %) 4. Double height apartments for four people ( 6 %)

The second part of the building is the lower one which is composed by the public spaces. This part of the building is a 3 floors block (containing sports Clubs, Swimming Pools and gyms) defined by a dynamic shape and not directly connected to the housing part in order to maintain a diversification of the public, semipublic and private spaces.

How can we look at the world today?
How can we imagine a project for the future in a realistic way?
We know now: Reality is not “Reality”.
Reality is an Incoherent and dense mix of realities.
It is a swarm which we generically call “reality”.
How can we use it to design? Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to inform you that our very own Editor-in-chief, Carlo Aiello, will be part of the “Viral Voices: Global Discussions” panel at the Center for Architecture on May 02, 2013. If you are in the city please reserve your place as soon as possible. Admission is free.

When: 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM THURSDAY MAY 02
Where: Center for Architecture (536 Laguardia Place, New York, NY 10012)

The AIANY Global Dialogues Committee has dedicated this year to “uncovered connections,” with the intent of investigating issues that are similarly impacting multiple regions, cultures and individuals. Viral Voices: Global Discussions will explore the impact that social media, technology and device culture are having on our design process, and ultimately the way we practice. How do we shape a global conversation? How are we changing the relationships between academia and the profession? What is the impact of hyper information sharing and critique? Throughout the evening, the topics of communication, research, collaboration, and data distribution will be addressed and debated.

Mark Wigley, Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University and David Basulto with David Assael of ArchDaily will come together for an evening discussing how these technologies affect the relationships between academia and profession. Following their talks, Carlo Aiello from eVolo, David Fano from CASE, Jill Fehrenbacher from Inhabitat, Toru Hasegawa from The Morpholio Project/the GSAPP Cloud Lab, Tim Maly from Wired Magazine and Cliff Kuang from Fast Company will join the speakers for a panel discussion addressing the impact that social media, technology and device culture are having on our design process, and ultimately the way we participate in a global discussion.

Price: Free
Please RSVP
Organized by: AIANY Global Dialogues Committee Read the rest of this entry »