The new luxury apartment complex, 100 Eleventh Avenue with it’s glittering glass facade, opens this month. Designed by French Architect Jean Nouvel, the 23-story condominium building faces the Hudson River with a front facade composed of 1,700 panes of glass, each set at a different angles and torques to better reflect the light. It’s a striking building that certainly lends a bit of character as well as glamour to the Chelsea neighborhood. On top of that, it’s aiming for LEED certification, with a long laundry list of sustainable building elements to prove its worthiness.

While the front side of the building is sheathed in glass, the backside is constructed from a simple black brick with windows punched through all the way up to the top. From the outside, the placement of the windows seems random, but from the inside, great care was taken to position each window to provide a picturesque view of a NYC landmark, like the Empire State Building. As Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times describes it, 100 11th Avenue is a, “mix of grit and glamour — embodied in a glittering facade that seems to have been wrapped around the curved front of a black brick tower like a tight-fitting sequined dress.” Read the rest of this entry »

Commissioned by the Philharmonie de Paris, this WA Community Awards 6th Cycle winner balances the strict needs of a world class concert hall, with the intricacies of the surrounding neighborhood and the grandeur of the City of Paris. The work is the product of Jungmin Nam, an Award Winning architect now Working at KVA , in Boston, MA. He completed the project while as a student at the Harvard School of Design. Read the rest of this entry »

The United States Department of State recently announced  that KieranTimberlake has won the design competition for the new, United States London Embassy. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Louis B. Susman, and Acting Director of the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, Adam Namm, remarked, “KieranTimberlake’s design meets the goal of creating a modern, welcoming, timeless, safe and energy efficient embassy for the 21st century. Their concept most fully satisfied the requirements outlined in the design competition’s mission statement. The concept holds the greatest potential for developing a truly iconic embassy and is on the leading edge of sustainable design.”

The core design challenge was to bring form to the core beliefs of American democracy – transparency, openness, and equality – and do so in a way that is secure, welcoming, and sustainable.

Located on the Nine Elms site in London, the site is to be transformed into an urban park and garden, designed as a spiraling form and providing strong pedestrian connections to mass transit and the proposed Battersea developments to the west.  The park doubles as a security measure and is a welcome alternative to the walls, fences, and jersey barriers that have come to dominate American government buildings. Read the rest of this entry »

The park bench, much like other public, utilitarian furniture, has too often been regulated to uninspired mediocrity. They seldom have a contextual relationship to their surroundings and they almost never contribute to the story of a place. Ben Thorpe’s Peelback Bench however, manages to do all of the above with grace and elegance.

The bench seems to peel away a layer of history, presenting for the person sitting on the seat, a short explanation of the history of the area. As Thorpe explains “The basic principle of the bench is to give the effect that it has been peeled away from the ground, revealing a typographical story based upon the history of the particular area where the bench would be placed, giving the impression that you were reading from the foundations of the town”. Read the rest of this entry »

CHROMAesthesiae: An installation of modular color

SOFTlab’s latest installation, CHROMAesthesiae, arrives at Devotion just in time for spring. CHROMAesthesiae is a flourishing landscape of color, blooming across the ceiling in high contrast-gradated clusters. This installation is an investigation on the spatial and chromatic perception of space. SOFTlab uses modularity as a core modality in order to generate complexity from repetitive form, allowing for rapid expansion or contraction of every piece created. With the motto, “everything changes,” the ability to adapt and grow conceptually underpins their entire body of work. This customizable installation is made of discrete, laser cut paper structures held together with binder clips: everyday objects are repurposed and precisely recombined. Forms evolve and shift color throughout the exhibition. Read the rest of this entry »

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Founded by Kilo Design / Lars Holme Larsen, BIG / Bjarke Ingels and Skibsted Ideation / Jens Martin Skibsted, KiBiSi is a Copenhagen based idea-driven industrial design firm. Each partner contributes with intelligence and experience from within his specific field, providing KiBiSi with cutting-edge knowledge and knowhow within the fields of architecture, design, furniture, electronics, transportation, contemporary culture and lifestyle. Having collaborated on multiple projects for years Lars, Bjarke and Jens Martin decided to turn their intuitive inclination to work together into a full time collaboration. Read the rest of this entry »