ECO-DESIGN: 2° CONCORSO RIVA

ECO-DESIGN: 2° CONCORSO RIVA:   Dal connubio legno riciclato e vetro nascono alcune tra le più belle proposte, secondo il mio parere, presentate alla sec...

5 SENSI....

Scade il 10 Ottobre 2012.

Luca Curci Architects seleziona artisti, architetti e designer, provenienti da tutto il mondo, per la progettazione interna di un esclusivo Design Hotel incentrato sul tema dei cinque sensi: cinque stanze a raccontare olfatto, gusto, vista, udito e tatto.

Il Design Hotel sorge al primo piano di un elegante palazzo di fine ‘800, situato nel centro di Bari, nei pressi dello storico Teatro Petruzzelli. Si compone di cinque stanze, ognuna delle quali avrà come tema uno dei cinque sensi, di una hall e di una breakfast room.

Lo styling degli interni, progettati dallo studio Luca Curci Architects, si baserà sul concept dei cinque sensi.

Termine presentazione progetti: 10 Ottobre 2012

Maggiori informazioni: itsliquid.com

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama has created an estimated 50,000 works during a career spanning half a century, is feted in her native Japan and in the US - yet in Britain she remains relatively unknown. Kusama turned 80 in March, but when we meet at her Tokyo studio, she is a vision in a bobbed, blood-red wig and a red one-piece dress covered in her beloved polka dots.

1. Yayoi Kusama
2. Walking In My Mind
3. Hayward Gallery,
4. London
5. SE1

1. Starts 23 June
2. Until 6 Sept
3. Details:
   0871 663 2500
4. Venue website

It is impossible to discuss Kusama's work without making mention of those dots and the omnipresent lined meshed patterns she calls "infinity nets". They appeared in her early paintings, on "living" installations comprising her own naked torso and those of her friends, and, more recently, wrapped around tree trunks in Singapore. Later this month, trees along the Thames will also be given the polka-dot treatment, as part of a collaborative exhibition with nine other artists at London's Hayward Gallery.

The motifs first came to Kusama in childhood. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto in the Japanese Alps, she started seeing a psychiatrist at the age of 10 after she became gripped by visions of dots, nets and violet flowers that covered everything she saw. "I call them my repetitive vision," she says. "I still see them. [They] cover the canvas and grow on to the floor, the ceiling, chairs and tables. Then the polka dots move to the body, on to my clothes and into my spirit. It is an obsession."

Hers was an unhappy childhood. "Not a single day went by that my mother didn't regret giving birth to me," she says. "She was the only daughter of a wealthy family, so my father, as the son-in-law, was able to lead an extravagant lifestyle. He ended up having an affair with a geisha and deserted us to be with her in Tokyo. It damaged my mother. I was stuck in the middle of a long-running feud and I felt mentally cornered. That's why I started hallucinating. I started seeing a psychiatrist, and it was he who first encouraged me to develop as an artist."

She studied, against her mother's wishes, at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, and by 1950 had moved from traditional Japanese painting to abstract natural forms. In her most fevered periods, in her 20s, she was producing dozens of paintings a day, leading to more conflict at home. "My mother was strongly opposed to my becoming an artist. She was from a very old, conservative family. She was a collector of art and desperately wanted me to become one, too. Whenever I drew or made sculptures, she would fly into a rage and throw paints and canvases at me."

Eventually, in 1957, Kusama left Japan for New York, following a lengthy correspondence with the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. "I had been a great admirer after coming across her work in an old book I found in a store in my home town. Her works are wonderful, moving. I spent six hours travelling to Tokyo so I could find her address in Who's Who at the US embassy. Amazingly, she wrote back, and we kept writing to each other."

In America, Kusama's installations caught the eye of critics and collectors. Her Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show - a real rowing boat encrusted with phallic protuberances - caused a sensation when it appeared at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York in 1963. "That kind of exhibition was extremely avant garde at the time," she says. "Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism were the big thing then. But they all came to see me and asked me why I did what I did. I said I just do Kusama art." Andy Warhol, she says, asked her permission to use the patterns in his silk screens. She refused. "People were queueing in the streets, waiting to see a Kusama original," she says. "After my mirror room show, other artists like Claes Oldenburg started making soft sculptures. So many artists have been influenced by my art and repeat my vision."

But Kusama's mental health deteriorated to such an extent that, in 1973, she returned home for treatment. In 1975 she checked herself into the psychiatric hospital she still calls home, finding that the routine gave her the order she needed to concentrate on her work. She slowly crept back into the public consciousness, and in 2006 she was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan's most prestigious arts prizes.

Kusama has often said that if it weren't for art, she would have killed herself long ago. "I only slept two hours last night. When I get tired from making pictures, I find it really difficult to go to sleep. But it's how I get away from my illness and escape the hallucinations. I call it psychosomatic art." So why does her work seem more like a celebration of life's euphoric moments? "I don't really think about what my emotions are. I don't plan to make them nice and cheerful, but once I start, they just move in that direction. My hands start moving before I can think anything."

Kusama will be happy if the new exhibition "brings people around to the idea of the infinity of the cosmos and the beauty of life. Nothing I do stays in the gallery space. Everything I do is a walk in my mind. There are no limits." It seems almost inappropriate to ask if she ever considers retiring. "No. As long as I have the energy, I will carry on. I'd like to live 200 or 300 years. I want to leave my message to my successors and future generations."

Arum Installation

ZAHA HADID ARCHITECT

This year’s Biennale theme ‘Common Ground’ shows how the work of the major protagonists of contemporary architecture – often regarded as independent individual creations – is in fact based on historical lineages of collective research. This is also true of the work of Zaha Hadid Architects. It is well known that the early work was initially inspired by Russian Suprematism.In our installation and exhibition at the Biennale we want to show that – apart from the dialogue with the work of contemporary competitors that existed all along – our recent work connects to a rather different historical strand of research.

The more our design research and work evolved on the basis of algorithmic form generation, the more we learned to appreciate the work of pioneers like Frei Otto who had achieved the most elegant designs on the basis of material-structural form-finding processes. From Frei Otto we learned how the richness, organic coherence and fluidity of the forms and spaces we desire could emerge rationally from an intricate balance of forces. We expanded Frei Otto’s method to include environmental as well as structural logics, and we moved from material to computational simulations. One particular area of research we would like to explore with our installation is the domain of light – weight shells in combination with tensile structures. We have already designed a number of complex shells as well as some tensile structures.

Here, for the first time, we would like to integrate these two worlds. The Arum shell is an installation made from pleated metal. We will surround the installation with the documentation of our research, including key reference projects of the pre-eminent precursors in this line of research.

We will show the work Frei Otto, Felix Candela, Heinz Isler among others and include work by Philippe Block, a young, contemporary researcher of stone compression shells.

CREDITS

Zaha Hadid Architects
Design: Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher
Exhibition Design: Woody Yao, Margarita Valova
Installation Design and Presentation: Shajay Bhooshan, Saman Saffarian, Suryansh Chandra, Mostafa El Sayed
Structural Engineering: Rasti Bartek, Buro Happold, UK
Material & Fabrication Technology: Gregory Epps, RoboFOLD
Coordinator: Manon Janssens

In collaboration with
Studio Hadid, Universität für angewandte Kunst, Vienna
Jens Mehlan, Robert Neumayr, Johann Traupmann, Christian Kronaus, Mascha Veech, Mario Gasser, Susanne John
The BLOCK Research Group, Institute of Technology in Architecture, ETH, Zurich: Philippe Block, Matthias Rippmann Faculty of Architecture, ETH, Zurich: Toni Kotnik
Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Posgrado, Faculty of Architecture, UNAM, Mexico: Juan Ignacio del Cueto Ruiz-Funes

Design: un concorso per premiare strategie d'impresa

Il Portogallo ospitera' il Management Europe award 2012

 MONZA, 22 AGO - La creativita' del design e la concretezza del marketing. Due qualita', in grado di trasformare un'idea in un successo commerciale, che saranno al centro del Design management Europe award 2012. Il concorso, ospitato ogni anno da una diversa citta' europea, premia esempi positivi di una disciplina che unisce il design al marketing integrando la creativita' alla strategia d'impresa, per ''dimostrare i benefici che posso derivare da buone pratiche di management''. A vincere le scorse edizioni del concorso, che quest'anno si terra' in Portogallo, sono state, fra gli altri, aziende come la spagnola Lekue' e l'austriaca Viteo Oudoors. I concorrenti avranno tempo fino al 7 settembre per presentare i loro progetti, che saranno valutati da una giuria di esperti in design management. La premiazione si terra' in 15 novembre a Parades, in Portogallo.

Westfield Presents Good Design- Australia

Westfield Presents Good Design is a series of week-long interactive showcases of the most innovative and well-designed products for 2012.

The showcases will take place in high traffic, high profile, premium Westfield centers in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane throughout August 2012.

80 market-leading products from the 2012 Australian International Design Awards and previous years will be on display.

Shoppers will be invited to interact with the products and supervisors, register their interest to buy products on the spot and receive direct information about the products via phone or email at the display clusters.

The Good Design showcase will highlight the latest in forward-thinking design to over 100,000 shoppers, providing direct access to the products and purchase points.

Australian International Design Awards winner and finalist products from 2005 to 2012 are eligible to be registered. To register your product into the showcase, please contact Premium Media at + 61 2 8003 4185 or email sales at premiummedia.com.au. Deadline for registration is June 8, 2012.

Dates and Locations
Sydney
Westfield Bondi Junction
August 2-8, 2012

Brisbane
Westfield Chermside
August 10-16, 2012

Melbourne
Westfield Doncaster
August 18-24, 2012

The Art of Collaboration: SEGD's Annual Exhibition & Experience Design Symposium

The Art of Collaboration, an initiative of the Society for Environmental Graphic Design(SEGD), will explore the impact of Multi-disciplinary collaboration from the perspective of clients, designers, fabricators, and educators. The one-and-a-half-day symposium will gather exhibition and experience designers, media software developers, graphic artists, architects, fabricators, clients, educators, and students for a focused dialogue on how collaborations work, why they sometimes fail, and how members of design teams can best work together to create a successful outcome.

"The most inspired design is created by multi-disciplined, innovative co-conspirators working together toward a unified purpose: to elevate the user experience," commented Cybelle Jones, Principal and Studio Director for Gallagher & Associates and Chair of the symposium. "We're using this event to gather those co-creators and compare best practices, understand effective processes-and even collaborative failures-to expand our views through honest dialogue."

The Art of Collaboration will feature a diverse range of speakers from all aspects of experience design, including Kenneth Luker, AIA, Principal of The Freelon Group in Durham and President of NC State College of Design's Design Guild Board of Directors; exhibit designer and SEGD Board member Jen Bressler, Hunt Design; and graphic designer and NC State alumni Susan May, Pentagram.

The symposium will launch with case studies of two Raleigh exhibition projects that benefitted from the art of collaboration: the Institute for Emerging Issues at the new Snøhetta-designed Hunt Library at NC State (opening Fall 2012) and the recently opened Nature Research Center at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Anita R. Brown-Graham, Director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, will lead a tour of the Hunt Library and in-progress installation of the IEI Commons prior to her presentation with her team of experience developers: Cybelle Jones, Gallagher & Associates; Julie Beeler, Second Story Interactive; and Eric King, 1220 Exhibits.

Roy Campbell, Director of Exhibits and Emerging Media for the Museum of Natural Sciences, will lead a tour of the museum and introduce the team he assembled to conceive and create new museum exhibits. Exhibition designer Andrew Merriell (Andrew Merriell & Associates), multimedia designer Linda Batwin (Batwin + Robin Productions), lighting designer David Weiner, and A/V system designer Yiannis Cabolis (Electrosonic) will share the challenges of working collaboratively.

The symposium will also address how design educators can best prepare students for the demands of working with complex collaborative teams. Meredith Davis, Professor of Graphic Design and Director of Graduate Programs in Graphic Design, will share how NC State has evolved its curriculum to address the shifting multi-disciplinary aspects of the design profession.

Students and faculty in NC State's Graduate Program in Graphic Design will also participate in the symposium, presenting their work on museum projects including a user experience study and a media element for the Hunt Library.

The symposium will begin Thursday, October 4, with an afternoon behind-the-scenes tour of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, followed by a pre-symposium reception and registration. Friday's full-day symposium will kick off with a tour of the Institute for Emerging Issues, followed by symposium sessions at the College of Design.