Pampering in Pantone
A new hotel recently opened in Brussels that is both branded and designed using Pantone colours. On top of the usual hotel amenities such as lounges, rooms and meeting rooms this colorful construction also offers professional colour consulting from large retailers. They also have an area called the "Pantone universe" that allows users to test drive new products that showcase the latest use of color. I have a feeling that a hotel like this would strike with the "dorky bone" in any visual designer - I know it has with me.
The Dream Cube
Source Esi Design's Flickr
A gorgeous collection of images of a building recently built in Shanghai for the 2010 World Expo. My favourite aspect has to be how the building's lighting adjusts to the movement and interaction of its inhabitants. I really hope that this sort of interactivity and contextual adaptation works its way more into art and architectural in the coming years.
Temperature Sensitive Tiles
Though I am unsure of the manufacturer of the material, I came across this intriguing little item on Inventables.com. This is the first time that I came across the Inventables site which unto itself features a huge range of interesting and inspiring stuff. But this post it about the tile.
The material is a translucent block that reacts to changes in temperature. The site states the material comes in a variety of sizes and colors. In the examples given it appears that a low temperature will result in a red color to the tile, while higher temperatures range in hues of green and blue. This color fluctuation concept is pretty simple in nautre and it's something we've seen before - who doesn't remember the hippy inspired days of mood rings? But for me, the really interesting aspect of the material comes in the visual feedback it can provide to a user. With a property as abstract as temperature, we have come to associate to it largely by touch. But with a material like this a simple glance, would enable a user to see the temperate state of where they have the tiles installed. They could run their shower and get an immediate sense of how hot or cold the water is. A surface that recently held a hot pot of water would provide a warning to any passerbys to be careful. Tiles that were built into an exterior wall wuould give you a sense of the weather that day. The list goes on.
Now I just wish I could find a video of it in action.
Source - Inventables
New Ars Electronica Building
On January 2nd the new Ars Electronica opened its doors to the public and what a sight it is to see. The new multi-level structure is immediately adjacent to the existing facility but actually managed to integrate it into its steel and glass structure. The new building also boasts a 5,100-m2 LED facade which can be programed to recreate a vast range of colors and animations. Check out a video of the visual feast here. Ars Electronica has always been a keen interest of mine due largely to their focus on the cross collaboration between art, technology and society. Reading over Ars about section I get a nostalgic flash back of all the reasons why I chose to enter what was a brand new and cutting edge undergraduate program that dealt with the same subject matter - this is now known as the SIAT program at SFU. The research and art that Ars generates is really quite inspiring. It seems to hit a real nexus in so many of my personal interests. I really hope I get an opportunity to visit this centre one day soon.
The Green”er” Docks of Paris
The city of Paris created a competition to create a new structure for the docks of Paris. One of the challenges of the redesign was to decide wether or not to retain the old concrete structure that originally was built there. Architetural firm Jakob+MacFarlane appears to have won the comeptition and opted to maintain the original building. Rather than destroy the original piece, they instead decided to "grow" upon it with a skin comprised of steel and glass. The end result was a intricate building literally representative of old and new architectural styles. Though it may not be as beautiful as something that may have been built from the ground up, I think the designers made a piece that worked well within their constraints. In doing this they saved a lot of energy and waste that would have been put into destroying the original building and hauling it off.
http://www.contemporist.com/2009/01/12/docks-de-paris-by-jakobmacfarlane/