Recently in Design Category

The florid prose and the CamelCase product name is well matched to the fountain-pen (msrp about $2,000)

This unique pen with its impeccably sleek profile and smooth curves is entirely made in Switzerland, although it looks as if it has just emerged from a NASA lab or from the desk of Major Boothroyd, the iconoclastic inventor of the James Bond accessories. Nonetheless, the sheer purity and simplicity of the design also evoke the golden age of aeronautics, the glorious era of the first Paris-New York flights, spiced up with a dash of Art Deco style. This tribute to third millennium design is a compendium of aesthetic appeal featuring an extremely playful DNA, enriched by the finest expression of the expertise cultivated by RJ-Romain Jerome in the domain of fusing materials.

 Moon dust, embodying all human fantasies of exploring the sky, is encapsulated in the cockpit bubble, and the resulting eloquent invitation to escape earthbound reality is interpreted in three different versions : Heavy Metal, Black Metal and Vintage, each adorned with 48 handapplied rivets. To ensure take-off in the best possible conditions, the MoonFighter is protected by a leather pouch and, upon returning from its missions, fits neatly into its carbon-finished docking station.

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Built of 100 layers of stacked flat steel plates in the Belgian region of Haspengouw,"Reading Between the Lines" takes the form of a church as its starting iconography.   It transforms from solid to nearly transparent depending on the perspective of the viewer.  Designed by a pair of young architects in Leuven, Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh, who collectively go as Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, it is part of a larger exhibition project Z-OUT, an initiative in which Z33, the contemporary art museum of the city of Hasselt, presents art in public spaces.

Opaque:


The shades of red and brown are from the rust that has accumulated on the unfinished steel structure. 

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In this closeup from during construction you can see how the layers are stacked.  As this is still in the workshop, the fresh grey steel has not yet started to rust.


These photos are from the artists website, there are plenty more there and a video clip of the actual construction.

A fantastic bit of humor, just go and see for yourself

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Ikepod is a strange little watch company which has always been focused more on the design side of the watch industry, using reliable but not interesting movements.  They have worked in partnership with industrial designer Marc Newson (previously mentioned) for a while now, but their release of his hourglass at Baselworld 2011 gave them quite a bit of positive publicity.

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Those are the basic models, the larger one times abotu one hour and costs about $30k, while the smaller model is about 1/2 the price and times 10 minutes.  Both are hand-blown from rather thick (3mm) borosilicate glass and use tiny steel balls, plated with nickel, copper, gold or something else for color, for timing.  According to promotional materials the large model contains approximately 1.3million balls. 

Their video of the production is stunning


For the 2011 Only Watch auction, they've made a unique model with red glass.  I was a bit disappointed to read that the red is a paint, rather then inherent in the glass, but that in no way detracts from the dramatic look



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In live shots the clarity and intensity of the red color, probably somehow related to the flag of Monaco, is much more obvious


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Calligraphic cat and mouse by Margaret Shepherd, a noted calligrapher.
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I don't have any more detail then simply the pictures, but apparently some Swedish subway stations are much MUCH more interesting then those in the US




More pictures at the, quite recommended, source.

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From the Michael Maltzan, the architect, in his description of the project

The project is a residence for two artists. Located 15 miles north of Los Angeles at the edge of Angeles forest, the site encompasses 6 acres of land originally planned as a hillside subdivision of houses designed by Richard Neutra. Three level pads were created but only one house was built, the 1952 Serulnic Residence. The current owners have over the years developed an extensive desert garden and outdoor pavilion on one of the unbuilt pads. The new residence, to be constructed on the last level area, is circumscribed by the sole winding road which ends at the Serulnic house.

The house has the form of a septagonal spiral, creating an unusually fragmented courtyard in the middle. Many of the rooms open into the courtyard and the outside rooms have protected windows, to keep the openess but provide privacy from the encroachment of LA.

The picture, and they have many more if you're interested, is from Architecture Lab

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In one of the current exhibits in the Duveen Galleries at the Tate museum, Fiona Banner has repurposed two decommissioned British fighter-planes.  The more eye-catching was a carrier-based Sea Harrier, suspended by the tail.  The top of the wings have been etched with a feather pattern, an homage to the plane's avian namesake, the Harrier Hawk.



The second was a Jaguar (a joint Anglo-French fighter), flipped on it's back to render it defenseless.  The skin has been polished to a mirror-like shine and presents the viewer with a changing reflection of the gallery.
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What to do when you want to keep with the traditional local architectural style when building a 160 room hotel, but that style only creates 4-5 story townhomes?
Stack them 70 of them!

(image from WAM, via )

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Using a programming toolkit called Processing Peter Blaškovič has created a collection of little interactive toys based on novel interpretations of basic physics, like particle interactions.  One of the newest ones, Flame allows on to simulate, quite well the sort of long exposure work that Julien Breton (previously referenced) does in reality. 

Sadly the image export function is broken on the Macintosh, but I was able to capture a sample of my work via screenshot and borrowed a sample of Peter's work from the gallery.

Mine