Design Boom put together a cool list of aesthetically pleasing libraries made in 2013.
Check it out — here.
The image above is of the Datong library by Preston Scott Cohen
Check out Design Boom’s list of the top 10 art exhibitions of 2013 — here.
Image is of ‘heritage’, 2013 by Cai Guo-Qiang
Via (designweneed)
Simon Dale is a family man in Wales, the western part of Great Britain. His interest in self-sustainability and an ecological awareness led him to dig out and build his own home—one of the loveliest, warmest, most inviting dwellings you could ever imagine. And it cost him only £3,000, about $4,700 American dollars!
Simon gives two reasons for building the home. The first elegant one, from his website, is:
“It’s fun. Living your own life, in your own way is rewarding. Following our dreams keeps our souls alive.”
His second reason is a plea for sustainability, in which he states that “our supplies are dwindling and our planet is in ecological catastrophe”.
The home is constructed from wood, stone, straw, and has a sod roof. It’s heated with a wood fireplace and has a solar panel for power. Most materials were scavenged and refurbished appliances. The effect, though, isn’t of a run-down get-by-with-second-best . It’s creative, artistic, elegant, and cozy. It is, in fact, magical.
A Humble Cabin In The Desert Becomes An Art Phenom
Mirrors, LED lighting, and Arduino programming turn a 70-year old home into a contemporary work of art.
There is a great history of artists and architects messing with houses. In the ’70s, Gordon Matta-Clark famously took a saw to a New Jersey home and split it in two. More recently, Detroit architect Catie Newell transformed burned and abandoned houses into mind-boggling sculpture. Now you can add a humble cabin in the California desert to the list.
Via (FastCodeDesign)
If you’re reading this at work, it’s best you take a deep breath and maybe go for a walk. Otherwise, life might become temporarily frustrating. We present to you the coolest workplaces on Earth.
PARLIAMENT
Chill factor: Firewood walls to start
Industry: Design studio
Location: Portland, Oregon
Design studios, on the greater whole, are usually pretty cool. They’re design studios! Parliament, a cutting edge design agency with clients like Microsoft and Gatorade, has taken the design studio thing to the next level. With wood being the main motif, they have walls constructed of firewood (it looks like a giant stack of wood—as the wall), and all the floors, chairs and desks are also wood with a little bit of varnish. The look? Like if a lumberjack decided to hang up the axe and open a creative agency in the centre of a urban core. (Did we mention there’s also an authentic bear rug? Because there’s that, too.)
PIXAR HEADQUARTERS
Chill factor: Steve Jobs’ brainchild
Industry: Animation
Location: Emeryville, California
According to Steve Jobs’ biography, the concept behind Pixar Headquarters was a place that “promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations.” He also wanted a building that would stand the test of time. Well, he nailed it. Again. The open space concept super-lab has it all: real-life sized characters from its movies dot the campus, mini cabins that are office spaces for executives, a huge 20-acre landscaped green space and lots and lots of casual meeting spaces, you know, for that unplanned collaboration, for say, the next big animated movie.
RED BULL LONDON
Chill factor: 3-storey video wall, “floating” staircase and slide
Industry: Energy drinks, action sports
Location: London, England
So it turns out that like Google, all of Red Bull’s office spaces are drool-worthy. And the new slick Red Bull digs in London takes the cake. From their translucent pod rooms to the carbon fibre slide to ping pong meeting rooms, to their “floating” staircase that is suspended, the adrenaline from just walking around this adult playground would be sufficient without the gratis energy drinks. But we will take one anyway.
TWITTER HEADQUARTERS
Chill factor: Redo on Mid-Market historic building
Industry: Social media
Location: San Francisco, California
Twitter quickly outgrew its original pad in San Francisco. And instead of building a state-of-the-art, brand-spanking-new complex, they instead took to revitalizing San Fran’s Market Square, which has seen better days. But the new location is a historic Art Deco building, originally built in the 1930s, equipped with a rooftop patio with a office garden, a yoga room and a cafeteria cleverly dubbed the “birdfeeder.” (Also of note, Twitter just came to Canada and has started hiring, you know, if you’re looking for a new job.)
Read more of Ryan Bolton’s cool piece for Chill Magazine — Art in the workplace
Design doesn’t just impact lives, or enrich lives. It can save them. That is the message the American Institute of Architects (AIA) is trying to emphasize in a newinteractive graphical chart that shows the ways in which the choices architects make can affect our lives.
If you aren’t dreaming of becoming a programmer—and therefore planning to embark on a lengthy course of study, whether self-directed or formal—I can’t endorse learning to code. Yes, it is a creative endeavor. At its base, it’s problem-solving, and the rewards for exposing holes in your thinking and discovering elegant solutions are awesome. I really think that some programs are beautiful. But I don’t think that most who “learn to code” will end up learning anything that sticks.
One common argument for promoting programming to novices is that technology’s unprecedented pervasiveness in our lives demands that we understand the nitty-gritty details. But the fact is that no matter how pervasive a technology is, we don’t need to understand how it works—our society divides its labor so that everyone can use things without going to the trouble of making them. To justify everyone learning about programming, you would need to show that most jobs will actually require this. But instead all I see are vague predictions that the growth in “IT jobs” means that we must either “program or be programmed” and that a few rich companies want more programmers—which is not terribly persuasive.
This isn’t a debate on global warming, instead it is a discussion about creating products that lead to more conscious, connected consumers.
“During the past 60 years, humans have stripped the world of a quarter of its topsoil and a third of its forest cover. In total, one third of the planet’s resources have been consumed within the past four decades.
Dr Jonathan Chapman’s research presents strategic counterpoints to ‘throwaway society’, by developing design tools that enhance the resilience of relationships between people and their products. These include practice-led studies into the way various material surfaces age and the development of theoretical frameworks to support not the design of durable ‘products’, but the design of durable ‘meaning’, and ‘value’, that the product delivers.”
Learn more here.
