Balance, Design, Products, Technology
December 9, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
Where we’ve been this week…
1. Core 77 for their post on Ice Cube and his take on the Eameses. (Plus if you are stuck for gift ideas this holiday season check out Core 77′s gift guide)
2. DesignSponge shopping guides are always jam packed with great stuff. Check out their green gift guide for some holiday ideas.
3. Good Reads for their awesome book lists. They’ve got an excellent architecture section.
4. The Design Miami blog for a good wrap up of that wonderful event.
5. Huffington Post’s design coverage including this piece on a glass home in Japan.
6. Meghan Wilker of the Geek Girls Guide, gives a GTD-focused tour of her home office.
7. Microsoft’s Steve Clayton takes us on a tour of his workspace. Can you spot the white Eames Lounge Chair?
8. Designer Daily for their home office roundup. Lots of good inspiration here.
9. The Fox is Black for the beautiful desktop wallpaper series.
10, Museum of Modern Art’s wonderful online store has a great home office section.
Balance, Design, Products
December 8, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
Here are some ideas to get you started with your holiday shopping. They are design-driven, connected to the home office and range from affordable to extravagant – and all can be ordered online so there’s no need to leave the comfort of your home office. Also we’d love to hear from you about your gift ideas. Just leave your suggestions in the comment sectio below… Read more
Balance, Design, Products
December 7, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
“Virgin is an English company – the brainchild of entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. They are using the Eames Lounge Chairs and Ottomans in their Virgin Atlantic Upper Class Clubhouse at London’s Heathrow airport,” says EamesDesigns.com editor Daniel Ostroff. “That’s fitting as the idea for this chair and ottoman came to Charles and Ray when they thought about an English club house, with its big, comfortable armchairs. The Eames Lounge Chair provides all of the comforts of a big, English club house chair, plus it swivels, and it’s made from sustainable materials.”
Balance, Design
December 7, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
My friend Preston of Jetson Green criticized me a few weeks back for being too negative about a possibly ground-breaking project. He was right; in that particular case, if I had nothing good to say, I probably shouldn’t have said anything at all. I consciously decided to follow that dictum when I first saw the stunning little Tetra Shed or Shedworking. It is a beautiful thing, designed by David Ajasa-Adekunle of Innovation Imperative,an award-winning British architecture firm, and it has been showing up on every design website, including Jetson Green.
So what could I possibly complain about with this little gem? Only this: I once owned a geodesic dome with doors and windows installed in sloping walls, and they leak. That’s why buildings have roof overhangs, why windows and doors are inset and have trim. That door, with its double hinges, is going to be hard to lock and harder to seal. The shape is gorgeous but it is technically a huge problem. My dome had a sloping door like that; the first time I opened it, while carrying my baby daughter, the waterlogged door came off its hinges and clonked me on the head. There are reasons wood buildings have evolved the way they have.
This thing is either going to leak, or it is going to be impossibly expensive. And then it will take a little longer to leak.
There are other issues; Bucky Fuller might point out that the tetrahedron encloses the least volume per unit of surface area. Or that municipalities with limits on floor area measure the overall footprint, whereas what matters to a human being is the headprint, how much room is there to stand up in.
Preston raises a serious issue; are we cheerleaders or critics? I don’t know anymore.By Lloyd Alter
This story appears in partnership with treehugger, a one-stop shop for green news, solutions, and product information
Design, Products, Technology
December 6, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
Admit it, visiting the museum is always a little better when you know they’ve got an ace gift shop waiting at the end of your day of cultural enrichment. It’s okay, museums often do an excellent job of curating hard to source items related to the history of art and design. Cultural institutions like MOMA male for a surprisingly great source for tech related gifts throughout the year, oftentimes offering import items you might have seen here or at other design blogs, but can’t be found at regular retailers. Here are 12 tech items we pulled from the catalogs of four of our fav modern museums …
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Balance, Design, Products
December 5, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
I came across Angelica Paez’s home work space on our Herman Miller flickr group. I was intrigued by her space and asked Angelica if she’d share some more about her Texas set up.
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Balance, Design, Products
December 2, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
Last night the Luminaire Lab Showroom played host to the Eames Aluminum Group’s outdoor series of chairs and tables which we launched at ICFF in May. Owner Nasir Kassamali spotted the pieces at the fair and was passionate about including them in his new second story addition to the showroom that for the duration of Art Basel is devoted to all things outdoors.
Above: The Eames Aluminum Group outdoor pieces, Konstantin Grcic’s Corian hearts for the Design Love exhibition and auction, Andree Putman’s Corian sail boat bowl and an illuminated Luminaire.
Also on display is the Design Love exhibition – a collaboration between DuPont, Intramuros magazine and well known designers including Ingo Maurer, Andree Putman, Jean-Marie Massaud, Patricia Urquiola and Konstantin Grcic (whose wonderful Chair One and Stool One are part of the Herman Miller Collection and grace the halls of Art Basel). The works are all in Corian and are exhibited together for the first time at Luminaire. You can bid for them in an online auction here until December 3. Sales will benefit the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami.
Photo credit: The image above of the Luminaire sign is from Worldredeye – check out their site for some great coverage of Design Miami.
Balance, Design, Products
December 2, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
Where we’ve been this week…
1. Treehugger for their interview with treehouse designer Pete Nelson. Fewer tree houses are used as home work spaces than was originally thought.
2. Core77 for their ultimate gift guide because suddenly it’s that time of year again!
3. Architizer for the MIMA House – a contemporary home that responds to the changing use of space with moveable walls.
4. Design Milk’s Designer Desktop series closes with the wonderful Dieter Rams.
5. Grain Edit for the post on Dutch illustrator Raymond Lemstra. Great work and a helpful link to Lemstra’s store (good holiday gifts perhaps?)
6. Design Observer’s Alexandra Lange on the interiors of Kevin Roche. You’ll spot some beautiful Eames pieces in the shots.
7. Unbeige for alerting us to the fact that Philip Johnson’s Glasshouse now has an online shop. Help raise funds to save the house and find great gifts. Perfect.
8. The Selby for a wonderful peek into publisher Angelika Taschen’s home.
9. PSFK for their post on architect David Adjaye’s pavillion outside the Design Miami tent.
10. Metropolis magazine’s piece on what a toy can do for architecture.
Design, Products
December 2, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
I met Eames Demetrios at the art collector’s lounge this morning. He’d just checked in and had a chance to take a quick look around the fair. He was amazed at how many Herman Miller pieces were dotted around the vast hall.
“There are so many booths that have Eames pieces in them,” said Demetrios. “You expect the plastic chairs but there are DCMs and they are serious chairs to drag around a big space when you don’t have to…I think it’s great.”
Adam Call (the Herman Miller Collection Lead) and I headed out to the floor to do a bit of furniture spotting ourselves and Eames was absolutely right. We were everywhere. As Call said this may very well be our first year here but it looks like we were at Art Basel even before we were at Art Basel!
Top: Eames Molded Plastic Chairs in white with wire bases and art still waiting to be hung. Above: A Nelson Swag Leg Work Table hard at work.
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Technology
December 1, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
Everyone is talking about the “cloud”, but one company, Berg, is trying to put a happy face to the amorphous concept with the announcement of a technological throwback: a printer. The Little Printer is a wireless connected printing device designed to work less like a sheet-by-sheet household printer and more like a miniature printing press of Tweet-proportions, delivering bite-size daily subscriptions to content you want to receive from the cloud. News, puzzles, messages from friends, a word of the day, horoscopes, the weather report…all configured from your smartphone.
“In your front room, Little Printer wirelessly connects (with no configuration) to a small box that plugs into your broadband router. It’s this same box that will enable our other planned products in the BERG Cloud family. There’s no PC required, your phone is your remote control. We think of BERG Cloud as the nervous system for connected products. It’s built to run at scale, and could as easily operate the Web-enabled signage of a city block, as the playful home electronics of the future. Not to mention the smart product prototypes that we work with our clients on, in the other side of our design studio.”
Right now, Berg and their BERG Cloud partners are Arup, foursquare, Google, the Guardian, and Nike, with pre-order email notification signup open for the planned 2012 launch.
This story appears in partnership with Unplggd, a site for people who embrace technology and design in their home.
