Thursday, September 17, 2009


The BMW Art Car was conceived in 1975, the year that French auctioneer and racecar driver Herve Poulain first entered 24 Hours of Le Mans. Searching for a link between art and motorsport, Poulain asked his friend, noted artist Alexander Calder, to commission a rolling canvas on the BMW 3.0 CSL that he would race. In the years that followed, this unique combination of motorsport and BMW design fascinated the famous artists of our time. Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol have all turned BMW racing cars into Art Cars.

Since 1975, outstanding artists from all over the world have been designing the BMW automobiles of their era. The BMW Art Car Collection include works by well-known artists such as Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, A.R. Penck, David Hockney and Jenny Holzer. The Art Cars reflect the developments in art history with regard to fine art, design and technology and are displayed worldwide in major museums such as the Paris Louvre, the Royal Academy in London, the New York Whitney Museum of Modern Art, Venice's Palazzo Grassi, Sydney's Powerhouse Museum and the Guggenheim Museums of New York and Bilbao. In the future, too, Art Cars will document the fascinating link between art and technology in international exhibitions.

Chronological list of all BMW Art Cars.

Alexander Calder (USA) 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL

Frank Stella (USA) 1976 BMW 3.0 CSL

Roy Lichtenstein (USA) 1977 BMW 320i Group 5 Race Version

Andy Warhol (USA) 1979 BMW M1 Group 4 Race Version

Ernst Fuchs (Austria) 1982 BMW 635 CSi

Robert Rauschenberg (USA) 1986 BMW 635 CSi

Michael Jagamara Nelson (Australia) 1989 BMW 635 CSi

Ken Done (Australia) 1989 BMW M3 Group A Race Version

Matazo Kayama (Japan) 1990 BMW 535i

César Manrique (Spain) 1990 BMW 730i

A.R. Penck (Germany) 1991 BMW Z1

Esther Mahlangu (South Africa) 1991 BMW 525i

Sandro Chia (Italy) 1992 BMW 3 Series Racing Prototype

David Hockney (Great Britain) 1995 BMW 850CSi

Jenny Holzer (USA) 1999 BMW V12 LMR


Tuesday, August 25, 2009


Cornell Professor Launches Interior Design Naming Practice

In the late 1990’s, professor Jan Jennings struggled to talk with her interior design students about design practices that had been used throughout history and across cultures, such as a dramatic staircase in the lobby of a luxury hotel, two similar chairs situated side-by-side in a large space, or columns in a restaurant ornamented by decorative means. For decades—even centuries, in some cases—these reiterative examples have gone unnamed and undocumented.Today, Jennings, a professor in Design and Environmental Analysis, leads a multidisciplinary research team of faculty from the Colleges of Human Ecology, Arts and Sciences, and Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University in building a new knowledge base for the creative dimension of design. The project is the first of its kind to assemble contemporary design theory in a searchable, online database that includes imagery from real buildings.“We had to invent a naming practice, a vocabulary for students to use in talking about design,” Jennings said. “Interior design had borrowed language from architecture and visual arts, but when you came down to it, we didn’t have a typology for contemporary design practices that have been occurring across history, style, and culture.”Today, that original concept is a full-blown research and teaching project called Intypes, which is short for the Interior Archetypes Research and Teaching Project. The project officially launched this summer at the NeoCon World’s Trade Fair in Chicago with partners Interior Design magazine and IIDA.


“This extraordinary undertaking, 13 years in the making, is sure to invigorate the educational process by creating a new vocabulary to define contemporary design,” said Cindy Allen, editor in chief of Interior Design."The project brings the field of interior design to a whole new level," said Cheryl Durst, executive vice president and CEO of IIDA. “The Intypes approach gives credence and relevance to the history and legacy of interior design as a profession, as a discipline and as a viable and vital contribution to society as a whole.”To date, the project has named nearly 70 interior archetypes. “Some of our alumni are using these words in the field,” Jennings said. “When they do that, they hear the word being used later by their colleagues. If the word is used without translation or definition, then it really has become a word that contributes to a design language.”In total, four faculty members and 16 interior design master’s students have actively participated in the project. Many of the students take on a market segment, such as health care, for their thesis projects, researching the history, cultural implications, and use. Their proposals go to the Intypes Research Group, which evaluates the research and considers the students’ proposed names.The Intypes workgroup is hoping their project inspires designers to think about these issues, and opens the door to more formal research in interior design. “Interior design is its own field and profession,” Jennings said. “We’re hoping the project provides a new way to talk about field and lends it the credibility it deserves.”


Images courtesy of Cornell University.


Monday, July 6, 2009

Mood, Memory Affected by Your Home

(OPRAH.com) -- Anyone fond of coming home to a chilled glass of Chardonnay to help wind down may soon be dreaming of the front door keys rather than a corkscrew. The pleasure is due to a hot new field of design called neuroarchitecture.

Big windows that allow in lots of natural light can provide a mood boost.

Emerging research on how factors like light, space and room layout affect physical and psychological well-being are driving the buzz behind this new intersection of art and science.

"The premise is to consider how each feature of the architectural environment influences certain brain processes such as those involved in stress, emotion and memory," says Eve Edelstein, Ph.D., adjunct professor at the NewSchool of Architecture & Design in San Diego and a research consultant to the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA).

For example, light is already a well-known mood modulator -- candles, artificial sources controlled with dimmers, lots of natural sunshine. Beyond that, neuroarchitecture experts have a few suggestions about how to make the kind of home improvements that also might renovate your mood:

Decor

Surprisingly, sleek minimalist interiors may not feed the brain as much as a home or apartment that's a little cluttered, says John Zeisel, Ph.D., who serves on ANFA's board of directors and designs therapeutic environments for dementia sufferers through his company, Hearthstone Alzheimer Care, in Woburn, Massachusetts.

"Alzheimer's patients wander. However, if you provide good visual cues -- pictures and objects they're familiar with, destinations at the ends of hallways, such as kitchens, activity spaces and doors that lead out into safe and inviting healing gardens -- they stop wandering and begin to walk with purpose."

Similarly, when you look around your own place and see the evidence of who you are (the books you've read, the projects you're working on), you feel grounded. Oprah.com: 7 decorating essentials

The hearth should always be the center of the home, according to Zeisel and British kitchen designer Johnny Grey, who have collaborated since Daniel Goleman, author of "Emotional Intelligence," introduced them three years ago.

"Being in the kitchen links you to hardwired feelings of comfort -- beyond getting food, there's a sense of protection, warmth, sociability, sharing stories," says Zeisel, which is why, ideally, it's both a functional and a social space where friends and family can gather, do homework, and relax.

Grey says the "sweet spot" is a location where you can cook with your back facing a wall while looking others in the eyes.

Zeisel explains why: "After a busy day, if your kitchen design makes you face away from family or company, wondering what the noises and bustle going on behind you mean your brain is more likely to continue to produce adrenaline and cortisol, the hormones associated with anxiety, fear, and stress.

"But when you face into the room and can see what's going on, you feel safer and more in control; then oxytocin, the bonding hormone, and serotonin, associated with relaxation and enjoyment, have a greater chance of being released."

Better yet is a kitchen in which you have a view of the door where people enter, a window onto a landscape and a fireplace. Oprah.com: Go inside this dream kitchen

Windows

A yard is nice, but if you don't have one, big windows or a balcony also offer an emotional lift. "Just being able to see how the weather is and knowing what's out there relaxes people and makes them feel more in control," says Zeisel.

'Soft geometry'

Grey suggests the use of curves instead of hard edges on counters, furniture, and cabinets to help nurture contentment and well-being.

"The reason has to do with your peripheral vision and is linked to a primitive part of the brain called the amygdala," he says. "If you were to walk down a dark, narrow tunnel lined with sharp rocks, you wouldn't be able to think about anything except avoiding getting hurt. But if the same tunnel were lined with linen upholstery, you'd feel safe to daydream."

Everything need not be rounded --"that gets very tedious," Grey says. "But if the key pieces and places are curved, that makes the body relax."

Original art

Decorating with a signed painting or one-of-a-kind sculpture not only puts your unique fingerprint on your place, it transmits a sense of authenticity and trust, says David Lewis, PhD, research director of Neuroco, a British neuromarketing company that uses EEGs (which measure electrical activity in the brain) and other techniques to understand consumer behavior.

A room of one's own

Lack of privacy is stressful, Zeisel says. Even if you can't have your own room, it's important to find ways to guarantee yourself solitude (make a time when the bathroom is yours so you can put on makeup alone, find a corner away from the family traffic to read).

Rearranging

"One of the keys to a home that elicits a lot of happiness and positive emotion is that it changes to some extent," says the University of Wisconsin's Richard J. Davidson, PhD.

Even an environment that makes our spirits soar -- an incredible view, for example -- tends, over time, to grow stale. We get used to it. Davidson isn't suggesting turning your place upside down, but if you get the bug to move things around a bit or play with the lighting, you might find your own interior gets a lift toward the sunnier.

By Tim Jarvis from O, The Oprah Magazine © 2008

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Sears Tower to Be Revamped to Produce Most of Its Own Power

By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: June 24, 2009
CHICAGO — The Sears Tower, that bronze-black monument that forms the 110-story peak of the skyline here and stands as the tallest office building in the Western Hemisphere, will soon have another unique feature: wind turbines sprouting from its recessed rooftops high in the sky.
The building’s owners, leasing agents and architects said Wednesday that they are literally taking environmental sustainability to new heights with a $350 million retrofit of the 1970s-era modernist building — and the turbines are only the tip of the transformation. The plan, to begin immediately, aims to reduce electricity use in the tower by 80 percent over five years through upgrades in the glass exterior, internal lighting, heating, cooling and elevator systems — and its own green power generation.
In such a huge tower, with 4.5 million square feet of office and retail space, 16,000 windows and 104 elevators, the project is bound to be one of the most substantial green renovations ever tried on one site, planners said. The Sears Tower is significantly larger than the 102-story, 2.6-million-square-foot Empire State Building, for instance, which is also undergoing renovation to reduce energy consumption.
“If we can take care of one building that size, it has a huge impact on society,” said Adrian Smith, an architect whose firm designed the Sears Tower renovation. “It is a village in and of itself.”
Buildings are among the world’s largest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions. After the retrofit, energy savings at the Sears Tower, which is to be renamed the Willis Tower this summer, would be equal to 150,000 barrels of oil a year, officials said. The savings are expected to help redeem some of the project’s cost, which is to be financed through private equity investment, grants, debt financing and government funds.
The Sears Tower plans to open a first-floor center to educate the public about the redesign, and hopes to serve as a model for other aging skyscrapers around the world, officials said.

Thursday, June 25, 2009


June 25, 2009

IC Green Container Dwellings Sprout Up in California

by Haily Zaki

sustainable design, green design, shipping container home, ic green, dwell on design, sustainable architecture, recycled materials

Inhabitat loves shipping containers, whether from down under or the Great North. These self-contained quadrilateral wonders are the perfect modular building unit; easily transported, super durable, and, with over700,000 containers being abandoned per year in U.S. ports, in need dire need of being re-purposed. That’s why we are happy to see IC Green, another innovator in the field of shipping container architecture. Check out their line of modest but sustainable and stylish container dwellings as they sprout up all over Southern California, including this weekend at Dwell on Design!

sustainable design, green design, shipping container home, ic green, dwell on design, sustainable architecture, recycled materials

IC Green is a Southern California-based design/build company that specializes in transforming overseas shipping containers into simple, comfortable and sustainable residences. The company features six main models ranging in size from a diminutive open floor plan studio to a full four-bedroom unit with courtyard.

All models come with water conservation measures such as rainwater collection systems, grey-water systems,green roofs, and dual flush toilets. Materials used include FSC certified wood products, VOC free paint, and metal products with high recycled content. All homes are also fitted with radiant floor systems paired with highly efficient insulation to reduce the overall energy demand of each residence. The large glass facades allow for ample daylighting and reduce the need for electrical lighting. IC Green is also currently investigating using LED lighting in their homes. Customized stackable designs are also available upon request. These boxy delights make simple but sweet abodes (and the perfect pool house).

For an up close and personal look at their dwellings, check them out at the special Dwell Outdoor pop-up community at Dwell on Design this weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center. If you can’t make it to the conference, they also have an upcoming 2400 unit project in LA County, a 1200 unit project with a 480 studio over a garage in Torrance, and a 320 unit on display at their main office in Garden