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Dezeen | AS Aperitivo by Nina Zupanc
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The people at Matadero, a cultural complex in Madrid, Spain, have decided to dedicate a breathtaking new space to non-fiction cinema. Inside, visitors find a massive film library (which doubles as a learning center), a film set and two stunning movie theatres (featuring nice touches like glowing seat numbers), each dedicated to the subject. The building, which is primarily fitted out with black washed wood planks, was designed by Spanish architects at Cayetana de la Quadra-Salcedo.

www.mataderomadrid.org

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HUH Magazine | Matadero Theater
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ùrun by the national taiwan craft research institute, yii is concerned with the revitalization and development of taiwan’s traditional crafts skills and industries.

front and back views

with their design, nendo researched taiwan’s traditional bamboo handicrafts and furniture, applying these methods to a more modern material – tubular steel pipes. their choice to use the metal over bamboo is to display how these techniques can be easily mass-produced with a certain level of quality in a contemporary context.
bamboo handicraft techniques were used in the chair’s seat, weaving thin sliced sections and joining parts, wrapping them around each other allowing them to give the hard metal a sense of pliancy.

the chair comes in a high back and lower arm chair version

throughout the design process, bamboo artisans nendo was working with, visited metal workshops regularly, engaging in conversations about the project and its potential capacity. ‘bamboo-steel chair is the result of these discussions symbolizing new futures for traditional crafts through the cross-fertilization of different techniques and materials.

‘bamboo-steel chair’ is on show as part of the ‘yii’ exhibition at la triennale di milano during milan design week 2011.

high back version: 3/4 and front view

detail

sketch

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designboom | nendo: bamboo-steel chair for yii design by andrea db
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HUH. | House in Aoto by Jack Lowe
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Le creative sweatshop is a creative studio that’s committed to originality and quality in design. In this recent project the studio have come up with an interesting concept in which a selection of lamps are immersed into solidified gelatine to create some incredible art pieces. The result is this selection of well shot images that brings the work to life and transform every day home lighting into unrecognisable objects that look amazing and push the boundaries in contemporary art.

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Fresh Habits | Jelly and Light
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Made from black clay, these tableware pieces interpret the famous
chinese fairytale of the rabbit on the moon, commemorated every autumn in Taiwan during
the Moon Festival celebrations. Lin and Tang have designed a cup in which the rabbit sips
the water within along the lip of the vessel; and a plate where a rabbit is found sitting on its edge,
its stretched ‘reflection’ becoming the dish itself.

detail of rabbit which sticks its head out along the edge of the cup

‘Moon Rabbit’ cup and plate are a result of ‘Yii’, an initiative of the Taiwan Craft Research Institute,
whose aim is to encourage the taiwanese people to cultivate an appreciation of the country’s
traditional crafts. It seeks to ignite exchanges between contemporary taiwanese designers
and local craft artists on projects which relate to these traditional production practices.

Dutch designer Gijs Bakker was invited to be the creative director of ‘Yii’.
Under his direction, these newest works focus on the revival of the increasingly extinct
taiwanese craft in contemporary, exploring methods of bamboo work, ceramic, fine silver works,
lacquerware, wood carving and other ancient craft processes,teaming up taiwanese designers
with local craftsmen.

‘moon rabbit’ plate

detail of the rabbit

detail of the rabbit
installation of ‘moon rabbit’ cups
image © designboom

installation view
image © designboom

‘moon rabbit’ cups and plates
image © designboom

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designboom| yii design: moon rabbit by hsiao-ying lin | by andrea db

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Taiwanese designer Jeff Dah-Yue Shi, has won the 2011 Gold Pin design mark from the Taiwan Design Center for his LED Bamboo concept.

To create these beautiful lights, Dah-Yue Shi placed LEDs behind the bases of each rhombus. On top of the LEDs is a layer of tempered glass with a thin application of bamboo veneer. This allows for the lights to shine through while also blending into the patterns around it. Because of both the patterns and shifts in color, a three dimensional optical illusion is created. This type of lighting system is designed to be used anywhere like clubs, offices, and even homes.

Dah-Yue-Shi also created a smaller and easier to manufacture bamboo light. The bamboo tube LED lamp uses much of the same process as the wall lights. However, the outside is made out of rolled up sheets of bamboo which makes it crack-proof. The veneer is applied only to the cut out areas to lessen the harshness of the light. A magnetic base is also featured which allows the user to move it wherever and however they want.

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My Modern Metropolis | LED-Lit Bamboo Room by Jacob Paul Wiegmann
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Yatzer, on the contrary, has always possessed a certain curiosity rediscovering the creative process that our favorite designers choose since we think it can be as interesting as the final result. After all, what stays behind closed doors undoubtedly has a special appeal. When we came across the FACETURE project by New Zealand based designer Phil Cuttance, we not only admired his faceted creations but we also enjoyed having the opportunity to see exactly how they are made, watching the incredible video that accompanies them. But let’s take things from the beginning…

The FACETURE series consists of handmade faceted vessels, light-shades and a table. The idea behind them is simple but effective. Each object is produced individually by casting a water-based resin into a simple handmade mould. The mould is then manually manipulated to create the object’s form before each casting, making every piece utterly unique. Phil Cuttance kindly reveals the formula behind the creation process: ‘‘First the mould of the object is hand-made by scoring and cutting a 0.5mm plastic sheet. This sheet is then folded, cut and taped into the overall shape of the product that is to be cast. The mould’s final shape, and strength, is dictated by which triangular facets I pop in and out. I do this each time I ready the mould for the next object, meaning that no two castings are the same. I then mix a water-based casting resin that is cast in the mould where it sets. The resin is poured into the hollow mould and rolled around to coat and encase the sides which is controlled by me on the casting jig on the machine. The material soon sets creating a hollow solid object. Then another, different coloured measure of resin is poured into the same mould, and swirled around inside, over the first. When it has set, the mould is removed to reveal the solid set cast piece. The casting takes shape complete with sharp accurate lines and a digital quality to its aesthetic, a visual ‘surprise’ considering the ‘lo-fi’, hand-made process involved. The mould is then cleaned and ready for re-use.”

The FACETURE line will definitely captivate you with its bright colors and faceted surfaces that beautifully reflect the light. But what makes the collection even more appealing is the FACETURE machine, a simple but innovative device that we are sure many of you would love to own.  We would even dare say that this machine is so interesting that it could perfectly form part of a design exhibition itself! Cuttance points out: ”Its construction is simple and purposeful, screwed together to allow it to be flat-packed for shipping. Wheels make the machine portable within a working space. The shelving beneath provides storage for freshly cast pieces, and room for the casting stool to be stored. The ‘hopper’ holding the Jesmonite powder is made simply from a polypropylene sheet, in the same way as the moulds. The casting jig at the back of the machine is simple and allows me to peer into the mould and control the flow of the fast setting Jesmonite. This means it is cast evenly and economically, leaving a thin yet strong wall thickness. It can also be attached at two different widths to accommodate different sized moulds i.e. vases or a table.” We invite you to watch the amazing film that Phil Cuttance prepared for his line and discover how the FACETURE  machine is used in order to make a vase. We are sure that you will enjoy it as much as the final result!

Filmed by Petr Krecji, Copyright Phil Cuttance 2012

photo © Petr Krejci

The FACETURE project was created with the support of Creative New Zealand.

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Yatzer| FACETURE by Phil Cuttance written by Apostolos Mitsios

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He stacked them—ten or so brown and black books, library hardcovers—in his dorm room, titles to the wall, lips facing forward. He didn’t really buy books, either—at least I don’t recall that he did—but he never passed a bookstore without entering to read. These same stores have since displayed his books in their windows.

“‘You can tell how serious people are by looking at their books,’” Susan Sontag told Sigrid Nunez, long ago when Nunez was dating Sontag’s son. “She meant not only what books they had on their shelves, but how the books were arranged,” Nunez explains. “Because of her, I arranged my own books by subject and in chronological rather than alphabetical order. I wanted to be serious.”

There are many varieties of nerd, but only two real species—the serious and the nonserious—and shelves are a pretty good indication of who is which. “To expose a bookshelf,” Harvard professor Leah Price writes in Unpacking My Library, a recent collection of interviews with writers about the books they own, “is to compose a self.” In Sontag’s case, a very rigorous self.

And, of course, that’s just the sort of self someone anxious about his aspirations might shy away from. “A self without a shelf remains cryptic,” Price notes. It’s like the straight-A student who says he hasn’t studied for finals: if you haven’t confessed to caring, no one can consider you to have failed.

There’s not a lot of anxiety about keeping libraries in this collection, however, because the adults featured—Junot Diaz, Steven Pinker, Gary Shteyngart, James Wood, Claire Messud, to name a few—are all solidly successful. Price’s interviews are less about each writer’s affairs and encounters with individual books than his or her shepherding of the whole herd—what’s treasured, tossed, bought twice, allowed to be lent. The interesting questions focus on each writer’s feelings about intellectual signaling and methods of overall arrangement. In other words, the stars of the pictures aren’t the books but the shelves.

As it turns out, for a great deal of their history, shelves were much more haphazard than they are today. Before they even displayed books, they supported piles of scrolls. In the first century BC, Atticus loaned Cicero two assistants to build shelves and to tack titles onto his collection. “Your men have made my library gay with their carpentry work,” Cicero reported. “Nothing could look neater than those shelves.”

But around the time the codex emerged in the first century AD, open shelves—which now housed two clashing forms, the long cylindrical scroll and the flat rectangular codex—began to be considered hideous. Texts were sent into hiding, stored in armoires and trunks, which were convenient for transporting books, but not for accessing them.
For the next fourteen hundred or so years, books, as Henry Petroski, a professor of civic engineering and history at Duke, writes in The Book on the Bookshelf, were shelved every which way but straight up, spine out. Engravings of private studies show books piled horizontally, standing on the edge opposite their spine (their fore edge), as well as turned fore edge out.

In the Middle Ages, when monasteries were the closest equivalent to a public library, monks kept works in their carrels. To increase circulation, these works were eventually chained to inclined desks, or lecterns, thus giving ownership of a work to a particular lectern rather than a particular monk. But as collections grew, surface space diminished, and books came to be stacked on shelves above the lectern, at first one and then many. The problem, of course, was that two books chained next to each another couldn’t be comfortably studied at the same time: elbows knocked; shackles clinked and tangled.

Hence the innovation of vertical storage. One book could be removed without disturbing the rest. Yet the transition was gradual. Books in monasteries retained their chains for some time, and many leather covers, particularly in private libraries, protruded irregularly, tricked-out as they were with embossing and jewels. Those books that did stand were oriented with their spines to the back of the shelf.

Sometimes an identifying design was drawn across the thick of the pages. A doctor of law just north of Venice named Odorico Pillone had Titian’s nephew, Cesare Vecellio, draw the fore edges of his books with scenes befitting their content. Other times a title label flagged off the inner edge of the cover or was affixed to the chain.

A selection from Odorico Pillone’s library with fore edges painted by Cesare Vecellio.
The first spine with printing dates from 1535, and it was then that books began to spin into the position we’re familiar with.

From The New York Times Shows You 65 Ways to Decorate with Books in Your Home, photographer unknown.
Despite the proliferation of affordable books with printed spines in the intervening centuries, the gold standard of shelving, the built-in bookshelf, didn’t become prevalent until the Depression. Edward Bernays, the man who sold women on smoking and invented “public relations” in 1923 with a course at NYU and a book called Crystallizing Public Opinion, was hired by publishers to hasten book sales.

As Petroski notes, he deployed famous public figures to proclaim “the importance of books to civilization and then convinced architects, home contractors and interior designers to build homes with bookshelves, believing, ‘where there are bookshelves, there will be books.’” Two decades later, The New York Times was putting out a dollar magazine, The New York Times Shows You 65 Ways to Decorate with Books in Your Home, celebrating the cheering effect of a wall of the publishing industry’s lithe and colorful new covers. Now we long for these slatted walls. They are, in James Wood’s words, the adult “show shelves,” in Jonathan Lethem’s, the object of childhood longing (and they were always to me a symbol of intellectual and economic well-being).

The cognitive psychologist and pop-science writer Steven Pinker and his wife, novelist Rebecca Goldstein, create theirs out of white smart cubes, which Pinker also employs in his closet to color code his shirts. Time critic Lev Grossman’s are the object of loathing—“my damn divorce bookcases”—while the comic novelist Gary Shytengart prizes his for adding a “sense of drama to the living room.” That is, a purely aesthetic drama.

Gary Shteyngart’s living room drama, available at Design Within Reach.
Junot Díaz keeps every book he has ever bought (even if it means having to do so in storage). Pinker prunes every few years, while the novelist and critic Edmund White frequently buys books to write an essay and then dumps them all after it runs.

“To be weighted down by things—books, furniture—seems somehow terrible to me,” Claire Messud says. And it was this very concern—the mental burden of being anchored by books, the cost and bother of moving boxes yet again, and the flattering idea that a donation could do some good—that led my boyfriend and me recently to shed more than two hundred titles.

My boyfriend was ruthless. He chucked a book if he thought it’d be easy enough to get again for a dollar. From him, Housing Works got Nabokov (The Gift), Hemingway (a second copy of In Our Time), Ishiguro (A Pale View of the Hills), and Ozick (The Pagan Rabbi, which, I’m sad to say, snuck past me).

I’ve always felt an obligation to keep any book with which I’ve had some sort of relationship, even if it was an insignificant one—an assignment for a short review, for instance. Over time, these bad and mediocre books began to stand on my shelves as reproaches—Was I fair? Did I do the book justice? Whom did I hurt?—and I was glad to send them off. But I kept most else, especially if I’d scribbled in it. My annotations—“!!” or “Hahah” or “Bleh”—are asinine, but I’m fond of them. Analyses can be recooked, but these grunts fossilize an initial reaction—how I responded to Notes from Underground at eighteen (“Meh”) and then three formative years later (“WAH”).

I put the survivors on a few new Billy Bookcases. (IKEA has sold more than twenty-eight million, and I, for better or worse, own four.) They went up like all my other books, in no particular order.
Someday I’d like to change that—but I couldn’t go through all the effort just to be seen as being serious.

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The PARIS REVIEW | Shelf-Conscious by Francesca Mari
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The Bidoun furniture series was inspired by the Middle East. Katrin Greiling studied the nomadic lifestyle and used the Bedouins daily-life-objects as her source of inspiration in creating this contemporary interpretation of the traditional Arabic seating, the majilis.

The Bidoun collection at ArtDubai 2009:

Coffee tables with rope handles, designed for a mobile nomadic lifestyle:

The sofa system involves several layers of mattresses stacked on each other and tied in place by a rope. The layers have a variation of different fabric and inspired by the stacking method common in the tents during. The cord expresses flexibility, inspired by both the tent but as well transport and trade. Applied in the x-pattern it connects these furniture visual back to the Chesterfield sofas, thus to the European furniture history.

The seating height of the furniture varies depending number of mattresses, both 430 mm and 330 mm. The look of the sofas can be changed simply by flipping the mattresses and bringing a different fabric to the top. The choice of the upholstery fabrics is motivated through the different cultural influences in the Middle East.

The coffee table – available in massive pine, veneer or marble, plays with the same visual element, with a cord tied under the table.

Visit Katrin Greiling’s website here.

Available at the TRAFFIC gallery in Dubai here.

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CONTEMPORIST | Bidoun Collection by Katrin Greiling by Dave

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