New at Pentagram
New Work: Vertical Zoo
The word “zoo” was first coined in the 19th century, but the concept of a man-made landscape of fauna is as old as human domination of the earth. The ancient Greeks had menageries, as did the Chinese and Roman empires, but the first historical reference to a “vertical zoo” might have been the medieval one in the Tower of London. Today 80 percent of the world’s zoos are located in cities, and a vertical zoo seems as inevitable as a vertical farm. A new competition in Buenos Aires, Argentina asked architects to design a vertical zoo for a location in a natural reserve on the city’s riverfront. Organized by Arquitectum and TodoObras magazine, the brief was to design a structure that would become a new urban landmark, one that would accentuate a growing area of the city and at the same time complement the natural character of the reserve. James Biber has designed a vertical zoo that is an urban take on Charles Darwin’s evolutionary tree of life, a phylogenic arrangement of species in vertical formation.
desigNYC: A New Design Resource for New York
In the midst of the financial crisis our friend Ed Schlossberg of ESI Design gathered a group of designers and design thinkers together to consider how to connect the NYC “design-impoverished” with all the designers who wanted to contribute in some meaningful way to the city. It was, at its core, a group looking for ways design could make NY a better place. At the time it seemed the least we could do and, in spite of the “recovery,” it still is.
Design is one tool for solving problems, but often it is characterized as the decoration on top of the cake (or even on top of the icing on top of the cake). For us it is, to stretch a simile nearly to its breaking point, the whole cake; recipe, layers, presentation and taste. With a sense of optimism that seemed almost anachronistic we met over a period of months in the ESI offices to formulate ideas for New York.
desigNYC was the result.
desigNYC is fundamentally a tool for connecting those organizations in need of design with those designers in need of an outlet for their sense of civic pride and engagement.
desigNYC is our attempt to put design back in the set of tools a city has to solve problems.
desigNYC is aimed at creating a civic design resource for New York.
desigNYC is in its beta testing now and we encourage all organizations in need of design to apply here. The deadline is November 30.
New Work: ‘Last Folio’
Daniel Weil has designed an exhibition entitled Last Folio, which runs from 10 – 27 November 2009 in the Lower Library at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Last Folio is a set of portraits taken since March 2006 of decaying books, pictures of wisdom turning to dust. Photographer Yuri Dojc found these poignant symbols by chance in an abandoned Cheder in Bardejov in the east of Slovakia, where time has stood still since the day in 1943 when all those attending the school were taken away to concentration camps. The schoolbooks are still there: essay notebooks with corrections, school reports, and remarkably enough, a book once owned by Yuri’s grandfather, Jakub. The books still tell a story, despite every page disintegrating as it is touched. But the story is of neglect and destruction, and Dojc treats each book as a survivor, every one captured as a portrait.
The challenge for Weil was to design an exhibition specific to this most appropriate of venues, a library. This part of the project highlights the contrast of destinies between these books and those housed in the College Library. He has created a series of virtual spaces which replicate bookcases in which each image is housed. The structure of these “ghost” cases is deliberately modest and vulnerable, contrasting with the venerable setting. Each has a translucent mesh behind it allowing the viewer to see through the image to the robust and grand cases behind, thus heightening the contrast. At the far end of the library is a massive image of the abandoned synagogue in Kosice.
This exhibition is one element of an extensive project on the extinguishing of Jewish life in Slovakia. A documentary film has been made by Yuri Dojc and filmmaker Katya Krausova. It follows the journey of the photographer through Slovakia and aims to preserve Holocaust memory through filmed survivor testimonies and photographic documentation of places and fragments including the schoolbooks.
New Work: Riverways
Manhattan is an island—some would say a landlocked island—and grew to prominence because of its harbor, but like many American cities, New York seems to avoid its waterways. Over the past decades, ferry and water taxi service has made an impressive reappearance on the city’s rivers—but along the way an evident problem has arisen. By definition, ferry landings are located at the edge of the city, usually in windy, exposed waterside sites that offer an unpleasant and discouraging experience for passengers waiting for a ferry or for connecting surface transit.
This year marks the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York harbor and discovery of the Hudson River. Over the past few years, under the leadership of the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial, a consortium of New York civic groups—including the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance and the Hudson River Foundation—have been developing plans for a system of “Quad Landings”: floating docks designed to allow access to and from the water for a wide variety of vessels, from ferries and water taxis to sailboats, kayaks, and other craft.
Building on this initiative, James Biber of Pentagram Architects and James Sanders of James Sanders + Associates have developed Riverways, a practical, economical, and flexible system of elements that allow water access where there is currently none, or enhance ferry and water-taxi landings that already exist. Though relatively small in scale, these elements are intended to provide crucial points of linkage, integrating the region’s water and land transportation into a single unified system, and opening the city’s waters for recreation to the immense populations adjacent to them. The proposal is designed to increase access to the water for communities frustrated by their proximity to magnificent waterways that can be seen but not touched.
Download a PDF of the complete proposal here.
New Work: MHL by Margaret Howell Tokyo Store
Last month saw the opening of a new Margaret Howell concept store in Tokyo, designed by William Russell and his team at Pentagram Architects. The latest product of Russell’s longstanding collaboration with Howell, this is the first stand-alone space for her diffusion brand MHL. The small (43m²) ground floor retail space is in the Daikanyama district and is clad externally with black steel grill panels. The interior features new display units, cash desk and furniture with a warehouse style storage wall behind the counter.
William Russell’s previous interior work with Margaret Howell includes the Place de la Madeleine store in Paris and award-winning Fulham Road store in London.
A look inside the new MHL store after the jump.
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New Work: ‘Weeds’ Dining Room
“Weeds” is all about the sacred and the profane. Or maybe the sacred and the mundane.
In the Showtime series a California housewife played by Mary-Louise Parker turns to selling marijuana after the death of her husband. The darkly comic mix of suburbia, naïveté and family dynamics is portrayed against a background of drugs, death, deceit and personal demons. The amount of killing, death, pain and humiliation surpasses even recent mob-themed shows; and this is a comedy!
This year’s Metropolitan Home Showtime House consists of twin penthouses at the luxury Tribeca Summit loft condominiums. James Biber and his team at Pentagram Architects were one of 14 designer teams invited to create rooms inspired by the network’s original programming.
Biber and his team, working on their first showhouse design, referenced a comic climax from “Weeds” for their design of the dining room. For those not up on the show’s past seasons, the scene was an eye-rolling reveal of a stolen rooftop lighted cross lifted from a new local religion-based community’s church. The enormous crucifix finally appears, lashed to the ceiling of a hastily assembled “grow house.” The stolen cross has become a lighting fixture over a bed of marijuana plants!
Montauk Residence Wins Second AIA NY State Design Award
The guesthouse at the Montauk Residence designed by James Biber and his team at Pentagram Architects has won a Citation for Design in the 2009 AIA New York State Design Awards. The project was recognized in the Residential, Small Projects (under 2,000 sq ft) category of the competition. The guesthouse is adjacent to the main house, which received its own Citation for Design in the 2006 AIANYS awards in the Residential, Large Projects category.
Each house has its own identity, yet they complement each other on the site. The guesthouse is supported on steel beams that give it the appearance of being almost entirely airborne, hovering over a pool and the ocean beyond. The guesthouse plan is modeled on a motel, with access to rooms off a continuous balcony that looks on the residence’s courtyard. The side facing away from the property has been louvered to conceal the neighbor’s house next door and at the same time preserve the ocean views and allow for air circulation. More about the Montauk Residence here.
Project Team: James Biber, FAIA, Michael Zweck-Bronner, AIA, Alex Mergold, AIA, Suzanne Holt and Denise Ramzy.
Construction Under Way on New M&T Bank Signature Branch
Lorenzo Apicella and his team in San Francisco and London have designed a new flagship branch for M&T Bank in Buffalo, New York. The 9,100 sq foot building is due for completion by year’s end and will serve as the model for all of the bank’s future branch construction and renovation.
“This new design language is deliberately more contemporary and expressive than M&T’s present branch architecture,” says Apicella. “Its inspiration, however, was the architecture of numerous enduring financial institutions—not least of all that of M&T’s own iconic Buffalo headquarters.”
Apicella’s team is working with local architects of record Kideney and HHL on the project.
Daniel Weil Maps His London at the Design Museum
Daniel Weil is one of the participating designers in Super Contemporary, the new exhibition at the Design Museum in London that focuses on the city’s dynamic design ecology. The show features a series of new commissions by influential and renowned London-based designers from different disciplines including Neville Brody, Ron Arad, BarberOsgerby, Industrial Facility and Paul Smith. Daniel was commissioned to create a personal map of London that will be part of a timeline charting the last 50 years of creative activity in the city. The map illustrates Daniel’s experience in London since his arrival from Buenos Aires in 1978.
Super Contemporary opens on 3rd June and runs until 4th October.
James Biber’s Moleskine on View at the Art Directors Club
James Biber filled a Moleskine notebook with a year’s worth of images and sketches.
Last winter James Biber was invited by I.D. Magazine to fill a Moleskine sketchbook for A Week in Your Life - 13 Book d’Autore, an exhibition of notebooks from 13 architects, designers and writers. Originally on view in Milan for 2009 International Design Week, the exhibition has now reached the Art Directors Club in New York, where, following a one night viewing for last week’s Stationery Show, it will be exhibited this Friday, May 29 for a viewing timed to Book Expo America.
Each participant in the exhibition was sent a notebook from Moleskine’s new Folio Collection and asked to document a week in their lives. For his book, Biber took the opportunity to go further. “During the last week of the year I collected the previous 12 months in an album of collage, images and sketches,” he says.
“Digital images, though convenient and easy to manage, are inherently non-tactile, can’t be juxtaposed or drawn on, and sit too neatly in the software’s grid. The Moleskine, and some transfer film, allowed me to create composites, contrasts and collages of a year’s worth of travel and projects. It’s the one chance to do what we all used to do with pictures: sort them, pile them up, throw them on a table and see them as objects rather than digital files.
“I plan to make it a yearly ritual. Finally, I am a part of the scrapbooking movement. Next, decoupage.”
Other participants in the exhibition include Yves Béhar, Marian Bantjes, Ayse Birsel, Han Feng, Michael Graves and Jessica Helfand. Friday night’s viewing runs from 6:30 to 9:30 pm and is open to the public. At the Art Directors Club, 106 West 29th Street in New York City.
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