New this month, June 2009
'Mechatronics Meets Rock and Roll' Interview with Moritz Waldemeyer, Mark Magazine June/July 2009
Waldemeyer’s work offers a glimpse into the future of interactive gaming, new potentials for high tech lighting and immersive environmental design. London-based German designer Moritz Waldemeyer is known for his interactive technological sculptures such as his Corian games table shown at last year’s ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’ embedded with 2400 LED lights, his sinewy motion sensing crystal sculpture with Yves Behar, his futuristic Swarovski chandelier that communicates by text message and his wizardry with LED lights and microchip robot dresses for Hussein Chalayan. But what sets Waldemeyer’s work apart from his contemporaries is not his engineering abilities or even his well-chosen collaborators but that his designs go beyond mere technical problem solving into the realm of conceptual design. In fact, his geeky fascination with LEDs and circuit boards may well be the prototype for a new breed of cool young designers that want ultimate creative control over their designs. While many designers think learning exactly how new technologies like digital manufacturing and interactive technologies actually work is too technical, Waldemeyer is proof that the more you know, the more possibilities you can have when you design. His artist-engineer approach is precisely what makes him such a hot commodity. He knows it takes an artist’s eye to be able to truly understand and then customize and adapt these technologies to allow extremely un-geeky things to be created---like his Vegas inspired designs for Okay Go’s LED studded stage costumes.... Read more (and learn why I've chosen a dirty VW Polo for this image) in Mark Magazine Issue 20 or you can view the PDF below.
| mark_magazine_moritz_waldemeyer.pdf |
| File Size: | 1894 kb |
| File Type: | pdf |
Download File
'Philippe Rahm's Digestible Gulfstream', On Site Review, Issue 21 'Architecture and Weather'
"Architecture should no longer build spaces, but rather create temperatures and atmospheres”. Paris-based Swiss architect Philippe Rahm proposes a new way of looking at architecture, beyond mere building, beyond modernist ideals that he claims have created “petrified narratives of social, political and moral conventions”. Atmosphere, weather, diet, climate and neurology are explored in Rahm’s pioneering and controversial installations, creating debate about new forms and purposes of architecture.
Read more of the text and interview with Rahm about the future of architecture and alternative approaches to sustainability in Issue 21 of Onsite Review below.
Interview with London's Raw Edges, Azure Magazine May/June 2009
Borrowing fabrication techniques from textiles and ceramics, the duo design their architectural furniture from their Stoke Newington studio....Shay Alkalay: “A few months after we graduated from the rca, we were invited to go to China with a group of designers to do a project with Kobold, which makes accessories, bags and suitcases. By this time, we had been together for about six years and were living together, but we hadn’t really worked in a formal collaboration.
For the first time, we were designing, making, and presenting together. We realized although we have different skills and approaches – Yael likes folded, flat materials that can become 3-D, and I like mobile things and mechanisms – what we both look for is how to reinvent an object: its core, structure, how it works and how it’s used.”
Yael Mer: “We were always talking about the “raw edges” of materials. We started thinking about these words and how they represent our strategy, both with how we make things appear industrial and ragged, and keep our ideas fresh and raw. So we started using this as our name.” Read more in Azure May/June 2009 and online here.