Tag / architecture
From Designer to Founder: Two Entrepreneurs Share Lessons From Building their Businesses
From Airbnb to Pinterest, more and more designers are launching and leading companies, and many are doing it without traditional business experience or backgrounds. Instead, they’re learning how to build a business while building their businesses. Two such entrepreneurs are Design Army co-founder Pum Lefebure and Jesse Genet, the CEO of product packaging company Lumi, who will share their experiences during an October 15 Adobe MAX session hosted by 99U.
Ahead of the panel, we’re reflecting on the lessons Lefebure and Genet have shared with us about becoming savvier entrepreneurs.
Don’t quit your day job too soon. Lefebure started Design Army with her husband Jake at their kitchen table with Lefebure also working her full-time job, so they could maintain their health insurance. Both regularly stayed up until 3 a.m. to get Design Army off the ground. They anticipated it would be two years before Design Army took off enough for Lefebure to leave her day job. It took four months. The tak..
Design polymath Gio Ponti to be celebrated in retrospective at Musée des Art Décoratifs
The Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti was one of the creative titans of the 20th century, yet his work’s playfulness has, perhaps, led critics to underestimate his importance compared with some of his more po-faced peers. That may be about to change, thanks to a major new exhibition at the Musée des Art Décoratifs in Paris. Titled ‘Tutto Ponti: Gio Ponti, Archi-Designer’, it’s the first French retrospective of his work, and runs from 19 October to 10 February 2019. Born in 1891, Ponti studied architecture at the University of Milan before setting up his own practice, though from the start he combined architecture and design. In 1923 he became the creative director of Richard Ginori, whose fusty output he transformed, and in 1928 he launched Domus magazine, which he edited (apart from a few years in the 1940s) until his death in 1979. Table service, Édition Franco Pozzi by...
Tadao Ando retrospective to open at the Centre Pompidou in Paris
The Centre Pompidou opens a major retrospective of Japanese architect Tadao Ando on 10 October, unpacking and celebrating the core elements of his practice from his use of concrete and geometric volumes to the integration of nature, light and water into his designs. Born in Osaka in 1941, Ando is well-known to be self-taught, travelling the world to understand architecture across cultures as part of this learning. He set up his practice Tadao Ando and Associates in 1969. Koshino House, 1981/1984. Photography: Shinkenchiku-sha Since then, he has completed over 300 projects across his 50-year career, picking up the Pritzker prize in 1995. The exhibition traverses periods of his production from his first house project in 1976, the Azuma House in Sumiyoshi, to his work on Naoshima island that commenced in 1988 and continues today, the Church of Light in 1989 and his upcoming La Bourse de Commerce in Pari, scheduled...
What to see and where: exhibitions from the Wallpaper* architecture desk
Error loading HTML
Creative luminaries explore the possibilities of light for photography show in aid of Maggie’s
Photography is the art of manipulating light: its very process depends on minute changes in the electromagnetic spectrum, often barely visible to the eye. Early modernist photographers in the 1920s were the first to experiment with different ways to record and use light to dramatic effect, reviving Fox Talbot’s photogram technique to produce x-ray like images, for example, while others, like Paul Strand, preferred to incorporate natural light into their compositions. ‘Without light there is no colour. Without light there is no life,” says Ed Freeman, a landscape architect at Reardonsmith Landscape LLP, whose photograph is included in a new exhibition, ‘Design To Shape Light’, curated by lighting designer Paul Nulty, and organised by Danish lighting manufacturer Louis Poulsen. On view at Carl Hansen & Søn’s London showroom in Clerkenwell, the exhibition explores the relationship between photography, design and architecture through light in 21 photographs by leading creatives including....
Greater Goods’ new coffee roasters in Austin started life as a car warehouse
East Austin Cafe by Greater Goods coffee roasters has been carved from the shell of an old automotive warehouse in Austin, Texas – a city that’s seen an energy boost of high-caffeine hotspots emerge of late. Converted by Michael Hsu Office of Architecture (the practice behind other Texan taverns like ATX Cocina restaurant, The Line Hotel and South Congress Hotel, and indeed, 200 further locations in Austin alone), much of the existing warehouse has been retained, if polished up (quite literally, in the case of the concrete floors). Exposed douglas fir framing, original gable steel trusses and translucent polycarbonate panels recall the former life of the structure, while a central coffee bar described by the architect as a ‘sculptural island’ is rendered in contrastingly luxe quartz. All-over whitewashed walls and sandy-coloured furniture accents give the place a refreshing, seaside-in-the-city feel. Discover more of the world’s best coffee shops here, with our handy...
Rem Koolhaas and Irma Boom publish in-depth survey of building details
When it comes to landmark architecture books, Rem Koolhaas’ literary output is as iconic as they come. The celebrated Dutch architect – and famous co-founder of international architecture firm OMA – has been known to produce some of the most widely referenced and treasured publications in the field. Now, the master’s latest offering, the hefty – at some four kilos heavy – Elements Of Architecture has just hit the shelves. From 1978’s Delirious New York, a unique insight into the Big Apple, to 1995’s S, M, L, XL, where the author explored the expansion of the architecture office through his projects, arranged by scale, and his more recent foray into Japanese Metabolism, with 2011’s Project Japan (written together with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist), Koolhaas is a master in taking one strong theme and digging deep, meticulously exploring his subject. True to form in his new publication, Koolhaas takes the material from his widely acclaimed...
A Portuguese show recounts 90 years of Brazilian architecture
A major exhibition in Portugal – the culmination of two years’ planning – depicts how Brazil’s rich but often turbulent history has given rise to an extraordinary collection of architecture over the last 90 years. The Matosinhos-based architecture institution, Casa da Arquitectura, has worked with Brazilian commissioners and curators Fernando Serapião and Guilherme Wisnik to assemble the ‘Brazilian Architecture Collection’; the first endeavour led by its executive director Nuno Sampaio to expand the house’s ample archive of local architects, including Eduardo Souto de Moura, Álvaro Siza Vieira, Pedro Ramalho and João Álvaro Rocha, into an international repository. The collection – no fewer than 103 projects, with more than 4,700 physical pieces and 45,500 digital pieces donated by more than 150 donors, including universities, foundations, institutes, the architects and their heirs – arrived at the house in July. The rich and original compilation brings together several generations of B..
Masters of illusion will challenge your perception of sculpture at Hayward Gallery
Confused, wobbly, and – frankly – a little sick. When you leave the Hayward Gallery’s new show, your body might not feel quite right. Your feet have been on the ceiling and your head on the floor; you’ll have met strangers’ eyes in the mirror. Through 20 optically-oriented, sensory artworks your image will be turned upside down and inside out, reflected back, cut up and blacked out. The artworks of ‘Space Shifters’ were made between 1960 and 2018 – a 50-year period that has seen vast changes in our landscape in every sense. Some of the artists were hippies interested in psychedelic effects, others are minimalists with pondering philosophical ideas about architecture and space. Yet despite the fact the surroundings, contexts and aims of each of these large-scale interventions may have been entirely different, they look remarkably united now – and in a world that feels the wrong way round...