The Polar Bear Cometh…

Beckmann-N’Thépé, the French architecture firm, has just won a competition to redesign the Helsinki Zoo.  As the zoo is eager to house a group of polar bears, which they have not done in the last 30 years, the design appears inspired by a glacier.  Though the construction is not completely confirmed, let´s hope that this projects gets off the ground!

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The $28million Chair

There has been significant press about the astonishing success the Pierre Berge auction from the Yves Saint Laurent collection in Paris which took place recently.  One of the highlights has been this Eileen Gray Art Deco chair.  Built between 1917 and 1919, it earned $28million- more than any other 20th century design piece ever.  Though the chair was only estimated to attract bids of up to $3million, the bids it received stunned spectators and the auction house alike.

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Venice… Brought to you by Coca Cola

The city of Venice has recently announced that its official softdrink will now be Coca Cola.  Supposedly, as a result of financial strains from conserving the historical and precariously situated city, the city has agreed the cola giant to install 60 vending machines throughout the town in places like the water bus terminals and even St. Mark´s Square!

Up next… McDonalds in the top of the Eiffel Tower!

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Louis Vuitton X 7th Letter

The graffiti group, The Seventh Letter, and one of their emerging talents Reyes, have been invited by Louis Vuitton to contribute to the location for the San Francisco launch of the LV Steven Sprouse book that was recently published.

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Droog York

Today, Amsterdam-based design collective Droog, will open their first stateside shop in NYC.  The store itself is decidedly massive (5,000 sqf) and features one of the latest designs from the group called the House of Blue.  The store is both a showroom and a model, so that customers can purchase the design and have it created with a variety of personalized materials.  The shop will also play host to events including a fashion show this September.

Droog

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Slanket Watch: part 2

Future Blog has begun eagerly anticipating Slanket sightings on the Jaunted/Hotel Chatter blog duo, and what do you know… Jenna from Hotel Chatter has made a startling revelation about everybody´s favorite ugly blanket/sleeve mutant.

“We’re all for quirky-cute hotel amenities. But we know that if quirky-cute and serious practicality were to collide, the Ultimate Hotel Amenity would be born — and just as we were extolling the virtues of a certain fleece wonder over in the comments section at Jaunted, it dawned on us that we may have stumbled upon what has the potential to be one of these Ultimate Hotel Amenities: The Slanket. Yes, the blanket with sleeves.

Think about it: wrapped in the warm embrace of your hotel room Slanket, you would never again find yourself cursing the inoperable in-room thermostats. With an easily-accessible Slanket, you could sit at your desk and do some last-minute presentation prep without freezing your tuches off. You could eat your roomservice comfortably while swaddled in Slankety goodness! Channel surf without having to fight with bedsheets! The possibilities are endless.”

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Low Rise Culture

With limited credit, and access to finances for construction, mega-buildings and starchitecture is being downsized in a major way.  Today, plans for the once monolithic Ground Zero towers are being revised as “stumps”.  The Moment blog´s, Michael Wang exposed how in the 20´s, post-crash, potential great architecture suffered as well and in some cases was cut down literally.

A potential “world’s tallest,” built to house the recently merged National City Bank of New York and Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company (the forerunners of Citigroup), the City Bank Farmers Trust Building, at 20 Exchange Place, maxed out 100 feet shy of the proposed 850. A month after the plans were released, the crash derailed a merger with the Corn Exchange Bank (a deal that would have created the world’s largest bank), and building plans were promptly downsized. The original design, by Cross & Cross, capped the tower with a stepped pyramid, culminating in an illuminated globe propped atop four eagles. In its stead, the signature offset tower terminates in a couple of setbacks and a cluster of antennas.

International Magazine Building When the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst commissioned his favorite opera set designer, the Vienna Secessionist-trained Joseph Urban, to plan an office tower for the Hearst Corporation’s 12 magazines, he was riding high on real estate investments and forays into film and entertainment. Only six of the planned 13 stories would go up in 1928, before the withering of Hearst’s empire brought construction to a halt. Building on the site wasn’t resumed until 2003, when the Depression baby Norman Foster began work on the steel and glass tower that would emerge above Urban’s cast-stone base.

Metropolitan Life North Building The MetLife Insurance Company had won the race to erect the world’s tallest building once before, with its 1909 Madison Square tower, which was modeled after Venice’s campanile at San Marco. In 1929, just days after the Wall Street crash, it announced plans for a 100-story office tower that would have outdone the Woolworth building as the world’s tallest. A couple of weeks later, in a hastily assumed spirit of restraint, MetLife issued a revised memo: the tower would be built in stages. Gently telescoping upward from a block-wide footprint and equipped with 30 elevators, the completed tower — abruptly truncated at 450 feet — was designed to support and service another 70 floors.

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BMW Art

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is currently exhibiting 4 of the sixteen cars from the BMW art car collection.  The selection includes the works from Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alexander Calder and was first commissioned by the company and racecar driver Herve Poulain in 1975. Since then, BMW’s art cars have toured the world and featured in exhibitions in the most renowned museums and public spaces worldwide. The exhibit will continue throughFebruary 25th, including Warhol’s Black and White Disaster, Stella’s Getty Tomb, Lichtenstein’s Cold Shoulder, and Rauschenberg’s print, Booster.

The cars will be on display as an installation at the BP Grand Entrance which is an admission-free area.  Additionally, the exhibit will feature rare, behind-the-scenes footage of Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg discussing their inspirations and influences in creating their cars, Warhol building his car, and Herve Poulain, the racer and initiator of the Art Car Project.

According to Slam x Hype, Poulain first approached BMW in 1975 with the idea of using his car as a canvas. A few months later, the race car driver and BMW commissioned Alexander Calder to create the first car. The most recent cars were done by David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, and Oliafur Eliasson, with a seventeenth under consideration by the German carmaker. The company uses a panel of prestigious judges culled from all over the art world to select the artists who will conceive and paint the cars.

Following their stint in Los Angeles, the Art Cars will be on display in New York at Grand Central station starting March 24th, and will continue to make pit stops through 2010″.

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Lockheed Lounge Documentary

 Peter Brant, husband of Stefanie Seymour, is the collector who famously spent 1.5 million on Marc Newson´s Lockheed Lounge chair/sculpture a few years ago.  After this unprecidented purchase, BBC filmed a documentary about the Australian designer which featured interviews and clips from his collectors and the designer himself.  This video managed to find its way onto youtube recently (below is part 2 of 5).

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MOMA in the NYC Subways

The MOMA in NYC recently installed a temporary exhibit in the Brooklyn Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street subway station in order to raise awareness about their collection.  Works are featured from Picasso, Van Gogh, Charles Eames, Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol and will be up through March 15 24 hrs a day.

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