My good friends at EFGH – Frank Gesualdi and Hayley Eber- were recently featured in the latest issue of Frames Magazine for their design of the Dogmatic restaurant here in NYC.
Go check out the work in their site, pretty incredible stuff.
This past weekend Mara and I made it to the Storm King Art Center in upstate. The center is a 500 acre estate with an incredible collection of large format art, from Noguchi’s to Calder’s to Serra’s… among many many more. It is WELL worth the trip. (more…)
The second phase of the Blue Marlin lighting project was the design and installation of lamps for the existing/future conference rooms and reception area. To continue with the same language as the overall lighting of the space, we developed a chandelier out of the same laser-cut/flat packed elements we used in Phase I and off the shelf components. As you can imagine, I have by now a masters in pipe bending…
I recently got my hands on some ferrofluid to play with, and man isn’t it just amazing. I’m going to try to setup something a bit more structured and experiment with it. For now, check out the short clip and a bad image below.
We just got back from Boston after being invited by MIT to give a lunchtime lecture. My good friend Daniel Cardoso, a PhD candidate there was kind enough to show us around the media lab, where a few -very generous- people showed us some of their work. We had a chance to see the fabrication labs and some of the robotic work being currently done there, and it was absolutely mesmerizing. Dimitris Papanikolaou gave us a full presentation on his Mobility on Demand (MOD) project for the Smart Cities group, not only was that incredibly generous, but an amazingly interesting solution to urban mobility. What I think was among the most interesting thing -not only of his project but of the lab in general- is the reality of it all. A lot of the research being conducted there is for real applications / products / solutions, which is very refreshing to see after having been involved in architecture school for some time now, where a very small percentage of what is produced has real-world implications. We had as well the opportunity to meet up with our friends Carlos Rocha (ex-Media Lab and current Honda scientist) and Skylar Tibbits.
View a few more images after the jump below. (more…)
We made it on Thursday to the opening of the show Darkness Descends: Scandinavian Art Now curated by Christina Vassallo. Our friend Marius Watz had three of his pieces in the show and performed with/vs Alexander Rishaug. His responsive visuals were absolutely stunning.
View more images and short clips after the jump. (more…)
My good friend Gabe and I made it to Mr. Talking Head David Byrne’s concert at Radio City last night. Mr. Byrne was of course his quircky-goofy-smart-loose kneed self and the concert couldn’t have been better. He sang while walking backwards, spinning on a chair, wearing a tutu, running the talking heads run and completely intermingled himself with the choreographies. We both were probably amongst the youngest ones in the crowd, which means we got schooled on the knee-breaking-elbow-flapping dance moves of the 80′s.
I made it tonight for the opening night at Alice Tully Hall for an incredible performance: Diaspora Sefardi, From Medieval Spain to Eastern Mediterranean. an exceptional concert of revived medieval songs and ballads in what I imagine can be considered old Castilian.
The show itself was just the excuse to make it to the building of course, and right from the approach, the building is truly fantastic: the huge lobby, with a gigantic glass paned curtain wall on one side and the warm wood behind the bar give it the right contrast between scale and warmth. The super long bar of course works wonderfully in crowded evenings like tonight. Heading towards the auditorium itself, the ceiling height is much lower and the scale becomes much more intimate. You walk below the ‘watch-me-im-uber-rich’ balcony then turn right and down towards the auditorium. Upon walking into the orchestra level there is a shift which is pretty surprising: the height from the floor to the balconies is quite low but it soon opens up. The scale of the space is just perfect and the wood/resin paneling looks incredible. It is quite remarkable how close everything looks to the original images. Truly a fantastic building, and can’t wait to go there in the summer.