February 15, 2013
After the obscene amounts of chocolates and candies you consumed over the course of Valentine’s Day, your teeth should be feeling the sharp pang of regret right about now. Who knows the kind of damage you inflicted on your pearly whites (and jaw—Charleston Chew, we’re looking at you)! To relieve the pain we suggest two possible solutions: overcome your erstwhile fear of teeth cleanings, fillings, and gas masks, and get thy rump in a dentist chair; or just have a look at our top favorite dental offices.*
Who would have guessed that dentistry—that most unhip profession—could look this cool? Click through for the slideshow!
*Disclaimer: we cannot guarantee the efficacy of the latter.
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February 14, 2013
The big day is finally here, and you better have ordered those flowers. It’s Valentine’s Day, the loveliest—or ugliest, depending on your view—day of the year. We’ve spent the last two days attempting to set the mood with tantalizing boudoirs and wineries, but now it’s time to get down to what really matters: chocolate.
Love— it’s great and all, but we all know that Valentine’s is really all about the chocolate and candy (obviously!). If you know us at all, you’ll know that we like to overindulge in the sweet stuff(s) in more ways than one. So what better way to celebrate a holiday that glorifies mass consumption of chocolates than to roundup our favorite sugar-inspired locales. All these ten projects are devoted entirely to the manufacturing, selling, and even fashion of our favorite decadent desserts. The architects and designers behind these tasty schemes will surely satisfy all your sugar cravings. Click through for the slideshow!
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February 5, 2013
Valentine’s Day is almost here, and you know what that means— over the next week and a half, large quantities of chocolate will be purchased and consumed by much of the world’s populations (we aren’t hating!).
If you didn’t know, chocolate has become a favorite medium of designers, used in everything from edible surfaces, hospitality design, and even 3D printing. But have you ever wondered just how long the delectable treat can withstand the elements—say, specifically, a warm light bulb? No? Okay, well admit it wasn’t our first question either, but thanks to designer Alexander Lervik and his new Lumière au Chocolate we now have the answer (as well as a tasty conversation piece).
The Poetry of Light lamp is constructed entirely out of chocolate, beginning life in complete darkness and then mimicking the rays of early morning light, spreading across the horizon as the bulb begins to melt the chocolate. See more of Lervik’s “sweet” lighting!
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October 16, 2012
The design research group Robots in Gastronomy’s 3D-printing food cart debuted last week in the “Adhocracy” exhibition at the Istanbul Design Biennial.
Robots in Gastronomy may not be the first tinkerers to come out with a 3D chocolate printer, but they’re certainly the most mobile. At the opening of the Istanbul Design Biennial last week, the Robots debuted their prototype for a food cart that brings 3D printing technology (and multidimensional snacking) beyond the walls of the research lab and onto the streets. (Is there an A+ Award for deliciousness?)
The group’s MakerBot 3D printer debuted earlier this year at Milan Design Week, where the collaborators printed out chocolaty confections for the “Future in the Making” show. For Istanbul, the Robots — among them architects from GGLab, chef Paco Morales, and architects Luis E. Fraguada and Deniz Manisali — constructed a curvaceous wood pavilion for scooting the bot around town. Eat Read more!
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October 12, 2012
Food, booze, and MakerBots churning out awesome little trinkets: This is what we call a party! Last night, we headed over to STORY, a 2,000-square-foot Manhattan space for pop-up stores, to celebrate its newest tenant, GE Garages “Making Things.” The space features a smorgasbord of rapid-prototyping equipment—CNC mills, injection molders, and other wondrous machinery—along with cool merchandise for tech geeks (we’re in that tribe). This project has Architizer A+ Award written all over it! Click through to see photos!
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October 9, 2012
Textile gurus Pinaki Studios and delicious cocoa artisans Chocolatl have teamed up to create the best of both worlds: Edible Surfaces. Decadent treats are pleated, creased, and embossed, drawing parallels between the technical methods of both crafts while also exploring new patterns and designs. Read more!
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October 1, 2012
Is there anything better than chocolate? For anyone with a sweet tooth the answer would typically be a resounding “no,” unless she was lucky enough to find this gem of a café in Poland. At Pump House Chocolate shop and bar, the proprietors are so obsessed with chocolate that the rich, gooey substance is actually dripping from the walls. Okay, chocolate is not literally dripping from the walls (that could get very messy), but the small café’s interior has been given a chocolaty embellishment courtesy of the interior designers at Bro.Kat. Read more!
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May 17, 2012
There’s 9 tons of chocolate in that there pyramid. The colossal cacao structure was commissioned to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Qzina Specialty Foods, which tapped chef Francois Mellet and M.O.F. Stephane Treand to create a six-feet tall edible replica of the Temple of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza, the most well-known and ingenious example of Mayan architecture. The finished model sits on a ten square foot base and weighs in at 18,239 pounds, a world record for the largest chocolate work, easily beating the previous 7,500 pound title holder.
The massive piece was made from using an assortment of Qzina’s line of chocolates that was poured in vast amounts and left to cool in bricks that form the core of the structure. Together with a small team, Mellet and Treand travailed for over 400 hours to build the edible sculpture, meticulously recreating the exact form and details of the temple in an effort to “honor the original chocolatiers.” Much research was conducted to familiarize the team with the precise proportions and ornamentation of Mayan temples to ensure verisimilitude to the real thing. Each of the pyramid’s four staircases is faithfully reproduced here, as are the temple effigy and the period dress of the diminutive guards. Not only that, the chocolate and stone temple will share the same fate and ruin as predicted by the Mayan calendar. Qzina will exhibit the piece through December 21, 2012, when it plans to destroy the model in accordance with prophecy–the end of all things, chocolate or otherwise.
[via Collacubed]
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April 27, 2012
Increasing in popularity and decreasing in cost, 3D printing technology has been appropriated from the industrial sector by DIY communities and repurposed for various uses other than rapid prototyping, from mass customization of frivolous knickknacks to the creation of intricate jewelry. As part of “The Future in the Making,” a recent exhibition organized by Italian design magazine Domus and Audi for Milan Design Week, Spanish architecture studio GGLab and designer Deniz Manisali showed off their method of applying additive manufacturing technology to haute cuisine.
Working with chef Paco Morales and the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), the team outfitted a MakerBot—a low-cost, open-source 3D printer with an impressively industrious marketing and PR team—to print a collection of diverse, formally complex chocolate sweets. This highly customizable technology could loosen formal constraints on dishes and increase workflow and volume in the kitchen, but, more importantly, has the potential to foster novel, inventive considerations of ingredients, flavors and aesthetics. Although less romantic, 3D printing also has foreseeable applications in industrial food production. Continue.
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April 10, 2012
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise–any time is a good time for chocolate. Despite missing this year’s cacao-themed holidays (Valentine’s Day and Easter), British-based Choc Edge will forge on in its quest to launch the world’s first commercially available (and exclusively) 3d chocolate printer at the end of the month. The release comes one year after the Choc team, headed by University of Exeter scientist Dr. Liang Hao, developed a working prototype to print chocolate into three-dimensional shapes. The positive feedback and corporate interest generated by that first device prompted the development and manufacturing of the Choc Creator–the first step in its makers’ path towards becoming the “world leader in cutting edge chocolate priniting solutions.”
Similar to Makerbot’s “Replicator released last December, the Choc Creator is compact enough to sit on your desktop and is easy to use and customize. And it works just like all other 3d printers, in that it gradually accretes material–in this case, molten chocolate piped through a syringe tip–in successive layers to build up your entirely edible sculptures. At $2772, however, the machine is beyond the price range of the more culinary-inclined architects among us. There’s always Christmas!
[via PCWorld]
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