Machine Drawing Drawing Machines from Pablo Garcia on Vimeo.

Picasso may have considered the computer useless, but he never saw how one could draw. “Machine Drawing Drawing Machines” explores a CNC machine’s illustrative capabilities through a series of facsimile drawings depicting twelve historical drawing machines. Each of the images represents a canonical device that introduced a technological shift in the way we observe the world and its contents. From Albrecht Dürer’s “Dürer’s Door” (1525) and Sir Robert Hooke’s Portable “Picture Box” Camera Obscura (1694) to the Drum Plotter “560″ (1959), the new prints cover the gamut of amazing, manmade machines that function(ed) both as an extension of ourselves and also as an autonomous being seemingly capable of its own intuitions and insights.

Devised by Pittsburgh-based artist Pablo Garcia, the project ironically highlights the possibility and obsolescence inherent in all machinery, with the CNC router effortlessly scrawling the painstaking detail hard-won by its precedents. The prints are available in a limited 4-edition set, which can be purchased through the artist here.

“Dürer’s Door”, Albrecht Dürer, 1525

Profile Machine, Carl Augustus Schmalcalder, 1806

[via Geek]

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Hearst Building (left), Gareth Pugh Spring/Summer 2009 (right), image via T Magazine..

Architecture and fashion. It’s a convergence we’ve seen time and time again, whether in Adolf Loos’s polemical essays about proper dress or in the twisted rubber of a pair of Lacoste sneakers designed by Zaha Hadid. We recently got a chance to speak with Karen Moon, co-founder of the newly launched StyleMusée, about the overlap between these two areas of design. StyleMusée is described as “a customizable style inspiration board keeping you at the pulse of fashion. It lets users visually explore the fashion industry’s social media posts on Facebook to discover designers and muses they love… and never knew they loved.” Their hope is to eventually take the style inspiration that people find in social media and offer tailored shopping recommendations. Their first editorial, Architectural Interpretations, immediately caught our attention, and Moon gave us the lowdown on building, dwelling, thinking…and dressing. Check out the interview after the jump.

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The promise of modularity and infinite flexibility embodied by the more ideological projects from the 1960s has not only been long fulfilled, but thoroughly exploited by late capitalist culture. That may or may not be a good thing (probably not), but it’s a fact of contemporary existence that extends to every aspect of our lives. Except, it seems, to our staid, stubbornly Cartesian bookshelves. Enter this modular shelving system, a set of interconnected and expandable crates which grows with your book and publication collection.

The units, made of bamboo and connected with circular pegs, can be pulled and manipulated to form several configurations, can be angled or laid flat, and can be combined with other sets.  Designed by Andrew Gancikov and John Fitzpatrick, the system can quickly co-opt your living room, especially in the hands of an architect, who will sacrifice space for this trophy case of oversized monographs and mounds of unread philosophy or economic tomes, until checked by financial realities (one set is $350). The bookshelf is available at the MoMA store.

[via CoolMaterial]

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Nintendo Controller Coffee Table

So the “new aesthetic” may not be about 8-bit graphics or the wireframes and voxels that constructed the compressed worlds of 80s video games. The present retro attitude and affinity for 30-year old computer graphics are just part of an initial phase from which NA will pass onto other more complex and descriptive iterations. In the meantime, we’ll have to put up with a further onslaught of trivial pixelations and pop-gradients, not too mention retroactive hacks for long obsolete gaming system. Case in point, the NES controller coffee table.

Rather than simply hunt down a controller to replace a broken or lost one, furniture maker Charles Lushear decided to build his own that would suit all his gaming/lounging needs. He scaled up the classic NES controller to the size of a table and installed an operable D-pad plus start + select/ A + B buttons. A movable glass overlay sits directly atop the controller face to accommodate books or beverages and can be easily removed as soon as the disapproving adults have exited the room. While the proportions and details of the replica are exact, the classic color scheme has been altered with a blend of mahogany, maple, and walnut wood. The controller itself, however, is too long for just one person to use and so forces friends to work together, turning one-player games into a fun, if frustrating,  play of planning and coordination. Here’s to teamwork!

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The air conditioning unit. Despite its bulky, bland and ubiquitous presence, the AC unit is an oft-ignored element of the urban landscape, something most choose to overlook, like scaffolding that engulfs the first floor of a building. In New York City alone, there are an estimated 4 million units installed, puncturing holes in apartment facades, draining excessive amounts of water and energy, and emitting chemical refrigerants every summer. First year Columbia GSAPP student Alison Carafa took a closer look at this essential building block of the city, which seems to have curiously escaped formal evolution. As she explained on Urban Omnibus, the basic design of the window air conditioner has remained largely unchanged since its first appearance on the market in 1935: “Instead of designing a more elegant object, we have allowed AC units to become visual background noise. For an object that most people would say they cannot live without, an object that much of our modern world was built upon…this lack of attention seems odd.”

She goes on to describe how the window AC unit was designed to adapt to the city’s architecture, a far-reaching resolution that allowed existing buildings to remain unchanged, despite the growing need for controlled climates. But as an unintended consequence, the contemporary city has evolved to adapt to the AC unit and its strangely stagnant design. Carafa’s ‘Field Guide to the AC Unit’ explores this unexpected turn, unveiling facts about falling units, environmental consequences, and improvised tactics to alter the archaic object and make it safer, more personal, and more efficient. More than just a compilation of anecdotes and advice, Carafa’s field guide makes visible a design trajectory that has tapered off, calling upon fellow architects and city dwellers to imagine a better solution to some serious and enduring problems. Take a look at the entire article on Urban Omnibus here.

[All images via Urban Omnibus]

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A few months ago, we explored the joy of Schrebergartenglück, a term translated as “the joy of spending some time in a small garden plot in the middle of many other small garden plots.” The Hütten Palast hotel in Berlin attempted to capture the elusive concept with an unusual lodging arrangement, haphazardly arranging caravans and small wooden huts inside a warehouse interior. We were reminded of the delightful indoor campground when we came across the new office for Canadian creative services agency The Metrick System. Moving into a 5,800 square-foot industrial space in Toronto with soaring 17-foot tall ceilings, The Metrick System chose to occupy the space with a series of reclaimed Airstream trailers. More after the jump.

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The spiral staircase has long functioned as shorthand for “modernist” design, to be inserted in any and all contexts both “traditional” and “contemporary”, with the expressed desire of imparting an effortless plasticity into situations where there is none. But such aesthetic redemption comes at a price, itself usually connoting further expenditures (e.g. an apartment renovation) that few young adults, let alone young architects, can afford or their small abodes can accommodate (no second floor).

While not necessarily cheap–the price is “by request”–the Elementstair offers a modular and portable spiral staircase that can move and even couch surf with you. Designed by Floris Schoonderbeek, whose says he was inspired by the tectonics of waterslides, the Elemntstair makes the case for the staircase as a piece of furniture–and not architecture, necessarily. Constructed from interchangeable polyester modules, the stairs can thus be used for domestic purposes, as a bookshelf or even pantry, or as Gizmodo feebly suggests, as a lookout point. It also comes in several thousands of RAL colors–convenient, since we’ll be needing one in cyan.

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The crane as an aesthetic object is something near and dear to all self-respecting architects, to whom it connotes both structural purity and the perennial promise of construction, and thus, the realization of their most ambitious (or half-assed) dreams. So it’s hard to resist the charms of designer Charlie Davidson‘s Crane Lamp. Davidson was formerly employed as a concept designer at LEGO, and his tenure there clearly continues to influence his work, as is evidenced by the Crane Lamp’s quirky functionality and microscopic details. The piece is actually a 1:50 scale recreation of the world’s largest mobile crawler crane, a powerful and destructive machine that has been domesticated and zapped into miniature for the purposes of brightening up your studio or illuminating your soon-to-be-abandoned reading of Das Kapital via the magnetized glass sculpture affixed to the lower sheave of the crane. The work will be on show at the Salone del Mobile in Milan.

[via Artinfo]

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Photo: Terrence Sanchez, New York, NY

Friendly, or downright creepy? Designer Joseph King has unleashed a fleet of vinyl sticker hands for willing dissenters to paste throughout their cities, framing everything ranging from subway gates, doors, and street signs to swing sets, graffiti, and even Johnny Cash’s star on Hollywood Boulevard. King explains the project as “commentary on a popular style of poster presentation in contemporary design and the implicit credibility it seems to suggest.” More after the jump.

Photo: Javas Lehn, New York, NY

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The Pentax K-01 Yellow

We’ve been fawning over the Marc Newson-designed Pentax K-01 ever since it arrived in the mail, and for good reason. The compact camera is a thing of beauty; sheathed in an irresistibly textured yellow skin, this handheld machine pops with minimalist features modeled into bold, simple shapes. Its thin, interchangeable lens comes with a magnetic lens cap comparable to a slightly flattened Junior Mint, as described by a coworker.

You can do no wrong in taking this camera with you to snap gorgeous photos of architecture. But with the –nth arrival of spring in New York, we could think of no better way to break out our new toy than with a trip to our favorite architecture-themed food truck: Coolhaus.

Coolhaus has been churning out building-sized ice cream sandwiches in Los Angeles, New York, Austin and Miami for some time now, and we couldn’t resist when we found out they were parked a mere five blocks away from the Architizer HQ. As described on the website, Coolhaus is a triple entendre, a play on Bauhaus, Koolhaas, and the oddly architectural make-up of an ice cream sandwich, described as “a cookie roof and floor slab with ice cream walls.” With camera in tow, we fought through the lunch hour crowds in Midtown to get our hands on one of these tasty prefab confections. Our “cool house” of choice? A hulking one-story scoop of I.M. Pei-nut Butter thrown between slabs of chocolate-chocolate chip cookie. Needless to say, we always knew we had good taste.

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