Modernism Week is an exciting celebration of mid-century modern design, architecture and culture in the good ol’ USA. This design aesthetic, originated in the 50s and 60s, was typified by clean, simple lines and celebrated elegant informality which came to define desert modernism.

Kaufmann Desert House

The interior of Park Imperial South on South Araby Drive, Palm Springs

A date to put in to my diary for next year… I could do with some sun!

Alberto Alessi said, “This seemed to me like a worthy tribute to “Juicy Salif” (1990), the most controversial Citrus-squeezer of the twentieth century.”

To celebrate the launch of the mysqueeze citrus squeezer, designed by Roland Kreiter for Alessi, mydeco.com searched for filmmakers to create a short film showcasing the product that Kreiter created.

The four winners of the competition won the opportunity to make their film and have it shown on mydeco.com. From narrative films inspired by American Psycho to conceptual films focusing on the shape, the filmmakers challenge our perception of what mysqueeze is and made it a desirable object. Here is my favourite film…

The Florinda chair, designed in 2011, is a mixture of beech wood and plastic combined in a simple shape that was conceived to erase the boundaries between zones, and lends itself to a wide range of different interpretations: from the dining area to the home studio, it can also easily adapt to restaurants, cafes and public areas, due to its contemporary look and versatility.

“Katie is a genuine new voice in design writing. She does Q&A in a fresh and unaffected fashion, allowing her subjects the space (both literally and metaphorically) to develop ideas and points of view. Deceptively reverential, she poses unaggressive yet astute questions that extract new insights.”

Barbara Chandler, design writer for the London Evening Standard

Have you ever wondered how Max Fraser put together ‘The Joy of Living’ exhibition, what inspires Anthony Burrill’s slogans or even what is John Makepeace’s favourite colour. Well, Katie Treggiden created the blog Confessions of a Design Geek to answer these important questions.

Skip forward a few months and she won the mydeco.com Design Democracy Award for Best Interior Design Blog and more recently has committed her interview to paper with the release of ‘Interviews, volume 1‘ full of eighteen of her favourite interviews.

The book is the first in a series of books to be released from confessions of a design geek in a limited edition of 1,000 and is priced at £10 and even better that 50p from the sale of every copy is donated to Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres.

Watch this short video to see behind the scenes of making her debut book…

“…[Katie] stands apart from other design writers… She turns designers into real people. [She] allows designers to speak in the same words as the people who use what they’ve made. There is something very democratic about [that].”

William Shaw, Web Editor for the London Design Festival

Over at Heart Home, Kate Baxter spent some time talking to Katie. You can read her interview at Heart Home blog.

“26 Typewriters” was a very successful exhibition held at Envoy Enterprises gallery in New York for one night in September 2011. 50 vintage typewriters were collected, reflecting 70 decades, including classic models such as the “Groma”, built in Germany in 1944 and the “Olivetti Valentine” by Ettore Sottsass in 1969 as “antimachine machine.” Exit Content chose 26 images to produce a series of prints and published a book of 36 pages in limited edition. Can you hear my geeky heart pounding?

To fall in love with this even more, watch this type-omatic video…

You can buy the book from colette for £34.31. If you would like to buy me one, feel absolutely free.

Over the years so-called Green search engines have appeared, including Blackle which changed the display from white to black to save energy. Of course I did dismiss this as a little sensationalist because merely reducing energy used does not, a planet, save.

So, after reading the article by Peter Salisbury I had learned that Google are incredibly energy-efficient not just to be Earth-friendly but this has obvious financial benefits for them. Adorned on top of the Googleplex in California is a sea of solar panels making use of their climate. Their datacentre‘s around the world are making use of ‘free cooling’ by channeling the outside climates in to cool the servers. This is a company that is thinking AND doing, and more importantly they are aware of the impact they have on the world and acting responsibly.

Now, they are inherently not a green company for sure, otherwise you would never throw out a perfectly good office fit-out only to bring in some brightly-coloured design classics in to your reception but acting responsibly is a lot more than I had expected and more than most corporations are doing.

Google claims that using Gmail instead of your average email system is up to 80 times better for the environment. The reason? Cloud servers are leveraged 100 percent while average company servers never use their entire capacity and have processing overhead wasted. “Using Gmail for an entire year uses less energy than is required to manufacture a bottle of wine, drink the wine, ‘stuff a message in the bottle and throw it in the ocean’” (about 1.2 kg CO2).

Similarly, one minute of watching YouTube videos uses 0.00002 kWh of energy on Google’s side (without counting your computer that actually displays the video). To put that in context, it takes approximately 0.15 kWh to boil a full kettle, which means you could watch 7,500 minutes (125 hours) of YouTube videos for the same energy used.

Something else that is quite amazing is that Google reuses everything, especially water. They are currently running two facilities that use 100 percent recycled water and they’re goal is to have all of their data centre’s using 80 percent recycled water this year. Incredible.

For a company that has 79.61% of the global search engine market share, this is good news to hear. Not only are they a massive search engine, but their email client is one of the largest webmail providers and this is powered by the same servers.

I now feel a lot better about using Google for all of my data. Thank you Google.

Further reading:
www.google.com/about/datacenters/
www.google.com/green

Using “Definitive Daft Punk,” a 7-minute mashup that he created himself based on Daft Punk’s complete discography, he exposes the entire structure of the 23-song piece, revealing everything from the cutting and layering to levels and equalisation.

Okay, so now for the science bit. What is a mashup I hear some of you ask? A mashup is a song created by blending two or more other songs. The more complex a mashup gets, the harder it is to distinguish the parts that are being used to create what you’re hearing.

Watch the screen to see the entire mashup, composed using the latest HTML5 and CSS3 technology visualized in real-time = geeky goodness.

(Thanks to HypeBeast for the additional info)

Mike Strout of the burgeoning Still + Co made a series of overdyed rugs that went on display in January with a limited edition chair part of the exhibition.

If nothing else, this beautiful film with a soothing background tune makes me want to run away to the country and sell hand-knitted jumpers and backed apple pies. Now, I’m sure I had some hair dye somewhere from 1997…

Crane.tv, the leading digital video-magazine for contemporary culture, will exhibit a selection of their favourite objects created by their most loved artists and designers, alongside intimate video profiles and if you look closely in the video you’ll spy me near the door during the talk.

Starting with Sir Terence Conran, famed for transforming the look of the British home will be showcasing his most loved work from his retrospective at London’s Design Museum. The following week, artist Kate MccGwire presents a cabinet of curiosities, objects, which she has collected over the years that continue to inspire her work. Closing the week is digital artist and founder of ‘Universal Everything’ Matt Pyke who will exhibit digital wonders like ultraviolet trees grown out of mathematical formulas and 3D-printed figurines borne from code.

“In keeping with the Crane.tv ethos of thoughtfully exploring leading thinkers’ and creatives’ works, we curate our favourite and most loved artists and designers, and give them free reign to select their own favourites – giving viewers an exclusive look into their ‘world’.”
Trisha Andres, Editor, Crane.tv

Crane.tv in The Front Room at St Martins Lane is open Monday – Sunday from 11am-8pm. Admission is free.
The Front Room, St Martins Lane, 45 St Martins Lane WC2N 4HX

9th January – Sir Terence Conran
16th January – Kate MccGwire
23rd January – Matt Pyke

Something quite incredible is happening right now. The Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong are showing Damien Hirst’s spot paintings in all of their locations until 18 February 2012. Conceived as a single exhibition in multiple locations, “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011” makes use of this demographic fact to determine the content of each exhibition according to locality.

Included in the exhibition are more than 300 paintings, from the first spot on board that Hirst created in 1986; to the smallest spot painting comprising half a spot and measuring 1 x 1/2 inch (1996); to a monumental work comprising only four spots, each 60 inches in diameter; and up to the most recent spot painting completed in 2011 containing 25,781 spots that are each 1 millimeter in diameter, with no single colour ever repeated.

To celebrate this, Paris store colette is selling merchandise from Damien Hirst’s own shop Other Criteria along with some other pieces such as this dress from the Art Freaks collaboration between Cynthia Rowley and artist Olaf Breuning.

Don’t miss your opportunity to see this show in your nearest location.