A pile of junk? A piece of art? Or Change Design, as we call it around here?

Tate Modern announced its new plan to expand the most popular crowded modern art museum in the world. Tate Modern’s 4.1 million visitors a year well passed Pompidou (2.1 million) and MoMA (2.7 million) (as Guardian reports).

It is as if H&dM decided to go from the interior focused TM1 to this sculptural ziggurat (or some may say a knockoff of Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment, I say it is very MVRDV). One thing I like about TM1 is this un-finished wood floor throughout the gallery. It is very informal and almost relaxing. Not to mention the café on the top floor overlooking St. Paul Cathedral and the rest of Old London. The interior of TM2 remains to be seen in any of the renderings in the press. But with 11 levels of gallery, performance, education spaces and 6 cafés packed in the new museum tower, it will be a challenge to connect all the floors comparing to the TM1’s Turbine Hall. We will see how it turns out…

Copy Goes Here

I tumbled upon Coudal Partners’ website through an NPR article about online museums. As a Chicago based design, advertising and multi-media studio, Coudal Partners’ website is quite informative and fun to read. It is nothing like a self-promoting design firm website, strange. This short comic film, “Copy Goes Here” is making fun of designers being illiterate. The title refers to the “place holder” in graphic design when the designer leaves spaces for the text boxes to go without knowing (or caring) what the text will be.

Also check out MoOM (Museum of Online Museums) also by Coudal Partners.

Who killed the Electric Car?

Tesla, possibly the hottest roaster, which happens to be an electric car, says on their website, “Burn rubber, not gasoline. 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, 135 mpg equivalent…” The coolest thing: it plugs directly into any 110V (or 220V) outlet, recharged for 3.5 hr for another 250 miles, so it is just like your laptop.

Speaking of electric car, there is an interesting documentary now playing in theaters.

Colorful LV

Takeshi Murakami is Andy Warhol of Japanese Pop Art. His series of pattern/print for Louis Vuitton with Marc Jacob in 2003 merged low and high art, commodity and value in a way that Warhol would never have imagined. Those patterns, as some of you may have seen, were applied to LV’s handbag and luggage collection in replacement of the boring gold and brown monogram (which I still can’t understand why it is such the big deal). Murakami’s approach is the best of both worlds: being playful and humorous while critical of popular culture, even better, making huge profit on creating seemingly kitsch art. Remind you of any architect? Not many.

Whale's Tail in England

Domus showed this beautiful sculpture/bench on its weekly newsletter. Designed by Ian McChesney, it was a competition winner of the Public Art program in NW England, city of Blackpool (north of Liverpool). Its arc shape in plan forms a curving bench for 8 people while extending 8 meters vertically to become a “wind shelter”. This wind shelter rotates 360 degree to protect the occupants from the wind. Some of McChesney’s sculptural design uses amazingly simple method. He draws the organic shape on a piece of paper in 2D then cut it out to fold or bend them to create a 3D form, not unlike Gehry in some regards. This kind of old school model/form making is still a lot faster and more effective than using computer, especially non-90 degree geometry.

OMA's Change Design

3 OMA projects were presented at the TED conference (Google Video 20 mins) a few months ago to demonstrate 3 key ideas of OMA’s design approach. The first is Hyper-rational process, which takes rationality to an absurd level, that it transcends all the baggage that normally comes with a rational conclusion. The second is the design without authorship and signature. Design through team collaboration and editing. The third is compartmentalized flexibility, which challenges the high Modernist notion of universal flexibility (think Mies).

These ideas, interestingly, are very similar to Change Design. In terms of presentation, we have quite a bit to learn in terms of using interactive QuickTime VR, diagrammatic animation and video montage. It is time think beyond photo-realistic renderings…

Less is not Bore

55 mpg is great, right? How about 80 mpg? And it will be even higher when the hybrid model comes out. Some of the model also has the speed as high as 75 mph, which means you can very much take it on the freeway (safety issue aside). It is very tempting to imagine myself commuting to work on this Italian scooter, and I am pretty sure I can put a car seat on it for my daughter, but where should I put the stroller…

Links: Business Week Article, VespaUSA

Good to Great

I have to say I was first drawn to the simple graphic on the book cover (that’s also why I drink Diet Coke rather than the Classic) after I saw the interview on Charlie Rose (free on Google) a while back. The author Jim Collins has a very focus and intense manner when he talks about his ideas. I finally finished the audio book (yes, too lazy to read), it is a scientific research that filters all the publicly traded companies in the U.S. down to 11 companies that have at least 15 years of high result (at least 3 times the general market return).

Why read a business book? Because the principles can apply to any human organization from fortune 500 to non profit organizations to high school running teams.

There are some counter-intuitive finding in the research, like: good is the enemy of great; charismatic leaders could be a liability to a great company; performance of a company has nothing to do with the general market condition faced by a particular industry; people are not the most important asset, the right people are; consensus is bad while debate and dialogue is good; as far as doing the right things, it is more important to stop doing the wrong things…

Green Thoughts

As being Green becomes more mainstream, there are more tips and ways to be part of it without dramatically changing our lifestyle. e-Design 2, a PBS program (which I post before), has some good resource on how to become more green by using less energy and save some money. Some of them are pretty easy:

Place a brick in the toilet tank, save four gallons of water per flush, or 13,000 gallons per year. (Depends on what kind of brick, of course)

Drive 65 miles per hour instead of 75; increase your fuel efficiency by 15 percent. (Unless you are already late for work)

Cable and video game boxes and other electronics use as much energy in standby mode as a 75-watt light bulb that’s left on continuously. Plug devices into a power strip, which makes it easy to turn them all the way out.

Swap five incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents. If every household did, we'd keep the equivalent of 8 million cars’ emissions out of the atmosphere each year. (Can you believe that?)

10 million hectares of ancient forest are vanishing every year—that’s a soccer field every two seconds. Switch to 100 percent recycled fiber napkins, save 1 million trees. (OK, not exactly money saving, but you can save trees!)

Actually there are more tips like that on Al Gore’s Climate Crisis website.

What can you do with $1 Billion?

Google is planning to spend that much to solve 3 problems: global warming, poverty and public health.

Here is an interview on Wired with Larry Brilliant, who is in charge of Google.org.

My first reaction is how we can be part of it. Not for the money but the future.

On Google.org, here is what they say, "We hope that someday this institution will eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems."

It is moving to see corporation who has resource take on it as their responsibilities.

Simply Dry

I am amazed by the creative way to design based on the sub-dividing grid and the zoom-in technique while using only black and white text.

Published in 2004, updated this year, by nobody but droog.

Rotating Fish Tank

From the Royal College of Art (London) Graduation Show. What a strange concept. It is like treadmill for fish. It doesn't look very easy to change water or simply feeding the poor goldfish.

Dutch Windmill

Commissioned by the Dutch government, the next generation of wind turbine is less boring with tree-like branches, designed partly by NL Architects. I think they should paint it green.

Exhibit Design

Atelier Bruckner, a german firm (or person) who did quite a bit of cutting edge exhibit design (and architecture). Too bad that I don't know German (maybe I should ask Volker to translate for me) since his website is German only. He is currently on display in Platform 21 in Amsterdam, among 2 other designers.

Floating House

I saw this on Archinect a while back. I beleive it is a rendering, I don't think anyone will be crazy enough to build such house, but I could be wrong. It tells you, pitch roof can be cool.

Moose Head

Saw in it ID. I think it will be much less scary for my daughter (and my wife) than the real one. Better still, no killing animal for fun.

Buy it on Generate.