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.