Inspiration: Tauba Auerbach

great inspiring (mostly) typographic work from tauba auerbach

Influences: Tod Hanson

At Cell Project Space, Hanson will continue his characteristic manipulation of architectural space, decoration and the language of interior design to explore the rush of an over-amplified globalised environment – its war, celebration and delirium. Once in the white gallery space visitors are enticed to walk over the threshold into an Alice in Wonderland riot of line and form. Hanson creates a 360 degree painted and taped world where floor, walls and ceiling become one through the meticulous graphic accentuation of every plane, every join, every architectural detail.

From the centre of the gallery a frenzy of what at first sight appear to be party streamers festoon the walls drawing the viewer into a bright golden back space. Here the streamers morph from torn rags through ticker tape and bandages into cut straw and rays of sunshine. Enveloping the viewer in a comic book world, Hanson constantly plays with their visual expectations through his bold graphic style and ability to create changes in atmosphere through colour and altered vistas.

source: http://www.cell.org.uk/

Influences: Vier5

The work of Vier5 is based on a classical notion of design. Design as the possibility of drafting and
creating new, forward-looking images in the field of visual communication. a further focus of our work lies on designing and applying new, up-to-date fonts.

The work of Vier5 aims to prevent any visual empty phrases and to replace them with individual, creative statements, which were developed especially for the used medium and client.

intresting work. see more!

Influences: Peter Eisenman - Casa Guardiola

great video studying Eisenman's Guardiola House and Deconstruction concepts..

the Underpass: Materials Research

Theatre Square Schouwbergplein / West 8 / Rotterdam

Maritime Youth Centre / PLOT Architects / Copenhagen

Westblaak Skate Park/ Rotterdam

Memorial Bridge / 3LHD Architects / Croatia

Brogard Square / SLA Landscape Architects / Copenhagen

Blue Carpet / Thomas Heatherwick Studio / Newcastle, UK

Research: Greyworld - The Layer

' The Layer is an art system created to articulate transit spaces through a series of contact sculptures.

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel was the first installation in a public space to use the Layer system. We had been experimenting with different ways to articulate these transit spaces, from purely analogue methods of sound capture and distortion, to more complex means of digesting movement and form.

A long blue carpet was installed in the dark tunnel running underneath the Thames. Tiny sensors, beneath the carpet detected the direction weight and speed of pedestrians as they passed along its length and translated this information into a generatively produced sound environment. An album - 'Various Walkers' was created by recording these performances.

The installation was commissioned by the London Docklands Commission and sponsored by the Daily Telegraph.

The Layer has undergone many changes since the Greenwich foot tunnel. These allow both a wider range of inputs to be used, such as colour and shape as well as a large range of expressive outputs, such as light and generative display. Essentially though, it is the legibility of the installation to a broad public that remains paramount to us.

The work of art was also installed along the Millennium Bridge that runs across the Iffey in Dublin, Ireland. It gave pedestrians crossing an opportunity to crate and interact, simply by passing through the space. The installation was a counterpoint to another work of art, which we installed in the Guinness Storehouse.

We installed a bright blue carpet along the bridge, to signify that something was different in the centre of Dublin. We then embedded sensors in the carpet that responded to each footstep across the bridge, generating unexpected sounds and melodies - a plaintive piano phrase or the sounds of footsteps crunching through snow or sploshing through puddles. '

extract from Greyworld's website

Alan Fletcher @ Design Museum

What an amazing exhibition. Went down to London last week and had the chance to see the Alan Fletcher exhibition at the Design Museum.

Very inspiring and full of fun, ideas and inspiration. I could feel the process of making things, the ideas flying around the designer and him just being able to grab them and make them alive.

You can easily say that it was mostly fun, the processes looked very obvious and the ideas were aiming straight to the point without any fancy stuff or really theoretical concepts. And this is what made everything so fantastic, so diverse and gave the flexibility for adaptation of different styles.

It was rather interesting seeing the actual works that I have been seeing in books, there nice and big for you to look at. Unfortunately I only managed to get to the Design Museum 45mins before it was closing although I felt I could stay in there for days..

some extras!

Johann Steingruber's Alphabet

In Steingruber’s alphabet, published in 1773, each letter of the alphabet is made into a plan of a palatial building. In some cases, as with A, there are two alternative plans. Accompanying texts explain the designs: in the case of A, there is a grand hall at the apex of the building, while its crossbar comprises a central passageway flanked by a pair of arcaded hallways, and, at the letter’s feet there are ‘cabinets’ and ‘garderobes.’ E is intended to house two sets of apartments, with main entrances top & bottom, and a chapel in the central prong of the building, which, Steingruber concedes, could equally well be made into a grand staircase, or a special reception room.

Influences: Simon Jones

Research: Typography Basics

Influences: Carlos Garaicoa / Lisa Openheim

Carlos Garaicoa

Nowhere is the constant march of history more obviously stamped on our surroundings than in cities, with the seemingly endless processes of demolition, reconstruction and rebuilding going on all around us. The cityscape of Liverpool, in particular, is currently changing so rapidly that even lifelong residents are bewildered. This makes it a perfect site for Carlos Garaicoa, whose art has long focused on the complex structures and ongoing evolutions of cities – the ways in which, although cities are constantly changing, they always retain, half-hidden, the traces of what went before. For International 06, Garaicoa makes intriguing use of his own photographs, ‘invading’ their surfaces to create poignant images of Liverpool buildings haunted by their own past.

Lisa Openheim

We tend to think of archives as impersonal collections of documents, but behind any archive there is a person (or many people), a purpose and an agenda. Lisa Oppenheim is fascinated by the human stories hidden within archives – the notes handwritten in the margins of historical documents, the scribbled descriptions on the backs of old photographs. She’s also fascinated by the many ways in which archives allow us to slip between past and present. For International 06, Oppenheim will make use of the archive of Liverpool photographer Edward Chambré Hardman, but with a twist, setting words alongside images and past alongside present to create a uniquely fluid portrait of the changed – and changing – city.