The Artek Site

I didn't realize till now that Artek, the company which reproduces and sells furniture designed by canonic organic designer Finland's Alvar Aalto, has a great website. Chairs with curves and unpainted, grainy wood are kind of commonplace nowadays, but someone invented that look. His name was Aalto. Not every single one of Aalto's designs was what I would consider organic, but he certainly made a great contribution to a modern look which more often than not uses natural forms and textures.

Link

Kids do Design

Fantasy Design is an international project in which schoolchildren are the main actors and producers of design. Fantasy Design is a three-year design education project consisting of activities aimed at schools and special training and teaching materials for teachers. The immediate and most visible result of the project will be an international touring exhibition of works by schoolchildren.

Fantasy Design is promoting basic skills in design: problem-solving, cultural thinking, artistic expression, and an innovative attitude to work. An awareness and appreciation of objects is promoted, as well as an interdisciplinary approach taking into account historical, social and economic points of view. All the activities will be implemented in each participating country simultaneously. All the partners will adopt the same methods.

Link

Gehry's constructive madness

The link is to a review of a documentary on the design of the aborted Lewis house, which appears to have been a kind of sketch pad for Frank Gehry to develop many of his organic ideas which finally bore fruit in the buildings he is renowned for.

With Lewis pushing and paying, the architect was encouraged to pursue ever wilder dreams. Boxy structures gave way to squiggles and blobs inspired by fish, horse heads and flocks of birds. The "house" morphed into a 35,000- square-foot village, with unexpected geometries set around a courtyard where Lewis, a contemporary art collector, could entertain. Scribbled drawings and elaborate models suggest a final design with the explosive qualities of Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles combined.

Link

Cardinal's building?

Native Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal was fired part-way through the building process for the National Museum of the American Indian which opens next week in Washington, DC. However the finished edifice still bears his trademark organic masonry curves.

Link (requires registration, or use Bugmenot.com)

If it walks like a duck...

...then it might be a robot. Although this blog deals mainly with esthetic issues relating to the human brain's response to design, organic sources of inspiration are being used by many different robot designers/engineers.

Dr. Ayers is one of a handful of robotics researchers who regard animals as their muses. Their field is often referred to as biomimetics, and the researchers who are developing robotic lobsters, flies, dogs, fish, snakes, geckos and cockroaches believe that machines inspired by biology will be able to operate in places where today's generation of robots can't go.

"Animals have adapted to any niche where we'd ever want to operate a robot," Dr. Ayers said. His RoboLobster, for instance, is being designed to hunt for mines that float in shallow waters or are buried beneath beaches, a harsh environment where live lobsters have no trouble maintaining sure footing.

Another researcher, Howie Choset of Carnegie Mellon University, has been testing sinuous segmented robots based on snakes and elephant trunks that may be the perfect machines to search for survivors inside the rubble of structures destroyed by explosions or natural disasters.

Link (requires registration or use Bugmenot.com)

Bruce Mau's Massive Change Exhibition

Toronto designer Bruce Mau has directed an exhibition which starts in Vancouver on October 2nd, and which looks at the positive effects of design worldwide in all kinds of disciplines.

Visitors will enter the exhibition through an orientation gallery and pass through segments on urban design, movement, information, energy, images, markets, materials, military technology, manufacturing and living. The final gallery will sum up global wealth in an installation of silver balloons inflated to different degrees, reflecting relative expenditures on such things as education, health, energy and the environment.

This link is to a long and interesting review and interview from the LA Times (requires registration or use Bugmenot.com)