Dark Side: Seamless Recessed Lighting by Igor Lobanov

beautiful award winning design by the moscow based product designer. m.









Dark Side is a space-inspired range of wall seamless recessed luminaires made of gypsum and concrete. Each fixture reminds a space object. Turning on the light gives an extra feeling of spherical volume for central part of the luminaire highlighting its relief and surface bump. Use of different colors and color temperatures of LEDs coupled with different concretes and proportions gives an assortment of luminaires.

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Black Apartment Block, New York’s East River by Richard Meier

sharp black monolithic design near the united nations complex by the typically white modernist architect. nice to see richard mixing it up! m.


American architect Richard Meier has unveiled the design for an apartment block on New York’s East River, eschewing his signature white palette for black glass facades.

The 42-storey tower will sit on the corner of 39th Street at 685 First Avenue, a few blocks south of the United Nations headquarters.

Unlike most buildings by Pritzker Prize-winner Meier, which include the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art and the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the tower will feature black frames and dark glass.

The monolithic block will comprises 828,000 square feet (76,900 square metres) and include 556 apartments, split into two-thirds rental properties and one-third condominiums.

Video — 483 Lines by Seoul-Based Studio Kimchi and Chips

fantastic light and space installation created using 483 lines of nylon string. m.

for the exhibition moment to moment, the jeju museum of art commissioned seoul-based studio kimchi and chips to create a new iteration of their previous work ‘line segments space’. the museum’s specific architectural traits, including a panorama of reflective floors and square concrete apertures, demanded a reconsideration of the original work, leading artists elliot woods and mimi son to realize ‘483 lines’.

prior to the digital video revolution, analogue broadcasts constructed living imagery using the NTSC standard. this system generates a moving picture frame as 483 lines of modulated light, stacked from the top to the bottom of a television screen.

within the museum, ‘483 lines’ magnifies the video picture at a scale of 16 meters wide, folding it several times to fit vertically into the gallery space. this layered reinterpretation allows oscillations of depth, which are activated by ‘tuning’ the projected video to match these waves. the team describes, ‘the strictly organized lines can be illusionary, creating a confusing architecture of horizons, whilst the video played through it displays a parallel past, present and future.’

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Mask House by Wojr

fantastic place for contemplation. m.










envisioned by WOJR, instead of a client’s brief, a storyline has influenced the program and design of ‘mask house’. the mysterious dwelling overlooks a lake and has been conceptualized as a place of refuge and contemplation for a man who has lost his younger brother.

despite its dark clad exterior of mask house, the sequence of rooms instill a sanctuary-like atmosphere that serves as a place of separation and protection that ‘removes one from the world of the everyday and offers passage to an other world.‘ the property is supported with stilts over a slope and is protected by a large slatted wall that covers the façade. the sanctuary is drawn-out through a series of thresholds that define a scalar sequence of nested interiors — each interior becoming successively more removed from one world and more connected to the next. the light wooded walls -a contrast to its envelope- instill a scandinavian aesthetic. large windows welcome views onto the lake and surrounding nature and as the WOJR say ‘provide one in search of sanctuary an abundance of opportunities to find refuge.’

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Video — AxiDraw V3 Personal Drawing Machine

very cool — i can see this making it’s way into some of my large scale print works in the near future. m.

Evil Mad Scientist’s new AxiDraw V3 personal drawing machine can use any pen or marker to print or write on your behalf if your penmanship is awful. But simply watching the machine draw ultra-precise doodles and complex patterns is so satisfying you might be able to justify its $475 price tag as just a relaxation tool.

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The Sector of Kungsholmen, Bolinders Plan by Utopia Arkitekter

wonderfully creative and well-planned tower for stockholm’s southeast kungsholmen. m.








Stockholm’s Southeast Kungsholmen is slowly transforming. Veidekke and Utopia Arkitekter are preparing a redevelopment proposal for the town — and they’re beginning by building an architectural gem. In addition to creating ambitious architecture, Utopia Arkitekter plans to add more housing developments closer to public transport. Their first project? The sector of Kungsholmen, Bolinders Plan, named after Jean Bolinder, who ran a mechanical workshop in the area.

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Video — James Turrell: The Wolfsburg Project by Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

one of the greats. i’ve seen numerous exhibits of his and had the pleasure of meeting him at length at a barnett newman symposium at the philadelphia museum of art. one truly has to experience his work live to fully appreciate it but this gives a nice tour. enjoy! m.

“The primary medium of Californian artist James Turrell is light. Probably the best-known artist in his field, Turrell’s entire oeuvre since the 1960s has been devoted to exploring the diverse manifestations of this immaterial medium and working towards a new, space-defining form of light art. While light here refers to nothing beyond itself, it causes surface, colour and space to interact and allows viewers to immerse themselves in a mysterious, painterly world. Occupying a central place in James Turrell’s oeuvre is the Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert which the artist has been transforming into an observatory since 1974. Building upon the cosmic aspects of this quiet, meditative place, Turrell is creating the worldwide largest museum installation he has made to date at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, producing a light-filled space of experience in the tradition of his Ganzfeld Pieces. Making full use of the adaptable architecture system of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg — unique within the German museum landscape — his installation will be an exploration of space and light: immaterial and material at once. The timelessness and fascination of James Turrell’s works derives from his incredible skill at capturing fleeting light and giving it the visual presence and tactile density of a physical body.”