The technology is in place for everyone to become a designer. But just how realistic is the utopian vision of a user-generated future, and what does it mean for society?
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It's difficult to think of the High Line without thinking of Joel Sternfeld's photographs of it in different seasons at the turn of this century. You can't see them without wanting to be there - and be there alone.
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When Daryl Hannah decorates Charlie Sheen's apartment in Oliver Stone's 1987 movie Wall Street, she whips up a quintessential postmodernist pastiche. The faux-ruined walls and clashing colours personify the aspirations of the nouveaux riches, a shallow world of image and artifice.
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Last week, as it does every April, the design world descended on Milan for the furniture fair, accompanied by thousands of journalists and an army of PRs. As the designers and other VIPs moved from champagne reception to champagne reception in chauffeur-driven cars, you could have been forgiven for thinking that they do very well for themselves, thank you.
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Flicking through the latest issue of Port, a new "thinking man's" magazine, I came across a photograph of a kind that is increasingly ubiquitous. In an article about two young design practices, there's a picture of a box containing a hammer, some leather-working tools and other bits and bobs of workshop flotsam.
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Shenzhen is probably the biggest city you’ve never heard of. Thirty years ago it didn’t exist. Today it has a population estimated at 13 million – nearly two Londons. Nowhere else has ever achieved the pace of this urban up-rush. But the merciless tempo of Chinese urbanisation is old news.
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This building treats the law like a game. A zoning regulation from 1916 makes Manhattan’s towers step back so that the streets can have light. It took nine decades and two outsiders to subvert that rule.
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In the awful 1980s comedy Volunteers, Tom Hanks spends an entire flight to Southeast Asia trying to smooth-talk his way into the pants of the pretty lady in the neighbouring seat. When she finally catches on she gets indignant that he even thinks he has a chance. Hanks, who fancies himself something of a master in the art of bedding, replies hurt, “Well I’ve put the hours in, don’t you think?”
Design, Reviews | Share Article I was born to test razors. My stubble has the kind of potential that would make a mullah weep with envy. In testing the new Philips Arcitec, I’m not the crash test dummy, I’m the wall. So will this be a case of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object?
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The first time I saw the VitraHaus it was made of gingerbread. Carefully stacked and finished with beaded icing, it looked delicious on Vitra’s 2009 Christmas card. It was clear even from this confection that the building was meant to serve as a new emblem of the venerable Swiss furniture manufacturer.
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Istanbul may be 3,000 years old but it's newer than Los Angeles. Less than three percent of it dates from before 1950. This 100km megalopolis is home to nearly 15 million people, and that population is doubling every decade, giving Europe its only prospect of the supercities of the Far East or Latin America.
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