The statement making hotel distinguishes itself from the outset, red plastic penguins from the Venice Biennale are perched on top of the building’s large entrance and have become visual markers as well as impromptu mascots for the hotel. An installation of four sculptures of children by Judy Fox loom over the reception desk of a lobby that has an uncanny resemblance to that of a contemporary museum.

As guests move through the rest of the hotel they can admire (and even interact with some of) the everchanging artworks on display, from communal areas right down to the stylish bedrooms.

This unusual concept hotel is so successful that the owners are currently planning two new locations, one in Cincannati and another in Bentonville.

The fair was hosted in a 2000 sqm purpose built temporary pavilion in Regents Park by London architects Carmondy Groark. The intervention consists of a series of interlinked, translucent pavilions housing hospitality spaces for both VIPs and the general public, along with large exhibition tents that take the form of timber lined spaces surrounding existing trees in the park.

The intervention perfectly balances architectural expression that is sensitive to its context with the requirements of a large scale art exhibition.

(Images via Dezeen)

A final design was selected from entries in a student competition, the winning design was a cardboard structure, chosen for its flexibility, stability, affordability, sense of impermanence and recyclability.

Six hundred 2,6 by 1,3 meter corrugated cardboard panels were cut, perforated, folded and glued together to form a massive block, which in turn was pulled apart like a giant accordian to achieve its final shape. Adaptable to any space, the entire shelving unit can be easily folded down to a tenth of its ultimate length for storage or transport purposes.

The cardboard itself, despite being light in nature, provides enough rigidity not only for the books, but also for the lowest shelf, which doubles as a bench for events, a place to display oversized objects, or simply to sit comfortably while leafing through a book.

At the end of the event, the shelving unit was auctioned off, ensuring funding for more publications as well as the continuance of the Bookshop in the coming year.

(Images by Reiner Hausleiter)

The exhibition forms part of The Bloomberg Commission that invites international artists to create annual site-specific artwork inspired by the rich history of gallery 2, the former reading room of the Whitechapel Library,  a creative haven for early modernist thinkers like Isaac Rosenberg and Mark Gertler.

McElheny’s installation explores how abstraction is used to depict an image of visual enlightenment.  The reflections and refractions created by the installation saturates the gallery in images and light, distorted and multiplied. The installation will be tranformed constantly by alternating the visuals projected onto the sculptures.

(Images via Whitechapel Gallery)

Coffee houses have been a part of social infrastructure of Vienna long before the phenomenon emerged in most other cities, and while each coffee house has its own distinct design and identity, there is undeniably an underlying atmosphere in each that embodies Viennese culture.

Alfred Polgar, a journalist who is famous for his wit for the city’s coffee houses wrote of the well known Café Central:  “Its inhabitants are, for the most part, people who are misanthropes, and whose aversion to other people is as acute as their need for people: who want to be alone, but must have company to do so. The habitué of the Central is a person who derives no sense of belonging from his family, profession, or party; the Café Central comes to his rescue, inviting him to join and escape. Its customers know, love, and underestimate one another. Even those who profess not to know each other regard this non-relationship as a kind of relationship; mutual dislike serves as a unifying force at the Central, a sort of camaraderie. Everyone knows about everybody. The Café Central is a village in the center of the metropolis, steaming with gossip, curiosity, and slander.”

Julia Landsiedl, 2011’s MAK designer in residence, makes observations and conducts interviews around the coffeehouse scene, collecting examples from actual practice while also sifting through the MAK collection in search of helpful thematic clues under direction of Gregor Eichinger.

The exhibition takes the form of a cognitively compiled and annotated map of historic and contemporary coffee houses throughout the city, along with a three dimensional ‘collage’ of artifacts associated with this culture.

“I have always been fascinated by the Viennese coffeehouse as the core of our culture of thinking and art. In the future we will have to take care to secure the existence of the coffeehouse in the 21st century.” Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Managing Director of departure.

“Coffeehouses encourage their guests to develop and spend time cultivating their own habits. These are mechanisms that offer us time and space, channeling our attention.” Gregor Eichinger, architect and designer who assumed direction of The Great Viennese Café: A Laboratory.

(Images via jeplus.at)

Nine designers were handpicked by the founders and spent five days with the distinctive silo structure, which inspired a dialogue between space and craft. The narrative that developed can be seen in the objects created by each designer for the initial prelude ‘Infrastructure’. The finished pieces walk the fine line between concept and functionality and evoke a strong sense of the space they inhabit, while clearly reflecting the voice of each individual designer.

Julien Renault + Camille Blin, Lightbox Library

Damien Gernay, Display Table

Damien Gernay, Lounge Chair

Florian Hauswirth, Rammed Clay Bench

Kaspar Hamacher, 3 L Shelf

Mieke Meijer, Service Desk

Mieke Meijer, Triangle Display

Max Lipsey, Tree Bark Benches

Max Lipsey, Concentration Chair

Tristan Cochrane, Podium Desks

(Images via yatzer)

Size + Matter pairs designers with materials / manufacturing processes so that the dynamics between design and materiality can be explored. This year’s material is Sefar Architecture Vision fabric, a metal-coated fabric mesh sandwiched between two sheets of glass to give a translucent / reflective effect that is black on one side and metallic on the the other.

This unusual material has been used by the architects to create a sculptural pavilion that plays with the orientation of the different surfaces of the glass to make full use of both it’s translucent and reflective qualities. Unframed laminated glass panels create simple vertical elements that visitors can move through, each time having a different experience depending on time of day and levels of activity.

The delicate, complementing relationship between the installation and its host site, the Royal Festival Hall, becomes apparent both in the designers drawings and in the physical manifestation of the design.

(Images via Dezeen)

RGB is by Frencesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla, an artist/designer pair from Milan operating under the moniker Carnovsky. For the London installation they explored the concept of “Jungle”, creating intricate, overlapping graphics depicting a dense forest. Each primary colour layer represents a layer of the jungle: green light reveals the foliage of the jungle, red light unveils the animal kingdom, bar the monkeys, which are playfully revealed under blue light.

Since the space is actually composed of two smaller spaces, previously the shops ‘Dream Bags’ and ‘Jaguar Shoes’, the designers decided to treat one space as day (images above)  and the other as night (images below).

(Images via Dezeen)

The illustrated aesthetic was complimented by a simple trestle table that served as the bar and a minimalist chandelier made of wood.

Its cardboard shell hovered dado height above the floor, partially revealing activity within.

(Images via Dezeen)