Table of contents for May 2017 in AZURE

WHEN IT COMES TO FIELDS like welding, carpentry and electrical work, women are a rarity. In Canada, as recently as last year, fewer than five per cent of students in these fields were female: a far cry from gender parity. In an attempt to address the issue, Fleming College opened the Kawartha Trades and Technology Centre in Peterborough, Ontario, in 2014. Their mission was straightforward: increase the number of women and other under-represented groups in the trades. Their approach? Architecture. “If the goal of a building is to encourage the engagement of marginalized groups, you begin with good design” says Safdar Abidi, principal at the Toronto office of Perkins+Will, the firm behind the build. For Abidi, it comes down to perceptions. Trade schools, with their dark, closed-off workshops, are often set…

IF YOU’RE SEARCHING FOR THE BEST FURNITURE and home accessories the Pacific Northwest’s thriving maker culture has to offer, look no further than Kate Duncan’s Address. A trade-show-meets-pop-up-shop built on community spirit rather than commerce, the event brings together some 30 local creatives. Duncan’s meticulously crafted Japanesemeets- Scandinavian wood furniture is a major highlight, but curator Amber Kingsnorth, lead at M?k Interiors, brings in a variety of talents whose products are assembled in a series of vignettes. Past exhibitors have included slocal creatives. Duncan’s meticulously crafted Japanesemeets- Scandinavian wood furniture is a major highlight, but curator Amber Kingsnorth, lead at M?k Interiors, brings in a variety of talents whose products are assembled in a series of vignettes. Past exhibitors have included sculptor and flatware designer Stefanie Dueck, textile studio Antipod…

FOUR YEARS AGO, New York designer Joe Doucet glimpsed the future of design. Working on a set of flatware, he heard about a new technology – 3-D-printed steel – and sent a file to prototype a fork. “It was incredibly expensive, and extremely low resolution, almost pixelated,” says Doucet. Nevertheless, holding the usable fork in his hand was revelatory and struck him with the force of a meteorite. “The fact that I had just completely eviscerated the traditional manufacturing supply chain by creating a file and sending it to print was an epiphany,” he says. Although the technology wasn’t perfect, Doucet began looking at the history of 3-D printing, which is typically associated with powdery, plasticky goods. “I realized it had loosely been following Moore’s Law” (which predicts that microchip…

TERRAZZO Long thought of as marble’s drab younger sibling, terrazzo has lately become popular among a handful of designers pushing the boundaries of material exploration. Appearing in Besler & Sons’ Props and Simon Legald’s Terra tables, the seemingly humdrum composite usually made from ground marble and concrete is rapidly rising through the ranks. And nowhere is this fact more obvious than in the Collecta series of furniture and accessories, for which Alberto Bellamoli worked directly with stonemasons to insert round marble inlays that look like drops of oil. Scattering the spots haphazardly, Bellamoli has made the composite seem almost naturally occurring. Working with craftsmen from his hometown near Verona, Italy – for centuries the heartland of terrazzo production – Bellamoli used the material to evoke his heritage and revisit his…

THERE’S NO QUESTION the virtual marketplace has taken a bite out of the traditional bricks-and-mortar retail model. Some shops, though, are thriving by offering what the Internet can’t: quality control. In Toronto, the design store Mjölk, which specializes in carefully curated accessories and furniture shipped from Scandinavia and Japan, appears to have usurped the online shopping threat by staying niche. “I think now is a very hard time to be a smart consumer,” says John Baker, who co-owns the store with Juli Daoust Baker, his wife. “The things that look the best in photographs are usually poor quality. People have a hard time buying a sweater online, for instance, when they can’t try it on first.” One way Mjölk has set itself apart is by crafting its own line of…

WITH ITS JAPANESE founder, French partner and Chinese manufacturing base, Stellar Works is effortlessly cosmopolitan. Since its founding in 2012, the company has continually subverted the cliché that China is home to only mass-volume and low-quality production. But the aspect of Stellar Works that most turns heads is its Shanghai factory, where many products are made by hand. “If we made our furniture elsewhere, it would mostly be made by machine because of the cost,” explains founder and CEO Yuichiro Hori. “Here, it’s still affordable to do it by hand.” In April, at Milan’s Salone del Mobile, Hori was on hand to present four collections: three by previous collaborators (Yabu Pushelberg, Space Copenhagen, and Neri&Hu Design and Research Office), and one that has been newly expanded by multi-disciplinary practice Crème,…

IT’S ONLY NATURAL, when it feels like the world around us is going mad, to withdraw into ones of our own making. Last January, while walking the floor at IMM Cologne – the first international furniture fair of the year, and a first glimpse at trends for the year ahead – I was struck by the serenity of each vignette. There were few flashy gestures. Instead, the palettes were muted, with bright hues replaced by shadowy greys, deep browns and other neutrals. Among the few splashes of colour to be found, green, baby blue and rust prevailed. It was an almost sanctuarylike atmosphere, centred not on expressive flamboyance but comfort. From the over 1,000 exhibitors, mostly from Europe and particularly Germany, much of what was on display expressed character through…

Fifty years ago at Expo 67 in Montreal, no pavilion captured the zeitgeist better than Buckminster Fuller’s massive geodesic dome for the United States of America. A 20-storey-high skeleton of steel polyhedrons sheathed in an acrylic skin, it relayed the moment’s collective desires: lunar colonization, salvation through technology, controlling the world within a giant, round ball. Then as now, the dome spanned the ages in its evocations: the eons-old moon, the 19th-century time machine of H.G. Wells, the 1960s space-travel extravaganza. Fuller himself predicted future miles-wide versions of the dome to enclose entire cities within carefully monitored microclimates – the acrylic bubble sealing off the rest of the earth rather than expanding over it. Thus our usual manifest destiny inflected from outward to inward, for a while. A 1976 fire…

↓ FOREST OF NUMBERS French architect Emmanuelle Moureaux used over 60,000 paper numerals to compose Forest of Numbers. The rainbow-coloured installation was launched to mark the tenth anniversary of the National Art Center, Tokyo. emmanuellemoureaux.com PLUME WI-FI PODS Plugged into standard wall sockets, these tiny, gem-shaped pods boost Wi-Fi signals to maximize a home’s wireless network, eliminating dead spots and signal drops. They’re sold in champagne, onyx and silver. From approx. $90, plumewifi.com T-TIMEPIECE Among the latest additions to Alessi’s Objets-Bijoux collection, Titus Wybenga’s T-Timepiece tea infuser resembles a classic pocket watch to encourage us to take a moment for ourselves. alessi.com RAYBABY Ray’s modern take on the baby monitor keeps parents connected to kids 24/7 with an app-linked camera. The device records sleep-routine data in a digital journal and…

KNOWN FOR ITS robotic vacuum cleaners and state-of-the-art hair dryers, Dyson is taking on lighting as its next frontier. Jake Dyson – who has adopted his father’s passion for engineering – has envisioned a standalone unit that single- handedly meets the illumination demands of the contemporary office. The challenge was to provide ambient and directed light within a single fixture, and to make it as energy efficient as possible. Even LED technology hasn’t cured the issue of expending light that isn’t useful, Dyson explains, and over time, diodes are prone to degrade in colour and intensity. “We wanted to get a huge amount of light output and then direct it to exactly where it’s needed.” After a decade of R+D, the Cu Beam Duo has launched, and it looks, to…

A/D/O, a new, 2,137-square-metre design hub in a former industrial building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, grew out of a fundamental change in the way many designers work. Dwindling are the days when industrial design grads compete to join large, established firms with a steady roster of clients; increasingly, these individuals are going it alone or starting nimble collectives with friends, and initiating their own projects and businesses. “It’s the atomization of design,” says Nate Pinsley, managing director of A/D/O, which was developed with the automotive brand Mini. “They’re in their coffee shop or home office, but they’re not necessarily getting exposed to cross-disciplinary influences. We wanted a place for designers of different disciplines to come together, to create a commons.” The resulting interior by Brooklyn-based nArchitects is equal parts co-working space,…

LUXURY ISN’T WHAT it used to be. Walmer Yard, a cluster of four new houses tucked into a West London neighbourhood, shows just how much it’s changing. The project is the result of a collaboration between architect Peter Salter and the distinctive developer Crispin Kelly. In a city of profit-hungry development consortiums churning out uninspired apartment blocks, Kelly stands out by putting high quality architecture first. Originally trained as an architect, he carries with him a deep love for the art of building. Equally important, however, is that he understands there is a special type of consumer in London’s fierce real estate market – the well-financed design connoisseur. These buyers are willing to spend a premium to live in fully realized architectural visions. So with that firmly in mind, Kelly and…

1 Lofoten by Casamania This modular system by Luca Nichetto includes upholstered seats and backrests in bright, cheerful colours; tables; and accessories such as planters. The tall, quilted acoustic panels double as divider screens to create rooms within a room. casamania.it 2 Laguna Modular by ERG Upholstered privacy panels and benches with or without backs bring multiple levels of usability to this configurable series. Legs are offered in standard metal or with wood accents or in a chromed finish. erginternational.com 3 Jif by Allseating The ergonomic waterfall edge on this stool offers relief to hamstrings, and a sway-base option allows for rocking or swivelling to engage the user’s core. The stool can easily be tucked away thanks to its compact size. allseating.com 4 Bivi Screens by Turnstone These panels provide…

A tour around the colour wheel has never been so dizzying or inspiring. “The fact that there is no objectivity in colour is a blessing to me, it’s a visual expertise, not a scientific one,” says Dutch designer Hella Jongerius. That said, a lot of rigorous work has gone into building Vitra’s colour and material library. Jongerius’s assured colour language and affinity for texture in her own work made her a natural choice for the decade-long project. Following her 2005 debut collaboration with Vitra (on the Polder sofa, a multi-tonal piece upholstered in exclusive fabrics with varied weaves), she was asked to amass, amend and chronicle the Swiss furniture brand’s colour and textile palettes. The book could have veered into glorified-catalogue territory, but instead gives an insider’s look at the…

ONE OF MODERNISM’S greatest shortcomings was the delusion that people do as they’re told. Consider the case of shortcuts: we walk diagonally, sometimes trampling through gardens, where planners and architects would have preferred us to turn at right angles. Julien De Smedt belongs to a generation of practitioners who are determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Such ambition is evident in the Hangzhou Gateway project, a 16-storey office building in the Gongshu district of the Chinese metropolis. Here, a pedestrian-friendly walkway bears witness to the Belgian architect’s belief that a building, regardless of its primary purpose, must give something back to the community. “A structure like the Hangzhou Gateway can’t be reduced to a hindering wall of office space,” he explains. It easily could have been, had it…

BETTER SHELTER walked off with the top prize as Beazley Design of the Year this January, beating out more than 70 other projects, including the artwork for David Bowie’s last album and a blinking bicycle helmet. In the architecture category alone, it smacked down Herzog & de Meuron’s new Tate Modern in London and OMA’s Prada Foundation in Milan. Commonly thought to be an Ikea product, Better Shelter was in fact designed by an independent social enterprise, Better Shelter, a partnership between the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Ikea Foundation. Intended to replace traditional refugee tents in all but the most shortterm deployments, the shelters are more spacious (higher ceilings), better insulated (clad in polypropylene panels), and more durable (built to last three years in moderate climates) than their counterparts.…

WHEN EERO SAARINEN first launched the Model 73 Womb Settee in 1948, it was a beautiful dud. The double-width version of his endlessly popular Model 70 Womb Chair, the settee was beset with structural problems that caused the arms to bend and break. After a three-year production run, it was set aside and pretty much forgotten. A team at Knoll rediscovered the settee a few years ago during a routine sweep of the archives. Working with original models old enough to crumble if handled too roughly, the team retooled the seat’s construction using modernday production elements. The goal, says Colleen James, director of marketing at KnollStudio, was to “use technology to make something a bit more durable and much easier to produce.” Saarinen originally sought out a boat maker to…

WHILE THE WORDS sustainability and innovation get liberally bandied about these days, German designer Werner Aisslinger long ago set himself at the forefront of material experimentation and manufacturing technologies. In 2012, his Hemp chair for Moroso combined both predilections by utilizing automotive production methods to form a stackable monobloc seat made using its namesake natural fibre; while Chair Farm, which he debuted that same year, revealed a revolutionary approach to manufacturing – one where a living plant did the heavy lifting. Trained to sprout around a steel frame, the living chair could be grown, literally, rather than be imported globally. For a museum exhibition in Munich, Aisslinger has amalgamated a number of his products – for such brands as Moroso, Kvadrat, Flötotto and Vitra – and represented them as part…

A MAJOR CANADIAN platform for up-and-coming talents, Toronto Design Week is often (and unsurprisingly) shot through with an undercurrent of lightheartedness, and this year was no exception. A playful twist on traditional forms and materials was seen almost everywhere this January, with the folklore-inspired installation by Spanish designer and artist Jaime Hayon, for Caesarstone, setting the tone. Placed front and centre at the Interior Design Show Toronto, the week’s anchoring event, the fantastical display showcased Hayon’s signature smiling faces, rendered larger than life on cabinets and tables. The whimsy extended beyond the confines of IDS, popping up throughout the Toronto Design Offsite Festival. Now in its seventh year, the week-long event has grown to include over 100 installations, events and curiosities. These included Jeff Goodman Studio’s Devil’s Abacus, a 2.3-metre-high…

1 Tuxedo Cove by Nienkämper Two high-backed sofas and an interconnecting panel form the basis of this enclosed booth that seats up to four. It can work in conjunction with the brand’s wall-mounted Gateway table or the freestanding Gateway Media Lift table to bring full connectivity to the isolated environment. Alternatively, the booth can incorporate T.V. screens or monitors on its panel. nienkamper.com 2 Cellular by Brunner The components of this family of adaptable furnishings cater to both individual and group needs. The freestanding screens can accommodate individual standing and sitting desks, as well as sofas or lounge chairs for small groups. Both the desks and the tables can be outfitted with media and power connectivity brunner- group.com 3 Lounge Zone by Teknion Part of PearsonLloyd’s comprehensive Zones series –…