Table of contents for September 2017 in AZURE

Dear reader, Notice anything different? We’ve been working towards some big changes behind the scenes at Azure lately, and the issue you’re holding is the first step of that revamp. Just over a year ago, we set out to rethink what a magazine should be in the age of hyper-information. It’s a challenging question, so to get a better sense of what readers want, we went into the field. We talked to you – architects, landscape architects, product designers and interior designers – to get a deeper understanding of what is on the minds of industry insiders, and what you hope to find when you turn to us. Fortunately, you’re a talkative bunch. The insights you gave us were plentiful and rich. For one, you asked for more opinion, on…

AT THE BEGINNING of Bluets, her beloved, fragmentary lyric essay, Maggie Nelson writes, “And so I fell in love with a color – in this case, the color blue – as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.” The two interior designers who founded the acclaimed Milanese design agency Studiopepe – Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto – might be similarly bewitched. Their Out of the Blue collection, a suite of eight, oneof- a-kind cyan-and-alabaster sculptures, is a paean to the titular hue, as well as to pre-industrial photographic techniques and the delicate play between light, colour and shape. At first glance, the forms are familiar – one sculpture might reference a pair of toy building blocks,…

FLÙR, on Toronto’s Bathurst Street, embodies a new breed of plant and flower shop; one that’s not dripping with ivy. In large part that is thanks to the minimalist design of the store’s interior by MSDS Studio – an intervention more art gallery than arboretum. Playing to Flùr owner Chloë Fraser’s background in visual arts, a carefully spaced wall of fixed shelving that boasts a rotating display of vigorous tropicals, locally grown flowers and textural vessels, most of which are artisanal ceramic works. “For budgetary reasons, we decided to use inexpensive materials, but they also go nicely with the shop,” says Jessica Nakanishi, co-principal of MSDS. Linoleum curves around the centre plinth, creating an organic and multi-tiered display of plants and pots. (The shop sells MSDS’s planters for Umbra Shift…

EDIT The vacant Unilever detergent factory in Toronto gets brought back to life this fall to play host to EDIT: Expo for Design, Innovation and Technology, a 10-day design festival. The inaugural event for this new biennale is curated by Bruce Mau and presented by Design Exchange in partnership with the United Nations. Through talks, installations and a series of pavilions, the event will demonstrate the world’s most innovative design solutions to realworld problems. editdx.org TRANSPARENT LEATHER Fashion designer Sruli Recht has introduced the Apparition collection, made from vibrantly coloured, transparent cow-skin leather. The innovative line of coats and shoes is produced by Dutch leather lab ECCO. eccoleather.com CORPORATE WARFARE German design studio Foreal launched this dark yet whimsical personal art project that plasters logos from international brands such as…

KONSTANTIN GRCIC is known for his function-first approach to furniture and for his prolific output. In April, during Milan Design Week, the Munich designer stayed true to form, launching seating for Cassina, Magis, Plank and Mattiazzi. But it was his lighting collection for Flos that stood out as something altogether new – an art project of sorts from the pragmatic designer. Called Noctambule, the prototypes (two pendant and three surface lamps) are composed of glass columns that appear to float between ambient rings of light. Noctambule is French for night owl, or reveller, Grcic tells me, “the kind of creature that is invisible during the day.” Inspired to create an object that would similarly disappear when switched off, Grcic found that LED gave him the means to accomplish this goal.…

It would likely surprise the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing to know that their stripped-down furniture has inspired yet another wave of devoted followers, this time urban-dwelling millennials. Better known as Shaker style, the pragmatic approach to crafting tables, chairs, tabletop objects and toys using the simplest of tools and materials has turned into a full-blown trend, in New York and elsewhere. Fifty objects by 14 design studios were on view at Design Within Reach’s Greene Street flagship during NYCxDesign, under the banner Furnishing Utopia: Shaker Design Influence Now. While Shaker design was born out of need over want, its current appropriation is more about the want. (After all, Anderssen & Voll’s Step Stool, for one, probably won’t come cheap.) The results are elegant, refined and surprisingly…

IT’S NOW ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO DISAPPEAR FROM THE GRID. With camera-filled city streets, buildings, and transportation hubs, not to mention smartphones that harvest personal data and track location, our movements are continually monitored. For better or for worse, surveillance has become a routine part of daily life. The concept may be unnerving, but we accept it in the name of security, convenience, and even fun, as we broadcast our activities to the world via social media. This ambivalence about surveillance was exhibited this past summer in an art installation by creative collaborators Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron. In the darkened Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, Hansel & Gretel greeted visitors with an army of drones buzzing overhead. An array of ceiling-mounted infrared cameras tracked…

WE ASKED What developments are you looking forward to in your city? “While I am curious to see whether the Low Line will be made a reality, I’m most interested in seeing New York continue to find ways to transform its waterfront into accessible green space.” In this issue, writer Kimberlie Birks reviews the graphic novel Playground of My Mind and takes us to Oki Sato’s whimsical CoFufun plaza in Japan. → Page 116 and 78 “I’m eager to see Westbank’s development at the former Honest Ed’s site, on Bloor Street West. Big projects with rental apartments are rare in downtown Toronto.” Twenty years after the opening of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim, Nicholas Hune-Brown weighs the benefits – and the downsides – of using cultural buildings to revitalize urban areas. Page…

Where innovation and technology are headed in a post-bulb world WHILE HE STROLLED the spacious halls at the Tate Britain as a security guard in the 1980s, Cerith Wyn Evans must have dreamed of filling the neoclassical Duveen Galleries with his future work. What he couldn’t have known then is that, one day, his art would also animate Instagram accounts from London to Sydney. It’s easy to see why Wyn Evans’ Forms in Space … by Light (in Time) went viral as it surged through the museum’s central hall earlier this summer. From a quiet neon oculus that hung like a trapeze inside the foyer, the installation appeared to lunge past the original columned archways in starbursts, swoops and scribbles. You’d be forgiven for seeing the trajectory of a dancer…

“ELECTRONICS SHAPED the 20th century; now we are in the time of light,” says Carlotta de Bevilacqua, vice president of Italian lighting brand Artemide, and a leader in lighting research. “It is the great contemporary medium, and it is so important to the development of civilization.” One of the reasons de Bevilacqua sees light as a defining technology for the century ahead is simply that there’s nothing faster than it. We already see this quality in high speed fibre optic internet connections, but the wireless networking technology Li-Fi – a Wi-Fi alternative first demonstrated by Professor Harald Haas in 2011, and now an open standard – promises to take this into the world with an ingenious hack. When the intensity of LED sources is rapidly modulated, data can travel at…

Carlo Ratti has barely sat down to stir sugar into his espresso when he starts telling me how to shape the future of urban life. The speed at which he’s talking is a giveaway that this is his favourite subject, and I doubt he really needs that caffeine. He’s explaining to me how his Senseable City Laboratory here at MIT incubates technology-driven ways of transforming cities to better serve people and to promote human interaction. “To see the potential for transformation, you ask design questions, exploring how things could be,” he says. “Then you use science, which looks at how things are, to find the answers. Today we have the advantage of using technology in our scientific work to create an alternative universe.” When Palladio wrote his treatise on architecture…

In early 2001, Richard Florida came to Milwaukee and – before the eyes of the anxious local businessmen who had invited the urban guru – proclaimed the city “cool.” At the dawn of the new millennium, being told you were cool by Richard Florida wasn’t just a boost to a local city builder’s ego: it was a promise of salvation. In those years the academic celebrity barnstormed across the continent pushing a compelling vision of a way forward for struggling metropolises. In the new economy, Florida preached, a city’s success depended on its ability to seduce the “creative class” – those artists, coders and designers who needed to be pampered with hip coffee shops, copious art galleries, world-class architecture and usable bike lanes. And Milwaukee, Florida said, had the right…

BUTE COLLECTION BY DESIGNTEX Vibrant colours inject a youthful energy into this wool collection, a collaboration with Scottish mill Bute. Six upholsteries keep the focus on the popular material’s rich textures – tweeds, twills, waffles and bouclés. designtex.com INNOVATION Can Carpet Save the Planet? With the launch of the world’s first carbon-negative carpet tile, Interface has exceeded even its own ambition to halt damage to the environment Since announcing its “Mission Zero” mandate in 1997, carpet manufacturer Interface has transformed itself from an ecological offender to a global leader in sustainability and corporate accountability. That original missive was to reduce the company’s waste and greenhouse gas emissions during manufacture to zero, and to use 100 per cent recycled or bio-based materials by 2020. Last year, the company upped its own…

GRAPHIC IMPACT 1. NATURAL SELECTION Crop circles and aerial landscapes inspired the textural patterns of Grain Design’s Lands. Braided and sewn in Rhode Island, these naturally stain-resistant rugs are made from undyed Canadian wool and are available in cream, brown and grey shades, as well as in custom colours. graindesign.com 2. PHOTOCOPY The abstract patterns of the Kulfi collection, from New York studio Tantuvi, are based on photographs by artist Adam Sipe. Hand-dyed and pit-woven in Rajasthan, India, the line includes Rose (shown), in warm earth tones, and Pista, which offers brighter hues. tantuvistudio.com 3. PATHFINDER Hong Kong studio Lim + Lu rethinks the modular carpet concept with Reform from Tai Ping. Designed to be reconfigured for different spaces, the rug’s overlapping circles are formed by three segments of varying…

GETTING NAKED WITH STRANGERS within a confined room – and where the ideal temperature is 85oC – might seem like an out-of-the-ordinary experience, but in Sweden, saunas are an integral part of life. Few, though, are as beautiful or as politically fuelled as the Solar Egg. This public sauna has been built on the site of a new city near Kiruna, the country’s northernmost outpost, 145 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. The reason for a golden egg? To provide some 23,000 Kiruna residents with a place to meet before they move, en masse, to this entirely new, built-from-scratch location. The original Kiruna is a mining town, and as the supplier of iron ore to 90 per cent of Europe, its booming success now threatens the stability of the city’s…

WHEN L.A. ARCHITECT Edwin Chan was asked to envision a cluster of Quonset huts on a two-hectare site in Detroit as a creative community, he was skeptical at first. The iconic structures seemed too steeped in military symbolism. But that presumption also posed a challenge for Chan, who founded EC3 after working at Frank Gehry’s office for 25 years. “It’s important for me to design a project that can overcome preconceptions,” he says. The result is True North, where eight Quonset huts of various sizes accommodate affordable live-work spaces for creative tenants, such as artists and aspiring chefs. The project was launched by real estate developer Philip Kafka, who is actively investing in Detroit’s rebirth with ventures that will entice entrepeneurs like himself – those hoping to breathe new life…

1 FONTANE BIANCHE BY FANTINI Designed by architect Elisa Ossino, this collection combines square and circular forms with a matte gunmetal PVD finish. $2260, fantiniusa.com 2 PAVANI BY NEWPORT BRASS Among the 29 finishes available for this widespread gooseneck faucet are a glossy black and the matte black shown. From $1020, newportbrass.com 3 ELEMENTS BY WATERMARK DESIGN The Brooklyn brand’s customizable collection lets you select from a variety of materials and finishes. The faucet shown features a charcoal body and insets, with a handle cover in stone-like Volcano. From $1210, watermark-designs.com…

THE DIN AT Lambert & Fils’s Montreal workshop is deafening. Plinking brass bars, whirring power tools and gasping pneumatic hoses get garbled into a primordial techno. For all this sonic chaos, the rigour of the workmanship has helped this maker of sleek contemporary lighting cultivate a reputation for elegant fixtures that walk a line between hand-built and precision-assembled. The tempo has only increased since founder Samuel Lambert and his team ramped up their European invasion in October 2016 with the unveiling of Laurent – a family of opaline glass globes circumscribed by thin metal supports – at Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk, Belgium. “Kortrijk suited us: It’s small, highly curated, and at the frontier of design and art,” Lambert recalls. “It felt like a homecoming, and being welcomed by an extended…

ARTURO ALVAREZ’S ONN For more than two decades, a fascination with the natural world has informed the lights crafted by Arturo Alvarez. For the Onn series, the Spanish designer looked to the mysteries of the deep sea. Onn is made from white-painted steel mesh embedded with LEDs, and its organic shape is intended to evoke the rounded forms of shells and corals. Unlit, its punctured metal pieces pose as sculpture. When illuminated, they spring to life, casting a gently diffused light. arturo-alvarez.com INGO MAURER’S WALKING IN THE RAIN Taking inspiration from the Japanese mino (a traditional raincoat fashioned from layers of woven straw) German lighting virtuoso Ingo Maurer cloaked this anthropomorphic floor lamp with three finely pleated sheets of treated Japanese paper. Standing at attention on red metal feet, the…

French architect Odile Decq had already designed two lighting fixtures for Italian lighting manufacturer Luceplan when she approached the company with an innovative concept for a product that would do more than just illuminate. “I was designing an office building and had the need to care about both acoustics and lighting. I searched products and didn’t find anything nice combining the two,” Decq says. “This is how the idea came of combining both constraints in one device.” Decq’s design challenge inspired a collaboration with Luceplan on the company’s first foray into acoustical lighting. In 2012, Pétale, a softly sculpted pendant that Decq describes as a “flying object,” made its debut. Luceplan’s line of acoustical lighting now includes two more fixtures, both imagined by Italian architect and designer Monica Armani: Silenzio,…

IF “SPANISH” DOESN’T STRIKE you as a promising theme for a Madrid hotel, design superstar Jaime Hayon has placed a 2.8-metre-tall zebra-striped bear at the entrance of the Barceló Torre de Madrid that’s just waiting to doff its top hat and change your mind. The fibreglass-and-brass sculpture, which plays with the image of the city’s coat of arms, sets the tone for a whimsically patriotic travel experience – a kitschy-butnot- too-kitschy love letter to the past and present of this grand, seductive city. “It seems to me Spaniards are somehow afraid of their own identity,” Hayon tells me as we sit in a café after visiting the opening of the Norman Foster Foundation’s new Madrid headquarters. “I wanted to change that by adding quality to local character and giving it…