Before her tenure at Dwell, Sarah was immersed in blog culture as managing editor of the green design and architecture site, Inhabitat.com, and the sustainable solutions site, Worldchanging.com. When not working in design, Sarah writes, talks and forecasts about food and consumer culture.
When you visit the website for the newest major development in Las Vegas, you are taken on a stomach-dropping virtual sweep up, over, around and through the new city-within-a-city funded by MGM Mirage and designed by a bevy of starchitects. CityCenter takes up 67 acres in a city already packed with casinos and hotels. But, the project's representatives says, "In sharp contrast to the rest of the Strip, the architects created a development of pure, unadorned modernism."
Just before Thanksgiving I traveled to Cleveland to give a few lectures at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Case Western Reserve University. If you haven't visited Cleveland, you might be subject—as I was—to impressions of a city without a whole lot of action. A shrinking rust belt town from which the boomtimes of industry have seeped away, it is indeed a place where millions of square feet of factory space lie vacant inside beautiful, if neglected, old brick buildings. Enormous mansions can be purchased for prices that shock a person accustomed to coastal real estate markets. Nevertheless, despite the economic depression evident in Cleveland, the arts culture and academic communities are thriving, and in many ways it's the modest size of these populations that makes them so exciting. The creative culture is one of collaboration over competition, and the benefits of such a supportive environment are clear.
The stream of amazing projects that emerge from students at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands is never-ending. This week I've come across one from an alum of the school who has spent the last few years producing work related to the output and lifecycle of livestock. Christien Meindertsma spent a summer in a village in Wales, shearing sheep and knitting with their wool—one article or product per animal. The resulting collection became a brand called Flocks, the ongoing product of which is the Urchin Pouf.
In 1955, photographer Elliott Erwitt snapped a photo of a bereted Frenchman riding his bicycle down a tree-lined road with a child and a pair of baguettes strapped to the rear. It’s easy to imagine the trip the man is returning from, during which he probably visited not only the boulangerie for his bread but also the fromagerie, the pâtisserie, and the charcuterie.
Earlier this year, Dwell editor Aaron Britt traveled down to Dallas, Texas, for a design charrette with Re:Vision Dallas. The project is a collaboration between Urban Re:Vision and the Central Dallas Community Development Corporation that aims to turn a downtown Dallas city block into a beacon of sustainable building and urban design. In June, the three finalists were announced, and yesterday, the big winner debuted: a design by Portuguese team Atelier Data & MOOV.
When Carlo Petrini spoke out against the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in his native Rome, he couldn’t have guessed that he’d be heard around the world.
Cities are a favorite subject for photographers, filled as they are with visual stimuli and primed for artistic criticism. A new series of images by Nurri Kim takes as its target the city of Tokyo, zooming in on one specific—and often overlooked—aspect of the cityscape: tarps. Kim's project, entitled Tokyo Blues, features black and white photos spiked with the bright blue hue of plastic tarps, draped over buildings, under roadways, and across plazas.
In one of Italy's oldest glass-blowing regions, Murano, the lighting company FDV Collection (a Leucos USA brand) has partnered with Italian architect Massimo Iosa Ghini to unite cutting-edge LED technology with centuries-old tradition. The result is Spore, a pendant light with an artful exterior and high-tech interior.
This fall, Inhabitat ran a series of interviews with leaders in sustainable design and urban planning. The last in the series was a lengthy chat with Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco. The city of San Francisco is well known for leading the way on green initiatives and Newsom has been a champion of taking big steps and testing the boundaries of what can be done through city-wide mandates.
Over the years the blogosphere has seen a number of stories about generating power from the vibration of people's feet on a train platform, stairs, bridges and even—in perhaps the most popular example—on the dancefloor. It's known as "piezoelectricity" and it might just start a new industry.
