Yacht name: A
Formerly: Project Sigma • SF99
Length: 390 ft • 119 m
Year: 2008
Builder: Blohm & Voss • HDW • # 970
Architect: Martin Francis
Design: Philippe Starck

More information and photo credits

Nolan Herbut’s interactive Wolfgang Keyboard Bench is a Baltic birch wood bench embedded with two thousand computer keyboard keys (and yes, you can actually press the keys and they will go down).

An unexpected and beautiful effect.

You and I might take a sabbatical and treat it like a holiday. Stefan Sagmeister used it as a way to free up his creativity. During his 1 year stint in Bali he created several interesting pieces including this chair which appealed to me because of the intrinsically connected typography and physical material.

The words on the chair are taken from a diary written during his stay and therefore have a contextual relevance to the place where the chair will live.

Typically of Sagmeister, the chair made of indigenous Bali Rattan is not beautiful in the usual sense, however the thin red line it weaves through it’s setting, into the material used, the words written in the material and back through into the setting experienced while sitting on it, is extremely elegant and verging on genius.

So there you go, some people do their best work on holiday.

To Sagmeister

To Karim Charlebois-Zariffa (fellow Bali breaker and the person who took the photo)

More about it here

Based in the south of the Netherlands, the pair try to use two main materials in every piece.

See more here:

On Dezeen

See the collection in real here

Gallery Fumi, London

The Fractal Table was designed by Platform Wertel Oberfell and Matthias Bär for Materialise.MGX.

Design movements have always been about theatre; the magic tricks you can pull with new technology or cultural insight.

Think of almost any formative design moment. The grandiose structure of Paxton’s Crystal Palace or Van Der Rohe’s floating Barcelona Pavillion. Or indeed Pugin’s Houses of Parliament where structure is decorated to show it off.

Cut to the present. A designer can create any form on 3d design software press print and the form, exactly replicated, rises out of a vat of resin. The freedom that this digital manufacturing technology  offers is giving rise to a new baroque style; of decoration as a showcase for what’s possible. No prior technology enabled the creation of such intricacy.

And I love it. It ticks all the boxes. Put your hand up if you’re a little bored with minimal modernism in every furniture store. And the half way house of new decoration isn’t really cutting it either, as it too has been hijacked by the Ikeas of the world as a way to disguise cheapness. Anyway, sorry, I’m ranting now.

So this sort of delight in decoration could be big. Obviously this technology is just gaining momentum, but as it does we may find it fills a need in us (well, me anyway) for much needed wonder and fantasy rather than stark cleanliness as the only escape from a busy life.

One caveat; are there ever going to be any more ‘movements’ or have our attention spans just gotten too short.

Quin lamp from California artist Bathsheba Grossman

Solid CI Chair by Patrick Jouin

Branch Out by Studiomama for TEN - looks like sticks but is a computer generated model.

Fallen Leaves by Guy Beggs

The lost twin ornaments by Committee

Some links:

MWP – Advanced manufacturing technologies

Metropolitan works – digital manufacturing centre

Advance CNC milling technology

About metropolitan works

Fontana Arte is producing some great reissues from Archivio Storico’s past – including the Archivio Storico Nasketta floor lamp.

Designed back in 1933, this modernist gem has a very functional look. Indeed, it’s still a functional light in the modern era, able to revolve in all directions, wherever you need some reading light in fact.

Find out more at the Panik Design website

DMY Berlin is Berlin’s international design festival, which by all accounts was a geat success this year. Winning three awards at this year’s show was this charming, uh, thing by mischer’traxler. Charmed I’m sure!