Vancouver Olympics Through Designer's Eyes

As patriotic Olympic fans all over the globe teared up as they watched their favorite athlete's from their home countries accept their medals for their respective sports, designers everywhere sat looking at their feet, picking apart the design for the podium on which they stood. The podium's were designed by Vancouver based industrial designer James Lee in collaboration with the late design director of the Games, Leo Obstbaum, who passed away suddenly in August of last year.

Lee and Obstbaum created a podium design that mimicked the form of Canada's natural surroundings. The podiums were made up of Western red cedar and Douglas fir which was donated by local businesses and carefully cut and assembled by Vancouver based woodworkers.

In addition to the podium designs, Lee and Obstbaum also worked together to create the wooden trays which were used to present the medals.

Another eye catching element that was catching designers eyes during the games were the Olympic Torches. The sleek Torches were designed by aerospace and transportation design firm Bombardier. Faced with many unique challenges, from creating a consistent flame in any condition that may be faced in a Canadian winter to designing a device comfortable enough for people of all ages to hold, Bombardier developed the highly technical device that we watched make it's way across the country of Canada.

To learn more about the inner workings of the Torch, check out Bombardier's how it works sheet.

JR - Women Are Heroes - UPDATE

JR has released a beautiful video chronicling the life of his latest project, Women Are Heroes. The video not only gives a glimpse at how big of a task the installation actually was to install for both JR and his colleagues, but also provides insight from many Parisians on how they viewed the public art and how it reflected on their neighborhood from its creation to its decomposition - both natural and by the human hand.

The Lambeth Palace

Shortly after it's recent screenings at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals, Banksy began some special showings of his film Exit Through the Gift Shop in a makeshift theater inside a tunnel beneath Waterloo train station in London dubbed "Lambeth Palace". The documentary will be showing twice daily up until it's release to public on March 5th. Lambeth Palace includes some installations created by the artist including a painted "red carpet" leading to the tunnel's entrance, a run down ice cream truck serving refreshments and a waiting area with the Paranoid Pictures logo plastered on the wall.

Meet | At The Apartment

Developed by the brilliant minds of Marc and Sara Schiller who created the hugely popular street art blog, Wooster Collective, comes this great space tucked in the heart of SoHo. Meet was conjured up by the pair as they saw a need for a flexible collaborative space in the city where creatives and executives could meet to discuss business, pitch clients and house company events. The 2500 square foot, two story space is intended to provide it's users with a stimulating workspace with various environments that can accommodate larger scale conference room meetings to conversations held in a more intimate environment.

The rooms are not only highly stylized to stimulate creative thoughts, but their shelves are filled with inspirational reference books covering art, design and photography.

Meet is available for rentals at set costs that include support staff, refreshments, state of the art audio visual set-ups and meeting facilities. Future locations are planned for cities such as London and Dubai.

Flex Family Furniture by Itamar Burstein

This beautifully crafted new furniture series by designer Itamar Burstein uses a new technique to create curves in wood. As opposed to the labor and equipment intensive steaming technique used for pieces such as the Eames dining chairs, where the plywood pieces are steamed, molded and dried, Burstein removes a portion of the primary pieces of the furniture and infills the gap with a solid contrasting piece that is cut with the desired curvature. He then glues the pieces together using traditional techniques to create the pressure required to form a strong bond between the two.

The end result are these elegant pieces whose contrasting wood types paint a clear picture of how each portion of the assembly was constructed.

The Story Beyond The Still

Canon and Vimeo have teamed up to create what is shaping up to be an incredibly exciting HD video contest dubbed The Story Beyond The Still. To kick the project off, Canon asked photographer Vincent Laforet (whose work is truly a must see) to interpret the story behind a still image and create an HD video using the new Canon EOS 7D to tell that story. The above is the resulting video by Laforet, which will be followed by a series of six more chapters that will each begin with a still that the previous video concluded with.

Submissions for the second chapter are due February 11th with a new deadline following about 5 weeks after the previous. The winners will not only be selected by the prestigious judging panel and featured on the contest website, but will receive some incredible prizes.

This contest is one of many avenue's to spread the expanding market of DSLR cameras with the ability to shoot HD video using traditional still photography methods.

Aonni Mineral Water Plant

Set in Punta Arenas, Chile, the most prominent settlement on the Strait of Magellan, this unique facility houses the Aonni Mineral Water Plant and offices. Architects Daniel Bebin and Thomas Saxton created the form based on the interaction of natural environmental forces, creating a form that is one of a kind and brings a sculptural presence to it's coastal setting that seems pleasantly unobtrusive to it's surroundings.

While the interior of the plant's simple aluminum construction is washed by natural light which enters through many of the buildings large eastern openings, the public space takes on a quality much like that of a contemporary art museum, with it's wood clad surfaces, modern furnishings and unique openings allowing views of the adjacent Strait.

Exit Through The Gift Shop

Enigmatic British street artist, Banksy, pulled a fast one on the tens of thousands of cinema fans attending the Sundance Film Festival this week in Park City, Utah. It wasn't until recent weeks that rumors had started floating around the art world of a trailer for a film created by Banksy dubbed "Exit Through The Gift Shop"; however many were unsure if this was truly a trailer for an upcoming movie or another prank pulled by the artist. As an artist known for his anonymity, followers probably should not be surprised to hear that Banksy's film was not listed in the Festival's catalog and wasn't even placed on the schedule until last week.

Exit Through The Gift Shop premiered earlier this week and was a huge hit. The movie is said to be a chronicle of guerrilla art (and artists - as you can see from some familiar faces in the trailer) that contains plenty of the political satire that Banksy is known for.

With any luck it won't be long before the film makes its way across the globe and to a local theater near you.

Blaine Fontana Screen Prints

Blaine Fontana has just completed a series of limited edition screen prints for a piece called "Morality of Chrysalis". The prints are available at three different levels, shown here from the most intricate level (top), including individually unique backgrounds as well as hand detailed renderings both in the foreground and background making them truly unique, to the most affordable level (shown below) which includes the screen prints only.

As an artist who has always made a conscious effort to create pieces that are affordable and attractive to all of his fans (see the many limited editions at his store as well as his book), it is exciting to see such an offering at all levels.

Parkour Motion Reel

Created and shot by a graphic design student in Singapore, this flip-book like animation takes a step back from the overly computer generated graphic world that we have grown accustomed to and shows that there are still undiscovered methods for turning traditional materials into works of art. The animation takes unsuspected turns in all directions as the artist orchestrates the pages of her illustrations to paint a picture of a Parkour¹ athlete traversing through a cityscape.

1. Parkour is a form of physical training where an athlete is taught to overcome any obstacle within one's path by adapting their movements to the environment (think opening chase scene in Casino Royale).