Phil Patton – Page 3 – DesignApplause

About Phil Patton

Phil Patton is a contributing editor at Departures and Esquire magazines, a contributing writer at Wired and an automotive design writer for The New York Times. He was a regular contributor to The New York Times House and Home section and, in 1998, originated the “Public Eye” column. He has written many books including: Made in USA: The Secret History of the Things That Made America (Grove-Weidenfeld, 1992), which was named a New York Times notable book of the year; Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile (Simon & Schuster, 2002); Michael Graves Designs: The Art of the Everyday Object (Melcher, 2004); and Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51 (Villard, 1998). He has also written for Art in America, ARTnews, Connoisseur, Geo, Harper’s Bazaar, Men’s Journal, The New Republic, New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Travel + Leisure, Traveler, The Village Voice and Vogue. Patton was Editorial Consultant on the Guggenheim Museum’s “Motorcycle” show in 1998 and Consulting Curator for the “Different Roads” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1999. In 2000 he was consultant and contributor for “On the Job: Design and the American Office” at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

ian callum’s new old jaguar.

Sep 4, 2014

Ian Callum, head of Jaguar design, has a new used car. A personalized, redesigned and reengineered early Sixties Jaguar Mark 2. Built at Classic Motor Cars Limited in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, in England. The car has modernized engine, transmission, brakes and so on. It has a cleaner, leaner body. In a statement released for the unveiling, Mr. Callum said that he had “a long held notion that, although the Mark 2 has always been a beautiful car, it could be even more exciting in shape and performance.” He said he had de-chromed the car. “Simplification and clarity was my objective.”

Sound 1 bluetooth speakers by cloudandco for elevenplus.

Aug 19, 2014

Desktop speakers for phones and other mobile devices have become a wondrously rich area for design innovation in the last few years. The Korean firm Cloud and Co offers a warm, minimal take on the ideas with crystaline cylinders inspired by Muji and Fukaswa, Bauhaus and Braun. [ cloudandco ] [ elevenplus ]

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2015 BMW concept car sneak peek photos.

Aug 9, 2014

BMWs vision future luxury concept vehicle will be unveiled next week at the annual Pebble Beach gatherings. Here are two sneak peek photos.

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Fed asks public for ideas to speedup airport check-ins.

Jul 29, 2014

Just heard on the radio: The Federal Transportation Safety Authority has asked members of the public to submit ideas to make airport check-in lines run more rapidly and smoothly. Process is also design. AND friends, there’s also a $15,000 prize [ details ]

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2015 jeep renegade final design.

Jul 9, 2014

Jeep showed off the final design of its Renegade model small SUV. Mark Allen, head of Jeep design. said the vehicle was designed in Detroit and rides the same underpinnings as the Fiat 500L, the long Fiat. It will be built in Italy.
All admitted that the face of the vehicle was “a little bit cute” but cute, he said, like a puppy dog beside the mature dog. There are lots of numerous playful details as well, such as the X-shaped taillights that echo a jerry can for holding gasoline.

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The clark institute expands via tadao ando, selfdorf architects and reed hilderbrand.

Jul 4, 2014

above> visitor center and reflecting pool | image courtesy of tadao ando architect & associates

Fourth of July marked the opening of the much expanded and renovated Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, in western Massachusetts. Originally opened in the Berkshire mountains by Sterling Clark, who feared nuclear attack on New York City would destroy art there, it is officially the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, now rebranded and newly logoed as The Clark.

After 12 years, the museum has completed a $145 million expansion. There are new buildings, including an entrance by Pritzker prize winner Tadao Ando along with a vast water feature and a pavilion by Annabelle Selldorf, who directed the interior renovation of the original 1955 Beaux Arts building and the 1970s addition, now renamed the Manton Research Center by Pietro Belluschi with Architects Collaborative. The vast site, with hills and trails, was designed by Reed Hilderbrand landscape architect and Madeline Burke-Vigeland of Gensler was the supervising architect for the whole project.

visitor center and reflecting pool | image courtesy of tadao ando architect & associates

Ando had already designed a building for the Clark, the Lunder Center at Stone Hill at the edge of its 140 acre site, six years ago. The freestanding research and conservation building with galleries shows off Ando’s brand of zen modernism. It layed off the imprint of plank like wooden forms in the concrete against actual wooden walls opposite them. The new building is more formal and elegant, steel, glass, concrete and granite. Ando is an unabashed devotee of Le Corbusier and the new building even shows the same sorts of dimples left in the concrete from the construction forms that Corbu did.

Here the concrete is joined by a red granite, to pick up on the Seventies building. That stone along with the long walls and reflecting pool suggests another modernist master—Mies and the Barcelona Pavilion with its green marble.

stone hill center | 2008 ©jeff goldberg/esto

One wonders what the long winter of Western Massachusetts will do to the pool, lined with rounded stones that perhaps suggest the shallows of the Hoosic River, power source for the disused nineteenth century factories in the area. One has been converted into MASS MOCA, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, a few miles away.
1,6> images courtesy of the clark institute
2-5> images ©jeff goldberg/esto

[ the clark ] { selldorf architects ] [ reed hilderbrand ]

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Aston martin dp-100 vision gran turismo. Playstation3.

Jul 3, 2014

Design Prototype 100 joins stable of Vision Gran Turismo racers in popular racing game for PlayStation®3. Designed and engineered over six months by Aston Martin Design team. Downloadable for in-game play in July 2014.

Sure it’s just a car for a video game but the Aston Martin DP100 is a sharp and real vision of future design. Released at the Goodwood festival of speed the new car will run in Gran Turismo 6.

[ press release – edited ]
Aston Martin is unveiling an exceptional new addition to the hugely popular PlayStation®3 exclusive racing game Gran Turismo®6 (GT6™) in the shape of the stunning Design Prototype 100 – DP-100 Vision Gran Turismo.

Developed in-house by the Design team at Aston Martin, led by Design Director Marek Reichman, DP-100 Vision Gran Turismo is a new, virtual-only GT racer that will be available for Gran Turismo®6 (GT6™) owners to download in July 2014, following the global launch at Goodwood Festival of Speed.

Starting with nothing but the traditional ‘blank sheet of paper’ the design team and design engineers worked for six months to create the new addition to the Vision Gran Turismo stable of race cars. Clearly pushing the boundaries of what an Aston Martin could be, DP-100 not only looks beautiful but also boasts a high degree of engineering integrity.

The twin-turbo V12 mid-engined racer offers up to 800bhp, endowing it with blistering performance fully in keeping with the high octane nature of the game.

Created utilizing many of the same techniques as applied in the development of Aston Martin production sports cars – hand sketches and 3D modeling, followed by full realization in the virtual world – DP-100 provides an exceptional level of detail with a fully functioning suspension system and state-of-the-art electronics.

Design Director Marek Reichman said: “DP-100 has been an exciting and intensive project for the team here at Gaydon. “Features such as the car’s revolutionary ‘active aerodynamics’ are there not just as a way of enhancing form, but also to support the car’s function in-game.

“As with the CC100 Speedster Concept, many of the design cues visible in DP-100, such as the light blade rear lamps, could also feed through into future sports cars that we’ll launch in the offline world so the importance of this project should not be underestimated.”

Aston Martin has supported previous editions of the long-running and hugely successful Gran Turismo® series, debuting in the very first game with the Aston Martin DB7 Coupé and Volante. The stunning 2011 Aston Martin One-77 is already a popular car in the Gran Turismo® 6 stable.

Kazunori Yamauchi, the creator of Gran Turismo and President of Polyphony Digital Inc, enthused: “When I first came face to face with this car at the Aston Martin Headquarters in Gaydon, UK, I was at a loss for words seeing the level of perfection in its design. I was surprised by the bold proposal of the car being the first midship layout model in Aston Martin history. And while it is clean and classy in design, it is also very emotional. Not only that, there was this future Aston Martin in front of me, that was so detailed it could be released on the market pretty much as is.”

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100 years later the fire hydrant gets first redesign.

Jun 26, 2014

Fire hydrants have provided de facto city sprinklers for kids in city neighborhoods for generation. But water pressure for fire fighting and tap pressure can suffer if too many well meaning citizens open hydrants in their neighborhoods. That’s why the Spartan hydrant was invented.

http://designapplause.com/wp-content/xG58hlz9/2014/06/patton-hydrant2.png

The Sigelock Spartan looks like the water hydrant of the future. Its practical advantage is that it cannot be opened except with a special wrench and therefore not by an individual on the street.

The Spartan has been installed in the town of Long Beach Island, near New York. The town folk seem to like it—but what do the dogs say?

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Marvelous sugar baby by kara walker.

Jun 26, 2014

Designers and artists in New York have only a few days left (until July 6) to see a landmark construction just north of the Williamsburg Bridge shoreline.

Kara Walker’s giant sculpture at the Domino factory ruin in Brooklyn is the art work of the summer. It is formally titled “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant”.

The “Marvelous Sugar Baby” is a 35-foot-tall figure suggesting a black woman as sphinx that evokes racial and sexual stereotypes. Think Mammy or Aunt Jemima conjoined with primitive Venus figures or other sexual cartoons.

It suggests the Great Sphinx of Giza and other sphinxes of art, pondering questions and prophecies. The figure appears to show a sense of erosion by wear and time. As a oversized figure inside a huge structure it can also read as sacred statuary in a temple: Athena in the Parthenon or Lincoln in white inside his memorial in Washington.

It is about the process by which dark sugar becomes white refined sugar at the hands of dark people working for white people. In the Caribbean during slavery the process meant literally working slaves to death.

But it also touches on many other meanings of sugar and race. A sphinx with the head of Aunt Jemima, the piece teams with plays on racist clichés. The face is “mammy” in all her complex cultural roles. (Aunt Jemima, one of the oldest American household trademarks, goes back to 1893 but continues to exist–refined and almost undetectably racist—at least by comparison with Washington Redskins or Cleveland Indians team garb.

The back of the Walker figure also possesses dramatically animal haunches and genitalia. I thought of David Bowie in man/dog guise on the Diamond Dogs album cover. The figure could be sibyl as well as sphinx, one of Walker’s sketches suggests.

It recalls a classic overscale American roadside attraction, notably Mammy’s Cupboard near Vicksburg, Mississippi, photographed by Edward Weston in the 1930s. After a while, so much white sugar also suggests so much granulated salt. The salt of tears and sweat by the workers, a woman of salt like Lot’s wife, or the desert salt flats.

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anne. ross lovegrove goes democratic for bernhardt design 125th.

May 22, 2014

In honor of the 125th anniversary of the Bernhardt furniture company, several designers have produced new chairs. Ross Lovegrove’s Anne chair, named for the company founder, is a real surprise. Lovegrove produced his iconic Go stacking chair, of magnesium/aluminum, for Bernhardt This walnut chair is radically different. It’s based on the American courthouse chair—a perhaps surprising inspiration for the Welsh born Lovegrove but a solid, democratic form based on the Windsor chair. The courthouse chair is to be found in many classic films think the spirit of Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird.

windsor chair | 1940s

Lovegrove’s take on it is a smart exploration of traditional wood, from someone who has spend more time with plywood, polycarbonate or magnesium. The chair is built by both traditional craft work and seven axis CNC machines, he said. For the leather seat, he thought of a pair of jeans bought pre-aged: he wanted the leather to seem sat in and crushed down already. It looks more like a flopped cushion than attached seat. Lovegrove shrewdly observed that many new things are sharp and off-putting, but things that we use and feel familiar to us have been softened by use. If you know the rest of his work, the bio futuristic side if you will, then the Anne chair is witty—a comment. It suggests a mellower Lovegrove? But it also suggests Art Nouveau. [ ross lovegrove ] [ bernhardt design ]

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Posts by Phil Patton

About Phil Patton