Akio Hirata’s Exhibition of Hats by Nendo

An unusual installation of 4000 hats by Japanese milliner Akio Hirata has been created by Japanese designers Nendo at the Spiral Garden in Tokyo. The hats appear to be balancing in mid-air, giving the impression of a flock of hovering birds filling the exhibition hall. Visitors are invited to walk in between and under the hand-made hats, most of which are white and suspended by invisible threads from the floor and ceiling. Hirata's colourful and patterned creations stand out against the non-woven white hats, forming a strong contrast between handmade, one-off products and mass market headwear. The landscape of the hats creates an environment for the visitor to explore, casting shadowed patterns on the floor and creating pathways through the exhibition.

Images: Dezeen

Oliver Peoples glasses

I have recently been lusting and swooning after a chic pair of Oliver Peoples glasses ever since I tried on a tortoise-shell pair in a Brighton optician. A few months later I saw a shop assistant in a fashionable Old Street boutique wearing a similar pair, and knew it was time to for-goe the contact lenses and go back to old-school chunky eyewear. 

Above is a melancholic and brooding illustration by artist Paul X Johnson, titled Behold a Pale Horse. His images depict classic beauties in a greyed-out world, brooding into the distance with the obligatory ebony slicked back hair and venomous lips. Below that is an image of actor Gregory Peck, as Atticus Finch in the classic film of To Kill A Mockingbird, which has inspired a new vintage style for Oliver Peoples to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the literary novel. 

Images: Oliver Peoples

Tali Lennox by Marlene Marino for Oyster #93

Annie Lennox's daughter stars in this editorial spread for Oyster, photographed by Marlene Marino and styled by Imogene Barron.

Images: Fashion Gone Rogue

Serpentine Pavilion 2011 by Peter Zumthor

Photos have recently been released for the new temporary pavilion outside the Serpentine Gallery, created and designed by architect Peter Zumthor. A previous post of mine showed some concept images back at the beginning of April. 

"At the heart of Peter Zumthor’s Pavilion is a garden that the architect hopes will inspire visitors to become observers. Zumthor’s says his design ‘aims to help its audience take the time to relax, to observe and then, perhaps, start to talk again – maybe not.’ The design emphasises the role the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture.With a refined selection of materials Zumthor creates contemplative spaces that evoke the spiritual dimension of our physical environment. As always, Zumthor’s aesthetic goal is to customise the building precisely to its purpose as a physical body and an object of emotional experience. Zumthor has stated that ‘the concept for this year’s Pavilion is the hortus conclusus, a contemplative room, a garden within a garden. The building acts as a stage, a backdrop for the interior garden of flowers and light. Through blackness and shadow one enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise and traffic and the smells of London – an interior space within which to sit, to walk, to observe the flowers. This experience will be intense and memorable, as will the materials themselves – full of memory and time."

I personally am very much looking forward to visiting the latest installation at the Serpentine, it is Zumthor's first built work in the UK and looks to be a diminutive addition to Hyde Park, enclosing a solitary interior garden space in the heart of a busy metropolis. 

Images: Dezeen

I was reading a very intriguing book the other day; Bill Bryson's 'At Home, A Short History of Private Life' and came across some historical anecdotes of the Serpentine's conception. In 1730, Queen Caroline of Anspach, the wife of King George II, ordered the diversion of the River Westbourne to make a large pond in the middle of Hyde Park. The Serpentine was the first lake in the world designed not to look like a manmade lake, moving away from the well-regarded and rigorously-used geometrical pools of the 17th Century; "Now here was an artificial body of water that was curvilinear and graceful, that meandered beguilingly and looked as if it had been formed, in a moment of careless serendipity, by nature." The result became endlessly popular with Londoners, and Queen Caroline herself even installed two large yachts, despite the fact there was barely space for them to move! Perhaps Queen Caroline would appreciate Zumthor's almost private natural retreat, as she herself made herself deeply unpopular in London when she banished the public from parks such as Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens (except on Saturdays and for a price), preferring them to be for the sole use of royalty and the respectable upper classes. I though am pleased that a piece of Zumthor's architecture is available for us to appreciate right in our very own city.  

Stella McCartney Resort 2012

Images: tobaccoandleather

Lara Stone & Frida Gustavsson by Peter Lindbergh for Vogue US July 2011

Lara Stone looks incredible in this editorial for US Vogue, very Hollywood goddess and 1940's siren. 

Images: Fashion Gone Rogue

Shadow House by Liddicoat & Goldhill

I first read about Shadow House in The Sunday Times a week or so ago, and was intrigued by both the architecture and the story behind it. The building was designed and built by relatively new architecture practice Liddicoat & Goldhill, consisting of husband and wife team David Liddicoat and Sophie Goldhill. The couple created Shadow House as their own home to both satisfy their fascination with the private house, but also to fulfil a frustration with the vicissitudes of the London domestic marketplace; "We knew that we could only realise the project if the house was very small, very simple and on an affordable piece of land – an anathema in London. We set out to find most awkward site possible, and to build a house there with our own hands". The name of the house refers to the way its form plays with light and shade, replacing a former electricity substation at the end of a Victorian terrace in the Camden Square Conservation Area, just north of Kings Cross. The project is both inspiring for its materiality and design as well as being kept within budget, at a mere £210,000 for 77 sqm. Shadow House is built from robust, primary materials such as the glazed black slim-format Dutch Engineering brick, laminated larch and polished white concrete. The interior of the house creates various conditions throughout the day: with limited light and space available, the design has to revolve around an intimate collage of shadow, texture, mass and reflectance.

Images: Wallpaper Magazine

Edge Condition Pavilion by Synecdoche

Michigan architects Synecdoche have won a design competition run by Young Architects Forum of Atlanta, which has resulted in this stacked timber pavilion in Atlanta Georgian. The two and a half ton structure, called Edge Condition Pavilion, is constructed of timber offcuts and is held to the ground with cables. It is a bit of a balancing act, with the hardwood rods being help together solely by gravity. The architects described the project as;
"Utilizing a by-product material as a means of invoking the temporary pavilion with a temporary material wood edges cut from hardwood boards give a standardized object to build upon creating a field in which to inhabit. By operating on the edge of definitive material, neither board nor wood chip, the wood edge becomes the temporal object between two phases. In the same light the pavilion offers the capacity to be an edge condition of construction. The methodical mode of stacking and maneuvering the edges is in itself on the edge of a mode of construction."

Images: Dezeen