Unbeige

Is crowdfunding the answer to giving stalled architecture projects a much-needed…kickstart? A report issued this week by the American Institute of Architects takes a closer look, highlighting crowdfunded projects such as Colombia’s 66-story BD Bacatá building and the “I Make Rotterdam” bridge-building project.

According to massolution, which compiled the white paper for the AIA, crowdfunding generated around $1.5 billion in 2011, of which almost half was raised via donation-based crowdfunding (distinct from Kickstarter-style reward-based crowdfunding, in which donors receive something tangible in return). In addition to its potential as a financing tool for beleaguered developers and architects, crowdfunding can provide architects with a way to work with local communities to discuss, develop, and implement design ideas–or simply to generate support for “passion projects” that may be tough to fund through conventional avenues, notes the report. The Italian government is all over this idea–to raise cash to fund the Italian pavilion at the this year’s Venice Biennale.

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Today in unreal estate news, Barbie is looking to sell her Malibu dreamhouse. The listing of the fictional pink palace–a bargain at $25 million–is Mattel’s way of launching “a year-long global brand campaign” that will follow Barbie on a worldwide hunt for new digs (may we suggest Vilnius?). “It wasn’t an easy decision for Barbie to put her Dreamhouse on the market, but this move marks an unprecedented opportunity for her fans to get an inside look at her dreamy home,” said Lori Pantel, VP of global marketing for Barbie, in a statement issued today.

Mattel tapped L.A. broker Josh Altman, who you may recall from Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing, to handle the fictional sale. Despite the abundance of hot pink scrollwork and Victorian flourishes, the listing describes the three-story manse as “clean-line[d]” and “contemporary.” Elsewhere the description excels in euphemisms, touting the Dreamhouse as “innovatively scaled” and with “a truly unobstructed view of the ocean” (it helps that it has only three walls). And while $25 million is steep for just one bedroom, where else are you going to find custom Pantone 219C hardwood floors? Adds Altman, “This is the only home in Malibu with a self-flushing toilet and fireplace that crackles even when it’s not on.”

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“I read the sports section very, very avidly. It’s one of the few places left where you find human interest. It’s very narrative, not to say novelistic, to follow sports teams and sports in play. Fashion is a bit like that, because the personnel set is not that changeable. It’s one of the weirdest and most contradictory things about fashion. It’s based on novelty, but in many ways very little is new. It’s such a stable population. All the editors have been the same forever. All the designers have been more or less the same forever. The only thing that changed was when Anna Wintour saw that nobody was developing a farm team, and got in gear. Because everybody was aging out and there was nobody to replace them. Because she’s a great HR person, she literally made it her business to make another generation to cultivate and anoint.”

-Guy Trebay of The New York Times, interviewed by Jay Ruttenberg in Fashion Projects

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Neither snow nor rain nor a ferocious hurricane (nor Saturdays) can keep Pictoplasma from New York City. Postponed in the wake of Sandy, the character design conference returns to Gotham on Friday for Pictoplasma NYC at Parsons The New School for Design. Organized by Pictoplasma “brain-fathers” Lars Denicke and Peter Thaler with Parsons Illustration chair Steven Guarnaccia, the two-day confab will celebrate contemporary character visualization–illustration, animation, installation, street art, fine art, and more–with lectures, panel discussions, and screenings. Kicking off the proceedings will be lectures by newly Brooklyn-based Buff Monster and toy designer/fiber artist Anna Hrachovec, followed by insights from Argentinean animator and graphic designer Adrian Sonni and self-proclaimed plastic surgeon Jason Freeny. Stick around for Characters in Motion screenings and a Saturday morning “Parson’s Pitch” pecha kucha. New to Pictoplasma? Watch clips from previous talks here.

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Thomas Heatherwick’s London bus, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, and the Pentax Q10 are among the winners of the Travel + Leisure 2013 Design Awards.

Before planning your next trip, be sure to review the newly crowned winners of the Travel + Leisure Design Awards, which will be featured in the magazine’s March issue. The winners, announced today, range from Schneider & Schumacher’s souped-up Städel (Best Museum) and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park first imagined in the early 1970s by Louis Kahn (Best Public Space) to Weimar-era glam Pauly-Saal in Berlin (Best Restaurant) and Götti Switzerland sunglasses that fold flat (Best Travel Accessory). Many of this year’s favorites will come as no surprise, including Thomas Heatherwick‘s diesel-hybrid London bus (Best Transporation) and the Microsoft Surface (Best Tablet). Meanwhile, 2013 T+L Design Champion Rolf Fehlbaum, the literal and figurative chairman of Vitra, joins past honorees such as ubercollector Micky Wolfson, André Balazs, and Amanda Burden. Tasked with choosing “the best new examples of design” in 22 categories was a jury moderated by Chee Pearlman that included interior designer Alexandra Champalimaud, creative director Stephen Doyle, and architect Deborah Berke. Keep reading for the full list of winners.
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Looking for a new job? Are you feeling bruised and battered from pounding the pavement without results?

“Score That Job” is a new show from mediabistroTV that will guide you through the never ending maze of online resumes, emails to nowhere and phone calls that go unanswered. Join career expert, author and mediabistro editor Vicki Salemi as she gives you the inside scoop on how to “Score That Job.”

In this episode, Vicki finds out what it takes to get hired at Rubenstein PR.

You can view our other MediabistroTV productions on our YouTube Channel.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This week, MSNBC.com is hiring an art director, while HarperCollins needs a senior designer. BeautySage.com is seeking a graphic designer, and Sandow Media is on the hunt for an editorial graphic designer. Get the scoop on these openings and more below, and find additional just-posted gigs on Mediabistro.

Find more great design jobs on the UnBeige job board. Looking to hire? Tap into our network of talented UnBeige pros and post a risk-free job listing. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Frederic Goudy had one, so did Philip Johnson and Robert Rauschenberg. The Eameses had two. Pentagram is awash in them. George Lois wears his to bed. We’re talking about AIGA Medals, the graphic design world’s highest honor. Allow us to be the first to tell you this year’s banner crop of medalists: John Bielenberg, William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand, Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Stefan Sagmeister, Lucille Tenazas, and Wolfgang Weingart. Read on for AIGA’s citations of each design star, who will be presented with their James Earle Fraser-designed medals on April 19 at the AIGA Awards in New York.
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New York’s Grand Central Station is an ideal spot for a flash mob–remember when Moncler Grenoble’s stone-faced model-dancers took to the floor in Carlo Mollino-inspired skiwear? As part of the big 100th birthday bash, the insta-happening experts at Improv Everywhere recruited 135 LED-flashlight-wielding performers to light up Grand Central’s grand windows, mesmerizing passersby. The impressively choreographed affair, a project cooked up with MTA Arts for Transit, was something of a homecoming for Improv Everywhere, which in 2007 staged “Frozen Grand Central,” a flash freeze that has racked up 32 million views on YouTube. Watch both successful “missions” below.

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Ready to unleash the next Angry Birds on the mobile-gizmo-obsessed world but need some help with logistics (i.e., cash)? Check out the Kongregate Mobile Developers program, a $10 million fund for independent developers of free-to-play mobile games. Launched yesterday by the online gaming platform Kongregate and backed by its parent company GameStop, the initiative will offer developers not only capital but also help with distribution and marketing to help their games to gain traction in the highly competitive mobile arena. Taking charge of the new fund will be Urbansquall and Zynga veteran Pany Haritatos, the freshly hired vice president of Konregate’s new mobile division. “Developers are increasingly finding it harder to get their games discovered through the different app stores,” said Haritatos in a statement issued yesterday. “I personally faced these challenges in 2009 while managing my own game studio. Utilizing the Kongregate platform made my games successful, which ultimately led to my studio being acquired by Zynga.” Learn more here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is continuing its multimedia push with 82nd & Fifth, a new web series that will highlight 100 works of art from the Met collection. Produced by the digital media department in collaboration with the photograph studio and curatorial staff, each episode includes “Watch,” a two-minute audio and visual essay with a curator and a work of art from the Met collection that changed the way he or she sees the world; and “Explore,” an interactive feature that invites visitors to get closer to the work of art on their own. Among the first episodes is “Modern Living,” in which Amelia Peck, the Marica F. Vilcek Curator of American Decorative Arts, discusses the living room of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Little House. Watch the first six episodes of 82nd & Fifth here, and then watch for new episodes to be posted in pairs every Wednesday for the rest of the year.

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The bubbly furniture fans at Design Within Reach have selected the winners in their champagne chair contest, which last month challenged all comers to create an original miniature chair using only the foil, label, cage, and cork from no more than two champagne bottles (glue was the only permitted adhesive). Taking top honors is the “Rockin’ Chaise” (pictured at far left) designed by one Miwa F., who went meta by including a wee champagne holder. Runner-up Jeffery Molter took a systematic approach with a chair that folds up into its own carrying case. And third place goes to Aaron Padilla’s foil basketweave “F8 Chaise,” with a sculpted cork underseat. Pour yourself a glass of bubbly and then click here to see all 319 champagne chair contest entries.

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New York’s Grand Central Terminal turns 100 this month, kicking off a year of tributes to the beloved “cathedral of transit” that escaped demolition in the 1970s by way of a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Sam Roberts offers a historical and cultural perspective in Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America, newly published by–of course!–Hachette’s Grand Central imprint. Centennial souvenirs can be found at the post office, where the USPS is now offering its Grand Central Terminal Express Mail stamp, featuring Illinois artist Dan Cosgrove‘s illustrated update (note the man with the roller suitcase) to Hal Morey‘s famous sunlight-streaming-through-the-clerestory-windows photo of the 1930s. The top of the stamp art includes the edges of the terminal’s famous sky ceiling, painted with a mural of constellations and figures of the Zodiac (fun fact: the constellations were accidentally painted backwards on the ceiling, so don’t rely on them for celestial navigation). And mark your calendar for March 25-31, when Nick Cave brings dancing horses to Grand Central. The artist will trot out an equine twist on his Soundsuits in a project co-presented by Creative Time and MTA Arts for Transit.

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• Google is fleshing out a national map of long-inscrutable North Korea. The largely crowdsourced cartography debuted this week on Google Maps.

• Calvin Klein is going to the big game–or at least his underwear is. Here’s a sneak peek at the company’s first Super Bowl ad, a 30-second spot directed by Fabien Baron. Look for it to run at the end of the first quarter.

• British designer Celia Birtwell is teaming with fast-fashion retailer Uniqlo on a capsule collection that will debut in March. “Most of the prints featured in the collaboration are from my archive collection,” Birtwell told British Vogue.

• Parisians are flocking to Philippe Starck‘s latest eatery, Ma Cocotte, a cafeteria-style affair in a converted warehouse near the Marché aux Puces. The WSJ‘s Tobias Grey pays a visit.
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“When I was a young architect, I never took a camera traveling because I thought I would look like a tourist. Then I had a realization: I was a tourist. So I began by taking slides, and for the past decade or so, digital photos. When I look at buildings, I take as many photos as possible–it actually helps me to see. Back at the office, they’re organized in a system that makes it possible to call the images up at any given moment. When we start a new project, we always begin by looking at ‘Bob’s favorites.’”

-Robert A.M. Stern in Architectural Digest

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“Big Waffles,” a 2010 painting by Mary Ellen Johnson

Lately Larry Gagosian has been the subject of even more media scrutiny than usual, fueled by assorted lawsuits (Ronald Perelman, Jan Cowles) and high-profile artist defections (Damien Hirst, Yayoi Kusama). New York magazine accompanied Eric Konigsberg‘s investigative profile with a photo-illustration (by hitandrun) that attempted to depict the uberdealer as Hirst’s famous diamond-studded skull, although it succeeded only in evoking Jambi the Genie. Well, meka leka hi meka hiney ho, haters, because Gagosian has something delicious up his well-tailored sleeve. Never underestimate a man who knows the power of waffles.

In March-ish (our best guess after peeking into the construction site earlier today), Gagosian will open a restaurant downstairs from his Upper East Side gallery. Designed by Annabelle Selldorf, the eatery will be managed by nearby Sant Ambroeus, so fingers crossed that they bring on Mucca to mastermind the menu design. There will be waffles–and wine, and chili, and fun!–as Gagosian revealed in an interview with Peter Brant that appeared in the December 2012/January 2013 issue of Interview:

It will be a neighborhood restaurant. Bill Acquavella already reserved a table. He was one of the first to say, “I want to have my own table.” So that’s good news. We’re going to try to have it be a destination for people who like wine and try to get wine companies to bring us special wines. We’re going to have international cuisine. We’re going to have waffles for breakfast because I love the waffles at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I put some things on the menu that you can’t get in every restaurant, things that I like. I love chili, so we’ll have a good chili. We’ll have a couple of Armenian dishes. But we’re going to have fun with it. I could have done a menu by consensus, but so many people were telling me what to do that I finally said, “Screw it. This is what I want.” I just want to be able to go down there and have a good time and be able to entertain my friends.

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Aperture is the storied photography quarterly that we’ve been known to purchase in duplicate, reading one copy with an X-Acto knife close at hand so as to surgically remove the suitable-for-framing images by the likes of Lee Friedlander, Joel Sternfeld, Mary Ellen Mark, Cindy Sherman, and Daido Moriyama. Sixty years after the publication’s founding–by a group that included Minor White, Ansel Adams, and Dorothea Lange–the Aperture Foundation is overhauling the magazine, a project led by executive director Chris Boot with editors Michael Famighetti and Melissa Harris. The new Aperture debuts with the spring 2013 issue, on newsstands February 26. In addition to the bold redesign by London-based A2/SW/HK, there are more pages and images, new columns (including “Object Lessons” and “What Matters Now?”), and writing geared toward a broader audience. Each issue will examine one theme at the heart of contemporary photography, explored in two sections: “Words,” focused on ideas, interviews, and debate, and “Pictures,” immersing the reader in individual artists’ projects and series.

As for the new look, A2/SW/HK’s Scott Williams and Henrik Kubel have gone big, reformatting the magazine to a larger trim size awash in typography unique to Aperture. “In the case of the Aperture suite of fonts, our starting point was a work-in-progress sans-serif typeface that was inspired by the hot metal fonts Futura and Memphis,” noted Williams in a recent interview on the Aperture blog. “This modern, geometric typeface echoes the Aperture logotype and also acknowledges the original incarnation of the magazine from the early 1950s. By contrast Aperture Serif, developed parallel to the redesign of the magazine, is rooted in the classicism of the sixteenth century and has been designed to contrast and complement Aperture Sans across multiple weights and to offer another flavor to the pages of the magazine.”

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The Mediabistro mothership continues to heed your cries for more design courses, and February is all about Adobe Illustrator. Over four weeks of online learning fun, budding ad designers will get up to speed on Illustrator under the expert guidance of designer and art director Soohyen Park, an Ogilvy veteran. By the time March rolls around, like an expertly rendered lion, you’ll be an old pro at creating vector images and be able to use a bezier curve with the best of them. All we ask is that you use your newfound colors and gradients knowledge for good. As Spider Man‘s graphic designer cousin Gene once said, “With great special effects and filter skills come great responsibility.” Register or learn more here.

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London’s Design Museum, which opened in 1981 in a former basement boilerroom of the Victoria & Albert Museum, is gearing up to move out of its current home–once a banana warehouse–into a $125 million new building, the former Commonwealth Institute, spruced up by OMA and with interiors by John Pawson. Until the big move, slated for 2015, the museum is pulling out the stops, or at least the stories, for a new exhibition of memorable objects from its permanent collection. “Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things,” which opened today, focuses on stories such as national identity (road signage, the Euro), the dominance of plastic in our lives (from 1960s furniture to recent Issey Miyake garments made from upcycled plastic bottles), and Modernism, in which visitors can marvel at the work of designers such as Marcel Breuer and…Erno Goldfinger (Ian Fleming borrowed his name for a Bond villain because of a personal vendetta, according to the museum). Among the objects singled out for special treatment are the Anglepoise lamp and Jasper Morrison‘s Handlebar Table, which is among the latest additions to the museum’s 3,000-object-collection. Another recent acquisition? An AK-47, developed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947, soon to be followed by a Russian cosmonaut spacesuit. Until you can make it to London (the show will be on view until 2015), visit vicariously via the Design Museum Collection App, free on iTunes.

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The good people of Printed Matter are heading west for the first annual LA Art Book Fair. The left coast counterpart of the beloved NY Art Book Fair gets underway tomorrow evening with an opening preview and runs through Sunday (we’ll take a Larry Clark pop-up shop over football any day) at the Geffen Contemporary, the Frank Gehry-renovated police car warehouse-turned-exhibition space that is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The fair promises to be a feast of artists’ books, art catalogs, monographs, and periodicals presented by some 200 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers. Come for the zine scene–including a “Zine Masters of the Universe” exhibition featuring the work of Mark Gonzales, Ari Marcopoulos, Ray Pettibon, and Dash Snow–and stay for the Gagosian-presented homage to the late Mike Kelley, tarot card readings, and the chance to watch Jean-Philippe Delhomme sign your copy of The Unknown Hipster Diaries, among many other happenings. Can’t make it to MOCA? Snag Andrew Kuo‘s “Reasons to Move to L.A.”–all proceeds from the sale of the prints will help to keep the LA Art Book Fair free and open to the public.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.