Open up your mind and say, ahh...

When young French designer Charlotte Perriand interviewed with Le Corbusier for a job in 1927, he turned her away with this biting (and sexist) comment: “We don’t embroider cushions here.” Le Corb would eat his words later that year, when he offered Perriand a job after seeing her tubular steel furniture.

Despite skepticism from a male-dominated profession, Perriand enjoyed an auspicious career. She was appointed by the Japanese government as an advisor on industrial design, and stayed for two years, traveling and studying.

It was in Japan that she designed one her most famous pieces, the Tokyo Chaise Lounge, a play on Le Corbusier’s famous LC4 Chaise (which Perriand actually helped design). After studying local woodworking, Perriand decided to replace the LC4’s steel tube base with 12 bamboo slats, giving the Lounge an organic elasticity and texture. It was a brilliant remix, before remixes existed.

But the Tokyo Chaise was never mass-produced. It’s existed only in museums, photographs, and the homes of collectors. Until last month, when 70 years after its birth, Italian furniture manufacturer Cassina unveiled the first consumer version of the design. The Tokyo Chaise is part of Cassina’s new outdoor line, which waterproofs a few other seminal Modernist pieces (Le Corb chairs, mainly). It seems that Cassina’s version is relatively true to the original, with a few new details for outdoor use: It comes in bamboo, teak, and beech, and replaces the original leather padding with waterproof polyurethane.

With Cassina’s revamp, you can now outfit your deck with elegant Modernist classics, but here’s a gentle reminder from Perriand herself about the dignified pieces: “While our chair designs were directly related to the position of the human body… they were also determined by the requirements of architecture, setting, and prestige.” In other words, don’t BBQ near it.

There are an estimated 1,000 vacant buildings in the Netherlands. For a small country, that number is massive and has sparked debate among Dutch architects for years. In fact, the country’s contribution to the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale was a massive model of the thousands of empty buildings that dot the country’s landscapes. “Why is there so much unused architecture in the Netherlands?” asked the curators.

When Rotterdam- and Paris-based firm Ooze accepted a commission to build an addition to a suburban Rotterdam home in 2009, they hoped to address the debate animating their peers. Their client’s existing home, which was built in the early 20th century and added to in 1991 and 2003, was a Frankenstein of styles and structures. What would have horrified many architects struck Ooze’s partners as an opportunity: to utilize pre-existing architecture, while pushing forward their goals as contemporary architects.

Strict limits on the footprint of Ooze’s expansion meant they were forced to consider unusual paths toward increasing the home’s square footage. Instead of building up a new structure, the addition wraps around the load-bearing members of the original house, increasing the home’s volume while controlling the footprint. The new volumes sit atop the old home like a faceted hat.

Ooze’s client, Gaby, was concerned with preserving what she called the “soul” of the original patchworked house. The language of the addition–prefab timber faced with stained black panels and sedum green roofs–is a deliberate mashup of Dutch farmhouse vernacular and new generative techniques. But the architects claim the folded structure is anything but formal. “It’s not an object,” writes photographer Jeroen Musch. “It’s a collection of very comfortable spaces.”

The addition is sweetly unapologetic for its alien appearance, as if it alighted on the site after taking a shine to the pre-existing home. “We’re convinced that reclaiming the past is a form of discovery,” say Ooze principals Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg, “away from the tabula rasa, towards a more sustainable way of enriching our environment.

Photo: NASA

We’re less than a week away from the scheduled launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and today the company will fire the engines at the Kennedy Space Center with the rocket firmly anchored to the ground. The static test is somewhat unusual for a rocket seven days before launch, but the test is part of a full dress rehearsal for the SpaceX team. Last week marked the final full simulation between NASA and SpaceX for the part of the mission that will take place in orbit as the company prepares to become the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station.

The launch of the Falcon 9 and Dragon has been delayed a few times since its initial planned flight in February. The last scheduled time was for today. But SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk told us last week there were some final adjustments needed to the software responsible for controlling the Dragon during its maneuvers near the ISS. “It’s been too sensitive to issues and has aborted when it shouldn’t have aborted,” he said from his desk at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. “Essentially Dragon got scared and ran away, when it shouldn’t have.”

According to the release, today’s launch rehearsal will include “all countdown processes as though it were launch day” and “The exercise will end with all nine engines firing at full power for two seconds.” SpaceX will broadcast today’s static test live beginning at 2:30 p.m. ET with the firing of the nine Merlin engines expected at 3:00 p.m. ET.

Following the test, SpaceX engineers will make sure that everything performed as expected and that the rocket is ready for next Monday’s launch. Three days after the launch, the Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to begin the demonstration maneuvers that will eventually lead to the docking with the ISS.

Only the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency have sent spacecraft to the ISS. If successful, the SpaceX mission next week will fulfill several requirements from NASA to become a regular cargo transportation vehicle for the ISS. But SpaceX and Musk continue to emphasize that success is only one of the possible outcomes. “This is a new rocket and spacecraft,” he told us in our interview last week, “the docking system is being tested for the first time.”

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft on its launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photo: NASA

Musk emphasized the complexity and risk involved in spaceflight last week. But he had the upbeat optimism of an industry veteran when describing the approach to success, dismissing the possibility of failure as just another step. “If something does go wrong we’ll fix it and we’ll be back on it on a subsequent mission.”

SpaceX is one of two companies, along with Orbital Sciences, competing for contracts to deliver cargo to low Earth orbit for NASA under the Commercial Orbital Transportation System program. If it successfully delivers the cargo, SpaceX will have an edge on the competition for flying astronauts to orbit. The company’s Dragon spacecraft (pictured at top preparing for next week’s launch), has been developed to be capable of flying humans into space as well as cargo and is competing with three other companies for flying astronauts to low Earth orbit. Earlier this year SpaceX tested new rocket engines that will be used on the Dragon as part of its emergency abort system for launches, as well as for precision landings upon returning to Earth.

Of course Musk reminded us last week that all of this work is just one of the steps towards his eventual goal of multi-planetary life. His reason for developing all of this space technology is for making trips to Mars, something he thinks could cost just $500,000.

Wired will continue its ongoing coverage of the new commercial space race and broadcast next week’s launch live at our new Open Space blog.