Open up your mind and say, ahh...

It’s always struck me as fitting that Koolhaas has never built a freestanding building in New York (despite the fact that it was his ideas about Manhattan that launched him to fame in the late 1970s); it’s as though his vision of the city is just a bit too far ahead of schedule for the rest of us.

The 30-year dry streak was reconfirmed this fall, when OMA’s proposal for a 41-story tower at 425 Park Avenue was put aside for a Foster + Partners design. The decision was not altogether unsurprising: Foster has a proven track record as the architect of two of the city’s biggest office towers of the past decade.

But it’s still worth noting OMA’s design, if only for what it says about Koolhaas’s evolving ideas about the city. Luckily, thanks to the developer’s (very rare) decision to videotape and upload footage of the competition pitches, we get it straight from the horse’s mouth: A YouTube video shows Koolhaas hunched over a laptop presenting the design to developer David Levinson.

“I wanted to think about New York as though there had been a plan,” Koolhaas begins. “Europeans write manifestos and never realize them, in New York, things are realized without any kind of plan.” (Indeed, Koolhaas has called his seminal book Delirious New York a “manifesto” for Manhattan.) The grand plan, in this case, is the grid extended from Central Park down to Times Square. The site at 425 Park is torn between the two poles of Central Park (ten blocks north) and Midtown (a few blocks south). Imagining the 650,000-square-foot volume being pulled in either direction, the OMA team gently torqued the structure until the facade began to vortex. It’s an incredibly elementary–and subversive–move: amidst a tightly regulated north/south framework, the building twists and shimmies like a dancer.

The resulting “Brancusi-like” tower looks almost organic–not at all what you might expect from OMA, which might have worked against them. Inside, though, there are more details that deserve mentioning. In particular, the decision to create a thin vertical atrium through the first 15 floors of the building, connecting the lobby to a public atrium above. Small footbridges sprout from all sides of the chasm, creating what you’d imagine to be a cacophonous space of intersecting companies, events, and spaces. It’s what Foucault calls a heterotopia, a space that is neither here nor there, inviting social interactions that are unplanned. Koolhaas called these kinds of spaces “architectural mutations” in Delirious New York–like mushrooms, they pop up in the dark corners and crevices of the city.

This proposal, like so many other OMA plans for Manhattan, has been put aside for Foster’s clean, middle-of-the-road technocratic vision of the future. But the doomed design is still a fascinating look into how Koolhaas conceives of a city that’s changed rapidly since he wrote about it in 1978.

H/t Design Boom

If you’re like me, you keep whole closets full of old stuff because you know it’d make a cool project (someday). The problem is that day doesn’t always come. Loose Joints, a kit designed by German designer Joscha Weiand, is meant to help you take that DIY furniture project to the next level.

Weiand graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven, where Loose Joints was his thesis project. The set consists of two simple components: seven types of white plastic joints about the size of dice, plus a load of simple wooden poles. It’s up to the user to concoct shapes and forms, which, as Weiand demonstrates, can get surprisingly complex. For example, he’s used the kit to construct a vortex-like cage for a hanging light and a rough facsimile of Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair.

The idea behind Loose Joints is to capitalize on what we already own–a bit like a furniture version of F.A.T Lab’s Universal Toy Construction Kit. Weiand says that he wants to empower people to make unique objects using mass-produced materials. “These days many products are mass produced to keep up with demand and lower cost,” he explains. “This means that many of us have exactly the same products in our homes. Loose Joints is a modular system that can be mass produced but can also be used to create unique products.”

Check out more about Loose Joints on Weiand’s website.

Facebook launched Developers Live Wednesday, a new way for developers to stay on top of everything Facebook.

An extension of Facebook’s existing developer’s site, Facebook says the new live portion of the site will be a “central place to learn about the latest tools and to get access to product manager and engineers who created them.”

The curated video channel will include live as well as recorded broadcasts, often with an interactive element for developers to get questions answered by Facebook staff. Videos on growing your mobile app and Graph Search have already been added to the site’s video library.

The first live event, What Developers Need to Know in 2013, will be held Feb. 19 at 10:30 a.m. PST/1:30 p.m. EST. Hosted by Doug Purdy, Facebook’s director of platform product, mobile, web, and gaming developers will hear first hand what the social network believes they should be thinking about this year. He will also answer developer’s questions.

Developers can RSVP for the event on Facebook.

Photo by Mashable, Emily Price

Type is all around us. It is a key component in the design process. The font you choose affects the aesthetic of your design, and one bad font can ruin everything. (Are you listening, fans of Comic Sans??) If you are a bit uneducated in the anatomy of a font, keep reading for a quick lesson.

Everything you design, type, create has a purpose. Before choosing a font, determine your purpose. It makes font selection much easier. Many fonts send a “message” so choose wisely. And stay far, far away from Comic Sans.

If you are a type novice, save this infographic. Keep your branded message consistent, clean and impeccably designed.

Every era has its architecture of excess, whether it’s correlated to a depression or a boom. Nineteenth-century Vienna had the Ringstrasse, where wealthy aristocrats struggled to outdo one another with cheaply built, flashy mansions. New York in the ’00s has the High Line, or more specifically, the streets that run along the edge of the High Line, where every year brings a new smattering of glittering office and condo buildings, from Neil Denari’s HL23 to Della Valle + Bernheimer’s 459 West 18th Street.

This week, the Chicago-based Studio Gang unveiled its own forthcoming High Line building, which it calls the Solar Carve Tower. Formally, the tower falls into stride with its neighbors along the elevated park, with a gem-like facade covered in faceted panes of glass. But the design–slated for completion in 2015–also makes some interesting concessions to context and environment.

“Our Solar Carve Tower employs a surprising twist to traditional zoning logic,” explain the architects. “Geometric relationships between the building form and the sun’s path, as well as the viewshed between the park and the Hudson, guide the shave and shape of the tower.”

In other words, the sloping cutouts that shape the facade are extrapolated from the path of the sun, allowing light to fall into the interior spaces that the 13-story tower would have permanently overshadowed. The cutaway sections are faced in sawtooth glass that reminds us of Olafur Eliasson’s dangerous-looking (but beautiful) chandeliers. The prismatic details are likely meant to exploit the unusually open, atmospheric conditions of the site, which offers a rare, unobstructed view to the Hudson (and the sunset).

It’s a trope we’ve seen quite often with architects like Bjarke Ingels, whose housing schemes tend to take shape based on simplified sun and ventilation diagrams. In fact, only 40 blocks uptown, Ingels’s forthcoming first New York building is predicated on similar solar calculations. Studio Gang’s most well-loved building, the Aqua Tower, relies on a similar mix of formal gestures knit from environmental observations.

Not everyone will be excited to learn that it will perpetuate the onward march of demolition that’s quickly clearing away any remaining evidence of the neighborhood’s past, for better or worse. But it is a polite gesture among ostentatious neighbors, striking an elegant compromise between the concerns of hungry developers and advocates for public space. It is, as Jeanne Gang explains, “a skyscraper that enhances the public life of the city in ways that a stand-alone icon cannot.”

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/

For the founder of a company as hot as Pinterest, Ben Silbermann has been awfully quiet of late. After claiming the title of fastest-growing web site ever (according to Comscore, at least), wowing audiences at the South By Southwest Interactive conference, and bagging a cool $100 million in venture capital from the Japanese retail giant Rakuten, Silbermann went off the grid this summer to address what has been in the eyes of many a rare shortcoming: The lack of apps. Despite Pinterest’s exploding web traffic, the three-year-old company has not had a presence on either the iPad or Android platforms.

“Pinterest was made for tablets,” Silbermann confided to me last month. He agreed to temporarily lift Pinterest’s summer-long lockdown to give Fast Company an inside look at its development process. (It was the first time he’d spoken with a reporter at length; the results will be published next month in a cover story as part of October’s Design Issue.) During a visit to the company’s new headquarters, an expansive loft in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, I sat in on a design critique for the new iPad app and got to play with an early version, which Silbermann unveiled at a launch party last night.

Sharp, on the left, and Silbermann Pinterest calls this their biggest launch since the grid design was unveiled, in 2009.

Reporters and some of Pinterest’s most active users were treated to a make-your-own terrarium station (terrariums being a popular Pinterest meme), as Silbermann showed off the new iPad app as well as a new app for Android devices and an updated version of the Pinterest’s iPhone app. It was the biggest, Silbermann told me, the most important launch since he and co-founder Evan Sharp created the original Pinterest grid at the end of 2009. “In perfect world we would have had this a year ago,” says Sharp.

Though the update to the iPhone app and the new Android offering give Pinterest an improved presences on mobile phones, the big news is the iPad app. Even before last night’s launch, iPad use accounted for more than 50 percent of Pinterest’s mobile traffic—despite the fact that the company had no app—according to data from AddThis. More than that, iPads, which tend to be used in more relaxed settings, seem perfectly attuned to the laid-back user experience Silbermann and Sharp are trying to cultivate. “You want to be comfortable and just let yourself really explore things,” says Silbermann. “Pinterest is a discovery experience.”

The iPad app largely mimics the look and feel of Silbermann and Sharp’s popular website. Users can share, or “pin,” images and can explore the pin boards of users they follow. But crucially, the new app uses a feature called “sheets” designed to make it easier to skip between pin boards in a manner similar to tabs on a web browser. Another nifty tweak: A button that allows users to see all the pins from a given web site. The idea behind both features is to subtly encourage users to find new people to follow, and ultimately, to create a way for users to easily discover new stuff without going to a Google search box, the Amazon.com homepage, or anywhere else.

That’s important to Pinterest as a business. As Silbermann told me repeatedly—and as the forthcoming Fast Company feature will explore in depth—Pinterest isn’t trying to be just another social network. Silbermann and Sharpe are trying to solve the problem of discovery, helping their millions of users find (and eventually buy) new things. “We want to build a service that helps you discover things you didn’t know you wanted,” Silbermann says. “There’s a ton of opportunity in that core behavior.”

Top image: Africa Studio/Shutterstock

Hyatt is hardly a boutique brand, but the international hotel chain is taking an increasingly bespoke approach to its properties. After a handful of successful, locally minded collaborations, New York-based architecture and interior design firm Stonehill & Taylor recently completed work on the chain’s Minneapolis location that boasts a “made in America” ethos throughout the whole site.

The large scale renovation encompassed all major public areas, including the lobby, bar, and addition of a new marketplace, as well as 533 guest rooms on a somewhat tight timeframe of 12 months, as opposed to the standard 18. Stonehill & Taylor was asked to spend as much of the budget as possible in the US. “It’s a commendable directive, and one that was almost absolutely required by the accelerated schedule,” principal Mike Suomi tells Co.Design. “There wasn’t time to have things made by the cheapest bidder–who may not be in our country–because it might not have made it on deadline.”

Research into the city’s history revealed three main, milling-centric industries–timber, grain and flour, and wool–that revolved around a waterfall at the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. “These became the source of a lot of our design ideas. Then we looked for manufacturers who were still working in these fields,” Suomi says. Everything from blankets to pottery, raw logs to corridor art, came from this deep dive into the area’s heritage. Stroud, a purchasing agency, did extensive legwork to gather quotes from vendors who would handle some of the bigger orders, such as large quantities of casegoods or seating. “They ended up identifying a lot of manufacturers we’d never heard before.”

The approach represents a potential sea change in strategy when it comes to domestic building. “Up until very recently, projects that were moving forward were set on spending as little money as possible–by taking a long time, they could aggressively bid and rebid to get costs down,” Suomi explains. “When the time saved is of less value than the actual dollars, people scour the earth to find things with no regard to the carbon footprint.” And as for the Minneapolis Hyatt, the shift away from outsourcing has been a success–there’s already plans to renovate an adjacent complex for Hyatt in the same spirit.

Photo: NASA

NASA’s next-generation blended-wing-body aircraft completed its first flight today at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The X-48C is the latest in a series of designs from the Boeing/NASA partnership to explore the design, using a a large, delta-shaped fuselage rather than a traditional tube to boost efficiency. The new version, which, like the older version, is a scale model with a wingspan of about 20 feet, is designed to evaluate low-speed stability and a low-noise design.

The X-48C started life as the X-48B which made 92 flights between 2007 and 2010. The main changes were moving the winglets to the top of the fuselage next to the engines and extending the aft deck of the airplane. Both of these changes were part of the new design’s aim at reducing noise from the engines. And the number of engines on the X-48 has been reduced from three to two, each producing 89 pounds of thrust.

“We are thrilled to get back in the air to start collecting data in this low-noise configuration,” said X-48C project manager Heather Maliska in a statement.

A blended-wing-body design produces much of the lift needed for flight from the fuselage design, rather than the long wings typical of today’s airliners. Passengers would be seated in a larger open, triangular area that makes up the bulk of the main fuselage rather than the standard tubular fuselage used today. One of the interesting questions still being debated from a passenger point of view is how people would react to the unusual seating style, in particular the relative lack of windows compared to today’s jets.

The main driver behind the BWB design is fuel efficiency. Like a flying wing, the X-48 produces lift with the entire fuselage, without the drag associated with the long tubular design and tail surfaces of a conventional airplane. The small wings protruding from the fuselage on the X-48 and the vertical surfaces aid in stability and control. A pure flying wing like the B-2 bomber must give up some of its efficiency by using flight control surfaces and spoilers to provide control. The BWB design is just one of many ideas for a future, fuel efficient airliner, and very different than others using a thin, high-aspect-ratio wing.

It will likely be up to the marketplace to determine if and when a BWB design is economically viable and acceptable to the flying public. In the meantime, there is still plenty of engineering and flight testing needed, and not just at the potentially efficient cruise speeds. The challenges experienced at lower speeds during takeoff and landing are one of many hurdles NASA test pilots involved with the project told us during the X-48B flight testing.

In addition to gathering data on the noise produced from the new design that shields the engine with the fuselage and vertical control surfaces, the X-48C will continue to explore the lower end of the flight envelope, developing control laws for the airplane’s flight control systems. The NASA/Boeing team plan more flight testing this fall, including engine yaw control to use asymmetric thrust to move the nose of the airplane left and right.

The C model is expected to be the last of the remote control models of the BWB design, with the next version most likely being piloted by a person sitting in the cockpit.