Shape - design
The Age
Friday July 24, 2009
Mentor as anything AS ANY designer will tell you, creation is easy. It's getting your designs to market that is the challenge.Following close behind might be actually finding someone who cares enough to help. Springboard - or "sounding board" as it could also be called - is a mentoring program for designers. Proof of its success could be found at both Design Made Trade (Paul Justin's MakeDo clips and Jessie Fairweather's Measure devices, pictured) and Format (Dhiren Bhagwandas' furniture), whose products grew out of the Springboard program.Springboard placements is about to go live on a new website, www.australiandesignunit.com Extreme design HOW do you design for extreme conditions? Michael Reynolds - aka "the Garbage Warrior" - is one of several design experts who will offer their words of wisdom today in a forum focused on Victoria's bushfires. The talks follow an RMIT Design Research Institute challenge. It offered a $25,000 prize to develop innovative solutions to bushfire problems. As Victoria comes to terms with the consequences of extreme bushfires, the public is invited to participate in meeting the ongoing design challenge.Design For Fire: Challenge Pitch and Forum, BMW Edge, Federation Square, July 24 Challenge Pitch: 9.30am- 11.30am, Forum: noon-2pm Mind gap HYPNOTIC and creepy, Kate Banazi's illustrations conjure nervous systems and sci-fimovies.For her first solo show, Neural Housekeeping, the London-born illustrator and fashion designer explores "the brief moments before drifting off to sleep, the ebb and flow before neural shut-down" in her hand-pulled silkscreen prints.Neural Housekeeping, Lamington Drive, 89 George Street, Fitzroy, until August 15, www.lamingtondrive.com Case study THINK of LA architecture and chances are the image was planted by photographer Julius Shulman.Shulman, who has died just shy of his 99th birthday, is famous for capturing West Coast America's mid-century modern architecture and helping spread its ideas of structural purity and outdoor living. It's epitomised in Shulman's shot of Pierre Koenig's Case Study House #22. Earlier this year, Taschen published Modernism Rediscovered, containing 400 of his architectural photographs, from the iconic to lesser-known works.While the Getty Museum which holds his collection is being reorganised, a selection of Shulman's photographs can be seen at www.usc.edu/dept/ architecture/shulman/ Human forms "ARCHITECTURE is an instrument to make community," Catalan architect Carme Pinos once said. And it's this humanistic approach to architecture that Tom Kvan, Melbourne University's architecture dean, believes architects and the public can learn from. "She has passion for a deeper understanding as to why humans create architecture," says Kvan, who has brought Pinos here as part of his Dean's Lecture Series. Her Cube Tower in Guadalajara, Mexico, has received accolades, but it is the Igualada cemetery, designed with architectural practice Miralles, that has brought universal praise. "[It] captures the spirit of her work, the way it invites you to walk through and engage with it," says Kvan.August 4. Free lecture. Register: www.bp.unimelb.edu.au -- RAY EDGAR
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