Archinect - News

Bobby Berk from Netflix's 'Queer Eye' talks about his new Midcentury furniture collection

2020-03-06T14:20:00-05:00

Bobby Berk from Netflix’s “Queer Eye” visited Mathis Brothers Furniture at Irvine’s The Market Place on Wednesday to promote his debut furniture collection, Bobby Berk for A.R.T. Furniture. The collection, described as Midcentury styling with nods to Art Deco shapes and Parisian style, features dining room, living room and bedroom pieces.

According to A.R.T. Furniture, the collection boasts modular capabilities and captures Berk's "minimalist sensibility with a new mix of materials." As part of the Netflix show, Queer Eye, where each episode features the "Fab Five," a team of gay professionals with expertise in culture, food, fashion, grooming, and interior design provide a complete makeover to a lucky individual on the show. Berk's role usually consists of redesigning the individual's home, but sometimes he provide his expertise in another spatial setting of importance to the person the team is serving.

Netflix's Abstract Season 2 to profile Olafur Eliasson & Neri Oxman

2019-09-18T15:30:00-04:00

The new season of Abstract will launch globally on September 25th. The subjects featured in season 2 include:

Olafur Eliasson - the Icelandic-Danish artist known for his large scale immersive installations. He has used light, architecture, ecology, and digital design to challenge the assumptions many of us make about design and perception.

Neri Oxman - the Israeli-born artist, bio-sciences pioneer, architect, and MIT professor. She is known for her masterful ability to combine art and science in her creations.

Also featured will be toy designer Cas Holman, product designer Ian Spalter, and typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler.

Tech companies are taking over L.A.

2019-07-19T16:16:00-04:00

The Los Angeles office market has been on the upswing since 2013 and showed no sign of stalling in the second quarter as tech and entertainment firms continue to expand into new space. Developers are responding to the demand by building new offices that are often rented long before they are completed, which was unusual during previous real estate cycles when tenants typically waited to see finished buildings before making commitments.

The tech industry's expansion into the Los Angeles office market continues unabated, The Los Angeles Times reports.

In recent months, Los Angeles has grown to become home to the third-largest tech workforce on the west coast, with San Francisco and Seattle still far in the lead. The expansion, according to The Los Angeles Times, is putting pressure on the city's office market, even as a collection of new office developments and expansions come online.

In 2011, for example, Google moved into the Frank Gehry-designed Binoculars Building in L.A.'s Venice neighborhood.

Is LA losing its cool?

2019-06-20T16:20:00-04:00

It’s because I love my Los Angeles full of texture and a little untamed that I worry in these days of rapid displacement and rampant development. One of the first things I noticed as the rents in my Hollywood neighborhood went up was that the fluttering silk flags and drawings on torn cardboard and other random street art projects that often would appear overnight suddenly became more and more rare.

How does a city maintain its identity under the pressures of global brands and developers hungry for real estate? Though Los Angeles is a city known for destroying its recent past for the elusive present, there are only so many buildings and details this city can turn over before it's a different place entirely.

The Burger That Ate LA (discontinued, currently a Starbucks)

Looking at the Los Angeles of previous decades, one can see a metropolis full of quirks: consider, for instance, the now-demolished Brown Derby, the now-renovated House of Davids and the The Burger That Ate LA, a restaurant modeled after an enormous hamburger and a shrunken LA City Hall (regularly featured on the show Melrose Place), which has been aptly repurposed into a Starbucks.

Entrance to Nick Metropolis Collectibles, a vintage store on 1st and La Brea.

As these establishments are refurbished, relocated or altogether destroyed, an element of the city's eclecticism shifts from present reality to distant memory....

The BIG Abstract; A conversation with Morgan Neville, Director/Producer of Abstract's Bjarke Ingels Documentary on Netflix

2017-02-16T19:16:00-05:00

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've already heard about Abstract, Netflix's incredible new documentary series on design. This week we're talking to Abstract's executive producer, Morgan Neville, who also directed the episodes featuring Bjarke Ingels and Christoph Niemann.

As one of the world's most groundbreaking and talented documentary filmmakers, there's a good chance you have already seen Morgan's work. If you haven't, a good place to start is "20 Feet from Stardom", his Academy Award-winning doc that takes a look at the fascinating lives of the often-overlooked backup singers. His documentary on Yo-Yo Ma, "The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble", will be premiering on HBO in March. I'm particularly looking forward to his upcoming Mr. Rogers documentary that he mentions in our conversation.

Yes, Archinect Sessions makes a cameo in the episode, with a clip of us sharing some of Bjarke's harsh criticism from commenters in our forum.

Listen to episode ...

The ecological footprint of your Netflix binge

2015-12-16T23:07:00-05:00

The impact of data centers—really, of computation in general—isn’t something that really galvanizes the public, partly because that impact typically happens at a remove from everyday life. The average amount of power to charge a phone or a laptop is negligible, but the amount of power required to stream a video or use an app on either device invokes services from data centers distributed across the globe, each of which uses energy to perform various processes [...]

"Still, it seems weird that most people—most engineers building the platforms people use every day, even—lack the basic comprehension that different online activities have different energy impacts, or that an individual’s online activities have energy impact at all beyond a laptop’s battery life."