New Campus Hub

Was in Lausanne a few weeks ago with my family, while I was there I spent some time to see the most exciting new piece of architecture in the area called the Rolex Learning Centre at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) Designed by the Japanese firm SANAA, the people who made the Serpentine pavilion in 2009. The building was designed to be the new hub of the campus, where a library, restaurant and other facilities locate. Open to both students and the public, it surely have became not only a place to study but also a place to meet. The form of building consist of a single free flowing floor surface with slopes connecting different spaces. The size of the building covers more than two football pitches and costed over 100 million CHF, largely paid by the government and private swiss firms, the simple form of the building actually was quite an impressive piece of engineering achievement with its complex mental framework to support the large curve surface of the building. It does make me jealous, I wish that we have something like this back in my uni...

Foster at PEK

This is an airport that I like, made for the Olympic in 2008, the gigantic terminal 3 designed by Foster + Parter was the latest expansion to the Beijing Capital Airport. Took only 5 years from design to completion with the budget of USD $3.5 billion, it is quite an impressive piece of architecture. The design concept of the terminal building is based on London Stansted and Hong Kong International, with a lot small details which related back into the chinese tradition culture such as the red column and roof. Every detail seem to be designed to let the terminal appears larger than it already is. It has a main concourse area for check-in and arrivals, and two more satellite terminal buildings, together it looks like the Hong Kong airport got cut up into 3 parts. Other things that you can commonly found in Foster's airport are all the service part of the building is hidden under the floor, which gives a stronger sense of space and increase the amount of light for the passengers. Had a few hours of delay there a while back, it's actually not a bad place to have a nap in, a lot more comfortable then Edinburgh airport.

I can't drive, I hate buses so I always take the train. Well to be honest trains in the UK aren't that great either... never seem to be on time when you need them and not really that fast either. In fact getting from dundee to london takes almost 7 hours, can't we just have something like the TGV? One of the few trains that actually work well that I can think of has to be the ICE in Germany. The new version of the ICE train they made designed by the german industrial designer Alexander Neumeister (also then man behind the 500 series Shinkansen for JR in Japan). He made quite a radial departure from ordinary train design, its one of the first time that I actually would say a train looks cool. Made by Siemens and now also exported to Spain, Russia and China. It goes up to 320kph, Frankfurt to Cologne in 1 hour, pretty damn fast. But best part is that if you sit in the front, the only thing separating you and the driver is a piece of glass. When running at high speed everything is controlled by computer. So me and my friend was just sitting there looking at the front while the driver is having a coffee chatting with some other passenger, this is as good as it get for a train driver i guess.

theforeigner.no

net-over-blog.com

This is a brand that I having pay attention for a while, used to be obsessed with it a few years back. Based in Japan, it had been making everyday product with the design philosophy that all their product is about quality and design not the brand. In English is it MUJI, in Japanese it is 無印良品 means something alone the line of quality without branding. Their first sore opened in Tokyo in the 80s and since then expanded to the rest of asia europe and america. Now known for the minimalist approach to product design. From my personal experience their product do live up to what they claim in the brand name. One of my favourite is one of their CD player that they made, designed by Naoto Fukasawa, where the spinning CD does not have a cover like a typical CD player, it simply sits on the surface of the machine. The on/off button is integrated with the power cable under the CD player, works like a switch from lamps. The form of it appears to be so simple but I remembered that I was so fascinated by how clever it is. It is now part of a MoMA permanent collection.

Container Shop

Happened to be in Zürich last weekend, on saturday I walked passed the Freitag Zürich store, a brand which uses recycled truck advertising material to make bags and other accessories. Quite an interesting concept and certainly markets well as everyone in Zürich seem to be walking around with one. I first saw their store in the Helvetica documentary and saw it by chance while I was on the S-Bahn so I went to take a look at it. Located close to Hardbrücke station, in the old industrial area right beside the busy tracks with passenger and fright train passing by. Just like the concept of the brand, designer Annette Spillmannn and Harald Echsle  uses old container to create a small tower, with the shop settled inside. This is quite a bold move in terms of choice of location for a flagship store for a brand, but it managed to capture a lot of attention. Looks old and rusty outside but the interior is well decorated, and the product is stacked in a box with a photo of it printed on the outside.

It's everywhere

Since my GCSE D&T project, I have pretty much stick with the same presentation style for almost all of my work, for this I have to give credit to my favourite font, Helvetica. This font is just everywhere. Some say that font is very boring, but I think that it is everything because it fit in with most thing around us so well. The font itself carries a natural feeling that you can use it to express anything. The form of the letter are made up of simple and clean line, which visually appears to be firm and clean. The US government uses it in their document to appear efficient, huge amount of companies uses it in their branding, Lufthansa, BMW, MUJI, Nestlé, FENDI, Wallpaper*, the list goes on an on. In fact I'm writing this blog in Helvetica.

It all started with Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann in Switzerland in the 60s, they wanted to create a simple and natural typeface, their type design company were own by Stempel, who gave it the name Helvetica in latin which means `The Swiss'. It was then sold globally and remain heavily influential until now.

I have been trying different font occasionally in my work, but I always go back to Helvetica at the end because I know that I could be sure that the overall presentation would work much better together than using other expressive font.

There is also a documentary on the font by Gary Hustwit if you want to find out more about the font.

Thank you BAA

Last year seemed like most of my travelling didn't go so smoothly with all the strikes and volcano. Just before christmas, I was stuck YET AGAIN trying to get to Hong Kong from Edinburgh. Thanks to the very efficient and hard working BAA, I was stuck in the UK for 5 days and ended up taking 4 different flight to get home...
The only thing that makes the whole experience less annoying is that BA said they I could spend up 200 on a hotel and they would pay for it later on (after 9 hours of queueing and got told that they couldn't book us a room as they were full), fair enough, so i checked into Hotel Missoni after browsing on TripAdvisor for 5 mins. After I got my room, I was glad that I booked this place, the interior is just what one would expect from the Missoni brand, the bright colour and stripe pattern used on wall and furniture fabric look fabulous. The room is colourful and to me they didn't over do it. It wasn't all just the look, the material that were used in the room were good quality, unlike most chain hotel. However my favourite object in the room was, of course, the Nespresso coffee machine! So during my stay, I spent almost all the time staying in the room watching TV chilling, drinking coffee and emptying the mini bar.
The 5 days getting stuck experience turns out to be rather relaxing, all the stuff i talked to were friendly, for some random reason me and the bartender even had a conversation about AutoCAD... not the kind of stuff that you normally expect to talk about in a bar. 
Now I just hope that I could be `stuck' in a nice hotel everytime my travel plan goes wrong...