Homes Made to Order
The San Francisco designer Yves Béhar has been using 3-D printing technology since the 1990s. So he’s not as surprised as perhaps the rest of us would be to learn that soon you’ll be able to 3-D print not only a house but an entire village.
Mr. Béhar’s firm, Fuseproject, teamed with New Story, a nonprofit that develops housing solutions for the developing world, and ICON, a construction technologies company, to build 50 houses for a community of farmers and weavers in Latin America (the exact location is not being disclosed until the construction phase).
Mr. Béhar said the breakthrough that made it possible to print a village was the ability to use concrete in a very large 3-D printing machine. It allows for an inexpensive, structurally secure and flexible design process.
“You can shape the walls to have different functionality; you can create a shower stall that doesn’t have sharp corners,” Mr. Béhar said, adding that homeowners can specify a two-bedroom or three-bedroom plan and the exterior concrete can be tinted different colors “so it doesn’t become that cookie-cutter look.”
The printing, which will be done on site, is to begin this summer, and each building will take roughly 24 hours to print.
STEVEN KURUTZ
Philippe Starck’s In Vitro collection for Flos includes one lamp that uses rechargeable batteries.
Cutting the Cord
At Euroluce, the Milan lighting show last month, cordless lamps could be found in the booths of Hay, Pablo, Innermost, Davide Groppi, LZF and Ambientec, a Japanese company that makes portable lights.
The reason for this plenitude: ever-improving rechargeable batteries. While naysayers point to the environmental harm that batteries cause, the French designer Philippe Starck is philosophical.
“The more we liberate ourselves from objects surrounding us, the freer we feel,” said Mr. Starck, whose new In Vitro lighting collection for Flos, above, includes a glass cordless table lamp that can travel outdoors and stay charged for up to 24 hours. “Tomorrow morning, we will focus on solar-powered battery, tomorrow evening on hydrogen batteries, the day after tomorrow you will have organic batteries, and the day after tomorrow evening you will have riskless nano-atomic fusion batteries. Afterwards, we will probably have light without the lamp.” Available later this year; usa.flos.com.
ARLENE HIRST
Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Ariz.CreditJessica Lehrman for The New York Times
The Not-So-Good Place: When Great Ideas Go Bad
“Nice Try” is what the real estate and home design website Curbed is calling its new podcast about failed utopias, real and imagined, from Jamestown to Biosphere 2.
Its host will be Avery Trufelman of “99% Invisible,” a podcast that examines the design of everyday things (AIDS ribbons, bar codes), and its wildly popular six-episode spinoff, “Articles of Interest,” which explains the back story of fashion items.
She is still putting together the new series, which will have seven episodes, so she doesn’t yet have a favorite folly. But Ms. Trufelman said what most intrigued her about her reporting was the idea that failure is in the eyes of the beholder.
“I live in the Bay Area,” Ms. Trufelman said, “where we worship at the altar of failure. I feel like a lot of what these stories tell us is that it’s a continuum: Things rise and fall and get perverted and they change. I love that we’re starting the story with Jamestown. And that’s how we end that episode, by asking: Was it a failure? Failure for whom?”
And what about that even grander experiment, the United States, for which Jamestown is a proxy? A failed utopia?
“I think there’s still hope,” she said. “I think America has time to redeem itself.”
“Nice Try” is to begin May 30, and can be found each week on Curbed, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher.
PENELOPE GREEN
The Architectural Gem That Nurtured Gay Male Artists
This year marks two notable anniversaries: Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., turns 70, while 50 years have passed since the Stonewall uprising. Inspired by the alignment, the Glass House is presenting “Gay Gatherings: Philip Johnson, David Whitney and the Modern Arts.”
Installed in the Da Monsta gatehouse and subterranean Painting Gallery, “Gay Gatherings” examines the history of the entire rambling Glass House property as an intellectual salon nurturing a select group of gay male cultural powerhouses. In addition to Mr. Johnson and his partner, the art curator and collector David Whitney, the members included the New York City Ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein; the composer John Cage and his partner, the choreographer Merce Cunningham; and the artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.
Organized by Thomas Mellins and Donald Albrecht, and designed by Pure & Applied, the show maps the interactions of the eight men throughout the compound and in their extensive offsite collaborations. The exhibits include vintage films, postcards, paintings and photographs (by David McCabe, Christopher Makosand others).
Much changed in the political and cultural landscape in the 20 years separating Mr. Johnson’s protected stone-walled enclave from the grass-roots events of Stonewall, Mr. Albrecht noted. The artistic contributions of gay men “were increasingly acknowledged within mainstream culture, particularly through the generation-bridging work of Andy Warhol,” he said. “Gay Gatherings” is an intimate look at a handful of men who drove some of the more rarefied aspects of that transformation. Through Aug. 19, theglasshouse.org.
ALAN BRUTON
Palace Intrigue
For 13 years, Carpenters Workshop Gallery has specialized in the gray area between fine art and design, a genre the co-founders Julien Lombrail and Loïc Le Gaillard deem “functional art.” Now, at the Venice Biennale, they are turning the idea on its head with “Dysfunctional,” a group exhibition at the Ca’ d’Oro, a 15th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal.
Installed at the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti — named for the baron who bought and restored the neglected structure in the late 19th century, then furnished it with his own art collection — the show cheekily places the creations of 21 contemporary artists and designers alongside Italian masterworks.
A collage of paper-thin terra cotta sheets fashioned by the French artist Vincent Dubourg into a 16-foot-tall door is installed at the first-floor gallery, and lighted steel-mesh tree sculptures by the Spanish-born Nacho Carbonell sprout in the marble mosaic courtyard. Louis Vuitton’s artistic director of men’s wear, Virgil Abloh, used the Venetian acqua alta, or periodic high tides, as the point of inspiration for his patinated bronze lights and furniture pieces arranged in a space overlooking the canal.
“We are questioning form versus function, art versus design and historic versus contemporary,” Mr. Lombrail said. “It’s also an homage to Giorgio Franchetti’s vision. We would like to believe that if he was still alive, he would have commissioned some of these pieces.” Through Nov. 24, carpentersworkshopgallery.com.
AILEEN KWUN
