Category Archives: Design

For decades Japan’s love hotels have provided a place for couples to enjoy anonymous, uninterrupted sex. Politician and secretary, teacher and student, husband and hooker — all are welcome, as long as they pay in cash and leave when the time limit is up. But 2006 spawned a new type of love hotel. Decorated with theme park interiors and equipped with game consoles, karaoke boxes and sex machines — these establishments provide kinky fun for all types, from fetishists and sadomasochists to the ordinary couple seeking sexual adventure.

Wow, I must say I’m very amazed at these themed rooms – larger than life, vivid, extremely lived-out – I guess this is why the Japanese are so good in anime? The desire to imagine in fantasy, and more importantly, the audacity to create and live in and among it. They are a people of contradictions – generally perceived to be polite and reserved, they do have a wild side that has probably witnessed and spurred the growth of their arts and creative scenes.

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A new 400-foot cheese grater is proposed for the Miami Design District!

Designed by Miami-OPPENheim architecture + design, it will add an interesting icon in Miami’s skyline. The key merit of $40-million, 25-storey building is the emphasis on the “green” factors:

COR extracts power from its environment by utilizing the latest developments in wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and solar hot water generation. A hyper-efficient exoskeleton shell simultaneously provides building structure, thermal mass for insulation, shading for natural cooking, enclosure for terraces, armatures for turbines, and loggias for congregating on the ground. The incorporation of all of these elements into one building represents a major breakthrough in design and engineering.

This building actually reminded me of Centre Pompidou, in the way that they showed off their design intent and utilitarian vision through explicit, external structures. Although on first sight I thought the external grater appearance was just the whim of a cheese-obsessed architect, I was pleasantly surprised when I learnt that it is a lot more, being the platform for the multitude of green architectural details to achieve their green objectives (did you notice the brilliantly integrated wind turbine on the roof?)

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What is this? You might guess that it’s perhaps an illustration from a children’s book. Well as fake as it looks, it’s a real picture of a real hotel room – the only reason it’s so comical looking is: an artist had hand-drawn thin black lines around the edges of walls, cupboards, corners etc, so it looks really fake.

This is just one room out of the many interestingly decorated rooms in Art Hotel Berlin. They invited a different artist for each of their rooms, resulting in about 50 unique interior. This one shown above is one of the better ones in my opinion: there are many others which still couldn’t shake off the look of a typical hotel room – they were just adorned by some installation or display art pieces.

Many designers swear by Pantone color charts, saying that they give the most accurate specification on what exactly he/she wants. I still have a half-suspicious view towards Pantone charts though – secretly thinking “are we just trying to make ourselves feel more professional?”.

Anyway, that aside, this Flickr photo-set made me smile, looking at the innocuous Pantone color placed against real life items. Is that trying to say that Pantone does cover every imaginable color? Or that most, if not all, of manufactured products were specified as one of those Pantone numbers?

I have fond memories of my primary school, where abandoned concrete pipes like these would lie around in the field. We would climb onto them, in them, skip around them, hide in them. The thick, solid pipe seemed like an impregnable fortress – while we shared jokes and secrets within the echo-y walls. Perhaps the designer went to a similar school too!

This is a ho(s?)tel in Austria, designed by art college graduate Andreas Strauss. Organized into clusters of threes, they nestle in green fields beside the Danube River. Facilities like shower, bar and cafeteria are in a central location. The hotel currently works on an honor system – you leave behind however much you think is fair for the duration of your stay.

Now I”m just wondering – is there a little big plug that’d cap the sky-hole should there be rain?

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