FastCoDesign: The Most Beautiful Modern Church Alter We've Ever Seen

Mathieu Lehanneur, a Frenchman known for organic forms, creates a rippling choir out of slabs of marble.

 

A Romanesque church might be the last place you’d expect to see a sprawling modern pulpit. And yet that’s exactly what the St. Hilaire in Meile, France got, thanks to the French designer Mathieu Lehanneur, who loosely modeled his renovation on a sedimentary formation in the church’s basement.

For the complete article by Belinda Lanks, please visit: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664048/the-most-beautiful-modern-church-altar-weve-ever-seen-slideshow?partner=co_newsletter#3

An Online Artwork Drawn by You and 999,999 Others

On the Internet, anyone can be an artist. In Xavier Barrade’s hands, everyone is.

Barrade, a British artist studying in Paris, has masterminded an interactive, online drawing that’s got virtual space for as many as a million (a million!) contributors. Developed with Wake Up Web Solutions, Epic Exquisite Corpse is designed to let anyone, whether a sketchpad virtuoso or a hack who can barely rough out a stick figure, unleash his inner Picasso. Just go to the site, click “draw,” then start sketching away in the blank square. The only instruction is that you start your drawing by following the lines in the neighboring squares.

For the complete article, please visit:  http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664047/an-online-artwork-drawn-by-you-and-999999-others-slideshow?partner=co_newsletter

Funky Modern Sculpture aka: Desk Set

Designers Adrian and Jeremy Wright aim to rescue your office widgets from the ignominy of the top drawer, crafting modern office tools that ease the mind as well as the workload.

 

There's perhaps no more fruitful landscape than your messy desk, but a shot of order and color might do it good. Created for Lexon by the London-based team of brothers at DesignWright, these Buro Desk Tools are the visual antidote to those mountains of white paper, books and ore-colored Apple products that litter your desk already.

Sliced from one rectangular form and colored in a gradient of green, gray or violet, the seven tools may not all come in handy every day, but once plopped on your desk like a planar Southern California house, they could serve as sanctuary for your wandering eyes. Like any good Wild West story, this one may end with guns blazing, should your office-mates walk off with one of these useful little slabs; they're not easy to get in the United States. Email one of the French retailers listed here to arrange the transaction. 

By Chris Dannen, for the full article visit:  http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663765/wanted-a-desk-set-that-looks-like-a-funky-modern-sculpture?partner=co_newsletter

Breathtaking Sculptures Depict Infinite Forests

By artist Anthony James

Utilizing two-way mirrors, chopped birch trees and fluorescent or LEDS to create sculptures that look like infinite forests trapped in a light box.  Beautiful and unique!

For the complete article from fastcodesign, please visit:  http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663412/breathtaking-sculptures-depict-infinite-forests?partner=co_newsletter

Amazing Stained Glass Directional Wayfinding

From Fastcodesign, artist Paul Houseberg:

Color-coded wayfinding never looked so good!  The crux of Housberg’s technique is layering colors to achieve what he calls “an envelope of experience.” His goal is to “create an environment rather than a series of focal points,” he says, adding quickly: “Not to get too art-speaky here.”

Housberg has produced installations for organizations all over the map: Pfizer, CalSTRS , Marriott, St. Regis, and the California Pacific Medical Center, among others. For each assignment, he says, he likes to “create work that feels like it can’t be sited anywhere else.” He starts by feeling out the architecture. “I try to understand the space and the lighting the conditions and who uses the space,” he says. “That usually suggests a general approach, and then I develop a palette.”

For the complete article, please visit: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663116/the-21st-century-master-of-an-ancient-art-stained-glass-slideshow?partner=co_newsletter#1

50 Miles of Thread Puts Double Rainbows to Shame

From fastcodesign.com:


The Texas-based artist Gabriel Dawe creates dazzling, Op-Artish sculptures out of thread, making sewing seem somehow painterly. Take that, seamstresses.

His latest installation, Plexus No. 4, consists of more than 50 miles of thread strung up on wooden planks to form floating, rainbow-colored veils. The veils are static, but in the photos, they appear to flutter and blur and sway -- sorta’ like the last hour of the Gay Pride parade.

Dawe is trained in graphic design, and he debuted the sculpture at Dallas Contemporary this fall. On view 'til January, it's part of the Plexus series, which got underway when he started experimenting with thread sculptures by climbing up and down a ladder in his studio about 300 times a day, for five backbreaking weeks. He has since refined the construction process (understandably so). As he tells us:

For the second [sculpture] I only had one week to install, so I developed this tool with safety pins, wood and an extension pole, which works like a giant needle. That reduced my time considerably. Plexus No. 4 took me about 105 hours just to put up the thread, working about three days a week for a period of one month... It is definitely a process about endurance and concentration. I have a system of numbering, so I can keep count while I make them, one thread at a time.

We’ve got a slide show of his latest work here, with images by Dallas artist and photographer Kevin Todora.  To view, visit http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662760/string-theory-gabriel-dawe-slideshow#1