Wallpaper 7

PHOTOGRAPHY: REBECCA SCHEINBERG WRITERS: EMMA MOORE, ROSA BERTOLI

Few things ignite urbanites’ pride

quite like the smartness of their city.

A driverless car here, a delivery

drone there. Yet while most cities

embrace ‘smart’ à la carte, others,

like Abu Dhabi’s Masdar and South

Korea’s Songdo, are subscribing to

it wholesale. These are cities built

smart from the ground up. Toronto,

however, claims to be the irst city

to build ‘from the internet up’. In

an efort to be the smartest city of

them all, Toronto recently ofered

Google’s Sidewalk Labs a large swath

of its waterfront Quayside district

as a tech guinea pig. Compared to

Masdar and Songdo, Quayside is

more smart neighbourhood than

smart city, but who cares when you’re

cruising in self-driving shuttles,

enjoying energy generated by a

thermal grid and marvelling at your

trash being carried away by robots?

That private cars will be banned is a

small price to pay for a high urban IQ.

STREET SMART

INCOMING | JOHN WEICH

Between 1966 and 1974, Florentine

design group Archizoom was at the

forefront of the radical, anti-design

movement. It staged an exhibition

dedicated to ‘superarchitecture’,

presenting a novel approach to

colour and shape in the domestic

environment, in contrast to the

functional, modernist stance of

the time. The ‘Superonda’, designed

in 1966, was part of this explosive

aesthetic exercise; a sofa without

a frame, it challenged traditional

furniture construction. Made from

BORN AGAIN

a polyurethane block cut into wave

shapes that allowed it to be taken

apart and reconigured, it has now

been brought back to life by

Poltronova, an Italian brand born

at the time of the radical design

movement and still dedicated to

preserving its legacy. Upholstered

in three pop-art-inspired shades

(black, red and white), it ofers an

ode to the mix-and-match freedom

of the Italian radicals.

‘Superonda’ sofa, €4,000,

by Archizoom, for Poltronova

A new skincare line by Aman does its best to embody

all the sense of place, becalming architecture, nature

and wellbeing that the resort chain famously espouses.

Aman Skincare is launching on the occasion of its

30th anniversary and Kengo Kuma was charged with

designing the range’s packaging. The resorts’ Eastern

origins are channelled in the sake bottle silhouettes

while Japanese rice paper, ceramic and burnt cedar

are referenced in the containers’ high-tech inish.

An exotic roll-call of ingredients includes powdered

pearl, cactus oil, algae, wild-harvested butters and

muds from the rainforest, amethyst and jade, copper

and silver. The active aspects of these ingredient

gems have been targeted for their ability to restore,

transport and transform. They can’t replace a body,

heart and soul nourishing trip to Amangiri in the Utah

desert, but do go some way to plugging the gap.

Retreat

yourself

Take your skin on a pampering

journey with a resort-inspired range

Newspaper

056 ∑

AURIC CLEANSE BATH SALTS;

GOLDEN BODY SERUM; DESERT

DEW FACE MIST, FROM £50,

BY AMAN SKINCARE, AMAN.COM