MAKE IT RAIN
Warm weather getting you down?
Feeling oppressed by those balmy
days and long, dry nights? Japanese
sound artist Kouichi Okamoto
has you covered. His Endless Rain
Record does exactly what it says
on the sleeve, o ering up two slabs
of fi nely crafted rainfall soundscape.
The Rain side serves up 10 minutes
of Japan summer storm realness,
while the Drop side is designed
in such a way that the raindrops
loop forever. Let it ride and hear
the storms warp and fade as
the record itself wears away.
kyouei-ltd.co.jp LRROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS
Like most varieties of retail outlet, petrol stations have become increasingly identikit in
recent years, di ering little in their branding, merchandise and sullen, clock-punching
sta in corporate golf shirts from one continent to the next. This is always a shame,
no matter the identikit retail outlet in question – but arguably more so with petrol stations.
As is demonstrated by a splendid new book published by Gestalten, petrol stations were
once things of wonder. The book, featuring a foreword by Jay Leno, is inevitably entitled
It’s a Gas!, but is nearer the mark with its subtitle, “The Allure of the Gas Station”.
As depicted in the above photo, petrol stations are indeed alluring places: eccentric,
distinctive, often beautiful, occasionally worth the drive on their own. In rural Britain in
the 1930s, at least one had a thatched roof, which seems an audacious choice given the
pressurised fl ammable liquids it was designed to house. Meanwhile, the (still-operational)
Skovshoved station on the outskirts of Copenhagen is rightly regarded as a masterpiece of
1930s functionalism. But it was America, inevitably, that perfected the form, punctuating
its freeways with stylish monuments to a national romance with the road. The book’s
most spectacular photos date from the 1950s and ’60s, when petrol stations were
frequently as extravagant and gorgeous as the cars they serviced. gestalten.com AM
ARTIFICIAL
UNINTELLIGENCE
Architect Arne Jacobsen once said, “People
buy a chair and they don’t really care who
designed it.” Which is usually true. But when
your chair lacks a seat, proper legs, or a
fundamental understanding of how skeletons
work, you might start to have questions. You
can direct these questions to Philipp Schmitt
and Ste en Weiss, the mad geniuses behind
the chAIr Project. The duo designed an
algorithm, showed it 562 pictures of chairs
scraped from Pinterest, and then asked the
program to design some originals. The results
are, well, certainly creative. Pushing the very
boundaries of ‘chair-ness’. Let’s just say robots
aren’t troubled by tedious details like the shape
of the human spine. Furniture designers
everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief. JS