Kanye West Surprise Drops Yeezy Gap’s First Piece, and Other News

The Design Dispatch offers expertly written and essential news from the design world crafted by our dedicated team. Think of it as your cheat sheet for the day in design delivered to your inbox before you’ve had your coffee. Subscribe now. 

Have a news story our readers need to see? Submit it here.

The first piece of Kanye West’s Yeezy Gap partnership surprise drops and crashes Gap’s website.

Yesterday, the first piece of Kanye West’s Yeezy Gap partnership—a boxy cobalt puffer jacket that West was recently spotted wearing in Los Angeles—dropped with little warning on Gap’s website, which promptly crashed thanks to the influx of traffic. (Its arrival was announced with projections in the sky in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.) To create the jacket, West and the Yeezy team enlisted British-Nigerian designer Mowalola Ogunlesi, who developed the collection at West’s ranch in Cody, Wyoming. Leaked pictures show that further pieces are departing from Yeezy’s standard fare of rich neutrals—instead, expect on-trend, exuberant shades of cyber blue, coral, orange, and pink. On a recent earnings call, Gap CEO Sonia Sygnal noted that “the creativity is through the roof and it’s spilling over to the brand and it’s inspiring our teams more broadly.” 

Hyperloop Italia enlists Zaha Hadid Architects to co-design its next generation of transport vehicles.

Zaha Hadid Architects is teaming with Hyerloop Italia to bring its signature aesthetic to the company’s next phase of transit vehicles. The collaboration stems from the newly launched Hyperloop Partnership Program, which commits to building the world’s most accessible, convenient, and safe transportation system using environmentally friendly materials. The operation will use passive magnetic levitation technology powered by renewable energy to transport passenger and cargo vehicles through low-pressure tubes to minimize friction and the amount of energy used.

SWA Group will soon break ground on a permanent memorial to Sandy Hook victims in Connecticut. 

Construction on The Clearing, a meditative memorial in which visitors can mourn and remember the 26 victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, has been cleared to begin in August. The $3.75 million landscape, designed by Daniel Affleck and Ben Waldo of SWA Group’s San Francisco office, was selected unanimously by the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission from a pool of 189 proposals. Visitors will enter the site through gently winding paths that pass through a landscape of meadows that converge at an open clearing, where victims’ names are inscribed on a circular water feature. In the center, a Sacred Sycamore symbolizes the resilience of Newtown following the tragedy. “The motion of the water embraces the tree and captures the energy, form, and cycle of the landscape around it,” SWA Group said in a statement. “Visitors are encouraged to give a candle or a flower to the water, which will carry the offering across the space in an act of bridging the deceased and the living.” The Clearing is slated to open on December 14, 2022, exactly ten years since the tragedy occurred.

Central Park Tower, the world’s tallest residential building, is nearing completion in New York City.

New images by photographer Paul Clemence of ARCHI-PHOTO confirm that the Central Park supertall 225 West 57th street, designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill (AS+GG), is well on its way to completion after years of delay. (It was originally supposed to open in 2018.) When it’s finished, it will take the title of the world’s tallest residential tower from Rafael Viñoly’s 432 Park Avenue nearby, and become the second tallest building in the western hemisphere. Overall, the mirrored skyscraper will comprise 179 luxury residences and mixed retail, including a street-level Nordstrom department store. 

Paris’s historic La Samaritaine department store reemerges as a fully restored mixed-use space. 

A design dream team of Sanaa, Peter Marino, Yabu Pushelberg, Jean-François Lagneau, and others has joined forces to revive a Parisian architectural treasure. Originally opened in 1870, the heritage-listed Art Deco landmark sat empty since 2005. Owner LVMH is behind the intensive restoration, including the undulating façade of 343 screen-printed glass panels, a sprawling glass roof, ceramic decorative elements, 37 skylights, and painted frescoes. A short walk from the Louvre, the structure emerges with shiny new retail space, ten restaurants, a hotel, offices, crèche, and a housing complex. “We had to define which elements of the building itself actually qualified as heritage items,” says Lagneau, a historical monuments architect, “so that we could preserve them and pass them on to future generations, ensuring that they too can enjoy the features that have so much to tell us about two key periods in our history.”  

Still on the crypto wave, Sotheby’s launches its first virtual gallery in digital metaverse Decentraland.

Sotheby’s has created a digital replica of its London headquarters on the digital metaverse Decentraland, a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. The auction house’s virtual gallery will feature five ground-floor spaces to showcase digital art, as well as an avatar of its London commissioner Hans Lomulder to greet new visitors. “We see spaces like Decentraland as the next frontier for digital art where artists, collectors, and viewers alike can engage with one another from anywhere in the world and showcase art that’s fundamentally scarce and unique, but accessible to anyone for viewing,” Michael Bouhanna, head of sales at Sotheby’s, tells The Art Newspaper. The launch comes during Sotheby’s first “curated NFT sale, which runs through June 10. 

Today’s attractive distractions:

Balenciaga continues their collaboration with Gucci through a series of “hacked” bags.

The disgraced New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner is getting into the NFT game.

Will furniture ever have a place within drop culture? The brand Outer seems to think so.

These two artists are digitally reviving derelict Soviet architecture with dancing flowers.