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
A Stylish Vipp Hotel Heads to an Italian Palazzo
One might not expect the origin story for a pop-up hotel in a 13th-century Italian palazzo to begin with a trash can. But here’s how it happened: a cylindrical bin Danish metalsmith Holger Nielsen designed in 1939 for his wife’s hair salon became a highlight of the permanent design collection at MoMA. It inspired a full industrial design brand, Vipp, and a portfolio of six hospitality experiences. This year, Vipp Hotel’s seventh location will open during Salone del Mobile in the Palazzo Monti, an artist’s residency in Brescia run by the art collector and curator Edoardo Monti.
The first floor hosts the residence, designed with a Scandinavian sensibility by Julie Cloos Mølsgaard. Vipp products, including a matte black modular kitchen and the new Monti Edition swivel chair upholstered in Torri Lana textiles, will come to stay beneath the ten-foot-tall 19th-century frescoes, while art pieces made by 200 artists from 50 countries who’ve stayed in palazzo since 2017 will inspire visitors to make new stories of their own. —Jesse Dorris
Rendering of the revitalized Lincoln Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Image courtesy of Selldorf Architects…
Selldorf Architects will lead an overhaul of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Selldorf Architects has been selected to lead a major overhaul of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The project marks the first comprehensive reinstallation of the museum’s exhibition spaces in nearly two decades and will allow the institution to showcase newly acquired works, foreground new voices, and present a more inclusive narrative of American art. The redesign, slated for completion in September, will focus on renovating 20,000 square feet of third-floor gallery space dedicated to contemporary and modern art. News of the overhaul follows the announcement that SOM and Selldorf Architects would oversee the Hirshhorn Museum’s most significant interior revamp in the museum’s half-century history.
Designed to purposefully crash land, NASA’s new rover will enable wider space travel.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena has designed a new landing gear, named SHIELD (Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device), to make crash-landing possible on planets or moons with an atmosphere. The device replaces traditional entry, descent, and landing mechanisms with a crushable conical accordion, similar to an automotive crumple zone, which absorbs the energy of the impact. This makes space vehicles much nimbler, simpler and cheaper, which could lead to frequent missions to explore the solar neighborhood without fear of failure and bring a new era of space exploration.
A catastrophic earthquake destroys heritage structures across Turkey and Syria.
On Monday, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake caused widespread devastation across central and southern Turkey and north-western Syria. Reports indicate that, at press time, more than 4,700 people perished and thousands more have been injured. The quake destroyed more than 2,300 buildings, including several heritage structures such as the Gaziantep Castle and Cathedral of the Annunciation. The castle, which was recently converted into the Gaziantep Defence and Heroism Panoramic Museum, was first built as a watchtower in the Roman period and expanded by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the fifth century.
Gabriela Hearst. Photography by Katie Thompson for Surface…
Two years after joining Chloé, Gabriela Hearst’s eco-friendly approach is bearing fruit.
Revenues at Chloé have risen 60 percent in the two years since Gabriela Hearst took over as creative director. The Paris-based fashion house’s commitment to sustainability is driving sales of products such as low-impact Nama sneakers, recycled denim, and linen Woody tote bags, which have a small environmental footprint. Hearst and Chloé CEO Riccardo Bellini are committed to making the company a purpose-driven, socially engaged enterprise, and have overhauled the fabrics used for Chloé’s ready-to-wear collections to use more environmentally friendly materials. “The change cannot happen from one person,” Hearst told WWD. “It’s the machine that has to change and be willing to change.”
In Colombia, a judge has admitted to using ChatGPT to help make a court decision.
A Colombian judge has used OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool to make a court ruling. Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia of the First Circuit Court in Cartagena used the AI tool to answer legal questions about a case involving a dispute with a health insurance company over the coverage of medical treatment for an autistic child. The judge included the chatbot’s responses in the decision, which he stated was not meant to replace his own judgment but to optimize the time spent drafting it. The use of AI in court decisions is controversial as systems like ChatGPT are known to produce biased and inaccurate results.
Fred Terna, an abstract painter of his traumatic Holocaust experiences, dies at 99.
Fred Terna, an artist and Holocaust survivor, died at 99 in Brooklyn. After surviving the Nazi regime’s imprisonment in four concentration camps, he began to translate his experiences as semi-abstract paintings that depicted fire, ashes, and chimneys. His work, which utilized reds, yellows, oranges, and blues, became his Holocaust testimony and offered a unique look into the mind of a survivor. In his paintings, he used sand pebbles to represent ashes and depicted flames that incinerated Jews in crematories. His works have been donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where they remain a testament to his experiences and serve as a reminder of the atrocities he and countless others endured.
The Jimmy Choo collaboration with Sailor Moon. Image courtesy Jimmy Choo…
Today’s attractive distractions:
Nissan unveils a clean new design direction inspired by Japanese futurism.
