Gitano Takes “Gypsy Disco” to Mexico City During Zona Maco, 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

Gitano Takes “Gypsy Disco” to Mexico City During Zona Maco

For this year’s Zona Maco art week, Grupo Gitano is bringing its “Gypsy-Disco Jungle” concept to Mexico City for a five-day pop-up to coincide with the fair. Having expanded to New York with a permanent outdoor venue dubbed Garden of Love, followed by Miami where it occupies a street-level space and crowns the rooftop of the boutique hotel Casa Faena, the Tulum-originated hospitality brand will take over the restaurant Helena and the club Phonique in Mexico City’s Juarez neighborhood. 

Bedecked in tropical plants and Gitano’s signature bubblegum-pink neon sign, the restaurant will kick things off Wednesday night with an Aegean–inspired menu of mezze and salt-baked whole fish by Athens–based chef Alexandros Gkoutis; familiar modern Mexican staples will return for the weekend. The music program will feature an international cast of DJs spinning disco mashups such as New York’s Amber Valentine and hometown hitmaker Dan Solo.

B&B Italia releases visuals for the brand’s first residential tower in downtown Miami. 

A collaboration between architecture firm Arquitectonica and designer Piero Lissoni, who is also the creative director for the Italian furniture brand, the 55-story Casa Bella will be developed by Related Group. When completed, it will feature an undulating facade, Mediterranean accents, a wine vault, a private theatre, co-working spaces, and landscape architecture by Enzo Enea, among other plush amenities. 

Buzzfeed found the identities of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s pseudonymous founders.

Bored Ape Yacht Club has become a lucrative venture within the fast-growing NFT  space, attracting celebrity investors such as Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon who shelled out six figures for their simian avatars. Until recently, the pseudonymous creators of the series had remained unknown. Thanks to some journalistic ingenuity from BuzzFeed, however, we now know the two main founders  behind what is currently the world’s most expensive NFT collection: Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow. 

MVRDV blames the failure of London’s Marble Arch Mound on a “loveless execution.”

When Marble Arch Mound opened in London, the Dutch firm MVRDV promised the artificial landscape would bring picturesque views of Hyde Park to Oxford Street. Unfortunately, the tourist attraction garnered ridicule for amounting to little more than a “pile of scaffolding.” In a new statement, MVRDV blames Marble Arch Mound’s failure on a “loveless execution” from Westminster City Council, revealing the landmark’s design was watered down. “Anyone who visited the Marble Arch Mound installation in London was no doubt severely underwhelmed,” MVRDV wrote. “Through a mixture of budget constraints and a lack of communication, many details concerning the mound’s construction were decided without our involvement.”

The latest renderings for the long-delayed Two World Trade Center have been unveiled.  

After two false starts, Two World Trade Center has released its latest renderings. After Silverstein Properties scrapped the original Foster + Partners design and gave the project to Bjarke Ingels Group in 2015, the developer returned to the former who envisioned a new design with a more boxy exterior with a cascade of verdant terraces in lieu of the first proposal’s monolithic sculptural structure. No start or completion date has been released yet. 

The artist Joe Machine accuses Damien Hirst of copying his cherry blossom paintings.

Damien Hirst has faced a multitude of plagiarism accusations over the years, but recently the painter Joe Machine has accused the British artist of copying his cherry blossom paintings. “I saw [them] and, for a moment, I thought I was looking at my own paintings,” Machine told the Observer. “His [work] is so similar to mine. But I was doing my cherry blossom paintings years before his.” Machine points to the paintings’ dark branches, powder-blue skies, and blotches of pink blossoms as signs that Hirst’s canvases are too close for comfort. Hirst plans to exhibit the series at the National Art Center, Tokyo, in Spring after showcasing them at Paris’s Fondation Cartier this past year. 

After being postponed, the Winter Show’s 68th edition will take place in early April.

The Winter Show’s 68 edition was originally scheduled to take place at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in early January, but was postponed due to the Omicron surge. The fair, which benefits the nonprofit East Side House Settlement, has announced that it will now take place April 1–10 at the former flagship of Barneys New York on Madison Avenue. “It was disappointing to postpone, but we knew it was the right decision,” Helen Allen, the executive director of the Winter Show, told the New York Times, “but there’s nothing as good as seeing artworks in person, and we are thrilled to have found a new venue.” The fair will take place across five floors at the former department store and also include online viewing rooms.

Today’s attractive distractions:

Astronomers are preparing for an unprecedented merging of two black holes.

Shake Shack’s dating service gives you a chicken sandwich for every match.

This precocious 14-year-old is developing new wildfire prevention technology.

Would you surprise your Valentine with this half-assed chocolate burger?