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The Vitra Design Museum in Germany has opened a new archive and exhibition space, called Schaudepot, which houses a collection of approximately 7,000 designs including prototypes of 20th century classics by Charles and Ray Eames.
The Swiss furniture manufacturer's collections were previously stowed underground and out of public view, but the Schaudepot, directly translating to “show depot”, brings the collections out of hiding and into the open.
The 1,000m2 addition was designed by Basel-based architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, who designed the recent addition to the Tate Modern. Basel-based studio Dieter Thiel designed the interior and exhibition spaces. Thiel previously worked with Vitra on exhibition design and has done projects for Adidas, pen manufacturer Lamy and lighting company Ansorg, among others.
The centrepiece of the Schaudepot is a permanent exhibition with more than 400 pieces of modern industrial design from 1800 to the present, including early Bentwood design, Classical Modernist icons by Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Gerrit Rietveld, colourful Pop-era plastics and more recent 3D printed designs.
The permanent exhibition, which features the chronological “canon of Vitra” along with some lesser-known pieces, is accompanied by smaller temporary exhibitions relating to the main collection, beginning with a 430-piece display that follows the history of furniture design from the late 18th century to present.
The modern interior design makes use of large steel and glass shelving and fluorescent lighting to eschew showiness and emphasise the furniture designs as the focal point in a cathedral-like space, says the Vitra Design Museum's chief curator Jochen Eisenbrand. Each design is assigned a number, which patrons can enter into a tablet to learn more information about the piece's designer, manufacturer and date of creation. As its name suggests, the building's curatorial design aestheticises its function as an open-viewing storehouse.
“Dieter Thiel decided to move away from the too-busy shelving system that we had used on other projects for a more minimal and flexible design that can be moved up or down depending on what pieces go in it,” says Eisenbrand. “We wanted the pieces to be the main source of visual interest in the space.”
The building's basement, which formerly housed the collection out of public view, can now be accessed via a staircase. Four large windows invite visitors to peer in at the Scandinavian, Italian, lighting and Eames collections.
“We're just relieved and excited to finally have the space to bring the pieces out of storage and into the public museum. Many of them have been in storage since 1989 when the main museum opened,” says Eisenbrand.
The building sits on the Vitra campus, which acts as a hub for the Swiss furniture manufacturer and was visited by 350,000 people last year. The site features buildings by contemporary architects including Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando and the late Zaha Hadid.
All images courtesy of the Vitra Design Museum.
The post Vitra Design Museum opens new exhibition space showcasing design classics appeared first on Design Week.
Exactly what powered the dynamo remains a mystery. One possibility is that the lunar dynamo was self-sustaining, like Earth's: As the planet has cooled, its liquid core has moved in response, sustaining the dynamo and the magnetic field it produces. In the absence of a long-lived heat supply, most planetary bodies will cool within hundreds of millions of years of formation.
MIT's research on an ancient lunar rock in 2011 suggested that the moon harbored the long-lived dynamo — a molten, convecting core of liquid metal that generated a strong magnetic field 3.56 billion years ago. The findings point to a dynamo that lasted much longer than scientists previously thought, and suggest that an alternative energy source may have powered the dynamo.
The magnetic field existed until at least 3.56 billion years ago, an MIT study suggests — about 160 million years longer than scientists had thought. “It seems like the lunar dynamo lasted very late in the Moon's history,” says Benjamin Weiss, a palaeomagnetics expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. “That's a very surprising result.” Weiss and his colleagues, led by MIT planetary scientist Clément Suavet, report the findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
“The moon has this protracted history that's surprising,” says Weiss, an associate professor of planetary science at MIT. “This provides evidence of a fundamentally new way of making a magnetic field in a planet a new power source.”
The MIT paper is the latest piece in a puzzle that planetary scientists have been working out for decades. In 1969, the Apollo 11 mission brought the first lunar rocks back to Earth — souvenirs from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's historic moonwalk. Since then, scientists have probed the rocky remnants for clues to the moon's history. They soon discovered that many rocks were magnetized, which suggested that the moon was more than a cold, undifferentiated pile of space rubble. Instead, it may have harbored a convecting metallic core that produced a large magnetic field, recorded in the moon's rocks.
A dynamo still exists within Earth because heat, produced by the radioactive decay of elements within the planet, maintains the core's convection. Models have shown that if a lunar dynamo were powered solely by cooling of the moon's interior, it would have been able to sustain itself only for a few hundred million years after the moon formed — dissipating by 4.2 billion years ago, at the very latest.
However, Weiss and his colleagues found some surprising evidence in a bit of lunar basalt dubbed 10020. The Apollo 11 astronauts collected the rock at the southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility; scientists believe it was likely ejected from deep within the moon 100 million years ago, after a meteor impact. The group confirmed previous work dating the rock at 3.7 billion years old, and found that it was magnetized — a finding that clashes with current dynamo models.
Weiss collaborated with researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the Berkeley Geochronology Center, who determined the rock's age using radiometric dating. After a rock forms, a radioactive potassium isotope decays to a stable argon isotope at a known rate. The group measured the ratio of potassium to argon in a small piece of the rock, using this information to ascertain that the rock cooled from magma 3.7 billion years ago.
Weiss and graduate student Erin Shea then measured the rock's magnetization, and found that the rock was magnetized. However, this didn't necessarily mean that the rock, and the moon, had a dynamo-generated magnetic field 3.7 billion years ago: Subsequent impacts may have heated the rock and reset its magnetization.
To discard this possibility, the team examined whether the rock experienced any significant heating since its ejection onto the moon's surface. Again, they looked to isotopes of potassium and argon, finding that the only heating the rock had experienced since it was ejected onto the lunar surface came from simple exposure to the sun's rays.
“It's basically been in cold storage for 3.7 billion years, essentially undisturbed,” Weiss says. “It retains a beautiful magnetization record.”
Weiss says the rock's evidence supports a new mechanism of dynamo generation that was proposed by scientists at University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). This hypothesis posits that the moon's dynamo may have been powered by Earth's gravitational pull. Billions of years ago, the moon was much closer to Earth than it is today; terrestrial gravity may have had a stirring effect within the moon's core, keeping the liquid metal moving even after the lunar body had cooled.
Francis Nimmo, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at UCSC and one of the researchers who originally put forth the new dynamo theory, says Weiss' evidence provides scientists with a new picture of the moon's evolution.
“We generally assume that cooling is the main mechanism for driving a dynamo anywhere,” says Nimmo, who was not involved in the study. “This lunar data is telling us that other mechanisms may also play a role, not just at the moon, but elsewhere, too.”
The Daily Galaxy via Massachusetts Institute of Technology and nature.com
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Argentinean poster for THE DEER HUNTER (Michael Cimino, USA, 1978)
Artist: uncredited
Poster source: Heritage Auctions
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