Ice ice baby- no ref to Milli Vanilli
Category Archives: UrbSpace
Free warm drink with Ice Carving
And that is why we love this city!
Ice carving
Upcoming Plans
Silence on the Blog means that the non-blog life has been hectic beyond imagination! As it turns out, it is quite a lot of work to travel overseas if it involved more than one person…especially if that one person is doing most of the organizing!
We look forward to posting more regularly, of travel, of unique and fun design, and just musings over the next few weeks. In the meantime, you all have a great holiday season and you’ll hear from me much more regularly. I promise.
RRobots on the wall
Something’s come up…
Dear Readers,
We hope you enjoyed reading about Canstruction here. We were also live tweeting as the awards were being given out-hope you caught that on Twitter (@ASMDESIGN1) last night.
This past week has been unusually weird and busy in a number of ways. Things are changing elsewhere and at ASM Design- professionally as well as personally. During this time (and it may be for the next 2 months or so) there are happy moments, planned travel overseas (India and around) and some necessary tasks that must be taken care of. In the midst of this, we will try our hardest to maintain regularity of our featured posts, but sometimes we may not be able to make our daily schedule.
Posting is a commitment we take very seriously. We work quite hard to make sure that you get something unique each time you visit. And if we blog about what others are blogging about too, then we try to make it unique in our own way-either by being the only LIVE blogger or by providing our own spin on it.
We hope that you will pardon our occasional absence from now until the end of the year. Keep checking back for fun stuff, more KidSpace, UrbSpace and LightSpace!
Love- ASM DESIGN
Space Pong
One of the really great things about New York city is the Public Space here. And one of the best things about the public space in NYC is that it can be appropriated to be anything. The streets become markets (NYC Streetfairs), the parks become theaters (Bryant Park Movies) and plazas become shanty towns that represent social discontent (Occupy Wall Street*).
Lately we witnessed the World Financial Centre become a sports arena, and an art gallery with Pongtopia. It was a public space, a sports event and an art auction all at the same time. This event was conceptualized and organized by SpinGalactic, NY’s answer to LA’s ping pong clubs, in collaboration with Brookfield Properties.
Public Space becomes tournament space
Tournament
Table Art
Designer Paddles Auction to benefit Operation Design
* More on OWS in the works
Iron in my soul
How much of our design world is metal/iron? A quick walk through Williamsburg shows that wrought iron and the industrial look is so in. It has always been a vital part of construction, but “flaunt your metal” is the new industrial chic.
For instance, check out the Metal Dimensions workshop and showroom. The Facade is a celebration of metal (and glass), as are the pieces inside.
Sculpture or Scrap-ture?
In Construction- show us what you are made of? (@ a construction site)
Doorway (@ Restaurant we passed by)
Peace and Pieces (@ Mandala Emporium)
Brace yourselves (@ Mandala Emporium)
Taxi 07: Nissan’s New York
Being one of the authors of the Taxi:Roads Forward book has its privileges! We were invited to preview the features of the Nissan’s Taxi of Tomorrow before it opens to the public on Nov 2nd at 23rd street in New York.
The Yellow Taxi is as much an identity of New York as the Empire State Building. It is a way of life, a mode of transport. It is a public space, a movable space, that forms the backdrop of many private interactions 24/7 in the life of this great city.
The Taxi of Tomorrow attempts to be many things. Nissan’s Francois Farion, Senior Manager, Design & Color Strategy, very enthusiastically explained Nissan’s vision for this new avatar. Consulting heavily with the Taxi and Limousine Commission and deriving from the research and benchmarking done by our “Taxi Book“, the Taxi of Tomorrow attempts to be many things that the present cab is not.
Ket features include:
- Higher roof and much more leg room;
- Special design of the wheel to take the number of miles that these vehicles travels;
- An integrated console that has the HVAC built into it and includes a 15″ monitor in place of the small screen you see now;
- Seats made of fabric engineered to have no VOC;
- Active carbon to make the cabin smell and feel fresher;
- Factory installed bullet proof partition which can slide, to speak with the driver and designed to provide maximum views of NYC;
- Curtain air bags ( in order to be effective, you must be strapped in though);
- High boot to accomodate maximum storage;
- And our favorite: A polycarbonate roof to make the Taxi lighter, and to provide views of the skyline as you drive past!
It is not all good though. This Taxi, as its predecessor, is not ADA compliant, although we are told that it presents itself to customization in order to become so. Plans are to lower the floor to provide wheelchair access into the vehicle. In addition there is little or no provision of a built in child harness/car seat. Considering how many urban families use Taxis as their main form of transport–that is an area where this Taxi of Tomorrow could have really made a difference.
Still, it tries and does quite well in most other aspects!
Check out our signature on the graffiti wall at the exhibit.
KidSpace: I’m feeling pink.
So what do you do if you have a festival in town?
Food? Check.
Entertain the public? Check.
Sell stuff? Check
Buy stuff? Check
Color the public fountain PINK*?–Oh Absolutely!
*Note: The fountain was pink for Breast Cancer Awareness week, not for the Halloween Festival.
ASM DESIGN 