Each year, the Grand Palais in Paris offers the entire nave to a sole artist for a great challenge called Monumenta. This year, the French artist Daniel Buren follows in the footsteps of Anselm Keifer, Richard Serra, Christian Boltanski and Anish Kapoor. With his in situpiece,  »Excentrique(s) » — which means both « elliptical » and « eccentric » —  Buren has built a true artificial landscape: a fascinating forest with a canopy of circle-shaped colored pergolas.The visitors’ path in this forest leads to a sort of clearing under the Palais’ large central dome.

There, huge circular mirrors are installed, reflecting the ambient colours of the installation in a magical way.

After spending a while in the installation, « Excentique(s) » becomes a very intimate space; life is seen through many different hues and we simply want to remain and be immersed in its magic. By Cécile Poignant.

www.rmn.fr

“Fast” has starting to invade all the market for a while: fast fashion, fast food and so on… everything requires to be quick, to be new but tend to leave the quality behind.

Our life is becoming more and more busy, with work, friends to see, projects to make, and we don’t want to use our time for other things. That’s why we want things to be quick. But now, we started to have a desire of quality and richness with slower things: slow food, slow living.

Something new, for busy people who want slow life, was created in Tokyo: a convenience store open 24 hours a day.

Normally, this kind of store sells fast food and industrial products (ready made lunch, salad, snacks, noodles, magazines, drinks and medicines.) In this new store, called “natural lawson & food kurkku”, fresh vegetables, fruits, meat and fish are sold. Everything is organic, coming directly from farmers. The staff makes a selection of products based on taste and quality, telling customers where it comes from and how it was made.

They got great Japanese wines, and next to the registration, you can buy brown rice by measure. In the basement of the shop,  burgers and wine are served.Kurkku is a project runs by musicians, who want to connect producers/farmers with consumers to create a better life and future.

They have already opened 3 restaurants in Tokyo offering wonderful organic food. For this new shop, they want  to combine quality of slow food and fast way to serve it.

The shop is located in Harajuku and during lunch time you can see fashionable young people: lot of fashion designers, hair stylists, shop owners… all coming to have a great slow food lunch in a short time.

That’s exactly what’s nice there : they don’t deny the convenience of fast store but instead, they try to create a new speed, just between fast and slow.

Kaori Leyasu

www.kurkku.jp

Daniel is studying at the Design Academy in Eindhoven.

« Nature’s supremely perfect imperfection: an endless source of inspiration, continuous source of motivation and tantalizing source of questions.

Massproduction and throwaway society. Superficial lifestyles. Desensitization. I wish for sensitivity, reduction and haptics, objects that are worthwhile for their own sake and last.
What if the object and its very specific qualities developed from a research into natural organisms define the function and not the function the object?
…I think, work and observe trying to give dimension to my wonderings, thoughts and wishes. »

Cabinet for a tree. A piece of furniture that shows ist uniqueness and 3-dimensionality of it’s origin: wood which doesn’t need to be cut in blocks but that already has its own shape language.

Within a yarn. An experimental research on textile and an old technique called « trimming » resulted in various sculptural textile objects for the architectural space. A collaboration with Dienke Dekker  and Philipp Weber .

daniel-costa.com

Ecovative has developed the worlds first materials made from… mushrooms! These eco-friendly, high performance materials are renewable and compostable.Ecovative don’t manufacture these materials, they grow them.

Today, this young company is producing packaging called EcoCradle® Mushroom™ Packaging. Great for replacing materials made of  extruded polystyrene foam  which aren’t eco-friendly.

EcoCradle is being used by major international companies selling furniture or technological devices to replace foam packaging.

It’s newest partner is Ford Motors, together they look forward to a fungus-based biodegradable material to be used for car bumpers, doors, and dashboards.

www.ecovativedesign.com 

Jort and Pantoufle are brothers. Bosco is the « shop dog » at Modern Folk Living and welcome every one. Simone got a very special pet: a sheep !

Wollie the cat  loves striped scarf while Bobje the dog  is very chic and  theatrical on a velvet stool. No one can be more relaxed than Indy, the sleeping brown labrador. Enjoy!