Urban Planning Blog

I love IKEA’s simple and elegant designs (although I hate their cashiers). What better way to get the word out than to pimp out your local transit train?

Public restrooms/bathrooms/toilets need not be bare, monotonous, and dull. Here are some of the more unique ones. No foot-tapping permitted in these though.

Now if I had one of these, I would grow roots in this thing. Really innovative [via Boing Boing].

Hackers are not always bad especially when they are called Ikea Hackers. These funky DIY-ers create innovative and eclectic furniture mods from existing models and since Ikea allows you to play around and assemble your own stuff, they couldn’t have looked too far for inspiration [via].

Shake hands?

An interior design competition results are always fun to browse through. A competition conducted by FabulousStationary and decor8 brought forth more than hundred joy-inducing entries [before and after pictures provided].

For a while I lived with a ‘rocker’ roommate who had drums, electric guitar, and the works and regularly practiced his art. He was considerate enough to pipe down when I asked him to and I actually even enjoyed some of it. But I wasn’t sure our neighbors appreciated it much. Heck, we even got the cops sent to us once for a noise violation. So how do we go about avoiding that?

Alexander  Gelfand and his percussion-crazy wife found themselves in a similar predicament when neighbors vowed to boot them out of their New York apartment. But they decided to be proactive and soundproof their apartment. They sure have some interesting suggestions and I had never heard of green glue or mass-loaded vinyl before. But of course, it didn’t come cheap:

Our total labor and sheetrock costs were around $4,000, with an additional $3,000 for materials. (We also invested $1,000 to have fiberglass insulation pumped into our walls to give the apartment a smidgen of sound isolation before the real work began.)

So unless you are really serious about your percussion skills, it may not be worthwhile. And of course, your spouse must love it too. There is no way to soundproof a marriage.

Inspired by Roger Ulrich’s findings on health care design that shed light on therapeutic landscape i.e. patients whose windows looked onto a green landscape had shorter postoperative stays, took fewer pain medications, and received fewer negative medical evaluations, Reg Adkins shares similar insights on ‘nudging’ your office:

• Choose the corner that is furthest from your entrance for your desk. You will then be in a position to control your work which enhances your confidence.
• Face in the general direction of the door when conducting business. This symbolism will help you remain open to possibilities.
• Mirrors create distraction and anxiety. They leach away your control of the environment. Keep them away from your work area.

Read the rest at Adkins’s Elemental Truth. Now I would slightly wary of following these guidelines without completely understanding their significance. Vaastu Shastra, the ancient Indian architecture guide has also been reduced to a similar set of specific guidelines that emphasize more on spirituality instead of climate orientation that it was initially based on. The effects of therapeutic landscape are psychological as well as elemental in terms of environment and climate (hence the advice to go live seaside for some ailments). I hope such guidelines do not cross the bridge to blind faith and remain rooted to factual findings as Ulrich did.

It has been a while since I roamed the aisles of interior design trade shows in Mumbai first organized by Inside/Outside Magazine at the Nehru Center or NSCI grounds. Even before I went to architecture school where it was almost incumbent upon us to attend such shows to collect reference material for our files, I used to attend these shows with my dad. Often strapped for time, we would split up and I would collect brochures and catalogues of products he hadn’t time to look at which he would carefully categorize and file away for future use.

The advent of the web may have made this exercise redundant but it was always fun to browse through latest products in one huge place. You almost had instant ideas for your designs that you couldn’t wait to implement or sometimes saw an innovative product that redefined your perspective for treating interior space; be it a new material or bathroom fittings. But the best display was always by light equipment and fittings. In this light (no pun intended), I was asked to review the website for Starry Nights Lights. Note that this is a part of ReviewMe’s Paid Reviews for this blog. Remember that this is not a review of their products which I haven’t sampled but that of their website.

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…at the Propeller Island City Lodge.

[tags]hotel, design, Propeller Island City Lodge[/tags]

I have always loved abstract and unsymmetrical furniture designs. I had designed a bookshelf at home using parts of a old dismantled wallshelf but it wasn’t half as good as the ones featured at Tangram.

Technorati Tags: tangram, bookcase, furniture, art, abstract, design

Google’s headquarters or fondly known as Googleplex required an unique design brief. It needed to “balance its utopian desire for transparency with its very real need for privacy.” L.A.-based design firm Clive Wilkinson Architects negotiated a steep learning curve to understand the way Google works and then design spaces to optimize their performance. The design was a mix of open spaces that we so identify with Google and enclosed private spaces that engineers need to code furiously.

However, after spending time with Page and Brin and the Google engineers that would occupy the building, Wilkinson realized that he was dealing with a distinctly different species of personnel. “We’ve always worked with people who were a mix of left and right brain,” Wilkinson says, “but engineers are very left brain. They might work in teams, but they require a high level of concentration; they sit in front of the computer and crunch formulas in the most extraordinary way.”

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How to make your parquet flooring a little – heck, a lot – more interesting.