Barcelona Design Week 2018: Highlights

Exploring the pragmatic and esoteric by reconsidering various approaches to design

Design form Catalonia has an identity rooted both in regional tradition and contemporary icons. Javier Mariscals objects and characters (like Cobi, the 1992 Summer Olympics mascot), Jorge Pensi’s Toledo Stacking Chair, and Rafael Marquina’s Marquina Oil Cruet (apparently one of the most copied design objects in the history of Spanish design) are all of note. These familiar names, along with the future of Catalan design …

Link About It: This Week’s Picks

Antarctica's first-ever Pride celebration, Olafur Eliasson's debut building, underwater data, lawn flamingoes and more

1. Microsoft’s Underwater Data Center One cylinder comprising 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage has been dropped by Microsoft off the coast of Orkney in Scotland. The goal is to see if the tech giant can save energy by cooling in the sea. And the location was chosen as the French-built cylinder will draw power from an undersea cable and the Orkney’s renewable energy …

The Delightful History of the Lawn Flamingo

Don Featherstone might not be a household name, but his life’s work is wildly famous worldwide. Featherstone, just after graduating art school in 1957, created the pink plastic flamingo—undeniably one of the world’s most popular lawn ornaments. Reproduced over 20 million times, Phoenicopterus ruber plasticus (as its creator called it) is more than a kitsch decoration, as Artsy’s Alexxa Gotthardt writes, it’s “a barometer of …