Royal Caribbean’s Radiance of the Seas has a gyroscopically stabilized pool table.

That is pretty cool.

Designed by Naoki Hirakoso and Takamitsu Kitahara, the Kai Table has multiple internal compartments, but with the twist that each of them takes the form of a hidden compartment as seen on other furniture.

I’ve always been a sucker for hidden compartments, and although the location of the compartments are quite obvious given the size of the piece, it still presses all the right buttons for me.

Architecture firm Tetuo Kondo, installed A Path in a Forest, elevated walkway through part of the Kadriorg forest located inside Tallinn, Estonia. 95 meters long, it is supported solely through straps fastened to the trees. It was created as part of LIFT 11, a “festival of urban installations.”

At first I thought this was a wooden walkway, but it looks like it’s entirely metal, which is kind of disappointing, but probably inevitable because of weight restrictions. It is also very reminiscent of their 2010 Venice installation, Cloudscapes, only outdoors.

Designed for Clarke Hopkins Clarke, John Leung designed “Magic Carp-pet“, a rug and table combination that uses lenticular printing to give the illusion of swimming fish viewers look at the table from various angles.

Video after the jump.

The solar power and auto-on features of the Kimono Lantern reminded me pummpers and and SolarRobotic’s PumLantern, but much less spastic. (See video after the jump.)

The PumLantern’s case is clearly inspired by Japanese tatami lamps, but with stencils to break up the light. I recently saw another lamp that did something similar. I can’t say I approve of the choice of stencils, but I do like the idea of shapes covering the individual panels of the lamp.

Hanger One is being dismantled. Hanger One has been in danger of being torn down for years. It’s walls are contain PCBs. Save Hanger One, has been trying get NASA to reskin the hanger instead of tearing it down. NASA Ames now wants to use it for airship research. Federal funds were finally approved to reskin the hanger, until the House appropriations committee, on recommendation from the NASA Office of the Inspector General, eliminated the $32.8 million to replace the skin. This means PCB walls will be removed, and hanger will probably be torn down.

I say “probably,” because at the last minute the House changed the appropriations bill language to allow NASA to reapply for funds to reskin the hanger in the future. It is supposed to be painted with a sealant to protected it while NASA reapplies for funds.

Personally, I suspect it will be torn down in three years.

Previously.

You may have heard of the Chinese knock off of Disneyland, or maybe you heard of the knockoff Hallstatt, Austria. Well,you can get a condo at Eastern Santa Clara in Dalian China. (Now with Stanford!)

Dalian has a software park on the edge of town where the city is trying to attract various high tech firms to locate offices. The newest housing developments in that area are named after cities in Silicon Valley. Eastern Santa Clara, and Eastern San Jose being the two newest.

The Eastern Santa Clara development is in partnership with Panasonic. According to Panasonic’s website, the condos are designed to be energy efficient with LED lighting and high efficiency home appliances. However, like all other housing in China, I suspect that the buildings are a series of poured concrete buildings with solid concrete walls. Which is a bit odd coming from an American perspective, and makes personalizing the units (e.g. hanging pictures) a quite a bit more complicated.

While reading about secretary desks, I came across a related type I had never heard of before, the mechanical desk. A fad of the 1700s, these desks featured mechanisms that hid shelves and surfaces when not in use. It’s a real shame that these didn’t make a comeback when computers became widespread. Computer desks were dreadful. While hiding a 21 inch CRT that weight 150 pounds wouldn’t have been easy, the idea hiding materials when they are not needed appeals to me.

A modern interpretation of the mechanical desk is the Crescendo C2 from Stilvoll. I like how it looks like a drafting table, but expands to reveal bins. Of course, the role these bins play could have been solved with a traditional divided drawer. Still, this got me thinking.

I’ve considered getting a desktop computer, yet I don’t know what I would do with it. At work I love my MacPro and its three 24 inch LCDs, and part of me would love to have that setup at home, even if I don’t do much coding at home. If I ever took to telecommuting regularly, I’d need such a setup, including the Steelcase Leap chair, as even a 17 inch laptop just doesn’t quite cut it. Assuming I had desktop computer with multiple displays, I wouldn’t like having the monitors dominating the desk space. Yes, LCDs have a much smaller footprint than CRTs, but they still are visually imposing. Sometimes that’s what you want, but sometimes it’s not. A mechanical desk that could retract the screens would be great. Even better, if the desktop could expand. Perhaps a second pullout spring loaded leaf, kind of the like the Crescendo C2, but with a pushdown panel that has the screens mounted on swivel arms. Fold up the monitors and push them down into a little protected area behind the desk. Hide the tower and assorted wires in pedestal, and put file drawers in the other pedestal. (Personally, I prefer desks with legs rather than pedestals, but such a desk would look weird with big solid front on it.)

This is something I’m going to need to draw out.

Writing about traveling bookcases and other dead media storage solutions got me thinking about other furniture that always seems pregnant with possibilities, yet just isn’t practical anymore: secretary desks, and travel desks.

I love all the cubby holes in the secretary desks. Holes full of letters, bills, and checks. Drawers containing pens, ink wells, and seals. All of it lockable. It’s very structure conveys “Important stuff happens here.” Need to do serious work on the go? Get a travel desk, the attache case’s awkward cousin.

While tasks like answering correspondence and paying bills have remained, the form they have taken has changed. No longer are we physically shuffling atoms around, but rather simply information. Email, online banking, and all the rest has replaced paper. Similarly, we no longer need travel desks, as our laptop contains everything that the desk, could and much more. Add a network connection, and almost nothing is out of reach. It seems increasing clear that physical media is dying. Newspaper circulation is down. CD sales have fallen. DVD and bluray are now seen as a transition technology as streaming is becoming increasingly widespread. (Thus Netflix’s price hike.) With the advent of eReaders and tablet computers, even the books and magazines seems in danger.

We’re losing the need to deal with physical items, and as a side effect, it seems like we’re losing an ability to signal our tastes; which is ironic, given how personalization and sharing has taken over the web. When visiting someone’s home, we would occupy ourselves by perusing each other’s bookshelves. The books, CDs, and DVDs were essentially the tag clouds of the physical world. They weren’t there just for storage, but also to signal our personality. Our collections not only express how we see ourselves, but also how we want others to see us.

Case in point: My CD collection. For years, I my CD collection was “abnormally” small. I guess I trace it back to when my parents gave me a CD player for Christmas in high school, but no CDs. (My mom rightly said that was because she had no idea what CD I would want.) I eventually went out and bought – for reasons I can not explain other than I was a 14 year old in 1991 that listened to the same Southern Illinois top 40 station he grew up with – Boys-II-Men’s Cooleyhighharmony. (This along with three other CDs I would eventually disown by removing them from my collection.) I had no idea about music, and being an adolescent, I aped my friends’ tastes. By the time I went to college, I believe I had twelve CDs, only about nine of them did I take to college. (The afore mentioned Colleyhighharmony was not one of them.) I tended to avoid purchasing CDs because they seemed expensive, and I got burned by a bad purchase or two. As a a result, my collection was heavily weighted towards They Might Be Giants and R.E.M., because that’s what my friends listened to. In one since it was outsider music, since no one at Z-R besides Billy listened to that, yet I was buying it to fit in. I didn’t always care for the music in my collection. I enjoyed it, but I was embarrassed by wanting something harder and louder. None of my friends owned Nevermind.

I always knew my collection was small, but going to college and seeing people bring in box containing a hundred CDs just made it clear just how small my collection was. I felt inadequate. Like I missed out something important.

I decided to correct this. By the end of college, I think I doubled my collection to about 20, and my tastes expanded to include Nine Inch Nails. As my friend John can attest to, this was due to conscious effort to change my musical tastes to fit in. I wanted “CS music,” and Nine Inch Nails and Ministry were it. When I got my first job, I decided to greatly expanded my CD collection. My goal was 100 CDs. I thought only then would I have I a collection that was a socially acceptable size. I went expanding my collection with gusto. Every week I went to the Arlington Height’s Best Buy on Palatine Road and would buy three CDs. (I think there was a deal when you bought at three.) I bought the entire Nirvana catalog. I bought the entire Alice in Chains catalog. I bought and bought. Anything that struck me as interesting at the time I bought. Grunge died sometime just prior to the turn of the 21st century, and so I experimented with the early aughts fad of electronica. Aphex Twin and Massive Attack being two of the better pickups from that era. When I went to grad school, I turned to used CDs to feed my habit. (I can thank P-Mac in Carbondale for my Jesus and Mary Chain collection.) During this time, even as I crossed the 200 mark, I still felt like my collection was small. It wasn’t until someone saw it and said, “You have a lot of CDs,” did I realize that my collection was now kind of large. It is about 240 now. (During the height of my buying spree, I could have told you exactly how large it was.) It’s so large, that when I transferred it from shelves to the media cabinet it nearly filled it to capacity. (Ironically, the whole point to the media cabinet was that I had outgrown the need to display – and thus be validated by – a wall of plastic disks.)

Prior to my move to California, I ripped the entire collection to MP3 and carried it in a 250 GB external hard drive. That’s when the advantages of leaving behind a physical form really came clear to me. I’ve bought some CDs since then. Maybe 10 or 15 (The last CD I bought was the Social Network’s soundtrack.) but mostly I’ve downloaded music. Having rooms devoted to collections no longer interest me. (Thus the desire to having a closable cabinet for the CDs.) Yet, I miss the social signals. Sean Bonner seems to have had a similar experience with books.

But what replaces the bookshelf? The tablet computer on the coffee table? No. Picking up, and using another’s device without permission is too much. The bookshelf was passive. Guests couldn’t help but look at it, as it was part of the environment. We still have the need / desire to send social signals passively. Picking an item out of the displayed media collection allowed one to immediately break the ice with strangers. It solved the chit-chat problem. If our bookshelves are empty, what fills this need? A tag cloud and digital slide show on a framed tablet, ala iPad + Velcro = ♥? A wunderkammer full of physical objects that can’t be digitized? I don’t know, but having a terabyte external drive hooked up to my TV, and Netflix queue just doesn’t cut it.

It seems like there’s a need for furniture to update to our nonphysical needs. Perhaps the furniture needs to integrate with our digital world. Not like those atrocious “computer desks” of yesteryear, but maybe something else.

This huanghuali wood traveling bookcase (a “tushu shinggui” if you want t be)
sold recently for $47,000 at Christie’s. It’s picture had been bouncing around the blogosphere for a while, complete with comments about how beautiful it is. The stain really brings out the wood grain, and it look like the doors were cut from the same board. Which isn’t surprising, given that it dates from the early 1600s. It’s a very simple piece, with very little ornamental woodwork. The metal work is also very simple, but together they make a very elegant package. Unfortunately, there are no photos online of the box’s interior. Inside it contains two small drawers (for writing instruments?) and a single shelf.

When I first saw the bookcase, I immediately thought of another traveling bookcase, the USLHE traveling library. Both are similar in both form and function. (The tushu shinggui is undoubtedly better looking though.) The USLHE libraries were government owned crates of books that were issued on a rotating basis to lighthouses. Every so many weeks, when the lighthouse was resupplied, the libraries would be switched.

Both of these bookcases remind me of my media cabinet. Again, it’s the general shape. Of course my cabinet was designed to hold CDs and DVDs, not books, nor was it it meant to be particularly mobile. Still, they both store media compactly behind closed doors.

Previously. Previously.