Jólan van der Wiel‘s “Gravity” stools, tables, candleholders, and bowls appear ripped from an enchanted sea floor–or are they Magic Rocks run amok? At once otherworldly and organic, these moody forms are in fact the products of the Amsterdam-based designer’s “Gravity Tool,” an innovation that earned him top honors at last year’s DMY International Design Festival Berlin. “I admire objects that show an experimental discovery, translated to a functional design,” explains van der Wiel. “It is my belief that developing new ‘tools’ is an important means of inspiration and allows new forms to take shape.” Now, just two years out of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy designLAB, he has a “Gravity stool” at London’s Design Museum, as part of the “Designs of the Year 2013” show that opens today. This short film by Miranda Stet provides a luscious look at van der Wiel’s unique process, which is something of a team effort among opposing magnetic fields, the forces of gravity, two-component plastics, and good old-fashioned elbow grease.

Looks from Vera Wang’s fall 2013 ready-to-wear collection.

“I try on everything I make….I think when I design ready-to-wear, I’m trying to channel myself. Women designers, of whom I admire so many, have a very special relationship with designing for other women. It’s a very personal journey. You can’t help but bring yourself into it. So if you’re feeling for a certain silhouette–if you’re feeling for a certain dress length or you’re feeling for black or you’re feeling for color–that will affect your work as a woman designer. And it will affect how you feel about other women. So in this particular case as a designer, you’re really channeling your own creativity and trying to bring it to women. When you dress a women for a red carpet event, like the Oscars, or you dress a woman for a wedding, it’s about them. It’s a hundred percent, for me, about the client. It’s about channeling who she is.”

-Vera Wang in a recent conversation with Fern Mallis at New York’s 92nd Street Y

Looks from the fall 2013 Mary Katrantzou collection, shown Sunday in London.

“All my prints are constructed through digital technology. Studying architecture made me very aware of the digital construction and technicality of engineering in design, which has really informed my design direction with prints. In my design and thought process, I’m constantly building from the foundations of my initial inspiration, and I often use architectural methods of accumulating designs at phase one. Engineering my prints is very mathematical and technical, and it allows me to envision a 3D shape around the body, sculpting a second skin for a woman. Digital print allows me to experiment with print in a way that fine art and other methods could not. It opens up a huge spectrum for possibility. I can create possibility out of impossibility, surrealism out of realism and vice versa for both.”

-Fashion designer Mary Katrantzou (who studied architecture at RISD before transferring to Central Saint Martins) in an interview with Nordstrom’s Qianna Smith

The Azzedine Alaia boutique in Paris.

“It’s one of my little marble fantasies. I started used marble a lot in 2005, 2006–in fact, Azzedine’s shop was one of the first things I did. At the time, no one was really using marble in a contemporary way. Marble was considered a really old-fashioned material. I’d picked up a little bit of experience over the years from going to Ferrara in Italy where they carve a lot of marble. People are always looking for new materials and new technology, like brand new high-tech things, but they don’t really exist. All of the materials that we think of as new materials have actually been around for at least ten or fifteen years. Doing something new is really about re-appropriating something, using a new material in a different context. As a designer you can only really do that if you work in different disciplines. That’s why I like doing all these different things and learning about different things. I designed a range of luggage for Samsonite ages ago, and the technology I used was something I had learned from designing trainers for Nike.”

-Marc Newson, interviewed by Jonathan Ive in i-D magazine

Terms such as “book” or “graphic novel” fail miserably at labeling the latest creation of cartoonist-cum-wizard Chris Ware. His Building Stories (Pantheon) may well be a high watermark for print culture: open the boardgame-sized box to discover 14 discrete books, booklets, magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets that comprise an infinitely satisfying choose-your-own-graphic-adventure. Meanwhile, having spent twelve years working sporadically on the project, Ware is the picture of modesty, describing Building Stories as “follow[ing] the inhabitants of a three-flat Chicago apartment house: a 30-year-old woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple (possibly married) who wonder if they can bear each other’s company for another minute; and finally, an elderly woman who never married and is the building’s landlady.” Trust us, there’s more. Last week, Ware joined fellow story builder Zadie Smith, whose latest novel is NW (Penguin), for a conversation at the New York Public Library. Pour yourself a fresh cup of nog, sit back, and enjoy the below audio recording of the two discussing the role of space and place in their work.

Ori Gersht, “Pomegranate” (2006). Courtesy Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art.

“‘Pomegranate,’ started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism. A [Juan] Sánchez Cotán painting and [Harold] Edgerton photograph then emerged from my unconscious. The final film is a fusion of these three elements.

For the production, I worked with a film-commissioning group in London called Film and Video Umbrella. With their production team, I constructed a wooden window in the studio and hung the fruit and vegetables from the top frame. When we lit the vegetables, very simply, and looked at them through the camera lens, the transformation was instant: they looked very painterly. For the shooting, we consulted with a special-effects expert, who constructed a special gun and devised a mechanism that allowed us to control the speed of the pellets.

After the filming, I realized that the fusion between the Cotán painting and the Edgerton photograph was also the fusion between opposite ends of a spectrum. Cotán was attempting to achieve compositional equilibrium through painstaking mathematical calculations, while Edgarton, who was trying to freeze time, captured a perfectly balanced composition from an event that happened in a flash, conceivable only through the mediation of the camera.”

-Photographer and artist Ori Gersht in an interview with Ronni Baer that appears in the catalogue for “History Repeating,” the first full survey of Gersht’s work. The exhibition is on view through January 6 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

“A home fragrance is first and foremost a good smell. It doesn’t have to mingle with the skin. Furthermore, it doesn’t have to last and evolve in the same way. Home fragrances are more one dimensional. The most technical aspect of working on a home fragrance is to develop a perfume that marries itself well with the supporting base, for instance the wax.

In other words, when working on a home fragrance one just concentrates on beauty and on comfort which is simpler than doing a perfume. However, evaluating candles or perfume guns is a tedious and long process. You can only smell one at a time (or one per room), rather than smelling four of them on your arms!” -Perfumer Frédéric Malle

Whether at the slap-happy climax of a local news broadcast, amidst a sea of chuckles on a morning show, or via the unceasing stream of “Oddly Enough” clickbait, it has been all but impossible to escape the story (and the cringeworthy evidence, pictured above) of the botched restoration of a 19th century fresco that was once the pride of the Sanctuary of Mercy Church near Zaragoza, Spain. The world pounced on the freshly disfigured Jesus Christ in “Ecce Homo,” once so skillfully rendered by Elias Garcia Martinez, after its fumbled “restoration” at the hands of a well-meaning parishioner. BBC Europe correspondent Christian Fraser compared the ruined portrait to “a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic,” and it wasn’t long before the swollen Christ emerged on Twitter (“Washed my head! Big mistake!” tweeted @FrescoJesus) and spawned a Tumblr: the Beast-Jesus Restoration Society. But leave it to Stephen Colbert to offer a fresh take on the story. In a recent segment, he turned the focus on the 80-year-old restorer, one Cecilia Gimenez, naming her his “Alpha Dog of the Week” (past honorees include JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater, Silvio Berlusconi, and Domino’s Pizza) in spectacular narrative fashion:

“Painting under observation is worse than being in the hospital,” Gerhard Richter tells filmmaker Corinna Belz, shortly after she has installed herself and a small crew in his bright, clutter-free studio outside Cologne, Germany. Fortunately, the artist agreed to endure several months of scrutiny as he went about what he describes to Belz as “a secretive business”: painting a series of giant abstracts in the spring and summer of 2009. The result is Gerhard Richter Painting, a mesmerizing documentary that made its U.S. debut last December at Art Basel Miami Beach and is out this week on DVD. “My interest was to show Richter at work,” says Belz, who first convinced the artist to appear on camera in her 2007 short, Gerhard Richter’s Window (fingers crossed for a trilogy). “How he moves, how he applies paint to canvas, his compelling squeegee technique.”
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“Years ago I was sitting in a rather boring faculty meeting at Princeton. To pass the time, I pulled out my pad to start drawing a plan, probably of some building I was designing. An equally bored colleague was watching me, amused. I came to a point of indecision and passed the pad to him. He added a few lines and passed it back.

The game was on. Back and forth we went, drawing five lines each, then four and so on.

While we didn’t speak, we were engaged in a dialogue over this plan and we understood each other perfectly. I suppose that you could have a debate like that with words, but it would have been entirely different. Our game was not about winners or losers, but about a shared language. We had a genuine love for making this drawing. There was an insistence, by the act of drawing, that the composition would stay open, that the speculation would stay ‘wet’ in the sense of a painting. Our plan was without scale and we could as easily have been drawing a domestic building as a portion of a city. It was the act of drawing that allowed us to speculate.”

-Michael Graves in his recent New York Times op-ed, “Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing”