collaboration

What happens when Western and African cultures meet in a Victorian warehouse in central London? The Double Club, Carsten Höller's latest art project. Backed by Fondazione Prada and directed by Jan Kennedy, the temporary space offers a unique approach to entertainment and hospitality with a restaurant, bar, and disco that are equal parts Western cool and Congolese hot—but never a lukewarm fusion. In practice, that makes for deliciously bifurcated meals: diners at the Double Club restaurant can choose from parallel menus (family-style Congolese dishes or bistro classics) in a room that is a cultural checkerboard, with dark African hardwood and humble plastic tables alternating with French brasserie tiling and supersleek Breeding Tables by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram, who led the design of the project's "Western side." Hungry for a wild boar terrine served on a Congolese tablecloth, a goat brochette fresh from the oil drum barbeque, or just a night of Ndombolo dance hits? Stop in soon, as the cultural coexistence ends July 11.

We still curse the sense of fiscal responsibility that kept us from purchasing those splendid Jeff Koons-printed frocks that Stella McCartney-showed for spring 2006. Now older, wiser, and able to subsist for weeks on a family-size bag of mixed nuts from the dollar store, we're not about to let her latest art-tastic collaboration pass us by. Famed artist and designer Peter Blake (or as we call him, "Sir Peter") has created a print for McCartney that appears exclusively on a summer capsule collection she designed for high fashion e-tailer net-a-porter. As you might recall, Blake designed an album cover for a band in which McCartney's father played.

The Blake-designed cloud print appears on a breezy silk jersey dress and shirt as well as beachy accessories such as strappy espadrilles and a canvas bag. There's also a cloudy t-shirt (organic cotton, of course) and a coordinating pair of dip-dyed skinny jeans. From a distance, Blake's motif smacks of Super Mario Bros., while up close it conjures the Benday-dotted skies of Roy Lichtenstein. In fact, this is Blake's first go at clouds. "I've avoided them. They're difficult," Blake told McCartney in a conversation taped in his London studio and posted on net-a-porter. "Most of my paintings have a clear sky, oddly enough, so when you asked me to do it, instantly I thought of [British painter John] Constable. I researched Constable's clouds." McCartney considers the collaboration a success. "What I love is the print is quite bold and it's quite a statement, and yet I think it's very approachable still, which is kind of quite hard to achieve," she tells Blake. "Well done." Quite.

Previously on UnBeige:

Just in time for the release of Gloria Vanderbilt's steamy novel about the widow of a Frank Lloyd Wright-like architect (warning: it involves a discovered cache of letters wrapped with a magenta ribbon), the Guggenheim today launched an online forum that will address the subject of how design can enhance or detract from everyday life. "Between the Over- and Underdesigned," which runs through July 2 on the museum's website, is the first in a series of moderated online discussions on the arts, architecture, and design. Leading the inaugural forum is journalist and critic Aric Chen, who is virtually joined by panelists Sarah Herda, executive director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; Arjo Klamer, professor of the economics of art and culture at Erasmus University in Rotterdam; Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum; and David van der Leer, assistant curator of architecture and design at the Guggenheim. The forum encourages visitors from around the world to submit comments and questions for consideration by the panelists and to participate in two live chat sessions scheduled for this Thursday (with Chen) and next Tuesday (with van der Leer). Lupton has already gotten things off to a rousing start:

Imagine walking into a brand-new public building—let's say it's a museum, a campus student center, or a mental-health clinic. Every detail has been designed, from the drop ceiling to the polished floors. But taped to the security desk is a paper sign, printed out in all-caps Times Roman, that says Restrooms Are Downstairs in the Basement Behind the Boiler Room or Don't Even Think About Asking Me Where the Elevator Is. These homemade signs boil over with irritation, directed at a clueless public who don't know how the building works. What's happening here is not a failure of the public, however, but a failure of design.

Designing children's clothing seems a natural move for Stella McCartney: fashion mogul, mother, and famed "child of." With a slew of successful collaborations (Adidas, LeSportsac, H&M) under her faux leather belt, McCartney has just inked a deal to create a collection of childrenswear for Gap, which eschews articles both definite and indefinite. Expected to launch in November, the limited edition collection will be carried in select GapKids and babyGap stores in the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, and Japan, as well as online in the U.S., according to a press release issued today by Gap Inc. So can we expect impossibly cool, dusky-hued separates for the littlest fashionistas? All we know is that they'll be affordable. "For years now I've wanted to create a collection for kids, it's something I've often been asked about," said McCartney. "I believe that kids clothing should be more accessibly priced, which is particularly important at the moment given the current climate. It's really exciting for us to do a boys and girls collection for the first time."

Today is Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday, and while we've been busy transforming a tower of fondant and Heath bars into an elaborate Fallingwater-themed cake, New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is celebrating the 142nd anniversary of Wright's birth with a global design contest. The Guggenheim has teamed with Google (a match-up that we can't help but refer to as "Googlenheim") for today's launch of the Design It: Shelter Competition, which invites amateur and professional designers to use Google Earth and Google SketchUp application to create and submit designs for virtual 3-D shelters for a location of their choice anywhere on Earth (anywhere? anywhere!). Submissions will be accepted through August 23. Two prize winners (one will be chosen by a jury that includes architect Neil Denari and Pentagram's Lisa Strausfeld, the other by public voting on ten finalists selected by students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture) will be announced on October 21, the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum's opening. Our advice? Get inspired by visiting the Guggenheim's stellar "Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward" exhibition and then head to the museum's Sackler Center for a companion exhibition of shelters designed, built, and lived in over the past seven decades by students of Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Arizona and Wisconsin.

Tel Aviv-born, Eindhoven-educated, and New York-based Dror Benshetrit is showing off his Isaac Mizrahi-style high/low range. After making a splash at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair with his crowd-pleasing crumpled felt peacock chair for Cappellini, the designer and founder of Studio Dror this month sees the launch of his line of affordable homegoods for Target. The limited-edition "Dror for Target" range includes bedding, decorative accessories, and stationery in a palette of brown, raspberry, plum, and aqua. Among the items that caught our eye? A modular shelving system (pictured above) that can be configured to fit a range of environments and functions. At $89.99 per set, it's the most expensive item in the 23-product collection, which also includes 99-cent mini-composition books and pillows that flip from abstract patterns to pixellated birds or butterflies, depending on your appetite for fauna and figuration. More Dror-designed Target merch is featured after the jump.

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With sales down nearly 30% in the last quarter, Herman Miller is busy restructuring, consolidating its manufacturing operations, and...diversifying beyond furnishings. The company best known for industrial design classics of yesterday (by the likes of George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames) and today (Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf's Aeron chair) is focused on a new product that you won't be able to see, let alone sit on: Convia, a high-tech wiring system that allows offices, restaurants, and stores to integrate power delivery and save big on electric bills. Developed in consultation with Applied Minds as part of Herman Miller's initiative to explore new lines of business in the wake of the 2001 recession, Convia aims to make traditionally rigid electrical infrastructure flexible. Mina Kimes explains how it works in the current issue of Fortune:

Normally, if an office manager wants to split, say, a conference room into two offices, he has to rip out the walls and hire an electrician to put in new wiring so that each office can control its own lighting. With Convia, the wires running through walls or cubicles are "smart," so no electrician is necessary, just install a switch and point a wand at every lighting fixture you want the switch to control. In a flash the room is divided into two separate circuits.

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Finally, a sink worthy of rinsing the years of dust from your Juicy Salif citrus-squeezer! That's right, Philippe Starck has designed his first kitchen sink—the "Starck K"—for Duravit, the 192-year-old bathroom products company that has collaborated with Starck since 1994. As with every kitchen sink we've ever seen, the Starck K boasts abundant right angles, "creating a sleek, simple rectangle with an all-around rim." Inside that rectangle is a deep sink cleverly connected to a recessed draining area and/or basin to prevent overflow, and the whole thing perfectly accommodates Starck-designed cutting boards and trays. An overhead shot suggests a life spent selecting superior produce and cheerfully preparing elaborate salads. The Starck K is available in various sizes and a selection of colors: white, anthracite, chestnut brown, or pergamon—which is Duravitspeak for a beige hue that smacks of ancient Greece.

And you can tell everybody this is your flavor. A deluge of positive feedback has prompted Ben & Jerry's to bring back the limited-edition ice cream flavor that it created last year to recognize Elton John's first trip to Vermont and to raise money for the Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF). "It's been one of the most amazing things," said co-founder Jerry Greenfield in a press release. "We've seen fans who've been excited before about a flavor and cool partnerships, but this has been something else." Originally available in Ben & Jerry's shops for one week last July, the "Goodbye Yellow Brickle Road" batch is back and will also be available at grocery stores nationwide through the summer. Watch out tiny dancers, because the company describes the flavor as "an outrageous symphony of decadent chocolate ice cream, peanut butter cookie dough, butter brickle, and white chocolate chunks." The expanded partnership will focus on enhancing awareness of EJAF's work, including a membership drive for the foundation. We imagine that Ben & Jerry's list of rejected Elton John flavor concepts includes Berry and the Jets, Levon, and Honky Cat Chunk.

Shoe design agrees with Zaha Hadid. Last year, Brazilian footwear company Melissa debuted strappy, space-age plastic wedges designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect. Now it's onward, to boots! Come September, Lacoste will launch a capsule collection of men's and women's footwear designed in collaboration with Hadid, the architect's office tells us. The final design prototypes (pictured below), which made a splash last fall at London's Frieze Art Fair, will soon go into production.

(Photos: Zaha Hadid Architects)

Digitizing patterned surfaces (crocodile skin, perhaps?) was the starting point for Hadid's design of the calf leather boots, which feature embossed and debossed wave patterns. "The design expression behind the collaboration with Lacoste footwear allows the evolution of dynamic fluid grids," says Hadid. "When wrapped around the shape of a foot, these expand and contract to negotiate and adapt to the body ergonomically. In doing so a landscape emerges, undulating and radiating as it merges seamlessly with the body."

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