Retromobile Officie, PARIS — Once a year, the city of Paris sets aside its hatred of cars and welcomes enthusiasts from around the world to the Retromobile show. First held as a small gathering in 1976, Retromobile has become one of the largest classic-car-only events on the planet. There’s something there for everyone, whether you’re looking to buy a classic Ferrari, a model of one, an ignition coil for a Fiat 126, or just about anything in between.
Retromobile takes place in the heart of the French capital, in the same venue as the Paris auto show, and its massive size attracts big-name vendors and exhibitors. It’s one of the few events that draws major manufacturers. Renault traveled to the 2023 edition to celebrate 30 years of the original Twingo, the Italian side of Stellantis showcased what its Heritage Hub’s restoration team is capable of, and the French side of the group displayed several classics from its collection, including a Citroën SM-based prototype built by Michelin to test tires.
FRANCE 24 English (February 7, 2023) – Glaciers are increasingly threatened by climate change. The French Alps are home to more than 4,000 of these fascinating natural monuments, of which 80 to 90 percent are set to disappear by 2100 due to global warming.
Among the most emblematic glaciers is the Mer de Glace, or Sea of Ice, which retreats a little more each year, under the watchful eye of tourists. Meanwhile, the Bossons glacier reveals aircraft debris that was thought to be lost forever. FRANCE 24 went to meet some of the guardians of the glaciers.
Chad Gerber (February 6, 2023) – The Arctic Circle: a place so far from our reality, yet so close to our dreams. Fellow filmmaker, Jaxon Roberts, and I spent 10 days exploring the north of Scandinavian countries: Norway, Sweden and Finland. Met with freezing blizzards, magical wildlife, and untouched landscapes as far as the eye can see – it’s safe to say it was a life -changing experience.
CBS Sunday Morning (February 5, 2023) – A new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art provides a window into Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and his view of urban life. “Edward Hopper’s New York” features about 200 works that capture a changing and changeless city, and illuminate the inner lives of city dwellers. Correspondent Serena Altschul reports.
ArchiPro – This unique beach house was thoughtfully inspired by Medlands Beach where it is situated on Aotea (Great Barrier Island).
The long curving shoreline is punctuated by a large, weathered rock to its centre. This informed the architectural composition with a low, long, horizontal form complemented by a taller, denser, two-level element to the centre. It is a confident design with a direct relationship to site and context.
This metaphorical design response flowed through to the materials, with textured, “sandy” plaster and light-coloured timber for the interior walls, textured bronze fixtures (cast in sand) and vertical cedar cladding, mimicking the bullrush reeds in the adjacent wetland.
Insider Business (February 4, 2023) – Handmade bespoke dress shoes take months to make. Shoemakers transform rough measurements of a customer’s feet into a one-of-a-kind shoe. One pair can cost over £5,000.
London has been a hub for shoemaking for centuries, and while the industry has shrunk over time, an increase in demand from Japan and the US has helped to reignite interest in this craft. So, why would someone buy bespoke dress shoes? And what makes them so expensive?
DW Travel – Discover Teyuna! It’s older than Machu Picchu and not quite as famous. Known in Spanish as Ciudad Perdida or the “Lost City,” it is located deep in the jungles of northern Colombia. You need weather-proof clothing and sturdy shoes for the four-day trek to the archeological site.
Our reporter Joel Dullroy is making the adventurous journey to the Lost City. Join him on his trip! Background: The ruins of Teyuna were once settled by the indigenous Tairona people. Their descendants still live today in the Wika and Kogi tribes in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
Sotheby’s (February 3, 2023) – Reminiscent of a landscape, or the strata of a Monet waterlily painting, the horizontal swathes of paint migrate across Abstraktes Bild in wave like-motion across the breadth of the canvas. Texture, colour and structure are here deployed with spectacular force, with the gliding scrape of the squeegee revealing the kaleidoscopic architectural structure of the artist’s underpainting.
It is a masterpiece created during the critical year of 1986, which saw the artist’s first large-scale touring retrospective and was also the year in which Richter first took up the squeegee as his principal compositional tool. He has only ever produced 24 Abstraktes Bild of this magnitude (with a width greater than 380 cm), of which half of these reside in museum collections across the globe.
Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany. Throughout his career, Richter has negotiated the frontier between photography and painting, captivated by the way in which these two seemingly opposing practices speak to and challenge one another. From exuberant canvases rendered with a squeegee and acerbic color charts to paintings of photographic detail and close-ups of a single brushstroke, Richter moves effortlessly between the two mediums, reveling in the complexity of their relationship, while never asserting one above the other.
0:15 This AI robot is revolutionizing farming – The robot can identify weeds and crops at rate of 20 plants a second. The robot then delivers either weedkiller or fertilizer directly to individual plants to an accuracy of within 1mm. It can treat up to 500,000 plants per hour. The robot was invented by US firm Verdant Robotics.
1:24 This company cancelled all internal meetings – In January, e-commerce platform Shopify cancelled all regular meetings with 3 people or more and imposed a 2-week window before staff could schedule anything new. It also permanently banned meetings on Wednesdays and limited large meetings to a strict window on Thursdays. More organizations are trying a ‘meeting reset’, from Dropbox to Asana and Zapier. But why – and could your organization try it too?
3:00 How to build a thriving workplace – Businesses often ask staff why they resign. So why not ask why they’re joining or staying? “Why would you wait until people have already committed to walk out the door to say, ‘If only I had a time machine, I would go back to the past and convince you to stay’? What I would much rather see employers do are entry interviews and stay interviews. Entry interview is just asking the same questions you would normally pose at exit at the beginning of the employment relationship: Why are you here? What are you hoping to learn? Right. What are some of the best projects you’ve worked on? Tell me about the worst boss you’ve ever had so we can try to emulate the good and avoid the bad.”
5:22 ChatGPT is already being used for scientific research – ChatGPT launched to the public in November 2022. It gives in-depth, natural language answers to prompts, based on what it has learned from a huge database of books and articles. People have been using ChatGPT to perform an impressive range of tasks, from writing university-level essays to debugging code and filling in job applications. It has written fake scientific reports that have fooled scientists and has even been used to write a children’s book.
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The Local Project (February 3, 2023) – One of New Zealand’s best kept secrets, this modern farmhouse sits on a mountainous landscape surrounded by lakes and rivers, allowing the owners to insert themselves into the countryside.
Video timeline:00:00 – Introduction to the Modern Farm House 00:36 – A Mountain Location 01:04 – An All Seasons Site 01:32 – The Layout of the Pavilions 01:58 – The Integration of Farm and Terrace 02:32 – A Unique Brief 03:07 – Designed for Multiple Styles of Occupation 03:47 – The Materials 04:43 – Balancing the Materials 05:13 – Combining Old and New 06:23 – The House from a Distance 06:47 – Getting Better with Age
Following the Australian and New Zealand idea of farmhouse layouts, Patterson Associates has designed Pouaka Waikura as a set of pavilions that faces the Shotover River. Built as small and simple pavilions, the house tour of the modern farmhouse begins from the stone driveway that leads up to the mechanical shed and into the porte cochère. Beyond this are the two main pavilions, the guest house and main house, which have been separated by a wide outdoor space that allows the owners to entertain and connect with the surrounds.
Employing natural materials for the modern farmhouse, Patterson Associates has used Corten steel panels on the exterior, which are left to rust naturally, while waxed black steel, naturally oiled timber and in situ concrete are used on the inside. The materials come together naturally with minimalist detailing. Moreover, the blending of the materials immerses the home into the site with colours of rust, browns, golds and greys, all while the in situ concrete anchors the home into the land.
Patterson Associates uses materials that will patina over time and offer a sense of growth and permanency. Further allowing the owners to connect with their surroundings, the modern farmhouse opens up through bi-folding doors and adds flexible living spaces throughout. Aside from architecture, Patterson Associates contributed interior design, and seamlessly blended personal items from the clients’ existing cottage home with newer colourful and eclectic pieces. In the kitchen the use of waxed black steel panels references the exterior Corten panelling, while Belgium bluestone is used for the benchtops and wall splashbacks, which reference the fingerprinting and natural patina of the black steel.
Additionally, the dark tones frame the large awning windows and offer a view straight down to Shotover River and invite a wealth of light inside the home. The architects have designed Pouaka Waikura with lighting design that helps to open the home up and allow for a greater appreciation of the southern alps and winding rivers. Furthermore, embracing indoor-outdoor living also ensures that the owners can feel a deeper connection to their settings from either inside the modern farmhouse, or by the courtyard and fire space that sits between the pavilions. Encompassing everything that its owners need and more, New Zealand’s best kept secret is a modern farmhouse that uses materials, colours, objects and landscape that will only get better as the years pass by.
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