Design Wire June 2021
This summer, Westbrook’s MAST LANDING BREWING COMPANY, whose brightly labeled silver cans are filled with tasty, award-winning beer, will expand to a new 11,000-square-foot space at WS Development’s FREEPORT CROSSING. The new location will cover two floors and will include a tasting room, a pilot brewing facility that will showcase small-batch recipes made and offered exclusively in Freeport, and one of the largest event spaces in the area. A permanent culinary partner (not yet announced at time of publication) will occupy the conjoined kitchen space, and will offer lunch and dinner menus in the tasting room. The brewery is named after Freeport’s Mast Landing neighborhood, where president and CEO Ian Dorsey brewed the first batches in his garage, thus in many ways the expansion is also a return home.
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Want to extend working-from-home to working-from-anywhere? A dreamy option would be the NISSAN’S NV350 CARAVAN OFFICE POD CONCEPT, one of several concept cars Nissan showed at the virtual 2021 TOKYO AUTO SALON. Based on the Nissan NV350 van, the Office Pod version would be retrofitted with a retractable workspace that fits neatly into the back of the van and can also slide out of the back on rollers, perfect for enjoying nature while also keeping productive. The workstation fits a desktop computer and a large office chair—such as the Herman Miller shown here—and the van includes a rooftop deck complete with a large, fold-out sunshade for relaxing before, between, or after working hours.
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In March, the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, T Magazine asked three architects—VINCENT VAN DUYSEN in Antwerp, Belgium, TOSHIKO MORI in New York, and MASSIMILIANO LOCATELLI of Locatelli Partners in Milan—each to design a PAPER HOUSE that could serve as a concept for a postpandemic domestic space, and that anyone with a printer, paper, scissors, and glue can replicate. Van Duysen based his design on his 2011 DC2 Residence in Tielrode, Belgium, a “passive house” that has clear possibilities for mass production. Mori’s is based on a series of buildings she completed in rural Senegal, and like those, her paper house is inspired by the region’s round structures. It features an opening at the apex of the dome that pulls hot air upward and ventilates the interior. The curved shape prevents the sense of isolation caused by separate rooms. Locatelli’s paper house, shown here, is based on a prototype for a 3D-printed, 1,076-square-foot concrete home that he made for the 2018 Salone del Mobile. Made from four pebble-shaped, conjoined modules and able to be erected in less than a week, it could reduce housing costs and provide emergency housing in a crisis. Download a PDF that contains the designs from the New York Times website, and make them for yourself.
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A recent study conducted by ENVIRONMENT AMERICA RESEARCH AND POLICY CENTER and FRONTIER GROUP found that New England has enough offshore wind to generate more than five times its projected electricity needs by 2050, and of those states, Maine has the highest ratio of potential wind power. Executive director of the center HABIB DAGHER told the Bangor Daily News in March, “Harnessing just three percent of the Gulf of Maine’s offshore wind would be enough to fully electrify heating and transportation in Maine.” Governor Janet Mills said that she plans to create the country’s first wind research farm here, 20 to 40 miles offshore, but this received objections from the state’s fishermen. In response, Mills has directed her energy office to review offshore wind regulations, and to ask for input from fishermen about the site of the proposed array.
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For their third-year design project at L’ÉCOLE DE DESIGN NANTES ATLANTIQUE—an international design school in Nantes, France—HUGO MAUPETIT and VIVIAN FISCHER created a system that collects discarded gum from urban areas and refashions it
into recycled plastic SKATEBOARD WHEELS. Instead of littering, people were encouraged to stick their chewed gum onto one of several “gum boards” the French students placed around the city. The boards, which are made from polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) plastic, were then collected every week and brought to a factory to be crushed, mixed, and manufactured into small balls that were then injection-molded into colorful skate wheels. Once the wheels are worn out from use, the chewing gum wheel can once again be ground up and melted to create a new wheel, forming a closed-loop system. Maupetit and Fischer imagine the system as a collaboration between brands like skatewear label Vans and Mentos, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of chewing gum.
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As the “beyond organic” movement becomes more prevalent in the agriculture industry, farmers will start to ask themselves what they can do to make their farms exceed the standards required for organic certification. California-based company MONARCH TRACTOR has developed a fully electric, driver optional smart tractor to cut down emissions and increase productivity and profitability. Built for 20 years of continuous operation, with zero tailpipe emissions and an ability to operate in the fields 24/7 with autonomous hardware built into the roof, Monarch Tractor is “ushering in the digital transformation of farming,” according to Praveen Penmetsa, the company’s cofounder. To prevent accidents, the tractor features 360-degree cameras for roll and collision prevention and vision-based power-take-off safety. The Monarch also has “gesture” and “shadow” modes, enabling it to follow a worker on the job. Machine learning techniques allow it to collect and analyze over 240 gigabytes of crop data, which can be used to predict yield and quality of crops as well as livestock production.
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In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, skateboard apparel company VANS has created a program called “Foot the Bill,” which creates limited-edition shoes for small businesses, the net proceeds of which go directly to those businesses. New partners are added weekly, such as BAO BAO DUMPLING HOUSE in Portland, the second restaurant from award-winning executive chef Cara Stadler and her mother, Cecile. Bao bao
in Chinese translates to “wrapped treasure,” which is a good description of the eatery’s tasty doughboys. The shoes are covered in a pattern of red and white squares stamped with the Chinese characters for bao bao and were designed by Westbrook-based WING CLUB PRESS together with Stadler.
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THE MAINE COLLEGE OF ART (MECA) has plans to convert the 108-year-old building at 45 FOREST AVENUE in downtown Portland into a new student residence hall. MECA president Laura Freid told the Portland Press Herald that students can no longer compete for apartments in Portland’s hot housing market. The historic renovation project would include a cafeteria, classrooms, and a lounge space on the first floor; it is estimated to cost $15 million. Ready for occupancy by the fall of 2023, it would allow the college to release 71 student apartments downtown back into the rental market.