Nike avoids Vaporfly running-shoe ban ahead of Tokyo 2020 Olympics

Nike's controversial Vaporfly shoe has been permitted for use in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics but the shoe Eliud Kipchoge wore to break the two-hour marathon record is banned.

World Athletics has temporarily updated its guidelines for sports shoes worn in competitive events ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in July.

The new guidelines from the international governing body for athletics bans the trainer Eliud Kipchoge wore to break the two-hour marathon record.

Vaporfly meets new stipulations

However, Nike's Vaporfly range – including the Nike ZoomX Vaporfly NEXT% and the Zoom Vaporfly 4% – meets the stipulations of World Athletics' amended Technical Rules.

These prohibit shoes with soles that are thicker than 40 millimetres and the inclusion of more than one carbon-fibre plate, or similar item, in the sole.

The news comes amid criticism of the fairness of allowing athletes to compete while wearing the Vaporfly range, which have thick, foam soles and carbon-fibre plates to improve speed.

Nike's Varporfly NEXT 4% has a thick foam sole and carbon-fibre plate designed to increase speed

In 2019, 31 of the 36 podium positions in the six world marathon majors were won by elite athletes wearing Vaporfly, as reported by the Guardian.

World Athletics' Moratorium, which forms part of the Clothing section of the guidelines, also states that, from 30 April, shoes have to be on the open market for at least four months before an elite athlete can wear them for a contest.

Eliud Kipchoge's record-breaking shoe banned 

While Vaporfly remains within the amends, the prototype Air Fly trainer that Nike-sponsored Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge wore to run a sub-two-hour marathon in October 2019 will be banned under the regulations.

The sneaker has a much chunkier sole than the Vaporfly and reportedly includes three carbon-fibre plates.

It has been reported, however, that Nike still has time to make amends to the Alpha Fly ahead of a release in March – over four months before the start of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics on 24 July.

This could make it possible for athletes to wear the shoe during the major competition.

Nike developed Vaporfly to break record

Nike's designers and scientists worked with athletes to develop the Zoom Vaporfly Elite shoes specifically for its Nike Breaking2 project.

It released the first version in the range, the Zoom 4% featuring a thick ZoomX foam underfoot, in 2017, claiming it could increase the speed of an athlete by four per cent.

Nike worked with athletes to develop the Zoom Vaporfly Elite shoes specifically for its Breaking2 project

The updated ZoomX Vaporfly NEXT% was launched last year, comprising two layers of ZoomX foam with an articulated carbon-fibre plate slotted in between to increase the stiffness of the shoe.

"That's what is giving athletes that propulsion to get their foot off the ground," vice president of Nike Running Footwear Brett Holts told Dezeen last year.

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wHY Architecture reveals design for opera house in Russia

Tchaikovsky Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre by wHY Architecture will be built on the bank of the Kama River in Perm, Russia, near the Ural mountains.

Perm is one of Russia's famous ballet centres, after Moscow and St Petersburg.

American studio wHY Architecture has designed a theatre with wrap-around glazing that will give views over the landscape, and allow the public to see in.

An undulating roof and curving glass facade is intended to invoke the flowing movement of the dancers who will perform there.

Copper-coloured elements will reference the ancient history of copper mining in the Kalargy region, a geologically rich area in the southern Urals of Russia.

A sweep of amphitheatre-style steps will lead up to the Tchaikovsky Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, which will be designed by wHY Architecture's Landscape Workshop.

Inside the opera house, a series of ramps and walkways will lead to different theatres and out to pathways through the outdoor areas.

Renders released by the studio show a rippling ceiling made from wooden panels cut like contours on a map and chandeliers with pendants dropping down from the ceiling through cuts in the floor plate.

The existing Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre in the city is one of the country's earliest, dating from 1870 and is home to one of Russia's most popular ballet troupes. Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in the region.

wHY Architecture was founded in 2004 by Thai architect Kulapat Yantrasast and has offices in New York and Los Angeles.

The architecture studio has worked on several other arts projects, including the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and an events pavilion overlooked by Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. wHy Architecture also designed an immersive tent for Los Angeles' first Frieze Art Fair.

Tchaikovsky Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre will join several other contemporary opera houses with curving forms.

Snøhetta has designed an opera house in Shanghai with a spiralling stepped roof, and MAD recently completed an opera house in Harbin with curving arms clad in white aluminium panels.

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Gregg Moore creates restaurant's tableware using waste bones from its kitchen

Ceramicist Gregg Moore has created crockery for the Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant outside New York, that is made from the bones of the very cows whose dairy and meat is served.

The table setting encompasses a bowl, plate and cup, with paper-thin white walls that are left unglazed to allow the eerie translucency of the material to shine through.

Their distinctive, luminescent quality is achieved using an 18th-century recipe for bone china – a type of porcelain made using animal bones.

In line with the restaurant's nose-to-tail philosophy, which seeks to utilise all parts of an animal, Moore has created his version of the material with bones that went unused in the kitchen.

These are cleaned and then fired, in a process called calcination, to turn them from a living material into calcium phosphate.

"What remains goes into a rotating mill called a ball mill, where it is mixed with water and ground into a sludge," Moore explained to Dezeen.

"I then dry and pulverise this to create bone ash and create a mixture that's 50 per cent bone ash, 25 per cent English china stone and 25 per cent kaolin."

In pursuit of the purest possible result, Moore sources both the stone – a type of partly decomposed granite – and the white kaolin clay from Cornwall in England, as their American counterparts can often be "dirtier".

The mixture finally gets mixed into a liquid slip and cast into a mould, where it remains for only three to five seconds.

"For the other objects I create, I cast the porcelain for about 20 minutes," he continued. "But in this case, I'm trying to get as thin a result as possible, and the less time the liquids spends in the mould the thinner the wall is."

Finally, after a day of drying, the dishes are fired. Although they go into this process perfectly round and symmetrical, the rims of the taller pieces bend to the intense heat in the kiln, creating gently curved, organic forms.

Much of the restaurant's beef and dairy comes from the Blue Hill farm in Massachusetts – which gives the restaurant its name – where the cows are grass-fed and free-range.

This, Moore explained, manifests itself not just in their milk or their meat but also in their bones.

"In the whole field of ceramics, bone china is the only material that was once alive, everything else is geological or mineralogical," he said.

"And so it has the ability, if we look at it closely enough, to tell us something about our interaction with those animals and the environment they lived in."

In an as-yet unpublished study Moore has been undertaking with evolutionary biologist Dr. Tobias Landberg, the duo found that the chemical composition of a cow's bones is fundamentally different when it is allowed to graze on grass or fed grains in a contained environment.

"If a cow is being raised on grass, it's also going to move more to seek out that grass, so it's a combination of both diet and exercise that transform the physical bones of the animal," Moore explained.

"There are impurities present in grain-fed bone ash, leading to a different colour spectrum, a lower firing temperature and melting point."

When it comes to turning it into porcelain, that means it can survive a hotter, more intense firing process, which in turn results in stronger, more translucent porcelain.

The result is a new take on an antiquated material, often associated with commemorative coronation tea sets and ostentatious displays of status.

"I think there's an opportunity with a material like that, which has such a narrowly defined history, to be able to express new ideas," said Moore.

"I think people's mindset is certainly shifting at the moment when it comes to what goes into our food and I'm hoping that with this work, that same question would be asked about what goes into the plates that serve the food."

Reexamining the ways in which we farm animals and the waste byproducts we create in the process has been at the heart of Moore's ongoing, five-year collaboration with Dan Barber, head chef and co-owner of the Michelin-starred restaurant.

As part of the project, the ceramicist has previously created a series of textured plates, with surface indents formed by grazing and pecking animals from the farm.

Designers are coming at the issue of sustainable food consumption from different angles, with some, like Moore, focusing on rethinking the tableware we use.

Vienna-based Teresa Berger, for example, has created a collection of multi-sensory crockery in the hopes of helping us eat more consciously.

Others still have focused on the production process itself, with graduate Rob Russell developing an at-home bioreactor that allows users to reduce their carbon emissions by growing their own edible algae.

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Intricate Landscapes and Animals Cut From Single Sheet of Paper by Pippa Dyrlaga

“This Fragile World,” (2019), hand cut paper and acrylic paint, about 11 x 11 inches. All images © Pippa Dyrlaga

For Pippa Dyrlaga, one piece of paper holds a lot of possibility. The Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire-based artist cuts each one of her delicate creations from a single sheet. Her intricate designs turn a blank page into a plant-filled landscape or a robot tending to a garden. Dyrlaga begins by sketching each piece in reverse, before cutting sections out. Then she flips it over to unveil the finished work or to paint details onto the piece.

Whereas her previous work often utilized a single white sheet, the artist now is working more with color, painting shades of blues, golds, and black, which helps to distinguish one group of plants or mosses from the next in her lush landscapes. She also has been inspired by Greek mythology and lore, describing “Psychopomp” (shown below) as “a spirit or deity, often depicted in animal form, which guide people into the afterlife,” on her site. “The piece is split into two, night and day, life and death. The daytime is represents life and growth, organic patterns and plants. The second half with nocturnal animals and abstract patterns, representing the more abstract idea of what comes ‘after.'”

Head to Dyrlaga’s Instagram for more of her intricate creations, and see which are available for purchase in her shop.

“Torn #3” (2019), torn and hand cut paper, painted with acrylic, about 20 x 10 centimeters

Left: “Arber” (2020), hand painted and cut Japanese 36 gsm washi paper. Right: “Garden Spirit” (2019), hand painted and cut Japanese 36 gsm washi paper

(2018), hand drawn and hand cut Awagami Kozo Natural Select paper 46 gsm, about 23 x 25 centimeters

Left: “Torn #1” (2019), hand cut paper. Right: “Torn #2” (2019), hand drawn and cut paper

“Bright” (2019), hand cut from Awagami Factory 36 gsm paper and painted with acrylic paint

Left: “Psychopomp,” hand drawn and hand cut paper, 80 x 40 centimeters. Right: “Bennu,” hand cut 32 gsm gampi washi paper, with hand painted gold acrylic

‘While the World is Asleep” (2018), hand drawn and hand cut paper, about 42 x 28 centimeters

 

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Dense Ecosystems with Flowing Water Systems Packed in Vintage Luggage by Kathleen Vance

“Traveling Landscape, Grey Samsonite,” vintage train case, resin, artificial foliage, soil, water, water pump, and fluorescent light, 13 x 9 x 9 inches. All images © Kathleen Vance, shared with permission

New York City-based artist Kathleen Vance creates lush landscapes brimming with green mosses, foliage, and rocky surfaces all stored in an unusual carrier: vintage suitcases. Vance’s ongoing Traveling Landscapes series connects travel and natural resources, inclining her to incorporate active water components into many of her miniature ecosystems. The artist tells Colossal she hopes to convey that “water and our natural open landscapes are our legacy to the future generations and something that must be protected and cherished.”  Her more recent pieces, like “Traveling Landscape, Spelunker,” deviate from her previous work by including caverns replete with hanging stalactites and stalagmites, or icicle-like rock formations, that she sculpts by hand.

Utilizing found vessels, Vance says she wants to “relate to a time when travel was slower and the distances between us and our homelands and foreign landscapes were more difficult to access.” Each portable environment is designed and retrofit for specific steamer trunks and train cases.

The cases act to abstract the idea of travel and romanticize its idyllic qualities. I am always on the look out for cases that have some indication of travel, with notes and markers which give a feeling that they have really been used for used for transportation of someone’s special or personal items.

To keep up with Vance’s environmentally focused projects, follow her on Instagram.

“Traveling Landscape, Luce,” vintage train case, resin, artificial foliage, soil, water, water pump, and fluorescent light, 11 x 6.5 x 8 inches

“Traveling Landscape, Ornate Silver,” ornate metal and wooden chest, soil, stones, resin, artificial, foliage, and water, 12 x 12 x 17 inches

“Traveling Landscape, Golden Interior,” 12.5 x 5 x 8 inches

“Traveling Landscape, Spelunker,” found traveling case, hand sculpted stalactites and stalagmites, resin, paint, artificial foliage, and soil, 13 x 9 x 9 inches

“Traveling Landscape, Assembly,” antique case, hand sculpted landscape, resin, paint, artificial foliage and trees, and a bulb light

 

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A post shared by Kathleen Vance (@kathleenvanceart) on Jan 22, 2020 at 4:14pm PST

 

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