Just a few blocks up the road from our studio is the workshop of Vancouver’s Molo Design. You have probably seen their magic accordioning softseating or their softwall room dividers which are now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Several times a week Molo’s unmarked shopfront morphs into a fairly fantastical environment while they test or photograph new pieces, and we always stop to look as we go by. You can see the shopfront window below. Molo’s pieces are pretty environmentally friendly, hold up well and are some of the most beautiful room dividers we’ve ever seen, in white and now in kraft paper as well. The kraft paper walls are here, and Molo also does beautiful double-walled glassware.

The new building for the BC Cancer Agency is a good addition to Broadway, one of Vancouver’s most ridiculously unattractive streets. The building’s most obvious feature is its round windows which are meant to reference the glass petri dishes used in cancer research. And they’re functional – you can actually open the window in your workspace and the glass ventilation shutters direct air flow. The beautiful 15-storey spiral staircase is designed to resemble DNA’s double helix structure, and the cover of the building’s roof deck is shaped like an amoeba. This type of clever thematic allusion can be very tiresome (remember postmodernism) but here it’s subtle enough that it’s not gimmicky. More importantly, it’s an award-winning green building. As a recent Treehugger article on the building pointed out, it’s water efficient, including the use of waterless urinals, a quarter of the construction and finishing materials were from recycled sources and are low-VOC, and the  building is energy-efficient and clean in myriad other ways. It’s not surprising that it won a LEED Canada Gold rating. The overall building shape is a little ordinary, perhaps, but the windows really carry it, both close up and from a distance. But the main idea was to create a healthy and creative environment for the researchers who work there. And they seem to like it. Top photo by slightly-less-random; below by Ruth and Dave, jmv and sabel on flickr.

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The Swell Future-Friendly Design Exhibition is in its third year. Curated by Propellor Design, Swell will be exhibiting Ouno Design’s Vintage Scarf Bedspread (above) along with sustainable design from about 30 international designers, April 20 – May 18 in Vancouver. HSBC Lobby, 855 West Georgia Street. Mon – Wed 9-6 pm, Thurs and Fri 9 – 9 pm, Sat 9-5 pm.
 www.swellfuture.com.

Check out the Canadian Design Resource, an excellent and informative compendium of Canadian Design. The CDR recently featured our friends Propellor Design’s Galiano lamp, at left.