Talissa Décor: Bringing interiors to new dimensions | Polycarbonate Embossed Sheet

Prior to receiving this case, I thought that cases couldn’t get any thinner than Spigen’s Thin Fit or Pitaka’s MagCase. Boy, was I wrong. This nameless case from MNML (get it? it’s a minimal version of the word ‘minimal’) is almost impossibly thin. It’s barely thicker than a vinyl skin, and yet it’s a case. It’s ridiculously minimal.

Another feature of today’s restaurants that greatly increases the loudness inside are open kitchens—where the making of the food is on full display. This design used to be relegated to the lowly diner. But fine-dining restaurants began to expose their kitchens during the 1970s and early ’80s; Pearlman attributes the trend to Wolfgang Puck (though he didn’t invent the idea). Puck’s restaurant Spago, which opened in 1982, was one of the first high-profile restaurants to feature a centrally located brick oven, and was met with widespread critical acclaim. Other design trends that increased the volume of eating establishments also got their start at this time, including the communal table and full-service bar dining.

the architects maintained the initial flooring-the black embossed steel plates – from the entrance to the office space

As a big fan of Apple’s leather cases, I was excited to check out what Bellroy had in store for the Pixel 2. Since these ~$50 cases are sold on the Google Store and the packaging proudly sports the ‘made for Google’ designation, you’d imagine that the case would be at least halfway decent, but I’m appalled at how poorly it’s made.

[CapnJackHarkness] based their build on a table made by Gaminggeek, adapting it to their space and needs. The main difference? This wasn’t exactly ‘cheap;’ between needing to purchase tools and a 39″ TV, their cost was around $1,000 — the poplar alone coming in between $200-$400. Additionally, those foam pads have been a functional nuisance so far, so they’re planning on replacing them with speed cloth or felt down the line.

“We failed to do some due diligence,” he admitted. “Then we visited the place and saw the deficiencies. It was too much.”

Ive went off to make some calls, and André described his own routine: he tends to arrive at five or six in the morning, and often then designs geometrically complex objects that he asks the machinists to mill. He called it a hobby, but, as Akana explained, “We’ll have a meeting about a speaker-hole pattern, or something, and Jony will say, ‘Bart, can you get your box of patterns?’ ”

The Rugged Armor is one of Spigen’s newer product lines. These cases are easily identifiable by the two strips of faux-carbon fiber on the top and bottom. But while they’re simple for the most part, that’s all most people really need. If you just need a case (and maybe a little bit of added carbon fiber flair), the affordable Rugged Armor is a great choice.

The next day, I visited Ive in his studio. The table previously covered with a flat cloth was now uncovered: it was a glass-topped Apple Watch display cabinet, accessible to staff from below, via a descending, motorized flap, like the ramp at the rear of a cargo plane. Ive has begun to work with Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice-president of retail, on a redesign—as yet unannounced—of the Apple Stores. These new spaces will surely become a more natural setting for vitrines filled with gold (and perhaps less welcoming, at least in some corners, to tourists and truants). Apple had not, overnight, become an élite-oriented company—and it would sell seventy-five million iPhones in the final quarter of 2014, many of them in China—but I wondered how rational, and pure of purpose, one can make the design of a V.I.P. area. Ive later told me that he had overheard someone saying, “I’m not going to buy a watch if I can’t stand on carpet.”

After I left Ive that day, he drove to a wine bar in San Francisco, for a celebratory Apple Watch buffet dinner. The evening, he recalled, was “very gentle, reflective, probably because we were so tired.” The Apple Watch software will award virtual medals, embossed and enamelled, marking fitness achievements; Ive described their appearance as “slightly nostalgic,” with echoes of a mid-century Olympic Games. “When you’re judicious with what’s literal, it can be powerful,” Ive said. At the party, what had been literal became manifest: the guests all left with a metal iteration of a virtual medal, in a black cloth pouch.

Chameleons themselves, Mr. Koolhaas and Ms. Prada made natural confederates. She was the famous communist turned high-fashion mogul whose empire evolved from bags and backpacks constructed out of an industrial nylon lining material. He was a prophet of global cities who declared the countryside his real passion after everyone else jumped on the urbanist bandwagon.

On Thursday, members of the Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform derailed a package of proposals that initially had bipartisan support. Among other things, it called for switching from annual to biennial budgeting.