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Daily digest: Kanye West buys a Tadao Ando home, Sherwin-Williams announces its color of 2022, and more

Business In The Front, Party In The Back

Daily digest: Kanye West buys a Tadao Ando home, Sherwin-Williams announces its color of 2022, and more

Built in 2013, the Tadao Ando-designed 24844 Malibu Road boasts 4 bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms. (Accessed via Google Street View)

Greetings and welcome back on what is the last day of summer 2021 in the Western Hemisphere. As the days lengthen, it’s the perfect opportunity to stay inside and start reading more.

Here’s what you need to know today:

Kanye West drops $57.3 million on a Tadao Ando home in Malibu

Hot off the release of his latest album, the polarizing Donda, noted architecture enthusiast Kanye West has dropped a cool $57.3 million on a beach house in Malibu designed by Tadao Ando. Ando, the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese designer who’s best known for his starkly minimalistic work with concrete, is reportedly one of West’s favorite architects. West’s new home at 24844 Malibu Road certainly slots nicely into Ando’s oeuvre; the 4,000-square-foot, three-story building appears to be a simple concrete box when approached from the street, but beachside the widowed half of the buildings is raised on massive concrete piers and directly overlooks the Pacific Ocean.

H/t to The Real Deal

Sherwin-Williams’ 2022 Color of the Year is a “sophisticated” grey-green

It’s not quite minty fresh, but Sherwin-Williams’ 2022 Color of the Year, Evergreen Fog SW 9130, is still plenty soothing. The grey-green mélange was crowned as the (prospective) hottest color of next year as the paint company predicts that consumers will back toward “revitalizing” and sophisticated mid-tones.

San Francisco puts the brakes on a hotel-to-supportive-housing plan after neighbors complain

Plans to convert a hotel into a supportive housing building with 131 units in San Francisco’s Japantown hit a wall earlier this month after community leaders and residents pushed back. More than 6,500 people signed a petition to stop the city from purchasing the Kimpton Buchanan Hotel at 1800 Sutter Street, claiming that closing one of the neighborhood’s two hotels would negatively impact tourism and businesses. Now the city has pushed its timetable for converting the building out a few more weeks so it can gather more community input about the project, but if it delays too long it could lose out on state funding.

H/t to the San Francisco Chronicle

Design Miami/ Basel kicks off with an exploration of Human Nature

Art and design fairs are, evidently, back in a big way despite the continued spread of COVID-19. Design Miami/ Basel 2021 kicked off today in Basel, Switzerland, after canceling in 2020, and this year the festival will explore the theme of Human Nature. Presentations from 26 different galleries will join 14 exhibitions, and, like other international art and design events of late, the whole thing will be available to peruse online at https://www.designmiami.com/tours as the event shifts towards a hybrid format.

Notre Dame’s stabilization is complete and reconstruction can begin

Two years after a fire gutted Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral and left the UNESCO World Heritage Site teetering on the brink of collapse, the building has finally been cleared of debris and stabilized. Now, formal restoration work can begin, and the project is reportedly on track to hit the April 16, 2024 reopening target set by the French government ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. With the structure stabilized, the interior walls and floors will be given a deep clean, and construction (which is being outsourced to private companies), is reportedly expected to begin sometime in the next few months.

H/t to Artnet News

Researchers in Japan develop patterns for earthquake-resistant cross-laminated timber

Researchers from the Japanese firm Kozo Keikaku Engineering have unveiled an experimental timber lattice structure that reportedly offers superior seismic resistance while allowing openings for light and air. By arranging cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels in a checkerboard pattern, the test assembly wall offered greater flexibility than its totally solid counterparts. Kengo Kuma & Associates will reportedly employ the design strategy (which also lends itself to modular assembly) in its Himawari Kindergarten project as the structure’s first real-world test. (Of course, the firm is no stranger to utilizing novel seismic strategies.)

H/t to Designboom

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