Life Expectancy
This project takes action in improving the quality of an important urban element in the Lisbon district of Belém, the underground pedestrian passage that crosses the train tracks in this part of the city. Focusing on the sound-proofing and temperature-controlling properties of cork, the communication designers Sagmeister & Walsh created patterned cork tiles for the tunnel’s ceiling so as to allow for better sound atmosphere and aesthetic experience. But there is also a communication-oriented and inspiring aspectto the intervention: this installation is part of Stefan Sagmeister’s “Now is Better” series, which highlights positive achievements of the human species. The sentence that reads “If a newspaper would only come out every fifty years, it would report how life expectancy rose by twenty years” reports one of them.
Location: Underground pedestrian passage to Padrão dos Descobrimentos
Humpbacks
“Now is Better” de Stefan Sagmeister, que procura também incentivar hábitos mais sustentáveis e um maior cuidado com o meio-ambiente. Urban areas often include places of community gathering close to water, such as public swimming pools and urban beaches. The New York-based designers conceived an environmentally friendly floating mattress made from cork spheres, which uses the material’s natural floating properties and proposes an alternative to plastic mattresses. Humpbacks features another aspect, as part of Sagmeister’s “Now is Better” project: the red colour represents statistical data on the growing number of Humpback whales in the Western South Pacific, in three different years, 2006, 2014 and 2022, so as to encourage more sustainable practices and care for the environment.
Location: Espelho d’Água, Av. Brasília, Lisboa
Cork Bottles
Sound pollution in public and semi-public spaces remains one of the problems in contemporary cities today. With a sense of humour, the designers tackled the issue of noise inside a restaurant by producing a series of bottle-shaped cork objects, inverting the raw material – glass is now cork and vice-versa. These pieces absorb sound and allow for more efficiently controlled acoustics within the interior landscape. Their flexibility is not only in the practicality of its manipulation but also in its creative potential in terms of the variety of layouts it allows for, in a short time, and its adaptability to different spaces. This project is presented at the Museu de Arte Popular in dialogue with pieces from
the Museum of Ethnology’s collection, curated by the museum.:
Location: Museu de Arte Popular, Av. Brasília, Lisboa
