Full+beauty

— Chinese Romanticism

It will be as beautiful as a full moon and it will illuminate eight times more. Well, it will probably also be more fake and definitely less romantic. What we do know is that a second moon will be launched into orbit by 2020 to illuminate the streets of Chengdu, one of the most densely populated cities in China.

The satellite, designed by the aerospace scientists of one of the most important research centres in China, is an actual artificial moon, capable of reflecting the light of the Sun during the night over an area between 10 and 80 kilometers. The “wow effect” is guaranteed. Energy saving too. What no one can predict is what the werewolf’s reaction will be.

— Lateral Office for Nordic Cottage

Apparently, the lands north of the 45th parallel are becoming the new frontier of luxury tourism. Sure you will need to pack a few less sarongs and a few more sweaters, because waiting for you on a little Canadian island washed by the Polar Ocean there won’t be a deckchair and a coconut, but an Inuit settlement designed with insulating materials.

Studying the demographic and urban development of the Great North and building prototypes of modular cottages that can be transported with helicopters in the over three thousand Canadian islands is the visionary project of Lateral Office, a prestigious architecture firm based in Toronto. And it is not a novelty, in the end. The sun is bad for you, global warming is the problem of the millennium and the aurora borealis is increasingly becoming a top-destination, almost mainstream. And so, quietly, the “Arctic GDP” annually grows by 11%.

— Music in the Living Room 4.0

In the era of Spotify and increasingly synthesized music, amplified and streamed, it arrives, or rather it returns a nonconformist trend: chamber music, or music from a room. It is called Sofar, songs from a room. Intimate as a group of friends playing at home, but already consolidated in 427 cities around the world, the Sofar phenomenon allows to give life to small unused spaces, such as the garage of a house or the neighbourhood store.

Here music is more analog than ever. A format that brings together great and small artists, sophisticated music researchers and neighbours seeking for diversions. It is the comeback of an intimate and authentic musical beauty, full and unplugged. Everything happens live. In a direct exchange between the musicians and their instruments, between the sweat of those who play and the curiosity of those who listen. Because music is like a love story. It needs contact. And of great beauty.