With all the gloom and doom financial news going on in the world, it was amazingly refreshing to experience the positive feelings at the Latin Food expo at the LA Convention Center last week.

Maybe it was the artisian Tequila speaking but that was the best show I have ever been too…ever! The smell of fresh tortillas and carne asada filled the air and the friendly nature of the people (more…)

The great Pablo Picasso once said, “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” Warren Knapp probably knows this quote well because his paintings show a love for everything and nothing is off limits for the artist. For over two decades, he has been producing some of the most exciting work on the west coast and has made a name for himself (more…)

Waking up with the roosters, reaping and sowing with the family may or may not be the way of the farm and our food supply in the future.

The design of the modern farm will be smaller and interstitial – packed between cities and suburban areas or grown sky high.

Movements on both sides of the aisle are set to make changes to the current way of farming, and make changes for the better for the environment. (more…)

‘For the last 40 years, innovation in spaceflight had been stalled,’ reads the website of the Ansari X Prize. This space competition was to award a prize of $10m, essentially, to the first private manned-spaceship launch. It was modelled on the iconic Orteig Prize, won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927 for flying non-stop from New York to Paris. Almost eighty years on, (more…)

The music industry has undergone more drastic changes in the past 25 years then the previous 125 years before. In 1982, the compact disc was introduced to the public and replaced the need for LP’s and cassette tapes. With the introduction of Napster in 1999, music downloading has steadily become the recommended way to obtain music. Consumers no longer have to go to their local record store and buy music; it is now just a mouse click away. Moreover, there is no need to purchase an entire recording as you can now only purchase the tracks you want to listen to. (more…)

My editor and I took a deep breath as we dove into the organized chaos that was the Natural Products Expo West in March.

Our mission was to find innovative packaging designs at an event that had almost 4 thousand exhibits and countless more products.

We fought our way through 52,000 retailers, manufacturers, functional ingredient suppliers and industry professionals to attend the country’s largest natural, organic, (more…)

So it may sound a bit discriminating to judge by appearances only but if that’s all the information you have, you don’t have much of a choice. We all judge and form opinions on a daily basis when we are faced with the outer shell of a product. For all we know, the box or bottle containing a product can be an empty shell but at least we have the tangible presence of the product through its outer skin, the packaging. (more…)

Walk through the Westin Bonaventure or the Macy’s Plaza in downtown Los Angeles and the reaction to the 1970s urban environment becomes immediately apparent. The buildings are inward-turning, reflexive microcosms which ask for, and provide, no interaction with the larger downtown environment. To walk past architect Charles Luckman’s Macy’s Plaza at 7th Street and Figueroa Street is to confront a fortress of brick and metal, self-contained and outwardly imposing; it is all the worse for being at the intersection of a major mass transit hub, the 7th and Metro Station, where the Red and Blue light rail lines connect. The Westin Bonaventure hotel, designed by John Portman, is somewhat less offensive, but only as a result of its iconic design. At street level, it rises in a single monolithic concrete square, and it is only at a distancethat one can appreciate the soaring concentric circles that have come to be a symbol of downtown Los Angeles. (more…)

Las Vegas—a marketplace for high fashion and cutting-edge architectural design, or one kitschy, tasteless replica of what was once-good fashion after another? True, by the time you’ve stepped inside any of the big name casinos in Las Vegas, Macau, or any other gambling destination, you’ve entered one of the most meticulously designed and fashioned structures in the world, be it walkways that guide you to gambling areas or all of the sights and sounds that have been engineered to make you feel like staying to gamble for a while. It’s got the exuberance, the high paid consultants and a cash flow larger than some small countries, not to mention the live shows, the nightclubs and an insatiable modeling industry. But most of the behemoth structures that typify today’s casinos resist the avant-garde, with designers and entertainers relying heavily upon classic notions of luxury, décor and architectural design. (more…)

Long before anyone knew what sound waves were and the ways in which they travel through a medium, people knew that buildings shaped a certain way could help enhance or stifle sound. With this knowledge, the ancients built amphitheaters and auditoriums in which their concerts and plays could best be heard by the assembled audiences below. Yet, it is obvious that scientific knowledge of how sound works and the ways in which it moves is now taken into consideration whenever one designs a room or building where it’s important to be listened to. Knowledge that was once developed through trial and error over countless centuries has now been codified and refined as a technical study that is applied, more or less, consistently with the builder’s desired effects. (more…)