Monocle

3 stories

MonocleEight architecture and design books you need on your coffee table 1. ‘Magazine C’, South Korea From the team behind Magazine B – the South Korean brand-documentary publication – Magazine C is a quarterly publication for furniture obsessives.

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MonocleBehind the hose at Tokyo Fire Department’s elite Hyper Rescue 8 unit On a wet autumn morning in Tokyo, four firefighters in hazmat suits are trying to pull an unconscious person from a basement room that’s filled with poisonous gas.

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Monocle‘We need to deliver history and culture.’ Volvo’s design chief, Thomas Ingenlath, on how the carmaker plans to not only survive, but go premium The global car market is in the midst of a huge upheaval. Chinese electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturers have eaten away at the sales of established Western brands to the point that giants including…

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発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo