A curious curatorial decision marked the inaugural National Gallery of Victoria Triennel, featuring 100 artists from 32 countries, including an installation of 100 massive skulls (note: not those of the participating artists).

Amidst other artists, designers, technologists, animators and architects, Australian sculptor Ron Mueck’s largest ever work to date still stands out, providing a chilling ambient atmosphere for more conventional museum pieces.

Titled Mass, it represents “a somber study of mortality, and an extension of [the artist’s] hyperrealistic sculptural practice, [drawing] from the biological structure of the skull, regarded by him as extraordinary facets of humanity.”

Made of fiberglass and resin, the skulls are around three feet (or: one meter) tall, but many are piled up on top of one another, reaching toward gallery ceilings above.

This exhibition in Melbourne is free and open to the public and will continue through late April — images by Tom Ross and Sean Fennessey.

Like door swings on architectural blueprints come to life, these works of metal-framed wood furniture express their embedded potential in physical space.

The new Trace Collection from Nendo takes the architect’s approach to the next level, physically representing the movements of furniture doors and drawers via three-dimensional frameworks. Their installation was recently featured at the Collective Design Fair in New York.

“Although they may not be visible, we are subconsciously aware of the ‘traces’ of their movements every day,” explains designer Oki Sato. For example, because of that, we do not put a vase in front of a door. It is essential for a person who specializes in space design to be even more aware of this, as they have to portray these ‘traces’ onto drawings.”

The visualized actions speak volumes about potential options for opening the various swing, flip and sliding doors in each piece. While the results may not be the most practical furniture, they do cause one to think a bit more about the embedded possibilities of everyday furnishings.

Made of rubber, metal, glass and wood, these dynamic flip panel doors tackle perhaps the world’s original architectural invention in a series in a fresh, new and interactive fashion.

Each member of the Evolution Door set by Austrian artist, designer and builder Klemens Torggler involves a multi-panel contraption the flips open and re-closes in a fantastic feat of kinetic motion.

The steel version of the door is particularly ingenious as its space-saving method of action. Like its sliding cousins, it avoids the in-and-out motions of a typical doorway to minimize the space you need to set aside in front of or behind it.

The glass design uses a minimalist framework of structural supports, all of which then disappears entirely into a secret wall space hidden alongside it.

With steel and glass variants in particular, though, viewers are sure to wonder how one avoids getting a finger pinched if they are not paying full attention,  hence this short video regarding benefits of the softest member of the Evolution family.

Aside from the finger-friendly end result, there is something brilliant in the common approach of these works: each bypasses all positions outside of the binary ones – these doors are either opened or closed between uses, never resting anywhere in between.