Qantas to launch world’s longest flight in 2025, the latest hotels popping up in Palm Springs, and this is the deal with liminal spaces. All that and more in this week’s Five on Friday.
Qantas teases cabins for world’s longest flight
A first class cabin on Qanta A350, shown in a rendering
Singapore Airlines will soon be dethroned as the airline with the longest flight—traveling 9,537 miles between Singapore and New York—by Australian carrier Qantas. Business Insider reports that Qantas will introduce the new longest flight in 2025, with a route that covers more than 10,000 miles from Sydney to London. A direct 9,950-mile flight to New York will also be added. Drumming up buzz for the Airbus A350-100 that will be flying the record-breaking routes, Qantas has unveiled a preview of the plane’s first and business class cabins. Cabins will lubricate the 21-hour flight thanks to luxury amenities, ranging from fully enclosed privacy doors, an 18-inch screen with Bluetooth, outlets and USB ports, and large trays positioned just below monitors. A storage cubby with a mirror and headphones will also be featured. Perhaps most opulent of all is the 80-inch lie-flat bed, that this 6’4” editor will actually be able to fit in!
Olafur Eliasson to create 98-foot mirror
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Artist Olafur Eliasson will unveil his latest artwork, Your Daylight Destination along the coastline of Silecroft, England. Commissioned by the Copeland Borough Council, the installation will comprise a 98-foot-long steel basin set into the beach akin to a pool, ARTnews reports. The basin will be sheathed by high tides and revealed as the ocean recedes to reflect the sky above when filled with water, and the skyscape will be observable from a nearby platform.
Why do liminal spaces spook us?
If you’ve found yourself scrolling too far through TikTok these last few years, odds are you’ve encountered a lo-fi scene of nothing more than a long hallway or an empty cafeteria. Community has surprisingly formed over the disquieting anxieties such liminal spaces can conjure. A24 is even set to adapt the YouTube short-form horror series The Backrooms into a feature to cash in on the eeriness inherent in fluorescent lit service stations, hotel corridors, or even highways. But what makes these places so scary? According to ArchDaily, French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep cited such liminal spaces as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned,” while French anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term “non-place” to refer to “spaces formed in relation to certain ends.” Terms like “terrain vague” and “junkspace” have also entered the design lexicon to categorize space not designed to be memorial. These unsettling expanses are also, evidently, a result of modernism, in which some spaces are noted for their undefined limits aided by claustrophobia and disorientation employed as a consumer behavior strategy. Are you sure you still want to run down to the basement to sort your recycling later?
Philadelphia Museum to add center for African art
From left: Trustee Ira Brind; Carlos Basualdo, deputy director and chief curator; Sasha Suda, director and chief executive; and Alphonso Atkins, director of DEIA; photo by Albert Yee
A gift from trustee Ira Brind has spurred the creation of a new center dedicated to African art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. According to The New York Times, the new Brind Center for African and African Diasporic Art will redeem the continent’s lack of representation in the museum’s curatorial structure. While development information is not yet announced, the project will invite new cross-curatorial dialogue and collaboration and house new gallery installations.
6 must-visit Palm Springs hotels on our radar
The Hermann Bungalows
Hospitality Design heads to the Palm Springs area next week for HD Summit, where industry professionals will stoke creativity and find inspiration. Known for its pastel palette and arid backdrop, the desert destination touts a vernacular more diverse than meets the eye. Six new, forthcoming, or recently refreshed hotels embody a standard of design all its own, from historic gems like Casa Cody nodding to its Spanish Colonial Revival heritage to the West Coast debut of Lifehouse introducing an alternative take on Japanese minimalism in a locale known for its midcentury modern proclivities. As we inch toward a spring equinox, find escape in these sunny designs.
