George Ladas '59 designs avant-garde clocks (and more)
George Ladas '59 designs avant-garde clocks (and more)
On the Bayside, New York, campus of Queensborough Community College stands a tall, slender bronze monolith with alternating red, blue, and green lights. This free-standing structure is not a newage stoplight, but a clock—or, as creator George Ladas '59 calls it, a "linear time column." Ladas is the creative mind behind Base24 Designs, a New Jersey company that specializes in technical illustrations and alternative time pieces, with clients ranging from FAO Schwarz to NASA.
An alumnus of the Hotel school, Ladas got his start in design shortly after graduation, when he was hired to create more efficient kitchens for International House of Pancakes. In designing his timepieces, he says, he still uses some of the same concepts. "I approach the timepieces with the idea of, how much information can I display with the least amount of visual energy?" Ladas says.
The time column, for example, is based on the idea of a candle that burns all the way down each hour. The column is divided into eleven colored blocks, displaying green for minutes and red for hours. When the hour changes, the red block moves one space down the column. Minutes are marked by the green block's location; halfway down is halfway through the hour. When it is either noon or midnight, a blue center block lights up. "It's a redivision or reorganization of the space," Ladas says. "It provides the time information as a linear sculpture."
In addition to the timepieces, Ladas has worked on a variety of other projects. His most challenging assignment: creating an educational poster for NASA depicting the inner workings of the Hubble Space Telescope. In addition to having to tackle a highly technical topic at a time when computer-assisted design was in its infancy, he says, "NASA by its nature is intimidating." Another of his high-profile projects was designing a giant "Trojan horse," complete with nodding head driven by pistons, that was an integral part of FAO Schwarz's Las Vegas store from 1997 until it closed this past January. "That was interesting," he says of the project. "No one had ever built a three-story horse with a store inside it."
— Erica Southerland '10