Hasta La Ideas

This boutique in Antwerp by Van Halewyck & Marco Architects features glossy white surfaces in a raw concrete shell.

Called Y. Di Cassanova, the shop at the base of two towers has white backlit shelves to display stock and a tree in the middle of the space.

More shops on Dezeen »

The following details are from Van Halewyck & Marco Architects

The new shop Y. Di Cassanova is located under the recently built towers of Diener & Diener Architects on “t’ Eilandje”. The semi-transparent aspect of the building is subtly mirrored in the interior with white glowing translucent panels.

The concept of a softer layer within the rough concrete concrete shell continues the white effect in the overall materialization. Under the white veil one finds surprising textures like coarse-grained wood and fiber board. Through careful manipulation of the different interconnected volumes a varied “parcours” is created with both intimate corners and free open space.

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Clothes store Y. Di Cassanova
Location: Westkaai 45, Antwerp, Belgium
Client: Joli bvba
Stage: built (1st phase)
Date: 2010

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See also:

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Aesop Aoyama by Schemata Architecture Office	9 Department Store and Gallery by Case-Real	Ahoti by Studio Lama

No, quante volte te lo devo dire che con questa, non ci puoi venire all’Eroica!
{Via}

Fair trade meets vintage florals for a fashion resurrection

Led by ’90s revivalism, a particular floral trend has proliferated on runways these past few seasons, many directly inspired by the fabrics of heritage brand Laura Ashley and its English garden-feeling flower prints. Thanks to a collaboration with fellow U.K. clothing label People Tree, the 57-year-old label is undergoing a reawakening of its own this season with a collection of limited-run pieces in prints sourced from the company’s archives.

Available March 2011 as part of People Tree’s spring collection, the nine-piece organic cotton collection offers up fetching floral basics—including a pocketed a-line skirt, a short swingy sundress, pleated shorts and a jumpsuit—in colors reworked from the ’70s to match the lineup’s more youthful, modern silhouettes.

As part of its ongoing designer collaboration series, People Tree is also teaming up with contemporary British print designer Orla Kiely to create two cotton-printed hobo bags, available later in the season.

The Laura Ashley collection spans $80-155 and will sell stateside and in the U.K. from People Tree.

As physical objects, I always thought books and magazines were pretty much the same thing; nothing changed my mind on that more than using the iPad. I use the tablet device religiously to read books at bedtime and to refer to sewing machine adjuster’s manuals during the day when doing repairwork. It’s perfect for books and manuals: All of the info with none of the bulk, with the occasional image that can be easily zoomed in on for clarity.

But magazines, man, different animal. Every mag app I’ve played around with on the tablet–Popular Mechanics, Wired, that horrible Zinio app–gives me a feeling of cognitive dissonance as soon as I open them. I easily lose track of “where” I am in the magazines, and although I’m not sure why that matters, it just feels wrong. With books and manuals the tablet disappears and I feel I’m absorbing pure information; with magazines I feel like I’m trying to drive a car with a cardboard box over my head.

Grafting magazines onto tablets provides a significant interface-design challenge, and I’ll shortly be testing out Apple’s much-ballyhooed The Daily publication. In the meantime, here’s Macworld’s look at it from the launch:

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