L’agence digitale et de production Digital Kitchen présente une vidéo résumant ses différentes activités et références au cours de l’année 2011. Montée avec dynamisme et mêlant différents projets intéressants, cette vidéo est à découvrir dans la suite.
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Both weddings and council assemblies take place beneath the double gabled-roof of this hall at the medieval centre of a German village (photography by Roland Halbe).
Designed by architects Glück+Partner, the three-storey Townhall Schefflenz is clad in grey fibre-cement on both the roof and walls.
The multipurpose hall that occupies the second floor can be partitioned to divide the wedding chamber from the council hall, or opened out to accommodate town assemblies.
Individual offices on the ground and first floors surround central lobbies.
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The building replaces a demolished 1960s structure on the site, between a church and a market square.
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Photographer Roland Halbe has photographed several buildings recently featured on Dezeen, including a hotel with an extreme cantilever – see all our projects featuring Roland Halbe’s photography here.
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Other buildings from the Dezeen archive clad in fibre cement include a house in the Dominican Republic based on Euclidean geometry and another in Bavaria enveloped by corrugated panels.
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More information is provided by the architects:
New Townhall Schefflenz Germany
The central part of Schefflenz (Mittelschefflenz) where the new townhall is located, is a densely built scattered village (Haufendorf) of medieval origin. A historically grown set of irregular houses with steep gabled roofs characterizes the appearance of the township of Schefflenz.
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The new townhall in the center of Schefflenz replaces a 1960s building. It brings together administrative functions in one large building that had been previously spread over three different smaller buildings.
In order to integrate the large town hall structure into a neighbourhood made up of smaller buildings, the architects selected a building type with two narrow gables (instead of one big gable.) The new town hall is located right next to the protestant church on one side and the historic market square on the other. As a result of the arrangement of the streets – they form an oblique angle – the building takes up a slightly rhomboid-shaped area. Through its specific shape, the new building blends in well with the surrounding historic houses while at the same time it meets all the requirements of a modern office building. The uniformity of the material for both the roof and the façade gives the building a monolithic character; it attributes the traditional form an almost abstract quality. The town hall façade with its staggered windows and golden shining window frames invoke the punctuated façades of many of the surrounding houses.
The ground floor is made up of double-loaded rooms, the most important feature being a spacious central hall. The gallery on the first floor runs around the open-space. It’s design is that of a classical atrium with surrounding galleries and offices. The attic floor combines the availability of a large space – the citizens’s assembly hall (Bürgerssal) stretches across the whole floor – with the unique experience of the double gable interior. The assembly hall can be subdivided into two spaces: the council hall (Ratssaal) and a wedding chamber (Trauzimmer).
In terms of its structure, the Schefflenz town hall brings together reinforced concrete components on the inside with a highly insulated wooden frame construction and premounted elements on the exterior. As a result of its design and the materials used, the Schefflenz town hall is a “green building”: it is an efficient as well as a resource-efficient construction that will help to conserve fossil energy sources.
This goal is achieved for once by the compact design of the town hall and the use of geothermal energy. Other contributing factors include the thermal activation of building units for heating and cooling, a monitored ventilation system, and a heating system with heat recovery.
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| Arribe Ataio townhall by Vaumm | Tallinn City Hall by BIG | Lalìn Townhall by Mansilla+Tuñón |
Hello there! In this week’s episode of “5 Things You Need to Know This Week,” we read a letter from Roger Ailes, discuss unwanted sexual advances, talk some football (J-E-T-S Jets! Jets! Jets!), and see Skittles in a totally different light.
Oh, and be sure to check out our brand-new video site MediabistroTV and follow us on Twitter. Thanks!
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Wonderland Room sells Korean papergoods such as these lettered and numbered boxes. (Though most letterss are out of stock, this would be an easy DIY project.) Lots of washi tape, stickers, fabric and decorating items.
Here’s a trio of neat design concepts from Coroflotter Ming Cao, a Wuxi, China-based industrial designer with more than ten years in the game.
His Telescopic Door Handle, above, would be brilliant on public bathroom doors where you often have to knock to determine if someone’s inside. When you lock the door from the inside, the knob on the other side retracts, providing a clear visual and physical indication that you can’t enter.
Cao’s Cross Bamboo stool and light combine plastic and bamboo, the latter of which is abundant in tropical regions. It’s not clear if this is his marketing intent, but it would be cool to sell just the business ends of the pieces and allow the end-user to locate their own legs and chop them down to size.
Talk To Me is new exhibition at MoMA in New York that explores how objects communicate with us, and in turn can help us communicate with others. The show features nearly 200 projects, all centred on interaction, and emphasises how the need to share information and have a dialogue with audiences is overtaking form and function in contemporary design…
Unusually for a museum show, the curators of Talk To Me were entirely open about their process in the run up to the show, placing all the projects that were being considered for entry on a website, moma.org/talktome. The site has now been turned into a hub for the finished exhibition, featuring details of the 194 projects that made the final cut. As with any show about the ‘now’, Talk To Me is an eclectic mix. There are works centred on utility and information sharing rubbing against pieces that would probably be more commonly described as fine art. But there are undoubtedly some brilliant ideas in the show. A number of projects, such as Chris Milk’s Wilderness Downtown and Chris O’Shea’s Hand From Above have already been covered in depth on the CR blog, but here’s a selection of the other projects on the site that stood out for us.
First up is Konstantin Datz’s Rubik’s Cube for the Blind, shown above, designed in 2010. Datz has replaced the cube’s usual coloured stickers with white panels embossed with the Braille words for each colour, transforming the game from a visual puzzle into a tactile one.
Chris Woebken created the Bat Billboard as urban housing for bats, who despite being seen as a pest by many, play a key role in our ecosystems, pollinating plants and providing insect control. The housing is set inside a standard billboard structure, as the film above shows. Woebken has also placed monitoring equipment inside the billboard that uses voice recognition software to map and translate the calls of the resident bats. These are then matched to archives of various call patterns and meanings, currently being compiled by biologists, and the translated bat messages are displayed on a screen, allowing humans to understand bats better. More on the project is here.
A group of designers at Mobile Art Lab (a research centre looking at mobile phone content, part of Dentsu ad agency in Japan) created the PhoneBook in 2009, which brings modern phone technology together with a physical book for children. The film above shows how the PhoneBook works.
While they are a pleasure to have around the home, plants can also be a worry, especially for those of us with a tendency to forget about watering. To help with this, a group of US designers created Botanicalls, a device that uses moisture sensors in a plant’s soil to trigger messages to its human caretaker over a wireless network. The messages are either tweeted or read out by a recorded human voice via telephone and allow the plants to send out distress calls, and even notes of thanks. More on the project is here.
Maarten Baas’s Analogue Digital Clock is available as an iPhone or iPad app and appears, initially at least, as a classic digital clock. In fact, as the film above demonstrates, it is a videotaped performance of an actor painting or erasing sections of the digital display numbers by hand, minute by minute. A nice mix of analogue and digital worlds.
Designed by Stewart Smith in 2007, the Windmaker applies current wind conditions to any website. As the film above shows, this means if it’s blowing a gale outside your window, Windmaker will also cause chaos on your internet browser. Visit the Windmaker site here to play.
The SMSlingshot was created by a group of German designers in 2009, and mixes a traditional weapon with digital technology. The wooden device looks like a large catapult but contains a display screen and keypad where users can write messages. These can then be flung at large public screens where they will appear as if splattered. The film above shows the SMSlingshot in action.
The Ink Calendar, by Oscar Diaz, is a ‘self-updating’ calendar, where the ink is gradually absorbed through the paper over the course of the month, revealing each date as it goes. More on the project is here.
The BBC Dimensions website (found at howbigreally.com) gives a sense of the literal enormity of important events by overlaying them on a map of where you are. For example, as the above image shows, it turns out the Apollo 11 moonwalkers only actually walked the equivalent of a couple of blocks. Lazy gits. The site was created by a group of designers at Berg in collaboration with the BBC.
The Talk To Me show also includes some less expected pieces of interaction design, such as Call Me, Choke Me, designed by Gunnar Green, a product that ties mobile phone activity to the practice of erotic asphyxiation. With each phone call or text message, whether or not it is picked up or responded to, the collar tightens. Fun for all the family.
Talk To Me is at MoMA until November 7. For more info on the products shown here, and all the others featured in the show, visit moma.org/talktome. A full review of the exhibition will appear in the September issue of Creative Review.
When uncluttering your home and office, chances are you’ll come across many objects you’ve thought about getting rid of dozens (maybe hundreds) of times, but never did.
For example, I’m allergic to Neosporin, yet I found six tubes of it when we were packing up for our move. I had regularly looked at those tubes in different parts of our house over the years — the medicine chest, the emergency kit in the kitchen, the medical kit in my gym bag — yet I didn’t get rid of them whenever I saw them and thought, “I should get rid of those.” I’m also not very sure how we came to own the ointment. My best guess is that my husband brought a couple into the house, maybe one or two came with a packaged medical kit, and one could have been left here by someone else.
In the case of the Neosporin, and all clutter, I believe Newton’s First Law of Motion can explain how it lingers for years in our spaces. An object (clutter) will stay at rest until a force (motivation) of equal or greater value acts upon it. The thought, “I should get rid of that,” is not a force of equal or greater value than the clutter. As unfortunate as it is, thoughts cannot move clutter. We can’t wish away our unwanted objects. We actually have to do something about them physically.
The other case of Newton’s First Law also applies here. An object (me) will continue in motion until a force (motivation) of equal or greater value acts upon it. Usually when I would see the Neosporin, it would be because someone or myself was injured. I was on a path to take care of the injury, not stop and deal with clutter. Then later, when maybe I thought about the Neosporin again, I could have been on a path to a meeting or to make dinner or to relax and watch a movie with my family. The motivation to clear the clutter wasn’t equal or greater than whatever else it was I wanted to be doing.
The only way to deal with the clutter in our lives is to break the patterns of inertia and muster up the motivation to do something about all the stuff we don’t want or need.
Surprisingly, the best way to create force (motivation) of equal or greater value to change the course of our clutter is to simply acknowledge that we have the power (velocity) to change the situation. After we think, “I should get rid of that,” the next thought should immediately be, “and to get rid of it I have to take action, now.” Then, take the action to get rid of the object. (Unless, of course, you’re dealing with an emergency. Deal with the emergency and then come back when you’re on a path to watch television or something equally benign.) Knowing that the object will not move itself and requires a force to act upon it can go a long way in helping you to clear the clutter you encounter regularly in your life.
It can be helpful to have five boxes in your laundry room or at the base of your closet when you’re just getting started on this process. Have one box for items to be returned to other people, a second box for items you wish to sell or Freecycle, the third box for charitable donations, the fourth should be a trash can, and the fifth box a recycling bin. When you come across a piece of clutter, pick it up and carry it to the closet. Decide which of the boxes is most appropriate for the piece of clutter, and then go back to whatever you were doing. When one of the boxes is full, deal with the items in all of the boxes. Take out the trash and recycling, drop off items to charity and to friends, and list the items you wish to sell or Freecycle.
The easier your system to handle clutter, the less force (motivation) it takes to get the unwanted objects (clutter) out of your home.
Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.
Un excellent concept par le designer japonais Hironao Tsuboi qui a designé et imaginé ces haut-parleurs “Volume”. Ces objets en aluminium au design minimaliste sont disponibles en plusieurs couleurs et dispose d’un style très réussi. Plus de visuels dans la suite de l’article.
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Advance PHP Programmer and Web Developer
LATIMUNDO
Dallas, TX
LATIMUNDO is currently looking for an advanced PHP programmer and web developer to join our in-house team for a full time position at our Dallas, TX studio. Pay is based on skills.
You should be comfortable working on custom code for our own constantly evolving proprietary application. You would need to be able to handle the web interface as well as the backend system that syncs our clients to our applications. Duties will also include updating our e-commerce system, customizing FTP access, and maintaining a database (variety of account types) for our customers. Other secondary duties will include maintaining and updating our small family of websites.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Caitlin Halcomb was our neighbour at Renegade San Francisco. She sells these banners for all occasions in her Etsy shop in addition to vintage apparel, housewares and lamp shades.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
