Hasta La Ideas

Continuing our series of stories about security-conscious and bunker-like residences, here’s an Australian holiday home that can be secured with huge sliding steel shutters.

Designed by architects Bourne Blue, the single-storey house in New South Wales surrounds a decked courtyard.

Openings in each of the facades lead to the central courtyard, where entrances to the house are located.

The corrugated metal shutters fasten across the fronts of the corridor openings, as well as around the courtyard-facing elevations.

When the shutters are open these corridors serve as external rooms, filled with hammocks and a dining table.

The openings divide the house into four blocks, separated into living rooms, a set of children’s rooms and two separate en suite bedrooms.

The house is the latest in a string of Australian houses on Dezeen – click here to see more.

Another recent story to feature steel shutters was an apartment block in New York by architect Shigeru Ban – see our earlier story.

See also: more stories about bunkers and other fortified buildings.

Photography is by Simon Whitbread.

Here are some more details from Bourne Blue Architecture:

Project Description

This site, just behind the sand dunes of Diamond Beach on the mid north coast of NSW, is very flat and has a modest view over wetlands. The proximity of the ocean would enable a beachside lifestyle, however the house couldn’t access ocean views to provide the amenity.

The design therefore needed to work in this context and provide the amenity from within. This is a holiday house for a large family, who frequently travel away with other families, so facilities for 10 – 15 people were required.

A covenant on the land dictated that the house was to built using brick and tile.

The design is comprised of four components, wrapping around a central court. Living space, two different adult sleeping areas and a kids area.

The living space has a slab for thermal mass and faces North. The two adult sleeping areas are identical parental retreats at opposite corners, while the kids area has a boys and girls bunkroom and a TV area.

Each of the four components is separated by a roofed deck, which either houses hammocks, a dining space or the entry. A monopitch roof wraps around the courtyard, over all these spaces, simplifying roof drainage and providing unity.

Click above for larger image

Sliding screens of perforated mini orb close off the roofed decks at the edge of the building, so that they are secure when the house is not in use. They also screen the undesirable sun and weather. A second set of screens wrap around the internal courtyard which also protect against inclement weather and cater for prolonged absences.

Architect – Bourne Blue Architecture
Engineer – Izzat Consulting Engineers
Builder – Sugar Creek Building Co.
Completion – 2010
Cost – $520,000 incl tax
Area – 169m2

See also:

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Beach House by Alexander Gorlin	Star House by AGi Architects	Wategos Beach House by Mackay + Partners

Wieden + Kennedy New York last week turned an ordinary billboard in New York into the set for a gig, as part of an ad campaign for Heineken Light beer…

The billboard, which is located on Lafayette and Great Jones in NYC, features the text ‘this billboard is occasionally perfect’. As the film below shows, it is just an average poster site, though last Tuesday it formed the backdrop for a surprise gig by US indie rock band TV on the Radio.

The band performed a short set in front of the ad, with fans alerted to the gig via Twitter and Facebook. Further events in the Occasionally Perfect campaign will take place over the next few months, to keep up with when and where they are happening, check out the #occasionallyperfect hashtag on Twitter or Heineken’s Facebook page.

Credits:
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy New York
ECDs: Ian Reichenthal, Scott Vitrone
Creatives: Charles Hodges, Gary Van Dzura
Production co: Show Cobra
Director: Matt Boyd

CR in Print

Don’t miss out – there’s nothing like CR in print. Our August Summer Reading issue contains our pick of some of our favourite writing on advertising, illustration and graphic design as well as a profile of Marion Deuchars plus pieces on the Vorticists, Total Design, LA Noire and much more.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year hereand save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine and get Monograph.

Over the next months we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year’s Core77 Design Awards! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

Designer: Rune Kirt and Mads Thomsen
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Category: Speculative Objects/Concepts
Award: Professional Winner

KNARR Cargo Airship

KNARR is a wind turbine freight system by modern airship technology powered with solar energy. An alternative to existing heavy cargo freight systems – focusing on wind turbine. Transporting wind turbine parts up to 1000 tons from manufacture facilities to installation site with zero carbon emissions.

This project has sufficient impact to spark a societal debate. The current environmental challenges we are facing call for ground breaking , provocative yet realistic solutions. In our view, saving energy isn’t about recession, but about optimization and, ultimately, intelligence. By combining wind energy—a beacon of renewable power—and a technology rooted in decades of innovation—airships—we aim at providing one of the constellation of proposals that will make the world a more energy efficient place.

Core77: How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

Rune: I was on holiday in France and at that time I was at the house of my parents in law in the countryside of Champagne. There was internet connection but I only had my iPad which couldn’t show the live web announcement. So I decided to wait to later and just watched some French television until then. Suddenly my phone was ringing and I could see it was from my parent back in Denmark. Then I knew something might have gone the right way. But my mum had only watched the video without sound because the computer loudspeakers didn’t work. She said: “They are showing your project in the end so I think you must be the winners!” Then I went to the website again and at this time the winning project was shown. It was the KNARR Cargo Airship. I got butterflies in my stomach and replied: ” Yeees, mum, you are right—we have won!!!” At the same time I got a tackling from the side. It was my wife who give me a big hug and said: “I am picking up the champagne!”

Core77: What’s the latest news or development with your project?

We have just established our own company—KirtThomsen—after having worked at the world’s largest wind turbine manufacture for 2.5 years. Beside the nicknames the ‘Air Captains’ or in Danish ‘Luftkaptajnerne’ our experience from the wind industry have given us a thorough knowledge of what it take to handle oversized components such as wind turbines. And more importantly, what is the business case for using modern airship technology to handle wind turbines.

So the project is actually very realistic and it is still something we are very much working on. But that is confidential.

What is one quick anecdote about your project?

When starting the project everybody around us were very skeptical and thought it was science-fiction. Our mentor and lector, Hugo Dines Schmidt, almost stopped us but after a good talk with him he was convinced that we had the energy and enthusiasm to make the project. Along the process he advised us to think about the process of transport handling and go out and talk with/watch/photo the real industry. After being at the docks of Arhus and at wind turbine producers we went all the way by train to South Germany from Denmark to visit the original Zeppelin company who’s daughter firm Zeppelin NT started developing airships again in the late 1990s. Exhausted after 17-hour train ride, we meet with our contact—a very dedicated German engineer, Johannes Eissing—who showed us their very large airship hangar with an airship under construction and we were lucky to see them take out a full operating airship to fly tourists to the Swiss Alps and back again. Afterwards we showed him our ideas and he gave us some useful feedback from constructional and aerodynamical perspective. He recommended we visit the local Zeppelin museum which we did. At the museum were build full-scale sections of Hindenburg and other amazing things from the golden era of airships. It was a perfect tour to gave us a feeling of scale, construction, materials and experience of these whales of the sky. No book, websites or phone calls could have given the same inspiration and eye-opener.

When presenting the final result Hugo told us that he recalled the doubt which he had in the beginning of the project as to whether it was a good idea or not.

Now, everywhere we go the project attracts a lot of attention. It has even led us to exhibit in Japan (Design center in Tokyo and temple in Kyoto), German radio interview by Deutche Welle, article in Brazilian magazine and a presentation at TEDx Oresund among other things.

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.

(more…)

Last week we saw the uproar over the Huffington Post‘s decision to run an unpaid-yet-high-profile logo design contest and this week we’re expecting the branding outrage to continue, this time in a slightly different direction but with likely much more ferocity. Late last week, Kansas-based designer Bill Gardner posted on RockPaperInk about the logo-for-cheap-site Logo Garden and how they had stolen not just 200 logos that his company had designed and were offering them up for a mere $79, but had also fairly blatantly swiped ultra-familiar logos like the World Wildlife Fund‘s panda and the Time Warner brand. So direct and widespread are the thefts that the AIGA has issued an Action Alert, requesting that all designers create an account through Logo Garden and search the site for copies of their own work that may have been pilfered. Should you find you’ve been robbed, the AIGA requests that you contact the site and CC: them, as “several legal actions are already in process.” Certainly not a bad idea to contact your own attorney should you find yourself in Gardner’s, and presumably other designers like him, predicament. Here’s a bit from the AIGA about the case against Logo Garden’s owner, John Williams, and what to look for when searching for your own work:

Williams has made slight modifications to many of the images, presumably in an attempt to avoid claims that he infringed on the original designers’ copyright rights, although these modifications are not enough to avoid liability for infringement of the creator’s rights in the underlying works. It may actually increase Williams’s liability by demonstrating his willful copyright infringement.

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