Hasta La Ideas

When first walking into the exhibition space, one encounters a mysterious, optically-fuzzy, impressively colorful, wedding dress. Upon closer inspection, the dress is composed of small seemingly-floating, wildly colorful round spokes. Emmanuelle Moureaux is a Tokyo-based architect who visits Design Tide each year, with a keen eye for evolving architectural design.

The title of the piece, “Toge,” means ‘thorn’ in Japanese. Each individual block is composed of a small metal ball, with a net of long, thin pine-needles, made of piano wire, and painted with a glossy paint. Moureaux says that the design for “Toge” marks the latest evolution of her exhibition pieces.

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Japanese architect Masato Sekiya has completed a house in Osaka with a sloping wall that looks like it’s toppling over.

The two-storey Shigita House is partly constructed from reinforced concrete and partly from wood.

A revolving door leads into the house, where sloping bookshelves lean against the angled wall of the ground floor living room.

One of the house’s four bedrooms is suspended above this room, but a gap between the walls allows natural light down from skylights above.

Both a staircase and a lift connect the two floors with an enclosed terrace on the roof.

Masato Sekiya, also known as Planet Creations, has designed a few buildings that we’ve featured on Dezeen – see all our stories about the architect here.

Photography is by Akira Kita.

Here’s some more information from Masato Sekiya:

Shigita House

It is located in Osaka Prefecture, in Higashi Osaka City

Concept: In a highly built-up area, closed in on all sides, this house offers both privacy and light.

Such a paradox is made possible by the structure’s ‘tunnels of light’.

Standing in the center of a densely populated area in East Osaka. The windows reach from the buffer zone through to the outside from the inner house.

Lighted up, the diagonally positioned outer wall seems emphasized. The inside is nearly invisible from outside. There are few windows, and the interior cannot be seen from outside. The wall on the right side of the car park area is unfinished RC. The vertical portion of the construction is made of painted inflammable wooden material. The white surface is spray painted. The entrance door revolves on a vertical central axis.

The living room is toplit as natural light enters between the diagonal outside wall and the inside vertical surface. The shelves in the living room were designed to follow the diagonal of the wall.

The second floor bedroom floats to allow an influx of light from above to penetrate to the living/dining room below.

Between the north wall and the inner chamber is a passage for movement to the bathroom facilities. The toplight makes this a bright and comfortable space.

The tatami room is designed contrastingly in black and silver.

See also:

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House for Three Children by Masato Sekiya	Lifted House by Masato Sekiya	Complex House by Tomohiro Hata

The quirky creative’s first store opens in NYC bringing a clever take on classic garments

A year after French designer Ramdane Touhami moved his family and introduced Cire Trudon to New York with a whimsical boutique, he has since sold the company and moved on to his next venture—the eponymous store and house label Ramdane, characterized by classic garments for men and women updated with the designer’s signature sartorial twists. Using the finest fabrics sourced from well-known names in the industry, Touhami brings together high-quality and fashion at an accessible price point.

As a nod to his collection‘s playful aesthetic and attention to textures and colors, the exterior facade of the Nolita boutique has been draped in woven wool surrounding the neon orange doors; the interior space is furnished with large, custom-made stone slab counters carved from single pieces of rock in upstate New York. Inside there’s an anything-goes atmosphere—after all, the creative maestro Touhani is not only a designer, but also a DJ, director, artist and journalist—with garments hanging freely from the ceiling or folded on counters, each accented with their own unique patterns and colors—a style central to the Ramdane aesthetic.

The store will eventually carry a range of products—furniture, accessories, clothing and more. Current offerings include coats made with Mackintosh fabrics, accented with a dozen or more buttons wrapped in patterned fabric sourced from Scotland, and a motorcycle jacket constructed of the same waxed cotton used by Barbour. The women’s green bouclé jacket and contrasting-neon trenches are at once youthful and sophisticated in slim contemporary fits.

For a more subtle creative touch, Ramdane’s light-pastel sweaters feature multiple collars, while the thick angora cable knit cardigans remain true to classic form. The colorful corduroys are also well proportioned and have a fine hand. We found a favorite in the “Crisis Suit,” an ingenious design that has to be seen—or, ideally, tried on—for the full effect (Touhani put it on for us, but we couldn’t contain his exuberance long enough to get a proper shot of the suit). The three-in-one combination of jacket and vest has a base layer with suit-jacket sleeves and three different vest styles—tuxedo, double-breasted and countryside—to change-up the lapels.

In an effort to bring superior fashion to a more inclusive audience, Ramdane sells his limited-run pieces in a relatively moderate range—sweaters go for around $200, coats for between $350 and $500 and pants for $200. Also of note, Ramdane is offering an extremely unique staggered payment system for customers under the age of 25, allowing for payment to be made in three installments over time. For now Ramdane is exclusively sold through the New York flagship.

To see the collection in motion watch “The Forrest,” a horror movie directed by Ramdane and produced for $500.

Ramdane
64 Kenmare Street
New York, NY 10012
Map

Happy Halloween! As this year’s falls on a weekday, the little ‘uns are most likely at school. Which wouldn’t be so bad if they had a Science teacher like Mr. Bergmann of Kinard Middle School, Colorado, who here demonstrates one very bad-ass way to make a Jack O’Lantern:

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A new body of work by artist Paula Scher takes a subjective look at topography

by Maj Hartov

Graphic design heavyweight Paula Scher‘s new book Maps covers her cartographic artwork since the late 1990s. She calls her large-scale paintings “distortions of reality,” as they comment on our world of information overload in a deeply personal way. When she was a child, Scher’s father—who wrote an introductory essay for the book—invented a device called Stereo Templates that helps correct the naturally occurring deviations in aerial photos used for creating maps. As a result, the artist grew up understanding that all maps contain distortions and used that riff on reality to guide her own interpretations. When Scher started painting her maps, she wanted to create them through her own altered lens, understanding that such inconsistencies were all around her as part of her everyday life—through her own work and the work of others.

Scher’s book of colorful, multilayered paintings present familiar geography in vibrant, thoughtful new ways. Besides being visually stunning, on closer look each map is crammed with geographical information. One titled “International Air Routes” includes airline hubs, flight routes, names of airlines and time zones, while another called “World Trade” outlines ports, trade routes and currencies. The book also features several pages of zoomed-in slices of each painting for closer examination of every angle of the maps.

With the book, Scher takes the reader on a virtual world tour with a twist and her “paintings of distortions” compel us to take a look at the idea of truth within our own reality in the process.

“Maps” is available from Amazon for $30.