Hasta La Ideas

The Tecnológico de Monterrey’s SLP campus

Last week I was down in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to speak at the Design Addict Congress, a series of lectures and workshops focused on industrial design at the The Tecnológico de Monterrey’s SLP campus. In attendence were over 300 designers and design students from all over Mexico. The Tecnológico de Monterrey was founded in 1943 by Eugenio Garza Sada. Along with a group of Mexican businessmen, Sada envisioned a cutting-edge educational institution for Mexico. Today the Tecnológico has more than 30 campuses throughout Mexico and nearly 50,000 undergraduate students.

At this year’s Design Addict Congress, speakers were invited to give a lecture to the entire audience, as well as a workshop to smaller groups. Speakers included Karim Rashid, Don Lehman of More/Real, Matali Crasset, Alberto Villarreal, Antonio Aguilar of Electrolux, and myself, Michael DiTullo from frog. The San Luis Potosi campus has one of the younger design programs in the Tecnológico system of schools, and in my experience those younger design programs tend to be a little more open, hungrier for reality, and full of eager students. That was certainly the case here. Everywhere we went we encountered eager, bright, and very passionate design students.

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Architects Codesign have converted a Stockholm warehouse into a school.

Clusters of recycled-glass classrooms are arranged inside the former furniture storage facility, filled with colourful chairs and carpets.

Informal study areas line the corridors outside classrooms.

Weighted hatches lift up to reveal a cafe counter at one end of the building, beside a line of black tables and yellow lampshades.

Other interesting interiors in Stockholm include offices for Skype and a hotel with layered fabric lamps – see all our stories about Stockholm here.

Photography is by Brendan Austin.

The following information is from Codesign:

Stadsmissionen School

To remodel worn school premises, on a tight budget and a tight time schedule, is nothing new. Doing it together with a client such as Stockholms Stadsmission (a nonprofit organization), with their progressive vision, is a challenge which can only be loved.

The aim was to create an attractive, dynamic environment where everyone is proud to spend their time.

The brief was to transform a 1000 m2 worn industrial shed, formerly used as a secondhand cloths and furniture store, into a functional learning environment in addition to increasing the capacity of the school with an increasing number of students.

A brief was worked out together with the client, where secondary spaces such as entrance, staircases and corridors were to be considered to be the primary spaces.

The idea was to transform under-used spaces into functional spaces for a multitude of purposes.

These secondary spaces now contain a new hub consisting of a centrally located cafe, in addition to informal study areas and intimate seating areas clustered between the classrooms and rooms for group studies.

Clearly defined pods, containing classrooms, have been added within the original industrial shed.

The public flow takes place between the facade and the pods, as opposed to the traditional central spinal corridor with the classrooms butted against the facade.

The space for communication thus becomes light and airy, and spaces for incidental meetings are created, such as the café, study areas etc. The classrooms are used for teaching or group studies.

The industrial character has been retained to the greatest extent. This is juxtaposed by the pods which have been given colourful interiors which seep out into the public spaces through the glass skin of the pods and when the doors o f the pods are left open.

As the project only has a limited life span (the building will be demolished in a few years time) it was crucial to use recyclable materials where possible.

The glass skin of the pods, consists of a U-profile glassing system of cast glass, which is already recycled and can be recycled again.

The vinyl flooring can be recycled and the MDF cladding of the pods, can be dismounted and moved.

The furniture is likely to outlive the building and will thus follow the school to their new premises, yet unknown.

The entire project has been a close cooperation with the client, from first initial meeting to beyond completion, including follow-up and evaluation on completed project.

Codesign has been responsible for a large portion of the procurement and the project management of the building project, as well as the complete furnishing and fitting of the interior design. The result is a project finished on time – and under budget! Obviously, this was only achievable due to close and excellent cooperation with the Stadsmissionen managers and staff plus the builders.

See also:

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Dinahosting Offices by O Antídoto	Goldberger by Tervhivatal	MiNO by Antonio Ravalli Architetti

Dezeen Wire: in her latest article for The New York Times, design correspondent Alice Rawsthorn profiles Studio H, a humanitarian design project has spent a year teaching design skills to school children in a deprived part of North Carolina – The New York Times

Rawsthorn describes the process that Studio H founders Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller undertook with the pupils – providing basic skills that resulted in the creation of a 2,000-square-foot pavilion at a local farmers market – and outlines the benefits of teaching design to students at a formative age.

See links to more articles by Alice Rawsthorn here.

Easy idea di Bluelounge per tenere ordinati i cavi sulla scrivania. Questo nuovo gioco si chiama Sumo, qui la scheda prodotto.

I like cutting two-by’s with a chop saw. Or slicing tubes with a pipe cutter, or trimming veneer with a router. Because all of those materials are rigid and you get nice, clean cuts that are exactly what you intended. But as someone who’s new to fabrics—I just re-upholstered the stool above for my studio—I absolutely hate cutting soft materials by hand. The required steps of making and tracing patterns seems like an inefficient expenditure of time and paper; I’m also clumsy with shears and the fact that the material moves when you’re trying to cut a precise curve drives me nuts.

So admittedly I may be more excited than you’d be to come across this PT-72 CNC cutter, designed to carve intricate patterns in marine canvas, upholstery vinyl and the polyethylene you see in the video below. It’s an interesting variant on a CNC tool in that it uses a directional blade that drags across the surface to make a cut, rather than using a bit that rotates at high speeds (which of course would not work with fabric). And I kind of like the THUMP noise the device makes when engaging the fabric, as it seems more soothingly analog than the banshee-like wail of a CNC cutting through hard stuff.

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