Hasta La Ideas

Norwegian designer Kristine Five Melvær has designed a series of lamps that look like buds about to burst into bloom.

The Bloom lamps comprise canvas covers dyed in graduated hues and supported by a steel frame, suspended from the end of a bent metal tube like a drooping flower stem.

“Like big drops, the shades may be associated with buds, fruits or water, while the seams in the construction are reminiscent of fibers. The steel structures have different heights, which contribute to the association of organic bodies,” says Kristine Five Melvær.

The project will be on show at ™51 gallery in Oslo from tomorrow until Sunday for an exhibition of work by Norwegian designers, called Tingenes Tilstand (The State of Things).

We met Kristine Five Melvær at Stockholm Furniture Fair in February, where she presented a series of jars with lights inside for showcasing treasured possessions.

Photos are by Erik Five Gunnerud.

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Kristine Five Melvær appeared first on Dezeen.

Although design students are often encouraged to seek inspiration in unlikely places, designers are just as likely to find a muse in everyday experience. For example, we’ve seen several examples of how, say, the lowly clamp can be elevated beyond its prescribed utility into a one-size-fits-all set of table legs, a clever shelf or even a backlit homage.

In fact, it turns out that one of the designers behind one of these variations on the theme just can’t get enough of the humble hardware: as with a previous project, Sam Weller‘s latest project starts with the clamp, arriving at a very different result. Where “Public Resonance” was a highly conceptual public art piece, “Holdfast” (not to be confused with these) is an investigation into minimalist furniture design.

Holdfast began with the exploration of clamps and their infinite possibilities as both a tool as well as joining device.

The clamp elements that hold this range of furniture together are very simple in form and were based on the holdfast clamping system typically used for holding material to the surface of a workbench. The components are manufactured using a computer controlled wire bending device. The components are then inserted into a through hole and wedged under the material they are supporting, creating tension in the vertical leg and in turn creating a strong stiff supporting structure for shelves as well as side tables, stools and other occasional home furnishings.

Although the legs vaguely resemble Linie58’s bent-wire clamp legs, “Holdfast” struts are fixed to the surfaces. Yet they’re semi-modular in that the legs take only one V-shaped form, which is arranged to support a shelf or triangular side table.

As always, Weller’s got a beautifully-produced video to accompany the images:

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The Revival Vest is a self-inflating life jacket that uses Footfalls and Heartbeats smart fabric technology to monitor respiration and physiological changes such as drowning. The fabric detects changes in circumference and stretch around the chest while the diver suppresses breathing. If the wearer blacks out, the body becomes limp and life vest is triggered to inflate and raise the body to the surface for rescue.

Designer: James McNab

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(Autonomous Life Vest was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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Dezeen Wire: “we’re advocating other UK architects to design on water,” architect Alex de Rijke told Dezeen at the Venice Architecture Biennale this week, where his firm dRMM are exhibiting proposals for floating housing at the British Pavilion.

Above: photograph is by Cristiano Corte

“Our idea was to learn from the Netherlands and show how their ideas might be applicable to UK waterways,” he said. “There is no shortage of water in the UK and no shortage of rain, but there is a shortage of housing and a shortage of development sites.”

Above: Water-houses in IJburg, Waterbuurt West, Amsterdam

The studio’s proposals are for an infrastructure of houseboats at London’s Royal Docks, and for the exhibition they present a floating terrace with an outboard engine and plastic floats.

Above, left to right: Alex de Rijke, Merlin Eayrs and Isabel Pietri of dRMM, photographed by Valerie Bennett

Named The Dutch Way, the project is one of ten on show for the British Pavilion’s Venice Takeaway exhibition, which showcases ideas for British architecture brought back from other countries around the world by teams of ‘explorers’. Read the brief in our earlier story.

Alex de Rijke is also now dean of architecture at London’s Royal College of Art and gave us a tour of the end of year show plus outlined his new direction for the course earlier this summer.

See all our stories about the biennale here, including an interview with director David Chipperfield and our pick of the five best pavilions.

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floating housing, says Alex de Rijke appeared first on Dezeen.

The botched restoration of the 19th Century Spanish Fresco ‘Ecce Homo’ is made by Spanish woman Ceci..(Read…)