Hasta La Ideas

This volcano museum in western Hungary features walls of dark concrete and Corten steel designed by Budapest studio Foldes Architects to reference the colours of volcanic rock and lava (+ slideshow).

Located on a flat plain between the city of Celldomolk and a former volcano, the Kemenes Volcanopark Visitor Centre tells the history of the surrounding region, which five million years ago was home to many volcanoes.

Foldes Architects won a competition to design the museum, using materials and forms that subtly reference the shapes and colours of volcanoes.

“Instead of the straight translation of the brief, such as creating a volcano-shaped museum building, we wanted to capture the true substance of the location,” said architect Laszlo Foldes.

“The raw materials, the homogeneous grey of the concrete, the lava-inspired colour of the Corten steel and the flue-like arrangement of the space deliver the spirit and essence of a volcano,” he added.

Corten steel boxes puncture the rectilinear volume of the five-storey building, forming self-contained screening rooms and exhibition spaces that project out towards the landscape.

The entrance leads into a full-height atrium. A small skylight five storeys above lets in a beam of light and is intended to recreate the feeling of being inside a volcano.

Concrete walls are left exposed inside the building, while steel staircases ascend to exhibition spaces on all four upper floors.

Other buildings we’ve featured from Hungary include an extension to a Renaissance palace and a library with an egg-shaped dome at its centre. See more architecture in Hungary »

Photography is by Tamas Bujnovszky.

Here’s some more information from Foldes Architects:

Volcano Visitor Centre opened in Hungary, designed by Foldes Architects

Though Hungary, located in Central Eastern Europe, is not rich in active volcanos, a large expanse of the country used to be volcanic some 5 million years ago. However, this does help ensure good quality soil for high level wine production, one of Hungary’s largest export products.

The iconic Kemenes Volcanopark Visitor Centre lays 200 km west of the capital Budapest, and has been realised following a national architectural contest announced in 2009 by the Celldomolk City Council, when Foldes Architects celebrated their winning entry from the competing 44 projects. The chosen plot for the centre highlighted a flat area between the city of Celldomolk and the 5 million year old Sag Hill, a former volcano.

“Instead of the straight translation of the brief, such as creating a volcano-shaped museum building, we wanted to capture the true substance of the location. According to our concept, the raw materials, the homogeneous grey of the concrete, the lava-inspired colour of the Corten steel, and the flue-like arrangement of the space, deliver the spirit and essence of a volcano.” – Laszlo Foldes, chief designer of Foldes Architects.

Upon entering the vast interior of the building, the visitor meets two engaging attractions. At first sight the vertically open space captures the eye. Five floors above, a small window lets in a beam of light offering the ‘eruption’ point on the flat roof. On the opposite side, the industrial materials of the facade appear consistent with the interior: naked concrete walls, dark grey resin flooring, steel staircase and corridor, and the Corten steel cubes also visible from the outside. The varied height and location of bridges link the different sizes and positions of the Corten boxes. These offer a range of functions, from screening rooms to interactive installations area, and present the fascinating history and typology of volcanos. To create a more refined interior, the exhibition texts are situated directly on the wall without any supporting board.

If you ever wanted to imagine walking through a cubist painting, this building is a great example of how it might feel to wander into Picasso’s Guernica. While passing below the red cubes, grey walls and bridges of the building, you have a real opportunity to comprehend the transience and vulnerability of human existence bracketed by such a formidable force of nature.

Project name: Kemenes Volcanopark Visitor Center
Location: Celldomolk, Vas County, Hungary
Program: Specific museum building to represent the volcanic history of the territory
Type: competition commission

Area/Size: 965 sqm
Cost: 1.238.000.EUR
Client: Celldomolk City Council
Project by: Foldes Architects

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by Foldes Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Après son focus sur ses autoportraits absolument incroyables, l’artiste hollandais Levi Van Veluw a imaginé une récente série d’illustrations réalisées au fusain. Des créations splendides réunies sous le nom de « The Collapse of Cohesion » à découvrir en images dans la suite de l’article.

Opinion: in his first Opinion column for Dezeen, Dan Hill reflects on the recent sale of Finland’s two most iconic design brands – Artek and Nokia – and suggests what the country’s design industry should do next.

“John le Carré said the only way to write about a place was after visiting it for a day, or after a long life once you’d moved there… Time between those two lengths didn’t lend more certainty, just detail,” wrote Rosecrans Baldwin in Paris I Love You But You’re Getting Me Down.

On that basis, I am not well placed to write about Finnish design culture. Having lived in Helsinki for two years recently, I can only really guess at the deeper resonance of Vitra buying legendary Finnish furniture brand Artek, following hot on the heels of Microsoft buying legendary Finnish cellphone brand Nokia. But guess I will.

Within a single week, not long after football’s transfer deadline day, Nokia’s “devices and services” division, which contributed hugely to Finland’s economic and cultural growth over the last two decades, moved to Microsoft for a Gareth Bale-esque $7.71 billion. This deal was swiftly followed by Artek, formerly owned by the Swedish investment company Proventus, joining furniture’s Champions League, via Vitra.

Although this small country of five million people has also produced Iitala, Marimekko, Kone, Fiskars and others, these two firms bookend a first era of Finnish design, with Artek founded by the Aaltos and co. in 1935 and Nokia’s dominance of the global mobile phone sector six decades later. Where do these “exits” leave Finnish design?

Under Marko Ahtisaari, a coherent and bold design culture had recently emerged at Nokia, with their Lumia phones drawing on a distinctly European heritage to produce an object, at least, that moved beyond Apple and Samsung. However, the wider culture around Nokia over the last decade had already – and fatally – betrayed a lack of understanding of the value of design. The software suffered badly and although intriguing handsets occasionally emerged, one felt that design was generally no more than an indulged child amidst what was really a masterful engineering and logistics machine, wrapped in the PowerPoint Palace’s bureaucratic managerialism.

Once Apple, and then Google, had deployed a richer, strategic approach to design in order to seamlessly orchestrate people, apps, media, devices and the interfaces between them, Nokia had no answer. Neither did Microsoft, for that matter. Hence these massive brands were left looking like the two kids picked last in the school playground, staring awkwardly at their boots, red-faced and uncomfortable in last year’s kit. With no other option than each other, Microsoft bought Nokia’s design function – minus Ahtisaari, who is moving on – simply to stay in the game.

Meanwhile, Artek had been looking forward, with Ville Kokkonen’s seasonal affective disorder-defying lamps building on imaginative research. As with Nokia and Ahtisaari, Artek benefits from thoughtful designer leadership in Kokkonen; both draw from wide-ranging perspectives well outside of traditional design practice. Yet Artek’s essential problem is that the entire furniture business is struggling for cultural relevance. Furniture is important for putting things on, yet unlike in the mid-twentieth century, it says less and less about our age. We know that, as architecture theorist Kazys Varnelis puts it, “technology is our modernity” now; inner space, not interiors.

So the questions posed by these acquisitions are more fundamental than those of the balance sheet, where both moves make sense commercially. The question is cultural: Artek was born with an avant-garde mission, whilst Nokia was the first to capitalise upon the most influential cultural object of the last three decades. So this week of deals actually poses the question: what does Finnish product design do now?

There are two obvious trajectories to ascribe, twin arcs towards a twenty-first century industrial design.

The first is in a new form of interactive object, as active partners of people, socially and culturally, via Internet of Things technologies, absorbing the essence of Varnelis’s “new modernity”. Here objects can be augmented with emotional expressiveness and responsiveness, with variable character and identity, via interactions across diverse social relations and contexts. In other words, what’s Finnish for Little Printer or Fuelband? Nest or Glass? Or better, whatever’s next?

Might this be a big ask for a culture whose national stereotype is the taciturn man likely to embark on a devastatingly lengthy Finnish silence at any moment? Like all stereotypes, this is both true and not true, and fortunately there are enough (North) polar opposites to refute it. Yet their late urbanisation means Finns rarely possesses a naturally social culture. It is a culture rooted in the tangible, the material, the output of designer Tapio Wirkkala‘s and Kaj Franck‘s peerless craft. After all, Nokia lost it when Apple veered towards people over things.

The Finnish language is at its most beautiful in the ancient series of soft, weathered words denoting the physical reality of landscapes and bodies; “chipped sounds, words eaten away by ice and silence”, as novelist Diego Marani has it. Yet there is effectively no word for “please”.

But despite this granite-hard pragmatism, there is evidence elsewhere of a supreme facility with the social (and no, Rovio, makers of Angry Birds, I’m not looking at you.)

There is the gloriously levelling ritual of cheek-to-cheek encounters in the sauna, a unique social space recently revived by NOW in Helsinki. Equally, the päiväkoti day-care system for pre-school children is one of the finest learning environments you can imagine, setting up the nation’s world-class results. It is human-centred, with an emphasis on both material and environmental exploration – most time is spent outdoors – as well as carefully tended social, cultural and emotional growth.

Then we must note the Nordic region’s unlikely but deserved emergence as a culinary leader, well-represented in Helsinki. This provides more evidence, with its emphasis on the nuanced, often intangible differentiators of quality, service, provenance, ritual and theatre.

Could Finnish design culture augment its innate facility with the inert via this empathetic understanding of people, ritual and service?

If that is a move outwards from the object, there is another trajectory in the opposite direction, towards a different kind of performative fabric, via architecture at the atomic scale.

The 50,000 Nokia employees not bought by Microsoft – still under the Nokia brand, focused on networks, mapping and advanced technologies – recently received a €1 billion EU grant for research into graphene, the “indistinguishable-from-magic” one-atom-thick material that is the thinnest and lightest yet produced, 300 times stronger than steel, transparent, bendable and highly conductive.

Similarly, Finland has Aalto University’s world-renowned Nanotalo lab, with its focus on biomimetic nanocomposites, particularly derived from Finnish timber. Artek’s Kokkonen is a regular visitor. Yet its facility is separated from the design faculties, lost in the university’s misguided attempt at an urban plan without the urban. Connect the power of this research to Finland’s design culture and its potential becomes tangible, just as with 1930s modernism that fused science and engineering with design in order to produce Artek.

Finland could take its design culture forward once again, now all that is solid – stone, fabric, ceramic, glass – has melted into an air of vertically-integrated software, services and media. Perhaps the next evolution is in digital/physical hybrid objects possessing familiar and treasured materials woven with two-dimensional nanocomposites, and allied with responsiveness, awareness, and character by virtue of having the internet embedded within. Finland might be perfectly placed to pick up that gauntlet. But will they?

Despite a culture borne of survival, Finland has an incredibly high standard of living. You might occasionally need to summon a bit of “sisu” on a pitch black, minus 20 degrees January morning, but it’s nothing a Woolrich parka can’t fix. In deep summer or deep winter Helsinki – don’t ask about November – it is difficult to imagine anywhere better.

Yet in places, that success bred complacency, and by “places” I mean the pre-iPhone era Nokia and some of its other heritage brands. These last weeks suggest that Finnish design can no longer afford to be complacent. Nokia single-handedly contributed a third of Finland’s entire corporate research and development as recently as last year; that is unlikely to happen again. Similarly, Artek has to try hard to prevent the sheer weight of its gilded past from holding it back. People might say, “those E60 stools won’t sell themselves!” Actually, they probably will. What they sell next is the question.

So building on and respecting these rich legacies is important, but moving on is more important. Again, Finland has every chance to do so.

Soon the Finns will witness “ruska” spread across the nation, from Aalto’s moonbase-style buildings in Rovaniemi near the Arctic Circle, down to the rapidly greying Baltic off the capital. Ruska occurs when birch, larch and rowan trees explode into russet tones of richly saturated purples, reds, yellows and oranges, before shivering off their leaves for winter. It’s an extraordinary vivid and life-affirming cycle.

Finnish design needs a similarly florid and dramatic replenishment. While the trajectories sketched above are mere suggestions, the recent seismic activity at its two most iconic brands, Artek and Nokia – one a tremor, the other a quake – provides the perfect opportunity for re-imagining Finnish design in the twenty-first century.

Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. He is an adjunct professor in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty at University of Technology, Sydney, and his blog City of Sound covers the intersection between cities, design, culture and technology.

The post “Finnish design can no longer
afford to be complacent” appeared first on Dezeen.

An electric bicycle parked in Shanghai. Image CC BY-SA Lars Plougmann.

Here at Core77, we’ve featured a number of electric bicycles. In our 2012 Year in Review, we noted that vehicles are increasingly going electric, from motorcycles to cars to bicycles. And earlier this year we took a look at the nCycle, a notable electric bike concept that’s sleek and modern like an Apple device. From folding e-bikes to retrofittable motors, electric assistance remains a holy grail for commuters who want the convenience of bicycles without the sweat equity demanded by having to pedal to work.

A recent piece in Atlantic Cities pointed out this emergent trend: "The electric bicycle has so far remained a novelty item in the United States, but manufacturers, retailers, and analysts say that will soon change. Fueled by soaring numbers of bike commuters and rapidly evolving battery technology, the electric bicycle is poised for a breakthrough, if it can only roll over legal obstacles and cultural prejudices." The article goes on to explore some of the bigger challenges, like legal restrictions. These barriers have prevented wide adoption in a city like New York, which is dense and flat enough to encourage electric bike usage.

It’s easy to see these electric bicycle hype stories as just that: hype. But it’s impossible to deny just how popular they are in other contexts. As the article points out, electric bikes are very popular in Denmark and Germany, both countries that have historically been friendly to cyclists. (Of course, this recent column in the Copenhagen Post suggests Danes are still adjusting to the idea of electric bikes.)

(more…)

London creative agency Firedog has designed a dreamy set of Tube posters for the Barbican that aim to capture the feeling of listening to classical music live.

Each poster features an image of someone immersed in classical and the strap line ‘Where will the music take you?’. To capture the range of music on offer at the Barbican, and the varying responses each piece of music evokes, the agency has laid a “dreamscape” over each photo – a multiple exposure image made up of shots of urban buildings and rural landscapes in shades of blue, brown and lilac. Subjects were shot with their eyes closed to emphasise a sense of being ‘lost in the music’.

“The Barbican wanted us to capture the act of listening to [classical performances] and transcribe this into a visual, relatable form…The dreamscape encompasses the notion that when we listen to music, our imagination continually flits from one image to the next…as the classical genre is so rich and diverse, it stands to reason that the more tranquil pieces might evoke a different visual reaction to a more upbeat piece,” explains Firedog’s Hannah Franklin on the company’s website.

The subjects are not professional actors or models but ‘real people’ sourced by the agency. Dressed in hoodies and t-shirts, they were selected to appeal to a younger audience, says Firedog founding partner Clifford Boobyer.

“We had to be quite resourceful with our budget, so this was one of the ways we could do this…The Barbican wanted to target young professionals interested in the arts, but who wouldn’t prioritise a night at the Barbican over a night at the theatre,” he adds.

The project is the first in a three-year partnership between Firedog and the Barbican, and Boobyer told CR that the agency will be releasing “a fresh take on the posters” in early 2014. “The concept will be different, but the visuals will retain elements of this campaign. The Barbican is also thinking about transforming our work into moving imagery/animation,” he says.

Design agency North has also produced a new set of visual identity guidelines for the performing arts venue, which will be released on September 23 to coincide with the opening of this year’s AGI Open.

Firedog’s campaign is the latest in a series of projects launched this year hoping to dispel notions of classical as stuffy or elitist (Studio Output has produced some great work for classical music site Sinfini and for the BBC Concert Orchestra with the same intent). It’s a lovely design and one that would work well as a moving image or animated campaign, if coupled with the right soundtrack.