When you think of knockout sci-fi concept designers, you probably think of Syd Mead and/or Doug Chiang. Between Blade Runner, Tron, Terminator 2 and the later Star Wars films, both men have gotten their due. Their names also ring a little sweeter to us because both majored in Industrial Design, Mead at Art Center, Chiang at CCS. But for fans of this genre, there’s another man whose name you may not know and whose work you should look at: Jean-Claude Mézières, whose background was not in industrial design but in illustration. And if you have seen the original Star Wars trilogy, you have seen the largely uncredited influence of his work (further down in this entry are the most egregious examples).
Mézières’ background is as wonderfully confusing as it is interesting: Born and raised in Paris of the 1930s and ’40s, entered an art academy at the age of 15. After graduation he did two years in the French army, seeing action in Algeria, and briefly worked as an illustrator upon his discharge. Then he became so fascinated by the American West that he hitchhiked across America in the 1960s to fulfill his lifelong ambition of becoming an actual working cowboy in Utah.
After wrapping up his cowboy gig and American adventures, Mézières returned to France—and started an influential science-fiction comic book, at a time when sci-fi was about as popular in France as being a hitchhiking cowboy was.
Following our special feature on skinny houses, we’ve put together a collection of some of the best examples of slimline residences from the pages of Dezeen.
Polish architect Jakub Szczesny claims that Keret House is the world’s narrowest house, measuring just 122 centimetres at its widest point.
Squeezed between two buildings in the centre of Warsaw, the house is designed to allow just one person to live and work inside as part of a writers residency run by arts group Centrala, of which Szczesny is a co-founder. Find out more »
This house in Ho Chi Minh City by Vietnamese architects Vo Trong Nghia is 20 metres deep but just 4 metres wide – a long, thin “tube house” shape common in Vietnam.
A dozen layers of concrete planters span the space between the side walls to create a vertical garden at the front and back, with a wall of glazing separating the plants from the house at the front. Find out more »
At just 3 metres wide, architects Katsutoshi Sasaki + Associates decided there was no room for corridors in this two-storey house in the Aichi Prefecture, Japan.
Instead, the interior is arranged as a simple sequence of rooms, one after another, with the proportions of the spaces changing according to their function. There wasn’t enough space for a garden either, so the architects added a small indoor patio on the ground floor. Find out more »
This London terraced house was already among the slimmest in the city, occupying a former stable in a 2.3 metre gap between larger buildings. Rather than add a solid block to the back to make more space, local studio Alma-nac staggered the floors of the extension, with a sloping roof punctured by windows to help bring in more sunlight.
“With such a narrow and deep plan the existing building was claustrophobic,” alma-nac partner Tristan Wigfall told Dezeen. “The key driver in developing the proposal was ensuring that natural light was able to penetrate deep into the plan to create rooms that felt spacious and light.” Find out more »
The rooms in this 27 metre deep, 2.7 metre wide house in Shiga, by Japanese studio FORM/Kouichi Kimura Architects, are connected by long, thin corridors.
“As you proceed along the hallway you will see the spaces spread out, one after another,” said the architect. Large pieces of concrete furniture have been built in to a number of the rooms to reduce clutter. Find out more »
Another take on the Vietnamese tube house, this four storey family home in Ho Chi Minh City is just four metres wide but 24 metres deep.
With site restrictions and abutting buildings often resulting in a lack of windows along the sides of these buildings, interior spaces in the middle can be dark. So Vietnamese architects Sanuki + Nishizawa introduced light wells, exposed staircases and flexible partitions to the interior spaces of ANH House to bring more natural light into the building. Find out more »
One of the widest buildings on this list, but one of the narrowest in Landskrona, Sweden, this skinny house fills a five metre gap in a street of traditional terraced cottages that was vacant for over 50 years.
“Compressed slab construction, unconventional ceiling heights, and the ground floor flush to the street level, permitted fitting three floors into a volume aligned with the neighbouring rooftops,” explained the architects from Swedish firm Elding Oscarson. Find out more »
Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa wanted to create a “house without walls” to make sure the narrow width of this four metre wide plot in Tokyo didn’t feel any smaller, so he used floor-to-ceiling glazing between each slab of the four storey construction instead.
A series of gardens on the facades help mask the interior from the eyes of passers-by, creating a screen of plant life and providing every room in the building with its own outdoor space. Find out more »
Los Angeles is more usually associated with sprawl, but it also has a few tiny urban plots like this one in the hilly Echo Park neighbourhood in the north of the city.
Anonymous Architects called their 4.5 metre wide house Eel’s Nest after the nickname for the Japanese narrow houses that inspired the design. There are no corridors inside the building, but stairs lead up from the entrance to a first floor living room, second floor bedrooms and a terrace on the roof. Find out more »
While the rest of this house in Tokyo is of more usual proportions, the west wing is nine metres tall but only two metres wide.
Designed by Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects, the slender side of the house contains kitchens, bathrooms, closets and a small bedroom, while larger bedrooms and living rooms occupy the wider half. The house doesn’t have any doorways, instead using large openings in the walls off the corridors to make it easier for the family to communicate. Find out more »
The wearable tech field just got a little bit more elegant. Today, American luxury giant Ralph Lauren debuts the Polo Tech shirt at the 2014 US Open, where several ball boys will wear the shirt on-court….
“Soldiers Inventories” est une série de photographies réalisée par Thom Atkinson et nous proposant de découvrir 13 tenues et accessoires typiques des soldats anglais, et ce allant de 1066 à aujourd’hui. Un travail réunissant uniformes, armes et autres éléments nous permettant de se donner une idée de l’évolution de l’équipement à travers les siècles.
1815 private soldier, Battle of Waterloo
1066 huscarl, Battle of Hastings
1244 mounted knight, Siege of Jerusalem
1415 fighting archer, Battle of Agincourt
1485 Yorkist man-at-arms, Battle of Bosworth
1588 trainband caliverman, Tilbury
1645 New Model Army musketeer, Battle of Naseby
1709 private sentinel, Battle of Malplaquet
1854 private soldier, Rifle Brigade, Battle of Alma
1916 private soldier, Battle of the Somme
1944 lance corporal, Parachute Brigade, Battle of Arnhem
1982 Royal Marine Commando, Falklands conflict
2014 close-support sapper, Royal Engineers, Helmand Province
Concrete Candleholder is the result of an investigation on concrete as a material. Concrete has been used for centuries and is a crucial part of our m..
I’ve solved the wallet thing for myself, I’ve got the perfect wallet for me. So whenever someone comes out with a new ultraslim wallet, I’m unmoved. But I just gave the Silo Mesh Card wallet a gander and am impressed at the thinking that went into it:
When most folks think of improving the design of a flashlight, they think of making it brighter or smaller. It’s easy to overlook the average flashlight’s central flaw: They emit a limited, circular patch of light that doesn’t really jive with human peripheral vision.
On a trip upstate last year, I was looking for my runaway dog in the woods at night. While my LED flashlight was powerful enough to cast a far beam, having to trace that small circle of light over a wide swath of trees felt like painting a battleship with a toothbrush.
I’d have done better with a Morphalite flashlight, created by product developers Frank and Gary Wall. They’ve figured out how to create a lens that effectively refracts light into a 180-degree arc, enabling the user to scan a large patch of horizontal darkness in one go. Alternately one can rotate it 90 degrees and send the spread vertical, to better illuminate a trail one’s walking down, for instance.
The Walls’ DIY video below is, well, DIY quality, but that doesn’t detract from the cleverness of the product’s design, and their logic is unassailable:
Interestingly enough, engineer Frank discovered how to create the lens purely by accident. You can read the tale here.
For all the emphasis placed on fitness these days, between newfangled workouts and wearable tech to help count the daily burn, the appropriate apparel hasn’t become any more advanced. There’s an obvious dearth of innovative, design-conscious activewear: women are still stuck…
The Bellows Bottle is a concept that makes transportation of liquids an easy experience. The bottle collapses and expands to pump out water and is very convenient to stack when empty. Not much rocket science to the design, but simple application and implementation.
It’s been a busy, brightly colored, organic-shaped summer for Karim Rashid. The globe-trotting designer has given lectures, made appearances, and occasionally DJ’ed in cities from Miami and Toronto to Hamburg and Ekaterinburg—the fourth-largest city in Russia. On Friday he could be found in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he delivered the keynote at the Construye & Remodela confab. Not that there’s any shortage of stateside projects: Rashid was recently commissioned to design three Manhattan residential buildings, including a mixed-use project (20 apartments, with office and commercial space at the street level) located at 1633-1655 Madison Avenue. The concept is a continuation of Rashid’s signature boundary-pushing approach, rooted in a desire to “bring a fulgent vibrancy to the environment and move away the trends away from tired archetypes and cold minimalism.” He made time between groundbreakings, prototyping sessions, and DJ sets to answer our seven questions.
You recently lectured—and DJed—in Ekaterinburg, Russia. What is your impression of the state of design in Russia? I have been to Russia 25 times and always love the country, the energy, the people, the intellectual spirit, the food, the sensibilities. In regards the state of design I have seen things change drastically since 14 years ago, but the problem is that Russia has not embraced the design phenomena enough, yet it is getting better and better. The condition is changing. In order to know Russian designers internationally they either work and develop brands in Russia—that become globally established—or work for foreign companies. And in all those trips very few Russian companies approach me to design for them.
Russia with all its diversified money, increasing incomes, intelligence, education, and manufacturing capability, lacks globally recognized brands. I always thought how fascinating it is that a country like Sweden has international brands like IKEA, H&M, Absolut, Volvo, and Voss with only a population of 7 million. Because of the size of Russia, companies were producing goods exclusively for their huge market and taking no impetus to export. Russia has the manpower and money to create major global brands. But times have changed and the doors to the West are open. I would love to see Russia build some very contemporary brands that contribute to our beautiful global consumer landscape.
I just completed the new OK.RU website [a popular Russian social media platform], and I am working on a shopping mall in St. Petersburg, an orange juice bottle, a cognac bottle, a tractor, and other projects in Russia, but I would love to design some hotels in every major city. There is a lack of design-driven boutique hotels in Russia.
How do you think design affects our mental and physical health? Design should be as inspiring and comfortable and work seamlessly with your life. Our environments should feel free, communal, and personal at the same time. I believe fluid, clean, bright spaces, smart poetic products and a real sense of progress and evolution of the physical and virtual world can promote a healthy, intelligent life. Good design creates a mental state where one feels positive, relaxed, inspired, and rejuvenated. Design can extend our lives and increase our aesthetic public memory. (more…)
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