Hasta La Ideas

South Korean designer Jeonghwa Seo has created a collection of stools and tables using 12 different materials in 15 different combinations (+ slideshow).

The low furniture pieces comprise a conical base topped with a flat disc-shaped container in one material with a contrasting material inside, sitting slightly proud to provide a seat or tabletop.

Pairings include basalt and rosewood, cherry and copper, and cork and aluminium. In total the collection uses two types of stone, five types of wood and three types of metal, as well as woven rush and acrylic.

“The Material Container series is focused on the texture of local crafts and unique material qualities,” Jeonghwa Seo told Dezeen. “I selected materials that have a special tactility, and tried to find out which combinations of materials go well together.”

“Creating a contrast between two materials is a good way to balance each material’s qualities,” the designer continued. “I also wanted to use materials that we see around us every day, but don’t expect to be used for furniture.”

Every piece in the collection is made in different way, by a different artisan, according to the materials used.

“Depending on the materiality of constituents I needed to find the right way to make it,” said Seo. “For me it is like travelling to find new places.”

The aluminium pieces in the collection were sand-cast with a variety of finishes. The wooden items were turned on a lathe, while the brass and copper was bent and welded.

The woven rush was made by Korean craftspeople, the basalt and granite was hand carved, and the acrylic was laser cut and dyed to achieve the different colours used.

“I want to make people think about the value of the normal materials that surround us,” Seo said. “The material used in furniture design is like currency. Expensive furniture uses comparatively expensive materials and processes.”

“The Material Container Series has a big price gap between the cheapest item and the most expensive, since the top can contain such a wide variety of materials,” he added.

Seo studied Fine Art, Metal Art and Design at Hongik University in Seoul and completed a Masters in Contextual Design at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands in 2010.

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with Material Container Series appeared first on Dezeen.

Boyarsky Murphy Architects sandwiched this glass-fronted family residence between two terraced houses in west London, on a site less than three metres wide at the front.

Named Sliver House, the narrow residence occupies a site that had formerly housed the stables of a Victorian wine seller, but had been left vacant for decades as a result of its awkward shape.

“The Sliver House is a unique response to a difficult infill site,” said architect Nicholas Boyarsky, one of the two founders of Boyarsky Murphy Architects. “There were no obvious ways to develop it.”

The architects created a four-storey residence, with one of its floors sunken down to the meet the lower ground level at the rear of the site.

As the site widens towards the back, they were able to create a rectilinear block with a secluded rear terrace and garden.

The translucent glass frontage helps to bring natural light through the building without compromising residents’ privacy. Additional light enters the building through strategically located rear windows and skylights.

“The guiding principles behind the project were to introduce as much light as possible throughout the building whilst retaining privacy from the many neighbouring windows,” said Boyarsky.

Protruding upper volumes help to increase the floor space on the higher levels, while also allowing different parts of the house to line up with the hotchpotch arrangement of surrounding walls.

A simple interior layout helps to ensure light permeates every space. The entrance leads through to a living space that occupies the majority of the ground floor, opening out to an enclosed balcony.

The staircase winds across the plan to suit the layout of each floor. It leads down to a kitchen and dining room on the lowest level, and up to three bedrooms on the two upper floors.

Photography is by Hélène Binet.

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slots into a three-metre-wide space appeared first on Dezeen.

A few months ago, I was contacted by an organization called Women Engineers Pakistan, which introduces girls to the field of engineering and technology. Just reading the name made me curious. For those of you who don’t know, I’m an architect, and I come from a family full of engineers and tech-heads. In other words, my choice of becoming an architect has never, at any point of my life, ever been questioned. I went to a technical high school in Uppsala, Sweden, always with the support of mom and dad, brothers and sister, my grandmother, aunts, uncle and most of all my wonderful grandfather. With 26 boys and 5 girls in my class, the male-to-female ratio was rather high, but my knowledge and competence was never questioned by anyone of the male gender. Not by teachers, nor by fellow students.

Hearing about an organization like this and its origins was inspiring, and it takes more then a bit of willpower and skin on the nose (Swedish expression) to start something as groundbreaking and controversial in a country where female students are told that they should reconsider their choice to study engineering and start studying something more suitable for women…

In this interview, I’ve had the great pleasure of talking directly with Ramla Quershi, the co-founder of Women Engineers Pakistan. She recently moved to the U.S. to study engineering on a full Fullbright scholarship. So even though she’s busy with the big move and getting her bearings, she set aside some time for this interview. I hope you get as inspired by reading this as I did from writing it.

Core77: Tell us a bit about the organisation and the thoughts behind it.

Ramla Quershi: The organization is a budding startup, which looks to increase participation from Pakistani women in Pakistan in engineering. Women have always been by and large in domestic and agricultural jobs in Pakistan, and their participation in science and technology has been minimal. We realize that women make over half the Pakistani population and we’re working to prevent that potential talent for technical prowess from going to waste. We’re working with young girls at high schools to encourage them towards science and math

When did you start working on getting Women Engineers Pakistan up and running?

It started with a Facebook page last August. But it’s wasn’t until six months ago that we started working as an organization.

Why did you decide on starting WEP?

Throughout my engineering degree, I felt a nagging lack of women in this field. We were often discouraged by our professors that engineering is a ‘big boy’ area. It was disheartening to realize that there weren’t many role models set out for us. So I created this organization to give women engineers a platform to represent themselves.

When the professors talked about it being a “big boy” profession, how did your fellow male students react to those sort of comments?

My fellow males knew that I was good at my studies, so they would often turn up for a group study option and ask me to explain things to them. So they had found out that the women in their class were just as good (some even better) engineers. Barring a few, many were courteous and encouraging. However, there were some ‘go make a sandwich’ sort of comments—but not many.

There must have been many ideas/incentives to make it go from an concept into reality, what were they?

Oh yes, there were. Initially it was just a Facebook page, but then it started getting attention, and I realized that I had hit a niche. We were contacted by the U.S. Embassy through the Facebook page for meeting with a NASA engineer coming to Pakistan. And i thought, ‘Oh wow, not much representation for the women in engineering crowd.’

(more…)

Feature: narrow homes have become increasingly popular in Japan, but can these awkwardly shaped residences offer housing solutions to other cities around the world, asks Dezeen deputy editor Amy Frearson.

Skinny houses aren’t a new idea. Architects have been slotting small numbers of buildings into spaces they don’t quite fit into for centuries. However a growing trend for micro-homes – compact city dwellings with areas rarely exceeding 30 square metres – has sparked a renewed interested in narrow houses.

The quest to find new spaces in increasingly dense, overpopulated and expensive cities is also making these buildings a more attractive prospect for people who are struggling to find land to build on as prices escalate. In London alone, land values rose by over 13% last year.

“There is so much pressure on land that there is more incentive to make interesting use of less conventional sites – many of which will be long and thin,” explained British architect Jack Woolley, whose projects include a 3.2-metre wide house and workshop slotted behind a brick wall in London.

“The narrowness is often what makes these sites so special,” he told Dezeen. “The most difficult issue is circulation.”

The recurring precedents for this kind of dwelling are found in the densely populated cities of Japan, where skinny houses are referred to as eel’s beds or nests, and are usually between two and five metres in width. By comparison, most of the standard new-build houses in England – often referred to disparagingly as rabbit hutch housing thanks to their below-standard sizes – are over 5.2 metres wide.

To create functional layouts within these narrower Japanese buildings, architects tend to drop the corridors and arrange rooms in sequence.

“Japanese people are a rare group who have a mentality of finding aesthetics in smallness and narrowness,” said Satoshi Kurosaki, whose Tokyo firm Apollo Architects & Associates has completed dozens of compact city residences around Japan.

“In Tokyo and other Japanese cities, most land is limited, highly dense, and ‘smallness’ exists in daily life,” said the architect. “Having the limited space led us to develop techniques for details and a smart lifestyle was born.”

One of the most widely celebrated examples of the Japanese narrow houses is Tadao Ando’s Row House, completed in 1973. At just over three metres wide, the building featured an uncompromising simplicity that spawned hundreds of replicas across the country.

Kurosaki thinks the key to projects like this is to avoid thinking about narrowness as a negative factor and treat it as an opportunity to keep things simple and uncluttered.

“In cases of narrow houses, too many uses should not be put in,” he said. “Dividing space into smaller rooms is possible, but separating it is not. We make sure that one space is arranged as loosely as possible and we try to secure a rational line of flow.”

“Keeping it from being monotonous is important, by creating differences in level and gaps in the ceiling height, and by adding rhythm moderately in the space,” he added. “Creating a blank space such as an atrium tends to make the space bigger, thus it is key.”

Can the success of this typology in Japan be repeated in other countries? Kurosaki is sceptical, as he believes these kind of homes will always be restricted by the cultural habits of their residents, which vary greatly in other nations.

“People all over the world are becoming aware of the charm of a compact space, as we see many special features on the theme of ‘small’ everywhere now days,” he said.

“However, if you ask me whether the Japanese housing can be exported to the world just as it is, I would say no.  Because the concept of small differs in each country. The modules have to fit different lifestyles to effectively utilise space.”

“Architects will need to customise the narrow house ideas established in Japan to suit the various characters, cultures and customs of each nation,” he added.

But Tristan Wigfall, one of the directors of London studio Alma-nac, believes narrow houses offer a realistic solution to the growing demand for inner-city family homes in the English capital.

“With the current housing crisis it is imperative that we create efficient homes that fully utilise all pockets of urban space,” said the architect, who completed an extension to a 2.3 metre-wide terraced house in London last year.

Like Kurosaki, Wigfall also warns that a “one-size-fits-all strategy” is potentially hazardous. “Characteristically, when working on infill sites we have to come up with bespoke solutions, which mean that the outcomes can sometimes differ from the norm and be quite striking as a result,” he explained.

Skinny houses have even started to crop up in Los Angeles, whose sprawling urbanism couldn’t be further removed from Tokyo’s dense cityscape. LA architect Simon Storey is behind one of them – a house named Eel’s Nest, in a nod to its Japanese counterparts.

“This was the first time I had worked on a narrow house,” the Anonymous Architects principal told Dezeen. “It took a lot of fine-tuning the design. It’s amazing how important one inch of space becomes when you’re dealing with such a confined width.”

Storey believes a new piece of city legislation encouraging the construction of narrow residences could usher in a new wave of more space-efficient dwellings in the American city.

“It might take a while before it becomes an established typology,” he said. “But LA is the perfect place for it to happen because it’s very spread out and could be a better place if it had greater density of living and less commuting.”

So what is the key to creating comfortable living spaces in skinny houses? Polish architect Jakub Szczesny asked this question with his attempt to build the world’s narrowest house in 2012. At just 122 centimetres at its widest point, Keret House tested the limits of confined living. The house was only wide enough for a single bed and very little furniture.

An angular wall covered in windows was key to getting enough light inside, while a double-height entrance space helped to create a feeling of spaciousness.

According to Wigfall, the design process is not dissimilar to planning the interior of a boat, where “spaces are not conceived in a two-dimensional manner but by fully utilising the three dimensions of a volume”.

“Far too often properties are merely judged on square footage and not three dimensional volume which can have a huge effect on how comfortable a space can feel,” said the architect, who is now working on a residence that is just under two metres wide.

He also suggests being strategic with window placement. “A key idea is to ensure that external openings are visible from as many vantage points as possible, so for instance, configuring windows so they are located at the end of internal corridors to avoid dark dead ends.”

“Spatially it is critical that the spaces are well organised so that rooms can be multi-functional and retain a sense of calm,” he said. “Other tricks include creating ‘through rooms’ that do not need to be enclosed spaces, such as studies or dressing rooms.”

Considering all of these factors, Wigfall can’t see any reason why this typology shouldn’t become more popular, if planners outside of Japan will embrace the concept. “For this to become a reality we need to have more forward-thinking planning authorities who are willing to consider this inventive approach to housing.”

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one inch of space becomes” appeared first on Dezeen.

News: the California department of motor vehicles has introduced new road safety rules, requiring all vehicles on its roads to have a steering wheel and brake pedal – including Google‘s fleet of driverless cars.

Google will have to fit manual control devices to each of the cars in its test fleet of driverless vehicles before it can take them onto public roads in the tech giant’s home state.

Google unveiled its latest prototype for a button operated car in May this year, with a movie showing members of the public test driving one of the vehicles. The company said it would create a fleet of around 100 cars to test on the roads near its headquarters in Mountain View, California.

But California’s DMV has now announced new rules that will come into effect in mid-September, that say a driver must be able to take “immediate physical control” of a vehicle on public roads – meaning it has to have a steering wheel and brake and accelerator pads.

Google told the Wall Street Journal that it would comply with the rule by adding temporary devices, including a pedal system.

“With these additions, our safety drivers can test the self-driving features, while having the ability to take control of the vehicle if necessary,” said Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne.

The company’s prototype cars had in-built sensors designed to detect objects up to two football-field lengths away in all directions, were operated with the push of a button and had a speed cap of 25 miles per hour.

But one of Google’s lead software engineers on the project revealed this week that the cars were now being programmed to exceed speed limits by up to 10 miles per hour.

Dmitri Dolgov told news agency Reuters that research had shown that it was safer to allow the cars to accelerate to keep up if surrounded by other vehicles that were speeding.

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to driverless car designs appeared first on Dezeen.