Four design installations have been published on Dezeen in the last week, so we’ve gathered together all the temporary artworks and structures from the Dezeen archive and added them to a new Pinterest board.
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Fibre-cement tiles have been used to create a latticed surface on the facade and roof of this house by Belgian studio NU architectuuratelier (+ slideshow).
Leeuw House was designed by NU architectuuratelier for a young couple on vacant land in the town of Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, near Brussels. Its shape mimics the area’s more traditional brick buildings, but its cladding distinguishes it as a modern addition.
Related story: Wall House by And’rol
“The slates are quite cheap, and we used them uncoated, which has a nice materiality. They are not as clean as the coated ones – there’s a variation in colour,” architect Karel Verdonck told Dezeen.
The couple asked for an energy-efficient house, so NU architectuuratelier designed it to meet Passive House standards in collaboration with Ghent-based office Robuust, who did the engineering. It is built with an airtight structure that requires little additional heating or cooling.
“The house has underfloor heating, but it hasn’t been used yet. The building requires almost no energy for heating,” said Verdonck.
The north facade of the three-storey house is relatively blank, while the south and west facades are almost entirely glazed in order to maximise light and warmth from the sun. This orientation also shifts views towards adjacent fields, and away from neighbouring buildings.
Multiple entrances and exits have been designed to give the house a more dynamic relationship with its location. These include a ramp from the street to the side of the house, doors to the terrace at the back, and external stairs from the first floor down to the surrounding land.
Green doors and shutters have been added to enliven the exterior.
“We liked the idea of adding colour to this grey volume. The colour was chosen together with the client,” said Verdonck.
The house has a garage in the basement and three bedrooms on the first floor. A dining room, kitchen, living room and study have been arranged on half levels between the ground floor and first floor.
A section of the living room flooring has been cantilevered out into the kitchen to provide a cooking surface.
Rather than design a separate circulation area in the house, the architects have created a route through the different open-plan spaces using metal stairs.
“The house is designed like a spiral internal landscape with alternating views to the exterior landscape,” explained Verdonck. “This spiral is made up of spaces with their own quality, but with open relations to each other. As you ascend, the spaces become more private.”
Concrete flooring has been used throughout, chosen for its natural ability to soak up heat during the day and release it slowly later, as temperatures drop.
Birch plywood has been used for the kitchen and storage cabinets, and the metal floor plate supporting the top level has been left exposed to double as the ceiling for the ground floor.
“The client wanted an industrial look, so the structure remains visible,” said Verdonck.
Photography is by Stijn Bollaert.
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for Leeuw House by NU architectuuratelier appeared first on Dezeen.
Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Niels Datema has designed a lamp made entirely of graphite, which illuminates when its two parts connect (+ slideshow).
Niels Datema took advantage of graphite’s electrical conductivity to alleviate the need for a switch to turn his Graphlights on or off.
Related story: Bread spoons by Niels Datema
Instead, the base and shade act as positive and negative terminals, which form a complete circuit when they touch and illuminate the bulb.
“The multi-applicability of graphite formed the root of my interests for finding a way for using and transforming this material and applying it in an everyday product,” said Datema.
Graphite, more commonly used for pencil leads, is made up of a specific stable arrangement of carbon atoms that allows electricity to pass through easily.
Datema shaped the material using a similar process to casting ceramics, forming two cylinders for the base and the shade.
The shade includes a frosted diffuser that covers the bulb set back from the edge of the tube. Its rounded shape sits within a concave section of the base, which has an angled slice cut through it.
Graphite is also a good dry lubricant, so the light can be easily repositioned to point in different directions by rotating the top section of the stand. An electrical cable connects the base to the power supply.
Datema graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2013 and set up his own design studio the year before. He has also designed a set of five measuring spoons that give the correct quantities of flour, water, yeast, sugar and oil to bake the perfect loaf of bread.
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properties to illuminate Graphlights appeared first on Dezeen.
Après leur excellente initiative à Montréal en 2012, le collectif de design canadien Daily Tous Les Jours ont proposé une nouvelle adaptation de ces incroyables balançoires lumineuses et musicales au Green Box Arts Festivals à Green Mountain Falls dans le Colorado. Une jolie initiative à découvrir en images dans la suite.
Dezeen Music Project: Israeli director Gal Muggia aimed to create a “fractured reality” with stretched landscapes, digital boxes and pixellated heads in this music video for artist Adi Ulmansky.
Gal Muggia shot and edited the low-budget video for the track Was It You? by Israeli artists Adi Ulmansky and Borgore.
“After listening to the song for a few days non-stop, day to night, I came up with this image of a girl seeing her partner with a fractured head,” Muggia told Dezeen. “It’s related to the lyrics of the song and I just had this vision of these floating pixels.”
“From there on I wanted to do something about living in a digital world but without showing the digital,” he continued, “showing a reality that is fractured and stretched, and made out of digital things.”
To represent a couple who don’t understand each other, Muggia turned the head of one partner into an exploded patchwork of pixels.
In other scenes, Ulmansky walks through a distorted world where the urban landscape appears to be infinitely stretched up or down.
“I worked on it for a very long time until I came up with those three digital interferences: the cubes, the pixellated heads and stretched pixels on the sidewalk,” he said.
Natural elements in the scenery are captured as if encased in cubes. These include plants growing between the rubble of an abandoned building and food in the apartment.
“I wanted to make an image of plants and growing things that have been put in digital boxes,” Muggia said.
Filming took place in empty car parks, underpasses and industrial buildings around Tel Aviv.
“It was a very low budget so most of it was shot in locations where we didn’t have to pay or without asking anyone,” said Muggia. “We searched for a lot of abandoned houses, warehouses, places that would show ruins.”
Scenes switch between these locations and an apartment that belongs to Muggia’s parents, which was used as a contrast to the urban environments.
“We wanted a process of showing a very clean house and slowly going into a derelict environment,” Muggia explained. “For me it’s a symbol of the inner situation that occurs during this music video.”
The shoot took place over four days, then months were spent editing the footage with two visual effects specialists during the team’s spare time.
“We used a very simple DSLR camera, most of it was done in Aftereffects,” said Muggia. “There was nothing added, all of the video and the 3D elements are things that we actually shot on set and included.”
Was It You? features on Adi Ulmansky’s album Hurricane Girl, which was released last year.
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music video for Adi Ulmansky appeared first on Dezeen.
Récemment, les personnes présentes à l’aéroport de Munich ont eu la chance de voir le pianiste Stefan Aaron pratiquer un concert au piano sur un « tapis volant ». Une superbe initiative poétique réalisée dans le cadre du Orange Piano Tour à découvrir en images dans la suite.
Photo essay: photographer Rebecca Litchfield has toured former Soviet countries to document the once-monumental structures around the Eastern Bloc that have fallen into decay.
Litchfield took a road trip through east Germany, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Croatia and Russia to capture the crumbling architecture, built throughout the 20th century and abandoned following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
She visited hospitals, military barracks, prisons, spy stations, sports halls and more – dodging security and military personnel, and risking radiation exposure to gain access to the derelict structures and find “beauty in the decay”.
Related story: “Design, fashion and architecture hold something mysterious in the objects they produce”
The series is collated into a book titled Soviet Ghosts – The Soviet Union Abandoned: A Communist Empire in Decay.
Only the most intrepid urban explorers cross the tattered ruins of the old Iron Curtain to endure the excessive bureaucracy, military paranoia and freezing winds of the East to hunt for the ghosts of an empire. Rebecca Litchfield is one who couldn’t resist the haunting allure of the ruins of the Soviet Union.
Time and again she risked radiation exposure, experienced arrest and interrogation, and was accused of espionage while collecting the stunning photography contained in Soviet Ghosts. “Not many explorers travel to Russia,” she explains, “where the rules are very different, locations are heavily guarded and a strong military presence exists everywhere. There are serious consequences for getting caught. We managed to stay hidden for all of the trip, we maximised our stealthiness, ducking and diving into bushes and sneaking past sleeping security. But on day three our good fortune ran out as we visited a top secret radar installation. After walking through the forest, mosquitos attacking us from all directions, we saw the radar and made our way towards it, but just metres away suddenly we were joined by military and they weren’t happy.”
Luckily, after some drawn out conversations between her guides and the military, followed by an unexpected trip to a military base and a long wait, Rebecca was allowed to continue on her adventure through the ruins of Soviet bloc, and witness many sights never before seen by western eyes.
From brutal eastern bloc architecture to haunting images of faded theatres the emotional effect of this poetic collection of images will keep you coming back for more, while a series of expert articles offer in-depth analysis of the historical context.
“I refrain from having personal opinions about the era and try to remain relatively neutral,” Rebecca goes on. “Whilst the period had bad times, the people living in the communities still got on with life and also had good times, it was not a period of pure black and white and so my aim of the book was to just capture it as it was now. Some places would have been thriving and others horrible places to be and you can see this reflected in my book and some of the accompanying text. But that is life, time moves on and things like this disappear. Some people may see the ruins of this time as destructive, but I see the beauty in the decay, like a memory hanging on that will soon be lost in a breeze, a museum that no one gets to see.”
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by Rebecca Litchfield appeared first on Dezeen.
1. Seeing is Hearing MIT engineers have developed a technique to “listen” to sound without the use of a microphone—audio can be recovered just from video by analyzing how an inanimate object (such as a bag…
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Five cliff-top buildings feature walls that fold in on themselves to frame views and offer privacy in this South Korean holiday resort by Atelier Chang (+ slideshow).
London-based Atelier Chang took inspiration from knots to design five residential structures on Geoje Island, which feature walls that fold up from the ground and across into the living rooms.
“A key question was how to achieve seamless spatial connection between the outdoor landscape and indoor living space,” said architect Soohyun Chang. “To answer that question, one had stop separating the building from the ground. Instead, we imagined a surface made of the landscape, which eventually folds into a knot to create an enclosure.”
The resort, called Knot House, was built for South Korean hospitality group House of Mind, and its five buildings have been staggered diagonally down the slope so they don’t overlook each other.
The first building is two storeys and doubles as a clubhouse for guests and a house for the owner. It has a communal kitchen and dining room on the ground floor, which opens on to a terrace and pool. The ground floor also has a private bedroom, bathroom and office for the owner, and the first floor has another bedroom, bathroom and a family room.
The four guest buildings contain single-storye apartments. Two have one bedroom, and the others have two bedrooms. Full-height glazing rises three to five metres tall in each apartment to maximize views across the water.
At the side of each apartment structure, sections jut out to house bathrooms with sunken tubs and provide outdoor space that is shielded from wind and overlooking from neighbours.
“Wind and rain is quite frequent in Korean summers, so we wanted to create an outdoor experience without being affected by unfavourable weather,” Chang told Dezeen.
Sections of timber from the terraces continue inside along the ceilings to provide a visual connection between indoor and outdoor space. Similarly, wood-effect ceramic floor tiles inside follow on from timber decking outside.
“Because we have wet areas such as the bath and the outdoor decking, we had to choose a material that is resilient to moisture,” said Chang.
At the entrance to each apartment, the roof folds down to provide an angular covered porch.
According to the architects, the buildings could be converted into private homes in the future.
“The project brings multiple advantages from the real-estate point of view,” said Chang. “At first, multiple units can be built for hospitality to generate immediate income. Years later, they can be converted and sold as residential units.”
The concept of knot-like enclosures could also be replicated on different sites, according to Atelier Chang.
“The set of Knot houses was designed as a possibility for chain resorts, which can be implemented in any location,” said Chang. “Because the ‘knot’ uses the landscape of the site, the unique context of a site can be used to influence the building.”
Photography is by Kyungsub Shin.
Project credits
Design team: Atelier Chang Ltd (Soohyun Chang, Federica Russo, Ryan Day, Hyunwoo Chung)
Structure design: Thekujo
Local architect: K20Art Architects
The post Atelier Chang designs angular cliff-top
buildings for Knot House resort appeared first on Dezeen.
The Philips Pasta Maker, a machine makes your pasta. Features:- Makes 1 lb. fresh pasta in 15..(Read…)
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