Hasta La Ideas

It is a Transformers-inspired ring, the Bumblebee Ring($300). The ring features Bumblebee’s..(Read…)

Italian designer Emanuele Pizzolorusso has designed a flexible flower pot that can double in capacity to accommodate plants as they grow and prevent the need for repotting.

Emanuele Pizzolorusso‘s silicone rubber Fold Pot starts out with its top folded down to create a small container suitable for a young plant.

As the plant grows, the top can be straightened out, doubling the capacity of the pot. Additional soil can be added, providing space for the plant’s roots to extend.

“While plants continually change, their pots have always been designed as immobile objects,” Pizzolorusso said. “I saw some workers in a public garden in Helsinki with a plant in a container that looked like a sack. I started playing around with the concept of a soft pot that could be unrolled to become bigger.”

One of Pizzolorusso’s biggest challenges was to achieve the desired aesthetic at each stage of unfolding. The designer made several 3D-printed prototypes before moulding the final design in silicone rubber.

“It was important to keep a perfectly circular shape even when the pot was folded,” he told Dezeen. “This was achieved by engineering the wall thickness in several parts of the object.”

Pizzolorusso used a clean silhouette and specific colours to mimic the hard materials used for traditional plant pots.

“Usually silicon rubber objects are designed to look soft, playful and rubbery,” said the designer. “Instead I used very sharp edges, as if the pot was made of marble or some other very hard material.”

“I also decided not to use the pop colours usually associated with plastic,” he continued. “The final result is a plant pot suitable for growing small plants and spices, that works with contemporary interiors and wooden furniture.”

The Fold Pot was designed for Hong Kong brand Zincere and is available in black, grey and terracotta colours.

Pizzolorusso’s previous projects include a waste-paper basket made from 30 removable pleated paper containers and indestructable city maps.

The post Fold Pot by Emanuele Pizzolorusso
expands around growing plants appeared first on Dezeen.

Football players disappear beneath a grassy knoll to access hidden changing facilities at a sports grounds in northern France by MU Architecture (+ slideshow).

French studio MU Architecture replaced the locker rooms and bathrooms for the football pitches just outside the town of Forge-les-Bains, tucking the new amenities under a plant-covered roof.

The architects designed the structure to conceal the facilities and create a raised area for fans to watch the action from.

“The location of the building has been chosen to preserve as much of the existing free space as possible,” said the architects. “Its shape also fits the geography of the site and the way the different athletic fields are connected to one another.”

The green roof slopes down over both sides of the structure, which forms a raised triangle in the landscape.

“We wanted the building to disappear into the background to put the focus on the athletes entering and leaving the space,” architect Grégoire Dubreux told Dezeen.

“The shape is connected to the flow on the sports complex itself; it opens toward the entrance and the fields and the slopes are created to allow spectators to climb up to sit and watch the fields which previously had no seating.”

A stepped facade creates two covered triangular porches, both providing access into the building.

Steel grating more commonly used for flooring covers the external concrete walls, while a central wood-clad block at the front of the building houses public bathrooms.

A corridor wraps behind this block, leading to two pairs of changing rooms that each share a shower room. The building also contains an office, entered directly from outside.

Taps to wash muddy boots before entering are located in front of the entrances and players can also scrape their studs off on the cladding.

The building is surrounded by a low wall made of woven willow branches, providing a natural barrier to hold the earth in place.

“We stuck and weaved willow branches to stop the dirt from slipping from the roof,” said Dubreux. “The willow lays roots easily and creates a strong and natural wall to hold the ground in place.”

“We wanted to create a contrast with the usage of the natural environment and a visual architectural intervention,” he added.

The post MU Architecture hides locker rooms
under plant-covered mound appeared first on Dezeen.

Since the dawn of the radio, over a century ago, there has been buzz about the invisible rays that make our tech go ’round… and what they’re doing to our bodies, and as our lives become more wireless, the myths and rumors presumably expand into an ever denser unseen web. Perhaps the most unsettling thing about those “invisible killers” is that they are, indeed, invisible. But add another layer to the equation and you’ll discover that those unseen signals are actually beautiful pieces of art (not that that’ll make you feel better about what they may or may not be doing to your health). Newcastle University’s Luis Hernan is giving us a peek into the concealed world of wireless signals with his project, Digital Ethereal.

Using what’s being described around the blogosphere as “a piece of equipment that translates the strength of the Wi-fi signal into colors” (blue being the strongest and red coming in as the weakest—like flames in a fire), Hernan captures time-lapsed shots of these waves at work. That description is about as vague as the ghost-hunting tools we see paranormal scientists toting around on the sci-fi channel—which actually makes sense considering Hernan compares the waves to ghosts, thanks to their invisible qualities.

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“I have this idea for a sweet comedy about death. A middle-aged author of e-books, with middling sales, retreats deep into the mountains of Japan to build a grave for his recently deceased father. After getting scammed out of all of his money, he falls into despair, but for some unknown reason he is visited by a savior in the form of a middle-aged woman. And then his divorced wife from ten years ago appears unexplainably too. Then this young woman with whom he spent a single night in a club many years ago is being treated for an incurable disease in the mountainside sanatorium, and she comes to him for emotional support. I’d love to do that story.”

-Artist Takashi Murakami discussing his filmmaking aspirations in a recent interview. Also on his wishlist? “Some form of a collaboration with J.J. Abrams.”

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