The fantastically simple Frida stool and side table are so sensibly designed they’ll make you say DUH! Each composed of just 4 flat-pack pieces, their clever construction is held together with just a single butterfly screw that locks the pieces in place and gives a touch of color. Easy to assemble and aesthetically adorable!
– Yanko Design Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design! (Screw It was originally posted on Yanko Design)
A scooter with a built-in luggage… or luggage with a built-in scooter. Whichever way you look at it, OLAF is simply hybrid-awesomeness! The multifunctional design is available in two versions: a casual backpack for kicking around town, OR a more serious carry-on for business travel. Whether you’re a briefcase/suit kinda guy or hip, urban dweller, both models represent a unique vision of modern urban mobility that transforms in seconds! See em’ in action —>
– Yanko Design Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design! (Kick, Scoot, Carry! was originally posted on Yanko Design)
La marque suédoise Radinn révolutionne l’industrie nautique et rend possible le fait de voguer sur les flots à toute allure avec cette planche à propulseur électrique. Ce wakeboard fabriqué en Suède possède une structure en fibre de carbone léger et fonctionne comme un wakeboard autonome. À découvrir en vidéo à travers cette démonstration.
La photographe australienne Kate Ballis est l’auteur d’une série de photos de plages et de mers turquoises capturées en vue aérienne : « Beach Above ». Les lignes sont tracées par les rochers, les jetées, les vagues, les algues et les parasols des nageurs. Un beau travail graphique, à découvrir en images.
Après sa série de photos aériennes, le photographe australien Tom Blachford revient avec « Midnight Modern » : des photos prises durant deux séjours faits au milieu des maisons de Palm Springs, construites dans les années 50-60 par Alexander Construction Company. Capturées de nuit, sous la lumière naturelle de la Super Lune et sans retouches, l’atmosphère des clichés fait penser au photographe Gregory Crewdson.
Il exposera au Modern Times, à Melbourne du 2 Octobre au 19 Octobre.
Basé à Athènes, le studio Fabulous Cat Papers conçoit des carnets cousus et brodés à la main. Les broderies sont faites sur un papier japonais très fin et les couvertures rassemblent des dessins d’insectes, de fleurs, d’animaux, d’anatomies ou des formes géométriques. A découvrir en images.
American company Bernhardt Design has celebrated its 125th anniversary by commissioning designers Ross Lovegrove, Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance and Jephson Robb to create new furniture pieces for the brand (+ slideshow).
Anne Chair by Ross Lovegrove
Bernhardt Design turned 125 this year, so the brand asked the three designers to come up with new designs for its range that “honour the company’s heritage of fine wood-working and upholstery craftsmanship”.
Each designer was asked to reinterpret a piece of furniture that typified American design for them.
British designer Ross Lovegrove modelled the first wooden seat he has created on a typical American courthouse chair.
Anne Chair by Ross Lovegrove
“These chairs were such a visible part of the American landscape because of their very powerful presence,” said Lovegrove. “Using this historical reference, I wanted to create a chair that is contemporary and a reflection of my design vocabulary.”
Anne Chair by Ross Lovegrove
The chair’s arms arc around the sitter to form a continuous curved backrest, while its legs splay outward towards the floor.
The design is named after Anne Harper Bernhardt – one of the company’s founders – and is available in solid American walnut with a natural finish. The leather seat comes in a range of colours.
“As in all my work, the Anne chair is about sculpting a material: creating something that has a human dimension and looks interesting from any view,” Lovegrove said.
Harper Chair by Noe Duchaufour-Lawrance
Also taking its name from the founder, the Harper chair by Paris-based Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance references the iconic Windsor chair, which although not actually an American design is often seen on the verandas of houses in Hollywood films.
“In the collective French memory, one vision of America is the view of a rocking chair sitting on an open porch,” Duchaufour-Lawrance said. “It might be influenced by the movies, but the picture of a man sitting in a rocking chair on a front porch with his feet up on the balustrade, is quintessentially American.”
Harper Chair by Noe Duchaufour-Lawrance
He deconstructed the Windsor chair and rearranged the components, so the spindly elements in the back become struts that span between the top and bottom of the curved frame.
Harper Chair by Noe Duchaufour-Lawrance
“The exterior of the Harper chair is very much like a birds nest with a structure composed of twigs,” the designer said. “The interior is a cocoon – in this instance a suspended cocoon. The seat and back appear to be floating inside the nest.”
Harper Chair by Noe Duchaufour-Lawrance
The leather-upholstered seat is supported by four pieces of timber that extend seamlessly from the outer frame.
Harper Chair by Noe Duchaufour-Lawrance
The Harper is made from solid American cherry and maple woods, using a combination of hand craftsmanship and a seven-axis CNC machine.
Alex Sofa by Jephson Robb
Scottish designer Jephson Robb used the Chesterfield sofa as his starting point for the Alex sofa as Americans were credited with popularising its name, and because he has fond memories of the design.
“When I was growing up, the first piece of furniture that actually made an impression on me was a Chesterfield sofa,” said Jephson Robb. “I was fascinated by all the buttons, and amazed that my head and feet didn’t touch the arms when lying down. It seemed larger than life to me.”
Alex Sofa by Jephson Robb
To update the design, Robb removed all but five of the buttons traditionally used all over the couch and used a horizontal strip along the back to tuft the fabric.
Alex Sofa by Jephson Robb
“The biggest design challenge for me was how to communicate quality and comfort without the repetition of buttons and tufting,” Robb said. “I decided to go with a single uninterrupted belt that creates one continuous tuft as it traces the interior.”
Alex Sofa by Jephson Robb
Available in various colours of leather or suede, the design has a solid American walnut base and leg details in bronze.
World Architecture Festival 2014: an image of the cavernous white interior of Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center has been named architectural photograph of the year, from a shortlist that also featured a twisted skyscraper and a sunken flea market (+ slideshow).
Winner: Heydar Aliyev Center by Zaha Hadid – photographed by Hufton and Crow
The 20 photographs were competing in the 2014 Arcaid Images Architectural Photography Awards, presented at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore last week in four categories – exterior, interior, sense of place, and buildings in use.
Runner-up: Cayan Tower by SOM – photographed by Victor Romeo
The shortlist was selected by a panel of judges that included architects Terry Farrell, Bjarne Hammer of Schmidt Hammer Lassen, and Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown of Brooklyn studio Tsao & McKown Architects.
The overall winner, voted for by visitors to the festival, was a shot by British photography duo Hufton + Crow of Zaha Hadid’s Azerbaijan project – a cultural centre with walls that rise seamlessly from the surface of the surrounding plaza.
Exteriors: Ivar Aasen Centre by Sverre Fehn – photographed by Ivar Aasen Centre
“The shoot for Zaha Hadid Architects in Azerbaijan was one of those rare occasions these days where Nick and I both travelled together and shot a project at the same time,” said Allan Crow. He and partner Nick Hufton had three shots of the building in the shortlist.
Interiors: Danish Maritime Museum chairs by Bjarke Ingels Group – photographed by David Borland
“It is a huge project and we only had two days to shoot it, so it really needed both of us,” he told Dezeen. “The winning shot is a classic example of how we try to capture and communicate architecture through our images.”
Interiors: Jochen Haidacher’s Inspirational Place – photographed by Mads Mogensen
“A good image to us has to be bold in composition, with strong architectural elements, ideally combined with capturing a moment. We don’t set up or direct the people in our images, rather we compose the frame and then shoot people as they naturally explore the space. This hopefully results in images that have a narrative,” he said, adding that the process is made “far easier” when world-class architecture is the backdrop.
Interiors: Michael Albert House by Hans Düttmann – photographed by Mads Mogensen
A runner-up from the Sense of Place category is an aerial view by Portuguese photographer Joao Morgado of Alvaro Siza’s iconic Leça Swimming Pools full of swimmers, while a runner-up from the Buildings in Use category was a shot by Barcelona-based Inigo Bujedo Aguirre looking down into a sunken flea market by B720 Arquitectura.
Interiors: Long Gallery Straberry Hill House by Horace Walpole, restored by Peter Inskip & Stephen Gee – photographed by Kilian O’Sullivan
Other shortlisted photographs included a view of Bjarke Ingels’ Bjerget project that juxtaposed the modular residences against the surrounding neighbourhoods, as well as a cow shed interior and the rooftop of a small house in South Korea.
This small portable lamp by ECAL graduate Claudio Gatto is powerful enough to be used on a balcony, in the basement or at the park.
While studying in at the École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL), Italian designer Claudio Gatto realised the entire street of houses where he lived had been built without any provision for lighting in the basements.
Inspired by the improvised solutions his neighbours came up with, from torches to lighters and glowsticks, he created the Bolla lamp.
“The main goal was to be elegant and cute but also functional,” Gatto told Dezeen. “I wanted to escape from all the very complex multitask lamps on the market.”
The lamp is made from an injection-moulded thermo plastic called acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) with a translucent polypropylene diffuser.
The handle can be rotated or opened up so that the lamp can be placed or hung in various positions giving it its multi-functionality, and is available in six colours.
“I hope people will consider it their own personal lamp that can be taken everywhere they go,” Gatto said.
In order to achieve the most powerful circuit within the smallest space possible, Gatto collaborated with an engineer at the ECAL+EPFL Lab – part of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in cooperation with École Cantonale d’Art.
The circuit is made from a six-watt LED light source – equivalent to a 35-watt traditional light bulb, powered with rechargeable batteries and controlled by a tiny microchip. The light takes four to five hours to charge fully and will then work for 30 hours.
Claudio Gatto recently graduated from a Masters degree in Product Design at ECAL, where the Bolla lamp was his final project. The institution’s graduate exhibition is open until 11 October.
The top floor of this former soviet telecommunications building in the centre of Moscow has been converted by studio Archiproba into an open plan office for a technology company (+ slideshow).
Called DI Telegraph, the new flexible space occupies the upper floor of the 1927 Central Telegraph building designed by soviet architect and engineer Ivan Ivanovich Rerberg. The corner site building on Tverskaya Street had been derelict for several years before its recent restoration.
The Moscow-based studio striped the dilapidated building back to the original concrete shell to produce an open plan workspace for technology company Dream Industries.
“The architects faced a problem of restoration of the space, rather than renovation. There were no walls inside, only a few columns located between giant windows and grouped in two rows in the center of the room,” said Archiproba founder Tamara Muradova. “It has turned out that the main idea of the project should be the return of the space to its original state.”
The architects divided the 1,400-square-metre space into three main sections – a conference hall, a kiosk containing a small cafe, and an open plan co-working space with desks that can also be rented out to freelancers and other businesses.
A glazed wall stretching between two concrete columns and the seven-metre-high ceiling separates the office area at the rear of the building from the conference hall and cafe by the entrance.
These areas have been left largely open plan and have flexible furniture arrangements to allow the spaces to be used for a variety of functions.
“Flexibility of the space has become a key advantage brought by the new design of the room,” said Muradova. “That is why most parts of the interior elements have wheels and consist of detachable modules. Depending on the needs of teams, the co-working [space] can transform and take forms necessary for fruitful cooperation.”
Beyond the glass wall a 100-square-metre, open plan co-working office has room for 100 rentable desk spaces.
The 500-person capacity conference hall in front of the wall is lined with a sound-absorbent tissue coulisse that improves acoustics within the high-ceilinged space.
Grey curtains hung between the concrete columns allow the conference space to be visually sectioned off from the cafe and an open plan meeting space.
A glass Kiosk with a pitched roof positioned adjacent to the conference hall hosts the cafe, which faces the entrance, and a meeting room at at the back.
The coffee bar has a white tiled kickboard and back wall. Black metal bar stools positioned along the raised wooden counter echo the black metalwork used throughout the building.
A transparent meeting room at the rear of the kiosk is divided from the cafe by a tiled wall. White blinds can be pulled down to give the meeting room more privacy.
A cloakroom by the entrance is situated under a black metal-framed staircase with wooden treads and a landing that abuts the original red brick wall.
Throughout the floor, 35 original windows have been restored by stripping back layers of paintwork to reveal the original wooden frames made from red-yellow larch, with metal latches. Archiproba have double-glazed the windows by inserting a layer of black metal framing on the interior.
“The 80-year-old wooden frames speak eloquently for themselves making reference to the building’s history,” said the architect.
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