Hasta La Ideas

En réalisant ses toiles avec de la peinture à l’huile, l’artiste Ariel DeAndrea met l’origami à l’honneur et de manière très réaliste. Avec une grande sensibilité, elle peint des oiseaux de papier flottant sur l’eau. L’artiste fait également un véritable travail de graphisme en créant de très beaux motifs appliqués au papier.

We all know the oceans are filled with plastic waste, and we’ve seen the horrific photos of dead animals that have ingested the stuff. It is up to activists, responsible corporate citizens and lawmakers to stop these plastic garbage patches from growing. But that won’t solve the problem of how to get rid of the stuff that’s already floating around in there.

Enter Boyan Slat, just 19 years of age. At 6, he was diving in Greece—that country whose postcards show pristine beaches and blue water–and was horrified at the amount of floating garbage he encountered. “I saw more plastic bags,” Slat told the BBC, “than fish.” When he returned home to the Netherlands, he started working on a way to rid the oceans of garbage—and his design solution is as promising as it is out-of-the-box.

The conventional thinking goes that ships need to be sent out into these garbage patches with huge tow-nets. The problem is that these nets would capture aquatic life as well as the garbage they’re trying to collect. And ships burn fuel. So Slat took a closer look at how oceans operate and how the garbage migrates around.

Oceanbound trash tends to gather into their own little garbage continents, driven by “gyres,” or rotating currents. There are five of these trash gyres worldwide.

Although the concentration of plastic in these areas is high—it’s sometimes described as a plastic soup—it’s still spread out over an area twice the size of Texas. What’s more, the plastic does not stay in one spot, it rotates. These factors make a clean-up incredibly challenging.

“Most people have this image of an island of trash that you can almost walk on, but that’s not what it’s like,” says Slat. “It stretches for millions of square kilometres – if you went there to try and clean up by ship it would take thousands of years.” Not only that, it would be very costly in terms of both money and energy, and fish would be accidentally caught in the nets.

Slat reasoned that it would be more efficient to let the ocean move the trash around, as it does on its own. We would then simply place floating barriers in the known trouble spots, allowing the floating garbage to simply run into the barriers. Aquatic life could still flow under the floating barriers unmolested, with no nets for them to get caught in, and the barriers would be anchored to the seabed via cables to prevent them from floating off. Garbage could then be harvested and recycled from an area with a much smaller footprint.

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News: the first glow-in-the-dark road of Daan Roosegaarde’s Smart Highway project has opened in Oss, the Netherlands (+ movie).

Glowing Lines uses photo-luminescent paint to mark out the edges of the road, and is the first of five concepts to be realised from Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde‘s Smart Highway project – designed to make highways safer while saving money and energy.

Developed with infrastructure firm Heijmans, the paint absorbs solar energy during the day then illuminates at night.

“Here the landscape becomes an experience of light and information,” said Studio Roosegaarde in a statement. “As a result this increases visibility and safety.”

The lines are now installed along the N329 route in Oss for an initiative called Road of the Future. Three glowing green lines run along each side of the dual carriageway and illuminate every night.

Rooegaarde described driving along the section of road at night as “going through a fairy tale”.

The project was first announced at Dutch Design Week 2012, and has since undergone a series of tests to gauge durability and user experience.

It was presented by Roosegaarde at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town in 2013 and received an INDEX: Award later the same year.

Next month, the designer aims to launch the next stage in the project – a light-emitting bicycle path designed as a contemporary interpretation of Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh’s painting Starry Night.

This will form part of the historic Van Gogh route in Nuenen, where the post-impressionist painter once lived and worked, to give cyclists the opportunity to experience a modern version of this painting in an innovative landscape of light.

Roosegaarde’s other Smart Highway proposals include temperature-reactive paints that will indicate to drivers when roads are icy, interactive street lamps that come on as vehicles approach then dim as they pass by and “wind lights” powered by the air from passing vehicles.

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is a Dutch road illuminated with solar power appeared first on Dezeen.

Comments update: architecture dominated the discussions on Dezeen this week, spurred on in part by the president of China who declared that he wanted “no more weird architecture” in his country.

Weird architecture? Chinese president Xi Jinping used a two hour speech on the state of art in his country to call for an end to the “weird architecture” that has sprung up during the construction boom, singling out projects like the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV headquarters in Beijing that has been compared to a giant pair of pants.

His comments appeared on the website of Chinese state newspaper the People’s Daily – whose own new headquarters building (top image) came under fire last year after being compared to a giant penis.

“Thanks Dezeen. I just spat my tea out reading this story. That is a remarkable penis,” wrote one commenter calling themselves Penis Envy.

“I personally quite like Rem’s Pants. As for the giant penis, why not? Perhaps fascist China is wary of the form manifest self-expression?” added another commenter, under the pen-name What does weird even mean?

Some approached the debate with a more serious tone. “The last thing China needs is another top-down dressing down of creativity in a nation that has imitation as its core ethos, that it’s the best form of flattery,” wrote spadestick. “Instead of picking on icons, why not pick on the myriad of ghost cities filled with banal developer schlock for commercial gain?” Read the comments on this story »

Computerised architecture: London designer Matthew Plummer Fernandez claimed that software packages have become so popular they are affecting the way buildings look, and called on architects to start developing their own code rather that using “off-the-shelf” solutions. Some readers felt his comments were behind the times.

“Even just a very superficial look at the work developing in architecture over the past 10 years in certain architecture circles would reveal that his critique, while spot on, it is at least a decade late,” wrote Matters. “As early as 25 years ago boutique researchers were doing just what he suggests. Maybe it isn’t widespread within the discipline today, but is that what we should really be addressing?”

But Stephanie felt the fault lay in lack of education. “I definitely fell into the trap at school of needing a quick, interesting-looking diagram/model, which things like Voronoi produced without much hassle (especially for people with limited coding knowledge).

“I think the problem was that we were never taught how to work with computational design – if you didn’t already have a background knowledge of programming, you took what you could get, and that usually resulted in the ‘marriage’ of interface and visual language described above.”

“One look at the huge amount of plug-ins available for Grasshopper should be enough to realise that architects and designers have been developing their own code and building their own tools for years,” pointed out Katja.

“In my opinion, the problem is a different one. It is not that architects and designers are not appropriating the new tools or coding their own. It is their obsession with them at times and their using parametric design for its own sake rather than to support a sustainable and integrated building design concept.” Read the comments on this story »

Privacy issues: a maze-like Japanese house with completely transparent walls raised a few eyebrows, quickly becoming one of our most commented-on stories of the week.

“Looks like split-level hell,” wrote Jon Jorgensen, one of a number who were less than impressed by the design. Su Vin had more practical concerns, asking “where do they have sex?”

Rafael Reyes was one of a number who saw some classic architectural references in the project. “Ok so obviously this house is unliveable for anyone but exhibitionists, but I still find the project really very interesting,” he wrote. “It’s the love child of Domino House, Farnsworth House and Villa Müller refined with that quirky elegance of Japanese architecture.”

“Someone still believes in Corbusier. This is an excellent example of the transparency our lives provide via government eavesdropping. We might as well all be living in glass houses,” added The Liberty Disciple. “Practically, this is a nightmare. Cleaning, insulating, privacy, security, and sound are virtually unthought of. It is a fun study, and likely a costly one.”

Sam said that the purity of the design wasn’t sustainable: “I saw pictures of owner putting up curtain which totally defeats the original intended aesthetic.” Read the comments on this story »

Floating house: the UK’s first “amphibious house”, designed to float on rising floodwaters like a boat in a dock, is being built for a couple who wanted to live on an island in the middle of the River Thames. Readers liked the idea, but had a few concerns about its affordability and practicality.

“And the Lord said to Noah, “Go into the ark and watch the neighbours suffer”,” wrote Flood Victim. “Love the idea but it needs to be cheaper. It’s a fantastic solution to our recent troubles in the UK.”

“Where is the front door? How do you get in and out? Do you get in depending on the level of water?” asked JDM.

Ralph Kent was one of a number who had questions about silt deposits left behind by floodwaters. “I’m guessing they have to artificially float the house and periodically ‘vacuum’ the trough out using some sort of system like a pool filtration system on a hose?” he wrote. “But I would be interested to know what the actual solution is, and how frequently they need to do this.” Read the comments on this story »

Virtual values: architect Henry Goss told Dezeen that photo-realistic visuals had helped design his latest project – a family home in Hertfordshire, England, which is also the first output from the renderings studio he recently launched with fellow artist Peter Guthrie.

“Who needs reality when we have hyper-realistic renderings such as these?” asked Dreamer. “I think it’s time I purchased Google Glass and sat in my sh*tty flat in London, looking out to the beautiful countryside from an imagined mansion with my beautiful wife who goes by the name of Scarlett Johansson.”

But Strom Architects thought that viewers impressed by the visuals might be missing the point. “Nevermind the CGI; it’s a good piece of architecture too,” wrote the architect. Read the comments on this story »

The post “I personally quite like Rem’s Pants…
as for the giant penis, why not?” appeared first on Dezeen.

Mental Floss explains Where Last Names Come From…(Read…)