As an American living in Japan for a year, I expected the apartments to be smaller. What I didn’t expect were the functional design differences in living styles. Three things in particular took some getting used to: 1) Having to constantly remember to turn the apartment’s gas off when not in use (due to earthquakes), 2) washing machines but no dryers (due to expensive electricity), and 3) the bathroom designs (due to different views on ablutions and elimination).
The bathroom in my apartment was like everyone else’s there: Completely waterproof, like it was in an RV. As space-tight as the apartment was, the toilet was off in its own little room and had a sink built into the top of it, like they have in American jails. The sink faucet was on a pivot and also served as the bathtub faucet. And on and on.
To get a good sense of how Japan’s distinct view of bathrooms influences their design, watch this little girl run down the design features:
A set of five primary-colored shipping containers rests in a unified pile along a corner of a bus parking lot, in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Inside, Vedat Ulgen and his team envision the possibilities of industrial design and execute in a meticulous, imaginative……
‘Casa Brutale’ Cliffside Concept designed by OPA. OPA presents the ambitious Casa Brutale. Intended as an inverted nod to the infamous Casa Malaparte on the eastern side of the Italian island of Capri, the home is constructed with simple materials like wood, glass, and raw concrete, putting the focus on the landscape and ocean. nothing extends above the ground level, and impact is limited to a single façade that separates the vertical cliff face. Live like an ant?! the roof of the residence is a crystalline pool made of reinforced glass. its bottom is glazed, and functions as a massive skylight that floods the interior with natural light. top-to-bottom glass covers the entire cliff-facing façade, which poetically maximizes the exposure of the home to the elements.(Read…)
Hillary Rae and friends went diving in a shark cage off the coast of South Africa. They encountered a 13-foot great white shark. While shark cage diving, our cage was attacked by an 11.5 foot Great White shark. The round buoy attached to the side of the cage was bent in half. Some of the lining of the outside blue barrier bar was bitten through as well. It was quite the up close and personal experience!(Read…)
Après nous avoir emmenés dans son road trip aux Etats-Unis, le jeune photographe français Sidi-Omar Alami nous conduit cette fois au coeur des montagnes suisses, entre lacs, sommets enneigés et nuits à la belle étoile. Des photographies toujours aussi dépaysantes qui vous procureront sans aucun doute l’envie de vous voyager et de vous évader.
Patterned brickwork reveals the entrances to all homes in this development near Cambridge, England, designed by Proctor and Matthews Architects to bring a sense of continuity to the large site (+ slideshow).
Abode at Great Kneighton is a new development of 306 homes just outside Cambridge, ranging from studio apartments to five-bedroom houses.
Although the buildings features a variety of different forms and cladding materials, London-based Proctor and Matthews Architects chose to add alternating dark and light bricks at the entrances to help unify the scheme.
“The brick pattern is seen in different ways, rather like a musical motif, knitting the different typologies together despite their wide variety,” architect Stephen Proctor told Dezeen.
The 6.4-hectare site was designed as a sequence of spaces, moving from an urban to rural scale as the homes get closer to the surrounding countryside.
It begins with terraces of townhouses and apartments at the entrance, followed by rows of mews homes in the middle of the site, and then individual houses at the edge of the development.
A limited palette of materials was used to accentuate this transition of spaces, with the dominant materials of brick and perforated aluminium at the entrance gradually replaced by timber as the housing gets less dense.
“This gives the development character, and avoids the bland uniformity that gives many volume housing schemes elsewhere a bad name,” said Proctor.
“This softer edge suggests ‘rural erosion’ into the neighbouring farmland and a new country park.”
The site’s entrance was conceived as a “great court”, inspired by the college courtyards of Cambridge. Both buildings and landscaping were designed to soften the appearance of a large roundabout that was already on the site.
“We used tall buildings and brick to establish a robust, solid presence at the entrance, and incorporated a landscaping scheme that features outdoor play and games facilities, and extensive planting, which encourages people to use this space,” said Proctor.
Two five-storey apartment buildings were placed alongside the three-storey terraces in the entrance court to create a gateway facade.
They are clad in aluminium panels, with a perforated pattern inspired by the fan-vaulted ceiling of nearby King’s College Chapel in Cambridge.
“We call these marker buildings,” said Proctor. “They are carefully positioned in the great court so that either one will welcome you as you enter from any direction, like the gatehouses in Cambridge’s courtyards.”
Colonnades were used to add depth to the facades of the terraces at the entrance, so they appear less flat and imposing, and voids were cut through them to offer glimpses of the lower-density housing deeper in the site.
Behind the entrance courtyard, there is an orderly grid of mews terraces, with rows bookended by pitched-roof houses.
Here, patterned brickwork was added to highlight entrances of the homes and “give depth and character to what would otherwise be flat facades,” according to Proctor.
The architects worked closely with Harriet Bourne at BBUK Landscape Architecture to create the public spaces around the homes.
Kerbs and steps were avoided to make all homes wheelchair accessible and landscaped pathways were designed between the mews terraces to create ‘green corridors’ from the front to the back of the site.
“These quality shared spaces mean the streetscape is inhabited, which helps to create a sense of place and community,” said Proctor.
At the back of the site, the grid of mews homes gives way to a more village-like layout, with houses arranged around narrow streets and winding paths.
Black Douglas fir was chosen as the main material here in order to reference local rural architecture, and was laid vertically and horizontally to enliven the facades, similar to the use of bricks on the mews terraces.
Affordable homes make up 40 per cent of the development’s housing and are spread across the site, with an average cluster of eight per location.
“There is no difference in terms of design, volume or quality between any type of the housing on the site,” said Proctor. “For us, that is critical in creating a successful community.”
The 306 homes form the first phase of a wider development, which will eventually provide around 2,300 new homes across an area of approximately 101 hectares, as well as new schools, healthcare facilities, shops and transport links.
It follows in the footsteps of the Stirling Prize-winning Accordia housing development, which was completed in the same area in 2008. Like Abode Great Kneighton, it aimed to set an example for high-density housing developments.
“The main challenge in creating a development like this is creating a real ‘place’ within a volume housing context,” said Proctor.
“We wanted to show that it was possible to create variety, a sense of identity and a richness of character with a limited palette – something which we hope other volume designers and house builders might take note of.”
This inky black cube designed by De Siún Scullion Architects for Dublin’s docklands reveals Ireland’s current oil consumption and future renewable energy targets (+ slideshow).
Measuring 4.2 metres cubed, the volume represents the 473 barrels of oil consumed in Ireland every five minutes.
The pavilion is clad in panels of glossy black toughened glass, in reference to the viscous liquid, and resides on Hanover Quay, an area of Dublin’s docklands by the River Liffey.
Local architect Declan Scullion won a competition run by ACE For Energy – an EU-funded body promoting the uptake of renewable energy – to design the 5CUBE Energy Pavilion.
“The concept behind the pavilion was to develop an easily replicable symbol of consumption, which could be scaled up or down, and would confront the public with the current rate of fossil fuel depletion,” explained Scullion, who co-founded De Siún Scullion Architects with Mícheál de Siún in 2014.
Two mirrored bands positioned on the east and west sides of the cube. The 50-centimetre-high horizontal strip on the eastern face is designed to represent the amount of naturally sourced energy that is currently used by the country.
On the opposite side, a much thicker section depicts the government’s renewable energy target for 2020.
Within this larger band, mirrored facets are angled inwards towards a hole that allows visitors to peer into the interior of the box. The view is a fragmented reflection of the sky, manipulated with more mirrors to create the illusion of a globe.
The architect sees the sky as symbolic of the wind, sun and the rain, and their potential to be harvested to produce energy.
“The sky has been selected as a means of representing all the multiple forms of renewable energy in opposition to the glossy black glass mass representing oil,” explained the architect.
“The sky was thought to be relevant as so many renewable energy sources are a direct or indirect result of the forces of nature.”
The pavilion is designed to be easily dismantled and is ballasted to its temporary location by several sand-filled boxes, so it can easily be moved when necessary.
Solar panels mounted on the roof of the structure provide an independent energy source to power the lights that illuminate the interior of the pavilion.
“The idea is that the installation might appear somewhere new overnight and then disappear again; a surreal and silent monolith,” said Scullion.
Project credits:
Architects: De Siún Scullion Architects Structural engineers: Casey O’Rourke Associates Electrical engineers: IN2 Engineering Design Partnership Contractor: Townlink Construction Ltd
D&AD has announced the winners of its New Blood student awards, with three black, four white and 20 yellow pencils going to projects for Nationwide, Airbnb, WeTransfer, WWF, Pantone, BBC, Vice and more. Here’s our pick of this year’s top projects…
Over 280 students received pencils this year, with winners hailing from 49 countries. Greg Ormrod and Thomas Worthington received a black pencil (the top prize) for How it Should Be, a campaign for Nationwide to raise awareness of the gender pay gap and position the bank as an organisation lobbying against financial injustice.
The project was submitted in response to a brief to position the bank as “a future facing brand you can trust.” The pair proposed sponsoring a ‘Page 2’ feature in newspapers to celebrate the achievements of inspirational women, as well as publishing a gender report using customer data on salary, gender and occupation to highlight wage inequality, and printing a limited edition £1 coin to raise awareness of the fact that women earn 85p for every £1 a man does:
Nu Ri Kim, Seunghoon Shin and Yoonshin Kim from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were also awarded a black pencil for their response to a brief from Pantone, which asked students to “reimagine your home town through a new colour scheme.”
The group suggested painting the streets of Seoul with hydrochromatic paint during its annual monsoon season, which would turn opaque in the rain to reveal brightly coloured artworks on pavements. They also suggested setting up an online gallery allowing people to share photos of the project and augmented reality billboards showing the paint changing colour:
University of Lincoln graduate Tom Watkins received the final black pencil of the night for When I’m a Dad, a response to a brief from WeTransfer to “envision where you would like to be in ten years time through illustration”. Watkins produced a printed book imagining 10 great things to do as a father and set up a website, whenimadad.com, which features various ‘Dad pledges’ illustrated by GIFs and memes.
White pencil-winning projects included Frazer Price, John Trainor and Teddy Souter (from the School of Communication Arts 2.0)’s Endangered Soles, a response to a WWF brief to “inspire a new generation to understand that we all have an impact on our planet and its health”.
The group proposed partnering with Puma to launch a series of limited edition shoe collections highlighting the dwindling populations of endangered wild cat species. Each year, the number of shoes made in each range would tally with the number of cats left in the wild from that species, from Bengal Tigers to Snow Leopards:
Arts University Bournemouth student Hilda Cortel also received one for her response to Pantone’s brief, a playful text-based identity for Croydon based on residents’ accents, which aims to celebrate the area’s diversity:
Several yellow pencils were awarded to promotional campaigns for Airbnb, including Kimberley Ong, Akarad Tachavatcharapa, Zarina Mendoza and George Widodo’s Be Someone Else project, which allows users to browse Airbnb experiences by choosing who they want to be rather than where they’d like to stay:
Central Saint Martins’ Ryan Ho and Chloe Lam received a yellow pencil for their clever response to BBC’s brief to engage 15-24-year-olds. The pair devised an app, BBC Jumpstart, to replace user’s alarm clocks in the morning, which offers a curated feed of music, news and audio content, tailored to the time they have available and their preferences:
Ben Silverton & Sidney Lim, also from CSM, developed BBC Surge, a social news platform which allows users to boost content by voting on it, and orders news in response to what people are talking about and sharing most online:
Chelsea College of Art’s Stella Murphy received a yellow pencil for her ident for Vice series, Rule Britannia:
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As did Kingston University group STRING (Jonathan Zheng, Anna Streit, Ines Nirkko and Jennifer Zheng):
Other yellow pencils went to Felix Nilsson and Nayeli Kremb (Berghs School of Communication and Hyper Island) for Eco-Route, a WWF platform which calculates the most efficient route for drivers planning a journey, and gives users the option to donate to the charity to compensate for their carbon emissions:
And William Lanham from Birmingham City University, who received one for his typographic film idents, submitted in response to a Monotype brief to “create a new visual language for film advertising.” Lanham designed typographic idents for science fiction films Blade Runner and Alien, based on the interfaces featured in each film. Text hints at key plot developments, without giving too much away for those who haven’t seen them:
To view the full list of winning projects and each of this year’s briefs, see dandad.org/newblood
The producers of Lucy and the Taken trilogy bring you the next adrenaline-fueled installment of The Transporter series, THE TRANSPORTER REFUELED, starring newcomer Ed Skrein as Frank Martin, the most highly-skilled transporter money can buy. The stakes are greater and technology better, but the same three simple rules apply: never change the deal, no names and never open the package.(Read…)
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