Hasta La Ideas

L’artiste canadien Guillaume Lachapelle explore l’infini et le reflet dans des petites scènes de villes qu’il appelle Visions. A l’aide de miroirs et de lumière, il crée l’illusion de l’espace infini à travers ses dioramas qui représentent de vastes parkings vides ou des pâtés de maisons typiques d’une banlieue américaine.

Construction work has started on a new concert hall by Mexican firm Rojkind Arquitectos in Boca del Rio, Mexico, featuring a bold geometric form that references the jagged outline of an adjacent jetty.

The Foro Boca concert hall will provide a home for the Boca del Rio Philharmonic Orchestra, which was formed last year, as part of the city’s wider aim to become a centre for music and culture.

Located at a breakwater between the mouth of the Jamapa river and the Gulf of Mexico, the concert hall is intended to dramatise the location and create a new cultural focal point.

“The Boca del Rio Philharmonic Orchestra has attracted diverse musical expressions, local and foreign musicians, making it the heart of the cultural life of the city,” said Michel Rojkind, founding partner of Rojkind Arquitectos.

“The dynamics and activities of the orchestra have had a successful social and cultural development, and have demonstrated the need to create a new social enclosure to serve as headquarters for the orchestra and its programs.”

The 5,410-square-metre (58,000 square feet) building will include a large concert hall for 850 people, designed for classical, contemporary, and popular performances, as well as a 150-seat chamber music room. The facility will also include a training program for underprivileged students.

Its jagged form is conceived as a series of concrete volumes of different heights and shapes. The tallest of these will house the concert hall in the centre of the building.

“The building appropriates the timeless expression of the concrete cubes formed by ripraps [loose stones used as a foundation material] in the breakwater, assimilating them as its origin and re-interpreting them,” said Rojkind.

Visitors will enter the building through a triple-height lobby before entering one of the halls or the music library. A third-floor interior will open onto a terrace that offers sweeping views of the ocean and river.

The concert hall will be wrapped by a wide plaza extending onto the jetty on top of the breakwater.

Other firms that have recently designed concert halls include Spanish studio Barozzi Veiga, whose translucent glass building in Poland was recently shortlisted for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2015 and this year’s Designs of the Year.

Boca del Rio is the municipal capital of Veracruz and was once an important port, but its economic centre is now the World Trade Center Veracruz development, which hosts conferences and conventions.

Rojkind Arquitectos and the local government hope the performing arts will be an important economic generator for an underdeveloped area of the city, which has struggled to control crime and pollution levels since the early 2000s.

Related content: see more concert halls

“The Foro Boca’s location is intended to articulate the dynamics of the central part of the city with the coastal avenue, and has the goal of functioning as an urban detonator capable of inciting modernity in the area,” Rojkind said. “The forum itself is a tool that has permitted the reconstruction and renovation of the infrastructure and urban image of this part of the city.”

The project is the cultural anchor of a new masterplan for the district, and will abut an emerging nightlife area with restaurants and entertainment venues.

Based in Mexico City, Rojkind Arquitectos was founded in 2002 by Michel Rojkind, and has established a reputation as one of the country’s leading firms. Among its best-known projects are the Nestlé Chocolate Museum in Mexico City, and a laboratory building for the same company in Querétaro.

Recent projects have included the renovation of Mexico’s National Film Archive and Film Institute.

The post Concrete concert hall by Rojkind Arquitectos will overlook the Gulf of Mexico appeared first on Dezeen.

Extra Moooi: explore furniture and lighting by designers including Marcel Wanders, Studio Job and Jaime Hayón, which is currently on display at Dutch design brand Moooi’s new US store.

Roll your mouse over the interactive slideshow above and click on the pop-up windows to learn about the products on display in the showroom. On mobile, rotate your screen to landscape mode to get the full functionality.

Moooi launched its first US showroom in May on 36 East 31st Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York.

“We’ve been seeing our business grow really fast over recent years in the US, so I think this is the right moment for us here,” Moooi co-founder Marcel Wanders explains in the video interview we published earlier this month. “Not only is the economy in the States doing really well, but the openness for sophisticated design has grown.”

“If you think about all the new, young companies, they’re all really design-savvy. So the whole understanding of what design can really do for you as a person or as a business has changed in the United States.”

This interactive slideshow is part of our year-long Extra Moooi collaboration, which will see us working with Moooi in Milan, New York, London and Amsterdam to get under the skin of the brand, its products and designers. Read all the stories at www.dezeen.com/moooi.

The post Interactive slideshow: explore Moooi’s
New York showroom appeared first on Dezeen.

Patterned tiles, geometric screens and a bright yellow staircase were added to this apartment in Athens by local studio Point Supreme (+ slideshow).

Point Supreme connected two previously separate flats, one above the other, to create the Nadja apartment in the Greek capital.

While renovating the spaces, the team used a range of colours, forms and graphics to create an aesthetic that echoes elements of the late 20th-century Postmodern movement – which is enjoying a renaissance in architecture and design.

“What is Postmodern in the apartment is mainly its diversity,” studio co-founder Konstantinos Pantazis told Dezeen. “The vivid juxtapositions, extensive use of colour and texture create an intense emotional and physical experience that is very non-Modern.”

“Also form and character is mostly symbolic rather than interested in any fashion or style.”

A staircase was custom-built to connect the two storeys, as well as to provide storage for the living spaces located on the lower level.

“The lower level is a continuous, marine-like environment with big pieces of furniture anchoring the family’s communal activities like floating islands,” said Pantazis, who co-founded the studio with Marianna Rentzou in Rotterdam in 2007 before they moved to Athens.

Painted bright yellow, the treads and risers turn a sharp corner beside an integrated planter after the first few steps.

On the other side of the flight, the structure incorporates green kitchen cabinets and a blue-tiled countertop.

A partition of framed windows up one side of the stairs provides views between the living and cooking areas, while a black banister runs along the other edge.

“It is a miniature piece of architecture in itself providing a focal point within the large open plan,” Pantazis said.

Other projects that integrate a staircase into the kitchen include a Melbourne house with steps built into the counter, and a London apartment where a dark walnut staircase merges with a worktop.

Across the Nadja apartment’s lower storey, wooden poles create screens and small turquoise tiles cover the majority of the floor.

“Instead of the typical division of rooms for kitchen, dining, living and playing, spaces in Nadja are flexible and look towards each other,” said Pantazis.

Thresholds are marked out by alternating black and white triangular floor tiles, while more traditional patterns are used across the covered balcony.

Accessed from a central landing paved with thin terracotta-coloured tiles, each of the upstairs rooms features a different colourful door handle panel.

Inside the rooms, more built-in storage units cover entire walls and bold colours are used to differentiate the zones for sleeping from those for studying or lounging.

“The bedrooms are designed as combinations of two complementary types of spaces, a more social area and a more intimate, private zone,” said Pantazis. “This level is rich in graphic treatment that complements the architecture, at times inspired by Greek island architecture.”

Raised white tiles create wave motifs across the blue-painted walls in the bathroom, and a pink “sun” is painted onto the wall at the top of the stairs.

“The apartment has a lot of differences to the Postmodern in the sense that its references are not explicit but nuanced and indirect,” Pantazis told Dezeen. “But it is also clearly non-Modern in the sense that it rejects all dogmas and employs a diverse repertoire of architectural tools that draw from very distant references.”

The project, which was completed in 2014, was built in collaboration with construction company KN Group.

The post Point Supreme adds Postmodern touches to Nadja apartment in Athens appeared first on Dezeen.