Hasta La Ideas

La photographe bosniaque Maja Topčagić centre son travail sur une partie précise de la population : des jeunes et jolies femmes aux cheveux roux. Sachant que seulement 1 à 2% de la population mondiale peut se targuer de posséder des cheveux d’une telle couleur, l’artiste parvient à magnifier les jeunes femmes immortalisées, à découvrir dans la suite dans une série de portraits.

This hanging acoustic panel system by Swedish design student Johanna Jacobson Backman has LEDs set into the underside to provide lighting for desks positioned below.

Produced by Swedish lighting brand Zero, the Block panels are designed to absorb high and low frequency sounds to create a more pleasant working environment.

Their half-oval shapes are mirrored in the cable-tidy system that is also used to suspend the panels from the ceiling.

The concept was devised by ex-electrician and Linné University student Johanna Jacobson Backman in her second year of a design degree, during an industry collaboration with Zero.

The brand liked her idea so much that it decided to put Block into production.

“Johanna’s design impressed us, as it was really innovative and would work in all kinds of spaces where you need light- and sound-absorbing features,” Zero’s Per Gill told Dezeen.

The students were each given an LED module and briefed to think about workplace lighting.

While other students used the qualities of LED lighting to create slim and minimal lights, Backman set about making the biggest light she could.

“I love to turn things upside down and think in the other direction,” she told Dezeen. The idea for adding sound absorption came to her when considering what function such a large surface area could serve.

Backman’s background as an electrician came into play when designing the cabling system.

“I actually thought about how easy it would be for the electrician to hang it and mount it, so when Block is placed in a row, the cable goes up and mounts at the same spot,” she said.

The resulting circles and diamonds created by the positive and negative shapes of the cable and panels form a harlequin-inspired pattern.

“I wanted to create a pattern that would break the often straight lines of office areas,” explained the designer.

The panels are available in 600 and 1,200 millimetre lengths, and 400 or 800 millimetre heights.

“I hope people dare to be playful with Block and use it in many different ways by combining the different sizes, and hanging it in groups, zigzags or at various levels to create their own pattern,” said Backman.

Block was presented at this year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair and Milan’s Salone del Mobile by Zero, which also debuted a series of lamps wrapped in pastel-coloured textiles for 2015.

Oslo studio StokkeAustad has also combined acoustic panels with additional functionality, incorporating a selection of reflective materials into geometric panels. Swedish studio Form Us With Love’s range of colourful acoustic panels made from sustainable materials were recently launched under the new brand Baux.

The post Johanna Jacobson Backman hides lights within Block hanging acoustic panels appeared first on Dezeen.

Le designer Coréen Cheolhong Kim a imaginé une typographie hors du commun conçue en 3D. Les silhouettes des lettres sont formées par des jeux d’ombres, des plis, des creux et des reliefs. Des mots composés par l’artiste sont à découvrir dans la suite ainsi que l’alphabet.

Slate-covered walls frame this swimming pool created by architecture studio LAD in the grounds of an Italian villa, which offers swimmers views of the surrounding hills and valleys (+ movie).

Rome-based LAD – short for Laboratorio di Architettura e Design – designed the Fontanile Pool for the owner of a villa that sits below the old city walls of the Italian city Tarquinia, around 55 miles north of the capital.

Designed for swimming lengths, the long and narrow pool is dug into a lawn to the rear of the house. Slate panels cover both the insides and outside of the structure, as well as a slip that allows water to flow over one end in the style of an infinity pool.

The architects selected the grey stone for the blue-green tinge it gives the water, helping it to harmonise with the lawn.

A teak sun deck sits to one end. Steps lead down from the decking into the pool, where the open end faces the rolling countryside below the fortified city.

“The Fontanile Pool is designed to be a machine for observing the landscape,” explained architects Francesco Napolitano and Matteo Bianchi.

“Two stone walls are framing the nature around, isolating a single point of view, like an optical device. These elements link together three open air spaces: landscape, pool, deck.”

“The project aims to create a space in harmony with nature and artifice, with the countryside and the city, allowing for contemplation of the landscape,” they told Dezeen.

“The shape and the proportions of this work remind you of the old country fountains of the surroundings.”

The client approached the architects after reading an article about their previously completed Villae Minimae project – a collection of five dwellings conceived as optical devices, balanced on rocks, in fields and on cliff sides to frame particular views of the landscape. He asked them to design the pool with the same concept.

“As everybody knows, Modern architects thought that houses were machines for living,” said the architects, referencing the famous quote by early 20th-century architect Le Corbusier.

“With the Villae Minimae we ironically played with this idea and tried to re-think a house as a machine for observing the landscape, without overlooking the functionality of the spaces.”

“The Fontanile is not a house of course, but anyhow it works like an optical device – it suggests you a single point of view, the direction where the sun is setting in summer,” they said. “It works like a visual joint between the observer, the city and the countryside.”

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