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Dezeen promotion: Italian company Nice has launched a system of automated interior blinds that can be tailored to homes, public buildings and commercial spaces.

Nice‘s Era Inn automation system incorporates roller blinds, Venetian blinds, Roman blinds, pleated blinds and projection screens.

Any of these styles can be programmed to settings that suit the users’ personal tastes and environments. The blinds’ automation can help to optimise the amount of natural light allowed indoors, improving the buildings’ energy efficiency and enhancing inhabitants’ comfort.

“Thanks to Nice solutions for blind automation, natural light can be managed in a smart, integrated and easy way, and adjusted according to situations, personal tastes and community needs, for the ultimate wellbeing in any living space,” said Nice.

Automation is managed through the user’s choice of a range of accessible controllers, or through the Nice apps, which can be used both locally or remotely as part of a connected home.

For manual overrides, Nice offers controllers including Air, a wall-mounted “touchless” transmitter that gives users the ability to raise and lower the blinds with the wave of a hand. Nice suggests it is the ideal system for environments where users need to wear gloves or don’t have their hands completely free.

Another control option is Agio, which Nice describes as an “elegant” solution. The transmitter also manages other appliances and lights, incorporating a dimmer function, and comes in three colours with a glossy finish. At night, its keys light up in response to an approaching hand.

The company claims its blind automation systems are “extremely quiet”, so their raising and lowering happens without disrupting the work or sleep of building occupants.

Nice was founded in the early 1990s in Oderzo in northern Italy, and specialises in integrated automation solutions across a range of products, including gates, garage doors, road barriers and parking systems, and awnings as well as blinds.

It describes itself as the first company in this field to prioritise design, and among the first to obtain the Apple HomeKit certification, offering full integration for the remote control of garage door automation.

For more information on Nice automation systems, see the Nice website.

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American studio wHY Architecture has won a competition to design a new events pavilion overlooked by Edinburgh Castle, with plans for a series of glazed pavilions topped by wave-shaped roof gardens. 

wHY partnered with Edinburgh office GRAS on its design for the £25 million Ross Pavilion, which was selected ahead of proposals by six other teams, including BIG, Adjaye Associates and Sou Fujimoto Architects.

The winning design, called Butterfly, proposes pavilions with a gently undulating terrain extending over the top, to ensure views of Edinburgh Castle remain the main focal point of the gardens.

This pavilions, which will house a visitors centre and a cafe, would be topped by an undulating promenade that provides access to Princes Street, one of the city’s main shopping streets.

The Ross Pavilion and West Princes Street Gardens competition was organised by The Ross Development Trust and Malcolm Reading Associates.

It asked entrants to design a pavilion to replace an existing bandstand within the gardens, to host key events in Edinburgh’s calendar including Hogmanay celebrations and the Edinburgh International Festival’s closing fireworks concert.

The winning team also included Groves-Raines Architects, Arup, Studio Yann Kersalé, O Street, Stuco, Creative Concern, Noel Kingsbury, Atelier Ten and Lawrence Barth.

The jury was unanimous in its selection of the design, praising it as “a beautiful and intensely appealing proposal that complemented, but did not compete with, the skyline of the city and the castle”.

“They demonstrated an impressive collaboration which respects and enhances the historical context and backdrop of the castle and the city, whilst creating new heritage and increasing the green space within the gardens,” said jury chair Norman Springford. “All of which were key aspects for us all and respected the importance of the space within a world heritage site.”

The jury also specially commended Sou Fujimoto Architects and William Matthews Associates for their team’s design, which featured a ramped pathway encircling a public green.

New York- and Los Angeles-based wHY was set up by Kulapat Yantrasast in 2004. Yantrasast and the practice’s landscape design director Mark Thomann led the project for the Butterfly pavilion.

“wHY is built around an ecology of disciplines, the convergence of ideas, experience, nature and people,” said Yantrasast. “The Ross Pavilion and West Princes Street Gardens represent this convergence and this was the perfect ground to further our approach to design.”

The firm also recently completed work on the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles and Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan.

Plans for the Ross Pavilion and West Princes Street Gardens will now be open for public consultation, with construction works expected to begin in 2018.

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Compact and usable in 150+ countries, this travel adaptor is four plugs in one. Color-coded to be extra easy to use (thanks to the included map), it’s made of ABS plastic. Since it breaks apart, you can travel with the entire piece (if going to multiple……

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This drugstore by Taiwan studio Waterfrom includes greenery, glass shelves and copper details designed to combat the clinical reputation of pharmacies.

The 120-square-metre space in Taichung, Taiwan features a central lab table that is intended to banish traditional counter service and encourage more natural interaction between pharmacists and customers.

The table is made from solid wood that’s supported by the trunk of a hundred-year-old tree, and includes a glass section housing growing moss and plants.

Copper lighting hangs overhead, alongside more green plants that have been suspended to create a “forest”. A sense of openness recurs throughout the space, which includes several further lab-style benches and tables for visitors to sit and talk.

Traditional brown bottles are displayed on glass shelves that cover the walls of the drugstore – which has been owned by three generations of the same family – and test tubes are also held in copper racks. Lab equipment is contrasted with pot plants that occupy the same shelves.

“Just like Molecure is split and reorganised from the words ‘molecule’ and ‘cure’, while approaching the design we returned to the original purpose of the pharmacy – extracting molecules from nature to synthesise healing drugs,” said Waterfrom.

“Thus we get the idea of building a space which we named ‘green in the lab”, combining the seemingly conflicting qualities of primitive with technology,” added the studio.

To further contrast the usual pharmacy appearance, Waterfrom covered the store’s walls in cobblestones, to create a rough texture, and installed a copper spiral staircase – included as a reference to the corkscrew shape of DNA’s structure – at the centre of the space.

The upper floor features a laser-cut perforated pattern made from tessellating triangles, which cast “scattered shadows of leaves”. Colour is introduced in the form of bright panels placed on glass shelves.

“Just as the owner designed, Molecure pharmacy gets rid of the fixed stereotype of pharmacies,” said the studio.

“It also brings the three-generation traditional pharmacy a totally different look, improves the value of Taiwan’s stagnant pharmacy industry, redefines the value of health and brings people who pay increasing attention to health a new space which integrates function, aesthetics and experimental spirit.”

A pharmacy in Belgium similarly ditched the clinical white to embrace a warm-toned space designed to be more welcoming to customers. Japanese firm Hiroyuki Ogawa Architectus also designed a more calming environment for Tokyo’s Fuji Pharmacy.

Waterfrom was set up in 2008 and has offices in both China and Taiwan. It works across interior design and architecture, and has been the recipient of several awards, including the Taiwan Interior Design and Golden Pin awards.

Photography is by Kuomin Lee.

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The highly detailed drawings used to create the backdrops of animated Japanese movies like Ghost in the Shell are the focus of a new exhibition in London.

Currently on show at House of Illustration, Anime Architecture pays tribute to the artists and designers behind some of the best-loved anime films, from Akira to Patlabor: The Movie, and Metropolis.

These creative teams were responsible for creating entire fictional worlds, combining familiar landscapes with fantasy elements. These scenes, often produced from hand drawings and watercolour illustrations, became defining factors for the visual mood of each film.

“The job of a production designer is to draft a universe for the director to locate his film,” explained exhibition curator Stefan Riekeles.

“In the development stage, the film architect – as the production designer is sometimes called – will try to provide a set in different camera perspectives so that a whole scene can be accommodated there. To make a story convincing, the drawn and painted architecture has to support the world in the film – it must be credible in narrative terms.”

The exhibition contains over 100 images, including both technical drawings and original watercolour paintings. These include several from Ghost in the Shell, the cult classic released in 1995, which was directed by Mamoru Oshii, and featured artwork by Production IG.

Based on the Manga comic by Shirow Masamune, the film featured an industrial-looking cityscape filled with faceless skyscrapers, complex engineering and excessive advertising.

The movie went on to inspire blockbusters including The Matrix and Avatar. It was also adapted into a live-action film starring Scarlett Johansson, which was released earlier this year.

“I think it’s a great moment to have a look at the original artwork which laid the foundation for the Hollywood version,” said Riekeles.

“The artists were looking for an expression of a crowded space,” he continued. “They found a blueprint for such a place in Hong Kong, which is exotic enough for a Japanese audience to evoke a feeling of alienation and strangeness, but familiar enough to relate their daily life to.”

“The film is set partially in the Hong Kong of the 90s and partially in a fictional, so called ‘new city’. The new city represents the future, while the real Hong Kong figures as the past. It is fascinating to see, how the artists integrated both concepts in their illustrations.”

The movie’s 2008 sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, also features in the exhibition – in the form of pencil drawings by prolific illustrator Takashi Watabe. There are also drawings by artists including Mamoru Oshii and Atsushi Takeuchi.

“The exhibition is silent. We do not focus on plot or main characters. We focus entirely on the masterful drawings,” added Riekeles.

“We present scenes that are tranquil, here and there almost picturesque, drawn by hand with pencil and watercolours on paper. It is the sheer beauty of these illustrations that we will celebrate in this exhibition.”

Anime Architecture is on show at House of Illustration, 2 Granary Square, London, until 10 Sep 2017.

Images are courtesy of Shirow Masamune, Kodansha, Bandai Visual, Manga Entertainment, Kodansha, IG and ITNDDTD.

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