Hasta La Ideas

London designer Lee Broom has created all-black versions of his most iconic furniture and lighting pieces in celebration of his studio’s 10th anniversary.

Broom, who started his eponymous studio in 2007, will present the totally black “On Reflection” collection during London Design Festival in September.

To create the collection, Broom looked back over his 10-year career and brought together some of his most notable pieces – each reinterpreted in a monochromatic palette.

These include the Hanging Hoop chair constructed from two brass-plated metal circles, and the Crescent light formed from an illuminated sphere that has been sliced and shifted.

The totemic-style Fulcrum light will also receive an all-black update, as will the Carousel pendant and On The Rock glassware.

For a week-long period during London Design Festival, Broom’s Shoreditch store will be fully decorated in black and charcoal grey – providing a camouflaged art deco-inspired backdrop for the collection.

“Presented in a tableau of an interior which will stylistically mix Art Deco and Bauhaus influences; visitors will be presented with a scene where nothing is quite what it first appears to be,” said the studio.

“On reflection, the true nature of the tableau will be revealed with a surprising, surreal and modern twist.”

Broom kicked off his 10th anniversary celebrations during this year’s Milan design week, where he filled a carousel with products he has designed over the past decade.

He also created a brutalism-inspired grandfather clock to mark the occasion, which was produced in a limited-edition run of 10 pieces – representative of the 10 years since his studio was launched.

Broom’s career has also seen him complete a variety of retail, hospitality and residential interiors, including a personal shopping suite for Topman and a prostitution-themed restaurant.

The designer was recognised on last year’s Dezeen Hot List, which ranked the most newsworthy and searched-for players in the design world in 2016.

London Design Festival takes place across the city from 16 to 24 September 2017. A “building block castle” by Camille Walala and an undulating tapestry by Ross Lovegrove are among the 400 events prepped to take place.

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The most characteristic feature of a book house resembling a book is the bookcase where all books on the bench can be stacked. It had always been the ..

NOMAD is a digital musical instrument born from the desire to create music on the go. Its compact and minimalistic form enables users to take it anywhere they go. The pressure sensitive frets and flexible strings offer a traditional playing experience, however, they will never break or get out of tune.

So how does it work? By marrying digital and analogue! The design combines the familiarity of a classic guitar with the flexibility of a digital musical instrument. Paired with an app, NOMAD can play an endless variety of sounds and the frets can be turned off so a digital capo controls the pitch of the strings.

It’s ideal for anyone who needs to scratch that creative itch on a whim and can be taken anywhere from the subway to the campground. Small enough to throw in a bag or backpack, it’s high quality music-making for wherever life takes you!

Designer: Orit Dolev

Ewoud Bon est un photographe et directeur de la photographie basé à Amsterdam. Il s’est rendu au Groenland et en est revenu avec une série présentant les habitants de cette terre la plus proche du cercle polaire Arctique. Des images remplies de vie. Une vie et une culture qui évoluent en harmonie avec la Nature.

With the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens now underway and the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire still fresh, writer and curator Owen Hopkins has called for politicians to stop using Britain’s post-war architecture as a scapegoat for today’s problems.

Hopkins is senior curator at Sir John Soane’s Museum, and is also the author of Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain, which examines the demolition of buildings constructed after the second world war.

Speaking to Dezeen, he said that issues with building regulations and social policy, rather than design, are too often leading to the “wanton and needless destruction” of these types of structures.

“Post-war architecture still remains a convenient scapegoat for the failures of our own era, whether in social policy or in ensuring that buildings in which hundreds of people live meet basic fire safety tests,” Hopkins told Dezeen.

Much of the UK’s remaining post-war housing is currently being targeted for redevelopment – former prime minister David Cameron even made it one of his governmental pledges back in 2016 to demolish, or as he called it “regenerate”, 100 of the country’s so-called sink estates.

Alison and Peter Smithson-designed Robin Hood Gardens became one of the best-known examples. Despite a high-profile campaign to save the historic estate, it was rejected for listing and is now being pulled down.

According to Hopkins, post-war housing is underrepresented on the National Heritage List for England – a point that was also recently made by Simon Smithson, the architects’ son. One reason for this, he said, is that these buildings aren’t seen to have enough “architectural interest”.

“For a building to be deemed ‘significant’, it needs to be of ‘architectural interest’ for its ‘design’, ‘decoration’ and ‘craftsmanship’, and exhibit ‘innovation’ and ‘virtuosity’,” explained Hopkins.

“Judging a building by these terms, it doesn’t take much to see a clear bias against post-war architecture, and housing in particular, serving to exclude many highly-successful estates from statutory protection.”

Hopkins claimed the reactions of politicians, after the fatal fire at Grenfell Tower in west London, will have done little to influence public attitudes towards this type of architecture.

He cited an article written for The Guardian, in which London mayor Sadiq Khan blamed the 1970s architecture for the fire that has killed at least 80, but glossed over the fact that the 2016 renovations are thought by many experts to be responsible for spreading the flames.

“Nowadays, we would not dream of building towers to the standards of the 1970s, but their inhabitants still have to live with that legacy,” wrote Khan. “It may well be the defining outcome of this tragedy that the worst mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s are systematically torn down.”

Hopkins said: “It was revealing that in an article written shortly after the fire, Sadiq Khan chose to lay much of the blame at the door of the house-builders of the post-war era. As many have pointed out, the irony of his statement is that if the tower hadn’t been re-clad, then the fire wouldn’t have spread with anywhere like the same ferocity.”

“There are lessons to learn from Grenfell at every level – from the way council housing is managed and maintained, to the efficacy of building regulations – but underlying all of this is the simple fact that we can’t keep looking upon council housing, and by implication the people who live in it, as somehow second-rate,” he added.

Released earlier this year, Hopkins’ book Lost Futures offers a closer look at 35 post-war buildings, including schools, libraries, offices, shopping centres and industrial spaces, as well as housing.

Black-and-white photography of the buildings, all built between 1945 and 1979, are accompanied by a short text explaining their origins and decline. They range from the well-known to the hardly known at all and destruction “celebrated and lamented depending on our point of view”.

Residential schemes featured in the book include James Stirling’s Runcorn New Town, completed in 1977 and razed just 15 years later, and the 1961-built Park Hill estate in Sheffield by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, which has undergone significant refurbishment works by HawkinsBrown and Studio Egret West.

There are also lesser-known examples, like the Central Hill estate in Crystal Palace, south London, designed by local authority architect Rosemary Stjernstedt.

“Despite its elegant arrangement of stepped blocks on the dramatically sloping sites to maximise natural light, the estate was deemed by the assessors as not innovative enough to warrant listing,” said Hopkins.

“Yet in many ways, that is the reason for its success. It doesn’t try to do too much, but makes use of a few different architectural elements to create a decent, humane place to live, which, despite the council’s lamentable maintenance, has stood the test of time and deserves to be protected far more than many buildings on the list.”

The book was published by the Royal Academy of Arts, where Hopkins headed up the architecture programme, before joining Sir John Soane’s Museum late last year.

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