Hasta La Ideas

Stefano Boeri has suggested that a “new Shanghai” made up of “vertical forests” could be built on Mars, should rising sea levels render Earth uninhabitable.

The ambitious Mars-based eco city envisioned by the Italian architect would be made up of his studio’s signature plant-covered towers built under giant sealed “space-proof” domes.

The hypothetical project was dreamed up in response to an invitation to imagine what Shanghai might look like in 2117 for Shanghai Urban Space and Art Season (SUSAS) 2017.

The architect came up with the utopian design in collaboration with Tongji University’s Future City Lab and the Chinese Space Agency.

The team imagined that, by 2117, irreversible climate change would force humankind to establish a new habitat in space.

Stefano Boeri realised his first “bosco verticale”, or vertical forest, in 2014, when construction completed on two 110-metre towers in Milan planted with 900 trees.

The towers’ living facades create an urban habitat for wildlife, filter out dust from the city below, while providing a humid, oxygen-rich micro-climate for the occupants of the building.

In June of this year, Boeri unveiled plans to construct an entire city in China covered in vertical forests. The Liuzhou Forest City will provide 30,000 homes and accommodate 40,000 trees, which the architects calculate will lock up 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, while producing 900 tonnes of oxygen.

Previous attempts to create sealed bio-domes suitable for use on inhospitable planets have been problematic. The infamous Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert was the largest closed system ever created.

Experiments were run in it during the early 1990s to test the viability of using such a design in space.

The four scientists sealed in the dome were beset by problems maintaining the delicate balance of the biospheres.

Controlling the populations of plants and animals proved challenging, fluctuating CO2 levels saw oxygen levels drop dangerously low, food became scarce and in-fighting broke out.

A space-living simulation conducted in Hawaii this year was more successful. The NASA-funded project saw six scientists sealed inside a dome on a remote volcano in Hawaii as part of the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS.

However, it was an experiment to assess the psychological risks of living in close quarters in a remote environment rather than an attempt to simulate a biodome. The structure was not airtight, food was delivered once every few months and the scientists were allowed out whilst wearing space suits.

Boeri is not the only architect or designer to imagine what kind of buildings and tools will be needed for life on Mars in recent years.

Recent ECAL graduate Thomas Missé has created a stackable carbon-fibre chair, a lightweight material he hopes will help future space dwellers save on import costs when furnishing their colony.

Central Saint Martin’s graduate Charlotte Lew’s Galactic Everyday collection imagines bringing bedtime rituals to Mars. She designed a range of space suits that would allow the user to take a hot bath before getting into a vacuum-suctioning dressing gown.

Meanwhile Elon Musk is busy making a manned expedition to Mars a reality. In August he teased the first picture of a spacesuit for his SpaceX program on Instagram.

“Worth noting that this actually works (not a mockup),” he wrote. “Already tested to double vacuum pressure. Was incredibly hard to balance esthetics [sic] and function. Easy to do either separately.”

In 2016 Musk presented a timeline for the SpaceX program that would launch the first manned mission to Mars by 2022.

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Finnish designer Joanna Laajisto has completed an office in Helsinki for service design company Fjord, featuring spaces for casual meetings and soft furnishings that offer a homely feel.

Having outgrown its current Helsinki studio, Fjord asked Laajisto’s studio to help create a new workplace that reflects its brand and provides a space where employees from around the world can feel comfortable.

Despite a lot of the company’s work focusing on digital services and technology, Laajisto was determined to provide an environment with a welcoming and friendly feel, where all necessary technology is concealed.

“Elegant, unconventional and human – those were the starting points of our design process,” said Laajisto, whose other projects in the Finnish capital include a restaurant featuring corrugated metal walls and marble furniture.

“This is an office primarily made for employees to feel at home, and the wow factor for outsiders comes from what the space feels like, not merely from its looks,” she said.

To achieve the warm and tactile effect demanded in the brief, Laajisto used natural materials throughout the 1,000-square-metre space, including oak flooring, sisal carpets and linen curtains. These are accompanied by plenty of plants.

Several kitchens and lounge areas contribute to the domestic feel of the studio. These spaces allow staff to hold informal meetings or relax, eat and chat in a comfortable and casually furnished setting.

The rooms are separated by full-height glazed partitions, featuring delicate black metal frames that allow natural light from the large windows to flood into the interior.

The glass walls incorporate sliding panels that can be opened to connect the spaces if required. The same system is used to provide privacy to booths where phone calls can be made without any distractions.

The client was keen for the majority of furnishings and products to be of Finnish origin, which led Laajisto to specify pieces including Artek‘s Rival chairs for the meeting rooms and Knoll‘s Womb chairs by Finnish designer Eero Saarinen for the lounge areas.

The living rooms also feature large rugs from Woodnotes and mobile-like pendant lamps designed by Laajisto and designer Pasi Kärkkäinen.

In the kitchens, cabinets are painted green to complement the natural material palette. Furniture includes Ilmari Tapiovaara’s Domus chairs alongside oak tables and benches from Finnish brand Nikari.

“Our people are very proud of our new office space and they are constantly inviting people to come and see it,” added Fjord Helsinki’s service design lead, Stéphanie Del Rey.

“When planning the space and its furniture, we wanted it to be very adaptable. Now we can use the studio in various versatile ways; people even use it in their spare time for movie nights and casual hang-outs.”

Laajisto founded her Helsinki studio in 2010. Other past projects include a restaurant with green panelling, white tiles and marble slabs lining its walls and a collection of modular storage units with boxes based on standard paper sizes.

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Fashion designer Ying Gao has created a collection of robotic dresses with fibrous panels that delicately twist and curl when they identify that strangers are nearby.

The Possible Tomorrow’s collection is inspired by Gao’s interest in the notion that clothing is often seen as a protective barrier.

The dresses’ movements are triggered by a fingerprint scanner built into a wooden frame that sits around the wearer’s neck.

The device sends to data to a microprocessor that uses Arduino – an open-source electronics platform – and if it doesn’t recognise the fingerprint, it triggers motors embedded in each of the panels.

Fingers that are placed on the scanner more than once, and therefore no longer “strangers”, will have no effect on the dress.

“The purpose of the project is to subvert the logic of security so that garments become anti-security objects,” Ying Gao told Dezeen. “The logic of security has become a political technology, that too often prevents us from emancipating. I would like these garments to open up to people that are strangers.”

“The idea is that you can never make the dress move twice.”

All of the dresses are made from gauzy nylon mesh, while translucent thermoplastic has been used for the threads in the kinetic panels. All materials were specifically chosen by Gao for their flexibility and strength.

When motionless, the thread panels form flattened curves that are meant to echo the hypotrochoid patterns created by retro games like Spirograph, which partly informed Gao’s designs.

“The challenge in terms of fashion design is to contract garments with free-flowing dimensions affording the potential for numerous shapes,” the designer explained.

Based in Montreal, Ying Gao has previously created dresses with integrated eye-tracking systems that move and light up when under someone’s gaze. The fashion designer’s Walking City collection also incorporated concealed pneumatic pumps so that the clothes appeared to breathe when their origami-style folds filled with air.

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Faraway Nearby est un projet du photographe et journaliste suédois Jan Tove de redécouvrir sa région d’origine, la Suède. Cette collection, prise sur une période de 10 ans, est une odyssée photographique, une documentation fidèle d’un paysage et ses habitants en constante évolution. Le Livre Faraway Nearby, publié par Hatja Cantz, est disponible ici.

To coincide with our series of talks on Good Design for a Bad World, we’ve created a Pinterest board filled with architecture and design that engages with the big problems facing the world. Projects range from biodegradable beer packaging to ink made from carbon emissions. Follow Dezeen on Pinterest ›

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