Of course the actual fragrances of BYREDO’s new range of room sprays are the most important, but the oversized black glass bottles are so sophisticated that you’ll want to have it on display. Available in Bibliotheque, Cotton Poplin and Tree House……
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Dezeen promotion: Spanish surface manufacturer Compac has revealed five new variations of its quartz surface material, each based on textures and patterns found in the natural environment.
The Unique collection includes surfaces inspired by natural stone. All five closely resemble marble – although they are actually made from engineered quartz.
This man-made stone is considerably more durable than its natural counterpart, making it more suitable for use as a kitchen work surface.
“The mix of quartz, resins and pigments make these surfaces solid with no porosity, high resistance to scratching and low maintenance,” Compac told Dezeen.
“For those looking for design without compromising functionality, Compac Quartz brings together these two qualities in a unique and innovative product, perfect for interior decoration.”
There are five designs in the collection: Calacatta, Marquina, Venatino, Arabescato and Argento. Each is a shade of white or grey, but they all vary slightly in both tone and pattern.
“The Unique collection represents the beauty of nature. It is born from total respect and admiration to the forms, materials and textures of the environment,” Compac said.
“Our creations are inspired by natural stones that can be found in the Italian quarries.”
While Calacatta is largely white with grey veins, Marquina is based on dark-coloured rock and the sparkling grains found on its surface.
Venatino and Arabescato are also light in colour, while Argento is a light grey decorated with white vein-like patterns.
Unlike other marble substitutes, the surfaces in Compac’s Unique collection have veins that run through the entirety of the stone. And, like true marble, the veining on each slab is unique.
“In our designs, the vein penetrates into the depth of the product, giving it dimension,” Compac said.
“This also means [the veins] are visible around the edges of the worktop [as opposed to just its surface],” the brand continued.
Compac was founded in Spain in 1975. Earlier this year, the company collaborated with Paris-based designer Arik Levy to create a sculptural kitchen installation for an exhibition during London Design Festival 2017, which was made using its Ice of Genesis collection that is inspired by the frozen lakes of the artic.
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Construction has begun on Zaha Hadid Architects‘ residential high-rise in the Mexican capital, set to become the city’s tallest apartment building.
The Bora Residential Tower is being built in Santa Fe, a major business district in the west of Mexico City – home to tech companies Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Roche and Amazon, as well as three universities.
Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) was given a prime location for the building, beside the Mexicana park and in walking distance to schools, theatres, cafes and restaurants. It will also be near to the new Santa Fe Transit Hub, which will offer a quick connection to the city’s metro network.
As the area is suited to a range of potential buyers, like families, retirees and young professionals, the British firm designed the building with six different layouts, which are arranged as separate sections around the central circulation.
The tallest of the sextet will have over 50 storeys – a feat that ZHA claims will make it the “highest residential tower in Mexico City”.
In total, the building will include 200 apartments of one, two and three bedrooms.
Each will have two glazed sides to make the most of natural light and views to the surroundings. These will open onto private terraces so that residents can enjoy the mild, subtropical climate.
Newly released renderings show that the balconies will have a triangular profile, and be offset from one another so as not to block light to levels below.
The tower tapers inwards at the base, as the corner edge skirts out over 10 storeys to form canopies over public space below.
The multi-level space underneath will be occupied by restaurants and shops facing onto the street. Renderings show a glazed entrance, leading into an atrium with marble-like walls. The levels wrapping the space will be occupied by seating areas.
Mexico City is in a seismically active region and was hit by a deadly earthquake earlier this year. ZHA has designed its tower to withstand high-magnitude tremors, using lightweight and flexible construction materials, and adding the canopy for stability.
The Bora Residential Tower is one of the many projects that ZHA was undertaking at the time of its founder Zaha Hadid’s death last year. Hadid worked on the project with partner Patrik Schumacher, who is now leading the studio.
The firm’s other projects in Mexico include a sinuous apartment complex in Monterrey and residences near Cancún.
Visualisations are by LabTop.
Project credits:
Architect: Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA)
Design: Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher (ZHA)
ZHA project director: Juan Ignacio Aranguren
ZHA project architects: Andrés Arias Madrid, Pierandrea Angius
ZHA concept design team: Saman Saffarian (Design Lead), Johannes Elias, Julia Hyoun Hee Na, Lisa Kinnerud, Kate Revyakina
Structural engineer (Concept): BAC – García Jarque Ingenieros
MEP engineer (Concept): PGI Engineering
Facade engineer (Concept): Front Inc
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Casa AR is the result of remodeling and extending a residence —in a 1,000 sq m lot constructed in the 80´s— located on the west side..
When you imagine a farm, this is probably the last thing you’d think of… and that’s precisely its appeal! Called Lotus, this floating architecture is at once a space for growing veggies, dining, and socializing within urban environments. The structure utilizes a vertical design to house its various hydroponic and greenhouse stations. Inside and out, visitors and diners can enjoy waterside views and watch and learn more about there food growing as they dine. Designed to be built on waterways and lakes within cities, they capitalize on centrally located free space to avoid interfering with the existing structures.
Designers: Taeung Kim, Sunae Shin, Sungho An, Seungjun Lee & Mirae Park
Le cabinet d’architectes néerlandais MVRDV vient d’achever la construction d’une bibliothèque hors du commun pour la ville de Tianjin, en Chine. Au centre de cet extraordinaire bâtiment qui a vu le jour en seulement trois ans, un auditorium sphérique baptisé The Eye donne le ton et vous invite à lever le nez de votre roman pour ouvrir grand les yeux. En effet, autour de cet orbe lumineux immortalisé par le photographe Ossip van Duivenbode, des millions de livres occupent d’interminables rayons de bibliothèque, dont les étagères colossales s’élèvent en escaliers vers le plafond. De quoi donner le vertige aux amoureux de la littérature.
The spherical, weighted base of this floor lamp by Australian designer Nick Rennie stops it from falling over if pushed or knocked.
Rennie created the Sway floor lamp for Australian brand Made By Pen. The brief called for a cordless light that could be placed anywhere in a room, but Rennie wanted to also create an object that interacted with its surroundings.
The designer, who is based in Melbourne, came up with a lamp made from two spherical forms joined by a thin pole.
The bottom sphere is weighted, allowing the lamp to sway side to side when pushed, and preventing it from falling over.
“Having a strong understanding of production processes, as well as a keen knowledge of technology, Nick set about designing a floor lamp that not only fit the brief, but challenged pre-conceived perceptions of what a floor lamp should look like and how it interacted with its users,” said Made By Pen.
“The result is a minimalist, nomadic floor lamp that is playful and could not be knocked over.”
While the bottom round form is made of steel, the lamp’s head is made of silicone.
The LEDs concealed within the shade are powered by a battery, and the lamp can be plugged into a power point when it needs to be charged.
To turn it on, the user simply taps the rod or the head.
Made By Pen was founded by Michael Mabuti and Susan Chung. Their vision was for a brand that creates opportunities for established and emerging Australian designers, by helping them bring products to the market.
Last year, they teamed up with architect Michael Ong to create a miniature wooden house for dogs, to fill a gap in the market for “designer dog kennels”.
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The smooth surface and soft-pink hue of a newly plastered wall provided the starting point for the design of communal workspaces at this new creative hub in east London by local studio Sella Concept.
De Beauvoir Block is an Edwardian industrial building in Hackney that was transformed by developer The Benyon Estate into a workspace for 26 creative businesses, as well as freelancers dropping in to use its flexible desk spaces.
Having initially approached the client to suggest creating a retail space and workshop for the building, branding and spatial design agency Sella Concept was ultimately tasked with overseeing an overall strategy for the interiors.
The consultancy, which was founded this year by designers Tatjana von Stein and Gayle Noonan, proposed the idea of incorporating co-working within spaces that were originally planned to be used simply as standard offices.
The result of the spatial re-evaluation is a communal area on the ground floor containing a cafe, lounge, reception and meeting spaces that are available for use by any of the building’s tenants.
The studio worked on the interior concept for the communal areas and for dedicated co-working space, as well as De Beauvoir Block’s new boardroom.
Sella Concept’s design focuses on imbuing various spaces with a unique atmosphere while tying them together through a material and colour palette that was based initially around the colour of fresh plaster.
“We spend most of our days at work, so it seems crucial to develop a space that calls upon your various moods at different points of the day,” said Von Stein, “particularly in creative industries, where a shift in your environment can take you to a more inspiring headspace.”
The designers worked on the layout of the rooms and created bespoke furniture to complement the relaxed, eclectic ambience they had in mind.
The communal reception area and cafe features elements of British colonialism in the form of plantation chairs and cane furniture, which combine with industrial details such as the metal-legged tables and spun-metal lighting.
The space is arranged around a central bar run by local business De Beauvoir Deli. Custom-made tables featuring rough-edged wooden planks set on metal frames provide spaces for coffee breaks or informal meetings.
The rest of the room is divided into zones, including lounge areas with soft seating and wooden bookshelves, bistro-influenced dining spaces and counters for a quick drink or laptop-based work.
“It’s hard to create a community and culture without a beating heart at its epicentre,” added Noonan.
“We wanted to challenge the large open room and the industrial fabric of the building through a cocoon of rich materials and colour that creates a feeling of movement throughout.”
The flexible furniture and variety of spaces ensures the communal room can adapt to various uses throughout the day, from lounging during downtime to post-work drinks.
Sella Concept created the wooden tables, as well as a circular reception desk, the banquette seating and a quirky pattern painted on the polished concrete floor of the co-working space to add bespoke touches to the interiors.
Graphic artist Emily Forgot was commissioned to produce a series of wooden assemblages and collages distributed throughout the building that evoke its architectural and cultural fabric.
Photography is by Nicholas Worley.
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A simple house features on the cover of Reinier de Graaf‘s new book, Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession. In this extract, the OMA partner reveals the building’s secret, politically fuelled past.
The house, a small single-story building with a square plan and a pitched roof, is nothing much to speak of. The street along which it stands is straddled with similar and similarly inconspicuous homes. Apart from customised doorbells and mailboxes, only the colour of their facades varies: off-white, grey, Prussian green (or yellow) and, in the case of more recently erected homes, just plain white.
The one that has our interest is terracotta red. Its exterior walls feel like a faded shade of the area’s former political colouring, but we understand that analogy might be a bit far-fetched. It is the street name – the Karl Liebknechtstrasse – that serves as the real reminder of the once potent ideology that held this part of Germany in its grip for 40 years.
We have come to know of the house pretty much by chance, from a report by the University of Brandenburg on the recycling of building components in Eastern Europe. With an ever-increasing number of the former East Germany’s public housing estates being taken down, the ensuing debris – mainly prefabricated facade panels – is being reused as a resource material mostly for new housing estates in neighbouring countries like the Czech Republic and Poland, but also for new buildings in Germany of an altogether different kind, such as this one: a small “holiday” home, located in an obscure German town, appropriated for permanent inhabitation shortly after its completion.
The concrete panels prove intrinsically tougher than the political system that begat them
If East German prefabrication technology was once proudly exported to friendly socialist regimes, it is now the disassembled panels themselves, the discarded products of a failed state, that attain the same status. Far from becoming obsolete, the concrete panels prove intrinsically tougher than the political system that begat them, and now operate as a finite, almost wholly recyclable resource in the context of the market economy. In an almost perverse mirroring of bygone days, when the GDR’s Bauakademie obsessively researched and advocated the virtues of large-scale panel housing and urbanism, the same enthusiasm is now being professed by the Technical University of Brandenburg for low density, low rise building typologies made of the reused building panels.
The pitched roof and a thick layer of stucco suffice to erase all traces of the origin of the modernist components that went into the house. If one didn’t know, one would never suspect. Can something be beautiful simply because of what we know, not because of what we see?
Apart from the more repetitive nature of its windows, there is nothing that distinguishes this house from its neighbours, allegedly all made of brick and mortar. Four walls and a roof: the house captures the sobering legacy of 20th-century architecture perfectly.
The pitched roof and a thick layer of stucco suffice to erase all traces of the origin of the modernist components that went into the house
The report references a small building firm on the outskirts of Brandenburg. Through the builder we obtain the location of the house; upon arrival we find it shielded from view. The hedge, planted at the time of its completion some 10 years ago, has overtaken the house in height, making photography impossible. If we are content to settle for a different house, the builder is happy to provide us with another address. He has applied the same construction method to numerous other houses, scattered over various small villages across the pastures of Brandenburg.
Armed with a camera, a tripod and a set of kitchen stairs, we set out to immortalise a replica of our hard-sought original. When it comes to serial production, I realise the notion of an original might be somewhat flawed.
It is a beautiful spring Sunday. The owner, who is expecting our arrival, greets us with mix of hospitality and surprise. The latter grows more intense after we decline his offer to photograph the interior of his home.
He has no objection to us taking pictures of his house. The builder and he are good friends. The series of which his home is part is small enough for the builder to have retained contact with every one of its inhabitants. In the former East Germany, the collapse of Communism has led to the revival of small businesses, including the typical familial relations that come with it.
Here, memories of an era in which the state actively encouraged people to spy on each other are still fresh
One good photograph is all we need: frontal, with an abundant amount of grey sky above. I know we have to be quick; the sun is about to come out any minute, but that isn’t the only reason to expedite our work. The familial relations, as we soon find out, do not necessarily extend to outsiders. While photographing the house from across the street, passing cars routinely stop to ask us what (the hell we think) we are doing. Don’t we know these are private houses of which the owners value their privacy? I have to think of the legal issues Google Streetview encountered in Germany and wonder how much of the resistance was driven by views held in the former east. Here, memories of an era in which the state actively encouraged people to spy on each other are still fresh. Privacy is a hard-fought right not to be squandered, certainly not by decadent foreign architects.
We manage to take our photograph. It looks good, and a year after our visit it is well in the public domain. The builder, meanwhile, is no longer building prefab concrete holiday homes. Trading in one form of recycling for another, he has moved on to the more profitable business of appropriating small Dutch naval vessels for German river cruises.
To him the concrete panels were but a means to an end – a way to make a living in the present, irrespective of the burden of their difficult past. There is something strangely exhilarating about his pragmatic disregard for the same history that so fascinates us. Perhaps, in the end, that is where history’s resolution lies: in oblivion.
Four Walls and a Roof is published by Harvard University Press. It began as a series of essays on Dezeen.
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Bonne nouvelle pour les plus jeunes et tous ceux qui ont gardé une âme d’enfant, la maison LEGO à ouvert ses portes en septembre dans la ville de Billund, après 4 ans de travaux menés par le cabinet d’architecture danois Bjarke Ingels Group. Cette infrastructure gigantesque qui s’étale sur environ 12 000 m² se compose de plusieurs blocs abritant des restaurants, des galeries d’exposition, un magasin consacré à la marque et une aire de jeux. Et les véritables passionnés de l’univers LEGO ont de quoi se réjouir puisque la plateforme de location en ligne Airbnb propose aux fans d’y passer une nuit en famille en répondant à une simple question : que feriez-vous avec un stock illimité de LEGO ? Au programme pour les heureux gagnants du concours : visite privée des bâtiments, rencontre avec le designer Jamie Berard, déjeuner aux petits oignons servi par des robots et nuit dans une chambre décorée d’une cascade de LEGO, spécialement aménagée pour l’occasion. Avis aux amateurs qui n’ont pas peur de marcher sur des briques…
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