Hasta La Ideas

Furniture continues to be a popular topic with Core77 readers, and here are ten of the standout pieces and stories we saw this year.

First off, some nuts-and-bolts stuff, that doesn’t actually require any nuts and bolts. We covered how Ikea’s new joinery system is advancing the design of the furniture itself.

Emko’s unusual, circular line of hideaway desks/storage cabinets are “an all round success.”

Another round piece of furniture, this one made for boozehounds (or oenophiles, depending upon how classy you are” was the Don Vino Wine Table.

Speaking of display furniture, this year we saw there’s a robust market for furniture for geeks. Specifically, folks who want to store and display their Star Wars figures within a functional piece of furniture.

We stumbled across this desk by Carroll Street Woodworkers that had a very unique feature.

A more commonplace furniture feature that’s now trending is the ability to make those around you disappear. At a time when people have little online privacy, furniture that offers physical privacy in public spaces is becoming popular.

At Stockholm Design Week we spotted another piece of privacy furniture, this one inspired by both Samurai armor and insects, by FÄRG BLANCHE.

Interestingly, the minimalist Wakufuru system of tables and benches is designed to offer not visual privacy, but “sonic relief” with its integration of sound-dampening materials.

In terms of a designer/builder doing something wildly different from his peers, we found Kent Walsh, whose Griffin Modern Furniture & Design combines three disparate aesthetics: Steampunk, Communist military and Mid Century Modern.

And finally, in another unusual but pleasing mash-up, Ikea and HAY finally released their much-anticipated collaboration, the Ypperlig collection.

Stay tuned for the best Transforming Furniture stories of the year!

There’s nothing quite like sharing a meal with your favorite humans, especially one that’s prepared at home with love. Whether you’re buying for a home chef, budding bartender, an enthusiastic eater or all three, a gift that revolves around food and……

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American architect Steven Holl has unveiled his Maggie’s Centre for cancer patients in London, featuring a facade of translucent white glass dotted with coloured panels.

Imagined by New York-based Holl as a “vessel within a vessel within a vessel”, the luminous Maggie’s Barts features a concrete frame, a layer of bamboo wood and a skin of matt glass.

It is located at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in northwest London – a facility that was founded in the 12th century, making it the oldest hospital in Britain.

Maggie’s Centres offer free practical, social and emotional help to anyone effected by cancer. There are already a number of these centres around the UK, by architects including Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, OMA and Snøhetta.

Holl’s design pays tribute to the building’s medieval heritage. The geometric facade is modelled on the medieval method of writing down music, called “neume notation”. It features lines at 90-centimetre vertical intervals, interspersed with the colourful glass panels.

“The word neume originates from the Greek pnevma, which means ‘vital force’,” said Holl in a statement.

“It suggests a ‘breath of life’ that fills oneself with inspiration like a stream of air, the blowing of the wind. The outer glass layer is organised in horizontal bands like a musical staff while the concrete structure branches like the hand.”

The glass envelope washes the interior with colour during daylight hours. Lit up at night, it glows from within.

“Interior lighting will be organised to allow the coloured lenses together with the translucent white glass of the facade to present a new, joyful, glowing presence on this corner of the great square of St Barts Hospital,” added Holl.

The three-storey structure is the first Maggie’s Centre completed with a vertical rather than a horizontal layout.

Clear glass panels form a main entrance facing the square, while a second entrance on the west side opens out to the garden of a neighbouring church.

Inside, an open curving staircase lined in bamboo connects the floors. At ground level, the main space is filled with a kitchen and dining area, as well as a “pause area” tucked away to one side and a separate counselling room.

The first floor has a library with seating areas, as well as two separate rooms that can be used as office space or additional counselling rooms.

The uppermost floor comprises a room with a curved glass wall. This opens out onto a roof garden – a flexible space that can be used for meetings or classes such as Tai Chi and yoga.

Maggie’s Barts replaces a 1960s brick structure, abutting the last remaining wing of the hospital’s 17th-century buildings.

This wing, called the Great Hall of St Bartholomew’s, was designed by renowned British architect James Gibbs, who also built the dome of the Radcliffe Camera at Oxford. The hall contains the Hogarth Staircase, which is painted with murals by William Hogarth depicting Jesus Christ healing the sick.

The new centre’s proximity to such a historic building, combined with its contemporary facade, caused controversy when the plans for first revealed. At one point critics even mooted a rival scheme they commissioned from British architect Michael Hopkins, but Holl’s design prevailed.

Holl won a competition to design the centre in 2012, but construction wasn’t able to begin until 2015, after work was halted to remove archaeological finds uncovered when the foundations were dug. These included medieval buildings and five roman burial sites.

The architect, who ranked at number 52 on the inaugural Dezeen Hot List, is best known for adding a new building to Glasgow School of Art and for the Campbell Sports Centre at Columbia University in New York.

This year his studio has also completed an arts complex for Princeton University, comprising three buildings around a courtyard and reflective pool, and announced plans to collaborate with Swiss studio Rüssli Architekten on a new workspace for Médecins Sans Frontières.

The post Steven Holl completes luminous Maggie’s Centre next to Britain’s oldest hospital appeared first on Dezeen.

C’est grâce à son œil d’architecte et de designer urbain que Jeroen van Dam arrive à photographier avec virtuosité le portrait de sa ville natale – Rotterdam. Des sous-sols de la ville aux plus hauts toits des immeubles, Jeroen fait vibrer la métropole au travers de son objectif et nous rappelle presque les photos de son acolyte bruxellois Mathias Mattéo.

Seemingly random bits of e-waste stud this collection of office furniture, designed by Italian duo Formafantasma for Melbourne’s inaugural NGV Triennial.

Formafantasma‘s Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin created the furniture as part of their Ore Streams project, a two-year study into the current state of electronic waste recycling that proposes new approaches for designers working on gadgets.

While this research will be more directly presented to audiences at the National Gallery of Victoria through a series of videos, the furniture is designed as a poetic response to the findings.

The pastel-hued metallic objects incorporate decontextualised bits of electronic waste, like the casings from iPhones and laptop keyboards. One cubicle features a pigeonhole formed from a microwave, while a rubbish bin is lined with gold scavenged from circuit boards.

Several of the pieces also sport images of the surface of Mars, a reference to the extra-terrestrial origins of gold, which is widely thought to have arrived on earth via a meteorite shower.

“On a subliminal level, having the images of Mars evokes a feeling of deployed earth or an empty planet, which we thought moved the objects from being only functional to an evocative level,” Farresin told Dezeen.

“We chose objects that were familiar within the office, but made them slightly odd and unfamiliar — the iPhone is under rather than on top of the table, you have the aeration grid that doesn’t serve to do anything on the leg of the table.”

In addition to the table, rubbish bin and two cubicles, the collection includes a filing cabinet, desk, chair, lamp and shelf, all made primarily of dead stock.

With furniture specifically requested as part of the commission, Formafantasma decided the office environment made the most appropriate focus.

“The office is where you see the pragmatic approach of modernism in terms of quantification, use of space, functionality and so on,” Farresin said.

“We feel that the same pragmatic approach based on quantification and supposed efficiency is also used with natural resources, so we thought the office was the right environment to express our investigation.”

Formafantasma described the pieces as a “Trojan Horse” for their research.

“The collection of objects created for Ore Streams act as a Trojan Horse, using form and colour to initiate a deeper exploration of ‘above-ground mining’ and the complex role design plays in transforming natural resources into desirable products,” they said.

They adopted the term “above-ground mining” in reference to a statistic that said that by 2080, the biggest metal reserves will not be underground but circulating in products or stored as ingots.

Their research project documents the electronic waste recycling process around the world, highlighting some of the issues in product design causing complications.

Based on this, the duo is encouraging designers and electronics companies to prioritise recyclability in their work, by taking such actions as improving labelling of parts, ensuring batteries and other hazardous components are easy to access and remove, considering a colour coding system that would enable different materials to be identified and sorted, and avoiding the use of glue to fix different materials together.

The Ore Streams research spanned two years and saw the designers disassemble electronic goods in their studio, visit recycling plants in Thailand and interview scientists, UN representatives, recyclers, NGO workers and electronics producers.

A number of these interviews are being shown in the NGV Triennial exhibition, which runs from 15 December 2017 to 15 April 2018.

Based in Amsterdam, Trimarchi and Farresin founded Formafantasma in 2009 after graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven. Their Wire Ring lamp for Flos was one of Dezeen’s top ten lighting designs this year in Milan, while 2016 saw them produce objects inspired by Roman ruins.

The post Formafantasma explores “above-ground mining” with Ore Streams office furniture appeared first on Dezeen.