Hasta La Ideas

Mexican architect Frida Escobedo has been named as the designer of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, which is to feature a latticed enclosure surrounding a pool of water.

Escobedo is the 18th architect to design the Serpentine Pavilion, the prestigious annual commission from the Serpentine Galleries in London.

The architect, who was born in 1979 and set up her Mexico City-based practice in 2006, will be the youngest Serpentine Pavilion architect yet and the first solo woman to take on the project since the inaugural commission by the late Zaha Hadid, in 2000.

Her design is for a courtyard enclosed by dark latticed walls, made from cement tiles. It is intended as a play on the celosia – a typical feature in Mexican architecture that allows breeze to permeate a building.

The perforations will allow views into and out of the pavilion, while the mirrored underside of a curving canopy overhead will reflect the building and a pool beneath.

“My design for the Serpentine Pavilion 2018 is a meeting of material and historical inspirations inseparable from the city of London itself and an idea which has been central to our practice from the beginning: the expression of time in architecture through inventive use of everyday materials and simple forms,” said Frida Escobedo.

“For the Serpentine Pavilion, we have added the materials of light and shadow, reflection and refraction, turning the building into a timepiece that charts the passage of the day.”

The pavilion will comprise two rectilinear blocks set at an angle to reference the Prime Meridian – a line of longitude at London’s Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

“With this bold interior, Frida draws history into the present and redefines the meaning of public space,” said Serpentine Galleries director Hans Ulrich Obrist and chief executive Yana Peel.

The pavilion will be open to the public from 15 June to 7 October 2018 in London’s Kensington Gardens. It will host a cafe, as well as a programme of art, architecture, music, film and dance events.

Escobedo’s varied oeuvre includes the conversion of the former home and studio of painter David Alfaro Siqueiros into a public gallery in Mexican city of Cuernavaca. She has also created interiors for two Aesop stores in Florida and an Aztec-inspired installation in the V&A in London.

The announcement follows the news that the Serpentine Pavilion for 2017, by Diébédo Francis Kéré, will find a new permanent home at a Malaysian gallery, following an extended run in London.

The Serpentine Galleries also recently announced its first Serpentine Pavilion commission outside the UK, a structured designed Chinese studio Jiakun Architects that will open in Beijing in May 2018.

Renderings are by Atmósfera.

The post Frida Escobedo designs secluded courtyard for Serpentine Pavilion 2018 appeared first on Dezeen.

British motor company Jaguar has announced that it will restart production of the D-type racing car for the first time in over 60 years.

The luxury motor company will hand-build just 25 new models of the classic D-type, one of which is being debuted at the Salon Rétromobile show in Paris taking place this week.

It has been 62 years since the last D-type was built. At the time, Jaguar had planned to manufacture 100 models, but only managed to build 75.

By restarting production of the iconic sports car with 25 all-new, period-correct models, the company is finally fulfilling its original aim.

“The Jaguar D-type is one of the most iconic and beautiful competition cars of all time, with an outstanding record in the world’s toughest motor races. And it’s just as spectacular today,” said Tim Hannig, director of Jaguar Land Rover’s Classic division.

“The opportunity to continue the D-type’s success story, by completing its planned production run in Coventry, is one of those once-in-a-lifetime projects that our world-class experts at Jaguar Land Rover Classic are proud to fulfil,” he added.

The new D-type models will be engineered at Jaguar Land Rover‘s purpose-built Classic Works facility in Coventry, England.

Powered by a six-cylinder XK engine, the sports car famously won the Le Mans 24 Hours race three times between 1955 and 1957, and each of the 2018 models will be created to match these authentic, original specifications.

As it stands, the engineering prototype is the 1956 Longnose specification, featuring the recognisable extended bonnet, characteristic tail fin behind the driver’s head, wide-angle cylinder head and quick-change brake callipers.

D-type clients will also be able to choose between a 1955-specification Shortnose or 1956-specification Longnose bodywork.

Jaguar did the same thing back in 2014 with its iconic E-type car. Having had the original objective of building 18 Special GT E-type Cars in 1963, the company only made 12.

It, therefore, restarted production 50 years later, creating the remaining six “missing” vehicles as exact reproductions of the original 12 cars produced in 1963.

Jaguar then electrified the E-type model three years later, in September 2017, in a bid to “future-proof classic-car ownership”.

The new D-Type is currently on show at Salon Retromobile, at the Parc des Expositions in Paris, until 11 February 2018.

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