A layer that will transition nicely from winter to spring, American Trench’s mid-weight waffle knit cashmere sweater can easily accentuate a collared shirt, but looks just as fine pulled over a T-shirt. From a sharp waffle pattern to the raglan sleeves……
Continue Reading…
Photographer Marc Goodwin visited Barcelona for the the next instalment of his series on architects’ offices around the world, shooting among others the workspace created inside a former cement factory by Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill.
Goodwin, who heads up architectural photography studio Archmospheres, shot 14 workspaces around the city, including the offices of Ricardo Bofill, Office of Architecture in Barcelona, and b720 Fermin Vazquez Arquitectos.
“Barcelona has been on my radar for a while because I used to live there during the building boom prior to the 2008 crash,” Goodwin told Dezeen.
“I was curious to see what was going on there now, how the greats like Bofill, OAB, B720 and EMBT were doing, and what some of the newer studios looked like. It was also a good excuse to spend some time in a city I will always love.”
The studios have been set up in a wide variety of spaces, including a former biscuit factory, an old laundry, and a building that was once used as a residence by the Spanish admiralty.
Despite having lived there previously, Goodwin found Barcelona to be to be “the hardest city so far” to shoot for his architecture offices series, which has so far included Shanghai, Beijing, Paris, Scandinavia and London.
“The weird paradox was that the people it was hardest to get in touch with and set up shoots with were also the most welcoming and kind once I got there,” he explained.
“I still had a few disappointments like Mateo and Baas who I was really hoping to shoot because I admire their work.”
Returning to Barcelona, he found it caught up in the political upheavals of the moment, as Catalonia made a break for independence from Spain.
“All eyes [were] on Catalonia. Was it affecting the architectural scene? It was.”
The London-based photographer also felt conscious of the fact he was visiting in the aftermath of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union.
“I expressed my concern over Brexit to one architect who answered ‘I know EXACTLY how you feel’. Seated opposite her was a man wearing a yellow, pro-independence ribbon,” said Goodwin.
“I couldn’t help but wonder if the comment was a sign of open hostility or open dialogue. The speaker was so incredibly warm and kind, it was hard to imagine it was the former.”
Take a look inside 14 of Barcelona’s most exciting architecture studios:
Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura
In this space since: 1975
Number of employees: 60
Building’s former use: cement factory
In this space since: 1997
Number of employees: 50
Building’s former use: residence for senior officials of the Spanish Navy and a fabrics company
Alonso Balaguer Associated Architects
In this space since: 2015
Number of employees: 25
Building’s former use: also previously used as an architecture studio.
Office of Architecture in Barcelona (OAB)
In this space since: 2004
Number of employees: 14
Building’s former use: purpose built office, gallery space, and formerly retail space
In this space since: 2015
Number of employees: 10
Building’s former use: artist’s studio
In this space since: 1982
Number of employees: 13
Building’s former use: private residence
In this space since: 2012
Number of employees: 10
Building’s former use: laundry
In this space since: 2005
Number of employees: 7
Building’s former use: wholesale warehouse
b720 Fermin Vazquez Arquitectos
In this space since: 2015
Number of employees: 20-30
Building’s former use: real estate agency
In this space since: 2018 (construction was still taking place during the shoot)
Number of employees: 25
Building’s former use: industrial workshop
L35 Arquitectos
In this space since: 1970
Number of employees: 55
Building’s former use: residences
B01 Arquitecte – sAmadó Domènech
In this space since: 2015
Number of employees: 4
In this space since: 1998
Number of employees: 10
Building’s former use: residence
In this space since: 2010
Number of employees: 16
Building’s former use: biscuit factory
The post Marc Goodwin photographs 14 architecture studios in Barcelona appeared first on Dezeen.
À l’heure où nous sommes tous accrochés à nos smartphones afin de capter les objets et les personnes qui nous entourent, le photographe indien basé à New Delhi, Shashank Shekhar, s’amuse lui aussi à travailler parfois avec son mobile. Il réalise notamment de nombreux portraits et manie si bien les retouches qu’il nous est difficile de percevoir la différence avec des clichés qui auraient été pris à l’aide d’une caméra professionnelle.
Ses photographies jouent beaucoup avec la lumière naturelle et sont empreintes d’une sensibilité et d’une intimité intrigantes qui ajoutent davantage à l’usage de la technologie de poche dans son processus créatif. Des portraits captivants qui nous donnent à réfléchir à l’importance, ou non, de l’appareil photo utilisé en art visuel. Abonnez-vous à son compte Instagram pour suivre son travail.
The trunk of a Brazilian firetree pierces the white zinc-coated roof of this house by Aaksen Responsible Aarchitecture in Bandung, Indonesia.
Set at the end of a narrow alleyway in a densely built urban area, the local architecture studio built the compact two-storey residence for a Muslim family of four on the western part of the island of Java.
Sunlight was a key component in the design of the building, named Nor House. Openings cut into the sides of the building and its gabled roof allow daylight to filter in from multiple angles.
The triangular window with a white decal cut into one corner of the building’s mass allows daylight to flood the home’s prayer room, projecting a shadow of the word Allah onto the floor.
The zinc-coated corrugated metal walls and roof reflect the sun’s rays and make the structure stand out from the jumble of surrounding buildings.
“The name of Nor House itself is taken from their [the client’s] children, who have the word nur or light in Arabic as part of their name. The name inspired us to put the element of the sun into the design,” explained lead architect Yanuar Pratama Firdaus.
“In Islam, the communication between humans and God is called the five times of obligatory ritual prayer, in which the five times indicate the transition of the sun,” he added.
“The prayer ritual was also our inspiration to design a house with the sun and light as the narrative of the architecture.”
A Brazilian firetree planted in the covered garden grows up and out of a square hatch cut into the sloping roof, and a spotlight at the base illuminates the trunk at night.
Trees that burst through the facade are a popular feature in contemporary Indonesian architecture. Branches protrude through circular openings cut into the decks of Budi Pradono’s “anti-establishment” house in Jakarta, and trees emerge through openings in the grass-covered roof of another of the studio’s projects in the city of Depok.
A wide, angled doorway to the garden opens up the facade of the building, allowing air to circulate to the prayer room off to one side. Sliding glass doors connect the tiled porch to the main part of the house.
The covered, double-height walled “dry garden” provides a semi-outdoors place that is shaded during the hot dry season and sheltered during the rains of the wet season.
In an architectural style described by Aaksen Responsible Aarchitecture as “contemporary tropical”, Nor House offers a total of 105 square metres of living space split over two floors. White-painted walls and light parquet floors or ivory-coloured porcelain tiles were used throughout.
Along with the prayer room and patio, the ground floor includes an open-plan living room, dining room, and kitchen, with a separate pantry and drying room, and a downstairs toilet.
Upstairs two children’s bedrooms and a family bathroom are arranged either side of a hallway, which overlooks the garden below on one side. The master bedroom runs the full width of the second floor at the end of the gallery.
Indonesian architect Realrich Sjarief added large circular windows and doors to his self-designed home in Jakarta.
Another Budi Pradono project, this time in Lombok in Bali, features a shipping container tilted at a 45 degree angle to create a sloping roof for the master bedroom for a house set into a hillside.
Photography by KIE.
Project credits:
Architects: Aaksen Responsible Aarchitecture
Lead architects: Yanuar Pratama Firdaus, Gea Sentanu
Construction: ASEPDEV (Aesthetical in Engineering Process)
Construction team: Agusti Salman Farizi, Gun Gun Yuliansyah, Arif Rahmansyah
Furniture: Jatilog
Video: Qrimson
Calligraphy and graphics: Monoponik
The post Fern tree grows through the roof of bright white “contemporary tropical” house on Java island appeared first on Dezeen.
Korean designer WoongKi Ryu has based elements of this chair on the motifs and colours seen in paintings by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky.
Ryu’s Abstraction chair features a wooden seat with a backrest formed from colourful, splaying shapes.
Each of these elements are based on motifs seen in the early 20th-century expressionist works of Kandinsky – in particular his Composition VIII painting, which features graphic shapes and colourful accents.
Ryu – a student at South Korea’s Hongik University – aimed to bring this abstract approach to traditional furniture design, using standard materials to produce a chair that puts form before function.
“Instead of approaching the functional purpose of the chair, I wanted to highlight the emotion and meaning of the chair, which could only be expressed abstractly,” the designer told Dezeen. “I wanted to mimic the way Kandinsky approached abstraction in his paintings.”
The designer used hard maple wood to create the semi-circular seat, while the backrest elements are formed from powder-coated metal.
An armrest-style protrusion is topped with a solid wooden ball, and the neck rest has been crafted from a wooden disk.
Three CNC-cut legs each take on a different form: one is shaped like a frame, another comprises a circular rod, and a third is a solid block placed at an angle.
“Kandinsky rejected the realistic form and expressed colour and form derived from his emotion,” the designer said. “Inspired by these expressive motifs, the chair’s physical attributes were represented by abstract ideas inherent in its form rather than its objective function.”
“The chair has been deconstructed by its structural elements, and has been rebuilt ideologically based on its shape and function,” Ryu added.
Kandinsky’s work was similarly used as a reference point by designer Denis Guidone when creating a watch for American brand Projects.
Looking to a piece named Diagram 17 – published in Kandinsky’s essay Point and Line to Plane – Guidone applied graphic elements to the watch’s hand and face that combined curved forms and straight lines.
The post WoongKi Ryu’s Abstraction chair takes cues from works of Kandinsky appeared first on Dezeen.
Jennifer Lawrence takes a lie detector test for Vanity Fair. Is she a bad tipper? Does Amy Schumer text her too much? Does she have a favorite brother? Does she know anyone in the Illuminati? Find out all that and more and watch Jennifer take a polygraph exam…(Read…)
Bruce Willis reveals the answers to the top searched questions about him on Google…(Read…)
The Graham Norton Show put together this entertaining compilation of some of the best and funniest moments from the show’s recently concluded twenty-second season…(Read…)
News Be Funny presents a roundup of the funny, awkward, and bizarre moments that happened during live TV news broadcasts in the month of February 2018…(Read…)
The Ecocapsule is proof that we’re heading to a future heavily inspired by the Jetsons. The tiny, egg-shaped smart-house is definitely a slice of the future… why? Because it relies solely on solar and wind energy to power itself. Providing the luxury of a hotel room literally anywhere on earth (even in the north pole, if you choose), the Ecocapsule by Nice Architects comes with dual-energy production techniques and a battery to power the entire house. Its spherical egg-shaped design is carefully formed to maximize collection of the rainwater and morning dew. Membrane water filters installed in the Ecocapsule are devised to purify 99.999% (wow, much accuracy) of the bacteria and rendering any natural water source suitable for drinking.
The spherical Jetsonian shape also allows the Ecocapsule to have massively hollow walls which are filled with hi-performance thermal insulation material, allowing the Ecocapsule to be used in the harshest of weathers with its residents barely being able to tell the difference. Don’t like where you’re living? No problem. The Ecocapsule is small enough to fit into a standard shipping container and be carried to wherever you want to take it! Oh, and if you want to grab one, they cost less than a Tesla ($80K).
Designer: Nice Architects
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
