Hasta La Ideas

British set designer Es Devlin has been chosen to create the UK Pavilion at the Dubai Expo 2020, with a performative structure that will use artificial intelligence to write poems.

Called the Poem Pavilion, the structure will feature an illuminated “message to space” made up of numerous AI-generated poems, which the Expo’s anticipated 25 million visitors will be invited to contribute to.

The 20-metre-high, cone-shaped pavilion will be made up of rows of protruding slats that extend outwards from one central point to form a circular facade. Poems lit up in LEDs will scroll across the facade.

Visitors will enter the building from below the cone through an “illuminated maze”, featuring augmented reality-enhanced exhibitions that will explore Britain’s advances in artificial intelligence and space technology.

The pavilion will be filled with a collective choral soundtrack, including choirs from every continent.

According to the Devlin, the concept was inspired by one of physicist Stephen Hawking’s final projects from 2015 called Breakthrough Message. This was a global competition that invited people to create digital messages that would represent humanity, if we ever encounter other advanced civilisations.

Designed to highlight Britain’s “leading expertise in artificial intelligence and space”, the Poem Pavilion will use machine learning technology to generate space-related words and phrases, amalgamating them with those contributed from visitors, to deliver a collective poetry display to passers by.

“What if the UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 becomes a place where visitors from all over the world take part in a collective global project that showcases British expertise in A.I. technologies and poetry while transcending national identities?” said Devlin.

“The UK has an unparalleled record in Expo design – from instigating the very first Expo in 1851 to the recent breathtaking pavilions of Thomas Heatherwick, Wolfgang Buttress, Asif Kahn and Brian Eno – it’s a true honour to be invited to take part,” she added.

This will be the first time since its inauguration that a female designer has been chosen to create the UK Pavilion, and Devlin will be leading a predominantly female team of experts in artificial intelligence and space technology.

“We urgently need to address the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, art and maths (STEAM) occupations,” said Devlin.

“I’ve learned from my collaboration with the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, that the evolution of scientific thought is often through the contribution of artists, musicians and philosophers as well as physicists.”

“My hope is that the fusion of architecture, poetry, music and science in this female-led project will attract and inspire girls and young women to investigate areas of science and technology that they might otherwise have felt weren’t for them,” she continued.

The project will be produced by London and Dubai-based brand agency Avantgarde, while Manchester-based structural engineer Atelier One and sustainability engineer Atelier Ten will help to deliver the complex sculptural architecture of the pavilion, which aims to forefront innovative and sustainable building techniques and materials.

Devlin employed a similar technique with her fluorescent red lion sculpture that was recently installed in Trafalgar Square during London Design Festival. The open-mouthed lion featured an LED screen embedded in its mouth that spouted out lines of machine-generated poetry.

The post Es Devlin to design interactive Poem Pavilion for Dubai Expo 2020 appeared first on Dezeen.

Nottinghamshire-based textile brand Kirkby Design has partnered with British designer Tom Dixon to transform photographs of textured materials such as foil and hair into digitally printed textiles.

The collaborative project resulted in a series of five graphic fabrics designed by Dixon and developed by Kirkby Design, which feature bold prints of foil, fibrous hair, two types of marble-like stone – one brown and one grey – and charred wood.

The studio chose these specific textures for their visual connection to the style adopted by Dixon in many of his products and interior spaces, such as metallic, reflective surfaces and coloured marble.

The fabrics were displayed at an installation that took place during this year’s London Design Festival as part of Dixon’s Hyper Real exhibition, which explores digital manipulation of materials.

Dixon tasked Kirkby Design with creating the series of hyper realistic fabrics using images taken by London-based photographer Peer Lindgreen.

Kirkby Design’s in-house studio took the images and manipulated them into a repeating pattern. They played with the scale and alignment to ensure that the overall design translated fluidly onto the fabric and could be printed without any seams, gaps or pauses.

Once the patterns were ready, Kirkby Design’s brand director Jordan Mould and his team experimented with various materials such as viscose velvet, cotton, linen and silk to see which designs worked best with what fabric.

The result was a range of five designs digitally printed in the UK on two fabrics, scoured linen and velvet. The cloths were purified before printing to get rid of any imperfections that could show up due to the high graphic content of the images.

The studio then used industrial-sized inkjet digital printers to transfer the high definition images onto the chosen materials, resulting in hyper-realistic patterned textiles. According to Mould, the fabrics “look unlike anything [they] have ever produced before.”

“One of the great things about digital printing is that it allows us to work on shorter print runs, which gives us more flexibility and results in less wastage,” said Mould.

“We’re really pleased with the result. The five designs are very graphic, which is something that Kirkby have always been known for. We have learnt a lot about digital printing in the process of this project and it has certainly furthered the studio’s horizons on working with digital prints in the future.”

The two rock textures were printed on linen cloth, while the other textures were printed on velvet. This was to achieve the best visual appeal, but also to customise them to how the designers envisioned them being used.

For instance, the wood pattern was printed on to the heavy cloth with the intent that it would be used in furniture and upholstery, while the creators envisioned the rock patterns being suitable for clothing.

According to Mould, these are materials and patterns that can’t be traditionally printed on textiles, in processes such as cylinder printing, as the level of detail wouldn’t be possible.

“Digital printing makes it possible to take an image of something in super high definition and transfer it onto textiles, so that it really does look like it would in real life,” said Mould.

The five designs were hung, draped and upholstered in the Hyper Real installation in Tom Dixon’s Coal Office Gallery, during the London Design Festival, which took place from 15 to 23 September 2018.

Also on display at Dixon’s Coal Office during the festival was a digitally printed hide by Glasgow-based design studio Timorous Beasties.

The hide is part of a series that also features collaborations between leather designer Bill Amberg and Tom Dixon, Faye Toogood, Alexandra Champalimaud and Natasha Baradaran. Each designer has developed a special graphic for one skin.

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Warner Bros. Pictures just released the final sneak peek at Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, an upcoming 2018 spinoff of the Harry Potter film series, and the sequel to 2016 film, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald comes to theaters on November 16th, 2018…(Read…)

Breathe Architecture has completed an apartment building in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, with metal-framed winter gardens arranged along its street facing facade.

Nightingale 1 was developed by Breathe Architecture on a site located alongside another building it designed called The Commons, where the studio is now based.

The building represents the first completed example of a typology created for housing provider Nightingale Housing, which aims to develop residential projects “that are financially, socially and environmentally sustainable”.

Located in the industrial and cosmopolitan Brunswick neighbourhood, Nightingale 1 is designed to provide affordable housing and was informed by input from the end users.

The building’s simple composition of geometric volumes and pared-back material palette are also influenced by the appearance of the area’s existing urban fabric.

“Nightingale’s form is a simple response to Brunswick’s industrial heritage,” explained the studio, which was shortlisted in the Housing Project category of the Dezeen Awards.

The building’s main facade is fronted by a series of winter gardens – balconies that can be fully enclosed by glass.

“Its steel-framed winter gardens respond to traditional warehouse characteristics whilst its recycled cream brick responds to the single storey single brick warehouses that once populated the vicinity,” the architects added.

The project seeks to engage with the local community and features a cobbled public laneway flanked by walls of recycled brick that enhances its connection with the street.

Seating nooks lining the recessed windows along the laneway encourage the public to linger and interact with tenants occupying the ground floor, which include an architecture practice, a not-for-profit organisation and Nightingale Housing itself.

The passageway extends deep into the building, towards a circulation area that overlooks a lush fernery through chainlink screens.

Materials used throughout the project were chosen to ensure a sense of consistency that prioritises simplicity, honesty and function over form.

“The design strategy was to build more with less, adopting an honest material palette and placing emphasis on reduction,” Breathe Architecture explained. “The planning was kept simple, and materiality took precedence over form.”

Shared spaces such as lift lobbies also feature untreated blackbutt timber battens, mild steel panels and coir matting, while the apartment interiors are defined by the use of waxed-timber floors and concrete ceilings with exposed services.

Steel-framed glazing lining the apartments on the southern side of the building evokes the crittall windows of traditional warehouses in the area. The northern apartments are fronted by mesh screens that provide a framework for deciduous grape vines to create shade during the summer months.

The building’s decked rooftop is divided into two terraces with distinct functions. The first is dedicated to utility purposes and accommodates a communal laundry area, along with a clothesline, potting shed and planters for growing fruits and vegetables.

The second part of the rooftop contains secluded seating nestled among carefully considered planting, as well as an outdoor dining area and a rooftop lawn for children to play.

Breathe Architecture also transformed the former headquarters of Paramount Pictures in Sydney into a boutique hotel topped with a screen made from chevron-shaped copper panels.

The post Steel-framed “winter gardens” form the facade of Nightingale 1 housing development appeared first on Dezeen.

British set designer Es Devlin has been chosen to create the UK Pavilion at the Dubai Expo 2020, with a performative structure that will use artificial intelligence to write poems.

Called the Poem Pavilion, the structure will feature an illuminated “message to space” made up of numerous AI-generated poems, which the Expo’s anticipated 25 million visitors will be invited to contribute to.

The 20-metre-high, cone-shaped pavilion will be made up of rows of protruding slats that extend outwards from one central point to form a circular facade. Poems lit up in LEDs will scroll across the facade.

Visitors will enter the building from below the cone through an “illuminated maze”, featuring augmented reality-enhanced exhibitions that will explore Britain’s advances in artificial intelligence and space technology.

The pavilion will be filled with a collective choral soundtrack, including choirs from every continent.

According to the Devlin, the concept was inspired by one of physicist Stephen Hawking’s final projects from 2015 called Breakthrough Message. This was a global competition that invited people to create digital messages that would represent humanity, if we ever encounter other advanced civilisations.

Designed to highlight Britain’s “leading expertise in artificial intelligence and space”, the Poem Pavilion will use machine learning technology to generate space-related words and phrases, amalgamating them with those contributed from visitors, to deliver a collective poetry display to passers by.

“What if the UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 becomes a place where visitors from all over the world take part in a collective global project that showcases British expertise in A.I. technologies and poetry while transcending national identities?” said Devlin.

“The UK has an unparalleled record in Expo design – from instigating the very first Expo in 1851 to the recent breathtaking pavilions of Thomas Heatherwick, Wolfgang Buttress, Asif Kahn and Brian Eno – it’s a true honour to be invited to take part,” she added.

This will be the first time since its inauguration that a female designer has been chosen to create the UK Pavilion, and Devlin will be leading a predominantly female team of experts in artificial intelligence and space technology.

“We urgently need to address the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, art and maths (STEAM) occupations,” said Devlin.

“I’ve learned from my collaboration with the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, that the evolution of scientific thought is often through the contribution of artists, musicians and philosophers as well as physicists.”

“My hope is that the fusion of architecture, poetry, music and science in this female-led project will attract and inspire girls and young women to investigate areas of science and technology that they might otherwise have felt weren’t for them,” she continued.

The project will be produced by London and Dubai-based brand agency Avantgarde, while Manchester-based structural engineer Atelier One and sustainability engineer Atelier Ten will help to deliver the complex sculptural architecture of the pavilion, which aims to forefront innovative and sustainable building techniques and materials.

Devlin employed a similar technique with her fluorescent red lion sculpture that was recently installed in Trafalgar Square during London Design Festival. The open-mouthed lion featured an LED screen embedded in its mouth that spouted out lines of machine-generated poetry.

The post Es Devlin to design interactive Poem Pavilion for Dubai Expo 2020 appeared first on Dezeen.