Hasta La Ideas

East London-based artist Lorenzo Vitturi deconstructed products from the Established & Sons collection, and reassembled them into disjointed sculptures, for an installation at London Design Festival.

Titled Remixed Properties, the installation saw Vitturi take pieces from the British design brand’s archives, as well as new products from its current collection, to create a series of site-specific artworks.

Each piece of furniture was dismantled and reconstructed to create five completely new sculptural forms. Included in the installation is a reworking of Established & Son’s well-known Stack drawers designed by Raw Edges, while another of the sculptures incorporates the vibrant, graphic wood block print designed by Richard Woods.

The pieces also feature various materials and objects from Vitturi’s studio. These found objects are things that the artist picked up around east London, where he is based, or from other countries during his travels.

The central sculpture, for instance, is topped with a striped plastic teapot that Vitturi acquired from a local market in Lagos, Nigeria, which local people would use to wash their feet.

According to the artist, by mixing items from different cultures, and taking objects out of their usual context, he aims to completely transform their intended function to give each sculpture its own story.

“I like to mix together things that don’t have any obvious connection to create a theme or sculpture that is made of hundreds of stories coming from different places,” he said.

“Usually at Established & Sons, you see single products, each with their own story and aesthetic, so I am taking fragments from the brand history and mixing them together to create a different story and offer a new perspective on the design.”

In a bid to further his exploration of different forms and colours, Vitturi also scattered brightly coloured pigment over certain areas of the sculptures. For him, pigment is the strongest and purest way to use colour.

Each free-standing piece was built in situ at the Established & Sons exhibition space in Tilney Court near Old Street, and was showcased as part of this year’s London Design Festival.

“I like to improvise and experiment with the materials in the space,” said Vitturi. “I don’t decide everything before the installation, I keep some things to chance, and feed off the energy I get from the space.”

Vitturi chose products that he believed would celebrate the materials, textures and colours characteristic to Established & Sons.

“Established & Sons has always celebrated aesthetic purity and operated at the intersection of art and design,” said Established & Sons design director Sebastian Wrong.

“Trusting and handing over control to an artist was something that seemed both exciting and natural for us. It will enrich what we do as a brand and how we think about our work,” he added.

Other exhibitions from this year’s London Design Festival, which ran from 15 to 23 September, include a contemporary tea party installation inside Fortnum & Mason by Scholten & Baijings, and an exhibition of furniture by emerging Uruguayan design studios at Aram Gallery.

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Designer and artist Pinar Yoldas has imagined nine designer babies based on the characteristics of hellenic deities as a reflection on human gene editing.

Yoldas, an assistant professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, designed the characters for her exhibition Genetically Modified Generation (Designer Babies) at the Istanbul Design Biennial, which takes place from 22 September to 4 November 2018.

The installation consists of nine 3D-printed models – one for each month of human pregnancy – which are designed based on the characteristics of gods and goddesses in Greek mythology.

Yoldas created the models to question the prospect of genetically modified babies.

“Gene editing of humans is not science fiction,” Yoldas told Dezeen. “Jennifer Doudna, the inventor of this technology, believes that it won’t be long before this technology reaches our doorsteps.”

The characters are named after Greek gods and goddesses including Artemis, Aphrodite, Kronos and Kassandra. Each character is designed as if its genes have been edited to match the traits of its namesake.

“I grew up around ancient ruins in Hierapolis so hellenic mythology has always been of interest to me,” said Yoldas. “As an Aegean I wanted to bring back these stories in a new form, which embraces the latest advancements in bio-technology.”

Each character is displayed with an ID chart showing which genes have been edited. The heightened traits include beauty, fitness, empathy, memory, intelligence and popularity.

“One big question was, what are the qualities that we all collectively desire? And why?” said Yoldas.

“I saw an opportunity to create a narrative universe with these designer babies, which are almost like genetically modified gods and goddesses, yet they are not superheroes.”

“With this piece I am sharing my excitement and curiosity,” she continued.

“There are three themes among nine characters, time, talent and power. I would like the viewers to think about the interplay of these while getting more engaged in each character’s background and future.”

This year’s Istanbul Design Biennial, called A School of Schools, focuses on how design can be used to tackle issues or rethink systems.

“As of 21st century, we have excelled at the design of the inanimate world,” said Yoldas. “We have reached design perfection in lemon squeezers, carbon-fibre chairs, plastic trash bins, staircases, vacuum cleaners, phones, laptops and fitbits.”

“I don’t think the world needs any more designer chairs, watches, cars, sunglasses or sneakers, “she continued. “Don’t get me wrong I love looking at this stuff but at the end of the day it is stuff that we no longer need. What we need is a design revolution where design reaches beyond the inanimate world to the living world.”

“When architecture means new ecosystems, when design means new species, when art means new cells, what are we actually looking at?”

Now in its fourth edition, the biennial is curated by Belgian curator and educator Jan Boelen, who recently stated that the use of recycled plastic in design is “bullshit”.

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Mexican designer Marco Antonio Barba Sánchez has won a James Dyson Award for inventing a low-cost seawater purifier, for castaways and people without access to drinking water.

Bermuda has a pop-up design, with an inflatable water tank contained inside a triangular disc for easy storage.

It is made for use in emergencies where drinking water is hard to come by but seawater, and the sunlight needed to distil it, is plentiful. In particular, Barba Sánchez had local fishermen in mind.

“The design of this product began with trips in Mexico, where I noticed that fishermen do not have optimal equipment for fishing,” said the designer.

“Some of them have had several problems with their boats, the weather or even orientation and most of them didn’t have the equipment to survive a longer shipwreck.”

Barba Sánchez worked with doctors and other professionals as he researched the current water purification options available to the fishermen, and whether they could be bettered.

“I found several processes that can be improved and that work but aren’t so efficient,” he continued. “That is why I decided to combine some of these techniques and basic principles of physics and chemistry to achieve a much more efficient process.”

Bermuda combines a few techniques for purifying water – solar distillation for the primary process of separating water from salt, and filtration to remove any bacteria, algae or sediment.

Both processes are done in the inflatable tank, which Barba Sánchez has designed with features to make the water distil faster.

The air pressure between the outer and inner layers of the tank can be manually controlled, generating a vacuum and lowering the boiling point for the seawater.

This also allows the saturation vapour pressure to be adjusted in the next stage of the process, so the steam can be captured and condensed back into water more quickly.

The designer estimates that one Bermuda unit could produce between 2.1 and 4.2 litres of drinking water per day, depending on the amount of sunlight. It’s safe to drink only in emergency situations and not for a prolonged period of time.

In the current prototype, the inflatable water tank and the triangular orange lid, which contains the filling cap and air pressure valve, are two separate parts.

Barba Sánchez says that industrial production processes would allow Bermuda to be constructed as a single piece that expands out.

Bermuda was the national winner for Mexico in the James Dyson Award, which recognises top inventions from current and recent engineering and design graduates from around the world.

Barba Sánchez graduated from the Industrial Design programme at Anáhuac Mayab University in Mérida, on the Yucatán Peninsula, in 2016.

British inventor James Dyson – famous for his vacuum cleaners – will pick the grand prize winner of the international competition on 15 November.

Previous years’ winning inventions have included a skin cancer detector that avoids the need for biopsies and a folding paper bicycle helmet.

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Two layers of perforated brickwork surround this two-bedroom family home in Hanoi by Vietnamese studio H&P Architects.

Brick Cave is located in a suburban area of the city that has undergone significant redevelopment in recent years. It is designed to make its residents feel like they are among nature, despite being in an urban environment.

According to H&P Architects, “the structure of the house resembles that of a cave”. It is enclosed by two brick wall layers that meet each other at steep angles. These are dotted with both small and large openings, to allow both light and air to penetrate the building.

The two layers also act as a filter to keep bright sunshine, dust and noise out of the main living spaces while still allowing the elements – light, wind and rain – into other areas.

The double skin also creates an atrium-like threshold space. Indoor balconies project out into it, glazed rooms overlook it and plants grow inside it, sheltered from direct sunlight.

“Brick Cave encompasses a chain of spaces interconnected with one another, with random apertures gradually shifting from openness/publicity to closeness/privacy and vice versa,” said the studio.

“The combination of ‘close’ and ‘open’ creates diverse relations with the surroundings and thus helps blur the boundaries between in and out, houses and streets, human and nature.”

The 8.25-metre-high outer wall begins to angle inwards at around two metres up, reducing the house’s overall volume and impact, and creating its angular shape. This tapered shape also helps to open up views of the surrounding area.

Principal architect Doan Thanh Ha told Dezeen that the idea was to work with typical local brickwork, but to use it in a completely new way.

“As a material, bricks have commonly been used across Vietnam and are widely used both across rural areas and in the more built-up cities,” he said.

“Brick is familiar to local people but here it has been upgraded in terms of aesthetics and construction technique.”

The house was built for a retired family who have moved back to the city to be close to ageing parents.

The ground floor is largely open-plan, arranged around a courtyard. On this level, the large perforated openings create a connection with the street and a sense of openness. As you move up the building, they become smaller to give more privacy.

Some of the rooms, including the dining spaces, also feature large skylights that reveal the full height of the building.

Timber window frames, ceilings, stairs and furniture contrast with the brick, which is carried through into the walls of the internal spaces.

On the roof there is a planted garden, which reflects the vegetable garden which was on the site before the house was built.

H&P Architects was founded by Doan Thanh Ha and partner Tran Ngoc Phuong. The practice has previously completed a prototype bamboo home designed to withstand floods in Vietnam.

Brick Cave made the architecture longlist for Dezeen Awards in the house category.

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The kind of specifications I’m about to read out to you are so insanely over the top, they’re sort of hard to believe. This super-expensive football capable of recording audio and video content in VR comes with 16 (yes, SIXTEEN) RED Helium 8K sensors with 180-degree Schneider lenses, and capturing content at 60 fps in VR in a single scene with depth information (so you’ve got 3D ready data too) to display 360-degree footage at a quality that has the brand value of RED attached to it.

The camera is capable of capturing depth information and discerning between foreground and background and rendering out parallax too (check out the video below), allowing for 6 degrees of freedom while viewing content using a VR headset, so in layman’s terms, you can move your head forwards and backwards, side to side, and up or down, and objects in the video will orient themselves with respect to your head’s position, which makes for an incredibly realistic VR experience because as your head moves even slightly while breathing, or just through involuntary movements, your VR environment responds to it by repositioning objects too, to make your VR experience significantly 0more believable and immersive.

The Manifold is built in a way that allows you to store controls and video storage as far as 328 feet away from the camera (obviously in a 360° recording, you don’t want any cast/crew or equipment in the camera’s field of view). The Manifold utilizes Facebook’s depth estimation technology to build its 3D view for volumetric data and even has post-processing tools for filmmakers like Adobe, Foundry, and OTOY to render out projects.

While the two companies aren’t being particularly generous with launch details, it’s safe to say that the Manifold is clearly strictly for professional use (and will most likely be extremely expensive for professional video capture too). However, if and when the Manifold does launch, and finds itself being used to capture videos (whether for movies or games), it’ll be pretty ground-breaking to be able to capture content as advanced as what the Manifold promises. I hope I live long enough to see it become an industry standard (like IMAX) too!

Designer: RED and Facebook 360