Hasta La Ideas

The set and lighting designers behind UK rapper Dave’s Psychodrama tour took the lights on the audience’s phones into account when creating the show.

Award-winning lighting designer Tim Routledge and creative studio Tawbox, made up of Chris Jablonski and Amber Rimell, worked with the London artist on his UK tour, which closed at the O2 Academy in Brixton, London, earlier this month.

The tour saw the rapper perform tracks from his debut album of the same name to audiences across 14 cities, against the backdrop of a skull and a bank of immersive digital panels.

Speaking to Dezeen, the designers said that the set was heavily influenced by the way audiences light up the stage and record gigs with their phones.

“It’s really hard to do anything moody these days because of bloody mobile phones,” said Jablonski.

“If 5000 kids turn on their lights at the beginning of a show, it just blows. You can’t do projection gags and the beginning of a show, you can’t let an artist just creep up and appear in the spotlight.”

“It wasn’t many years ago that you could sneak the artist in, bring up the lights and everything goes mad,” he explained.

To account for the light given off by mobile phones in the audience, two hydraulic-powered trap doors were built into the floor to lift Dave and his special guests onto the stage without being seen.

“The stage has lifts built into it. He comes out of that lift that gets dropped down, he gets on and that’s brought up,” said Jablonski.

For the London “homecoming” shows, Dave performed in front of a five-metre-tall skull made of fibreglass and polystyrene and fitted with lasers, smoke machines and dry ice, which acted as the main visual focus for the audience.

“The skull was built in two weeks. It is loaded with lasers inside, it has CO2, smoke, dry ice. It lights beautifully, you can make it look evil or weird or psychedelic,” lighting designer Routledge told Dezeen.

“It’s always in the centre. It’s not moving, but everything is framed around it,” he explained.

The skull is taken from the Psychodrama album cover in which Dave’s head is on fire: “This is what is left,” said Jablonski.

Dave performed on a stage laid with square digital panels, in front of a huge screen. Both the floor and the screen projected bespoke video content throughout the show.

“This show’s designed so that wherever you look, it’s really cool,” explained Routledge.

Positioned diagonally across the venue ceiling was a “theatrical conceit” of controllable fluorescent tubes that lit up the stage and changed position throughout the performance.

For the track Black, the stage was filled with low-sitting smoke and soft backlighting, while light projections made the skull look like it was crying.

“That type of imagery when he’s backlit is just fucking stunning,” said Jablonski.

Later on, the backdrop was divided so that one half was projecting videos of people in Lagos, Nigeria, while the other half showed corresponding situations in London.

One of the most memorable moments is the one that accompanies Dave’s segue into his older tracks. The artist had requested to include his old songs a day before his first London performance and wanted the tracks to appear on stage as a wheel of fortune.

The resulting speedily finished video featured the rapper’s face in real time projected as spinning on to the digital screen, which was made to look like a wheel of fortune.

“What we then did was put a live camera in to shoot him in real time in a circle with the spinning disc on top. That was made in an hour,” said Routledge.

Another track Hangman transformed the stage into a giant game of guessing game hangman, where the traditional drawing was shown to one side and the wrong letters on the floor.

“If all of this digital panelling wasn’t here, all the rapper will do is walk at the front of the stage the whole show. It’s the way the music has evolved in small dirty clubs to be as close as possible to the people, and dropping him into this, turns him into an artist,” said Jablonski.

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Amanyangyun hotel is designed to celebrate Chinese culture says Tanuj Goenka, director of Kerry Hill Architects, in this movie produced by Dezeen for the AHEAD awards.

Part of the Aman Resorts collection of hotels, Amanyangyun was named Hotel of the Year at the AHEAD Asia Awards 2019, which celebrated the best in hotel and resort design across the continent.

The project was the big winner of the night, also winning the Guestrooms, Hotel Conversion and Visual Identity categories.

The resort was designed by Kerry Hill Architects as part of a restoration of a 2,000-year-old forest. The project also involved the preservation of several antique buildings from the Ming and Qing dynasties that were salvaged from their original site in Jiangxi province, to avoid demolition to make way for a new dam.

In total, 10,000 Camphor trees and 50 historic buildings were transported 600 kilometres to a site on the outskirts of Shanghai.

“It was a mammoth task,” Goenka said.

The antique structures were carefully dismantled and rebuilt on the new site to supply the main structures of the hotel.

“The antique houses as well as the Camphor trees had to be woven into the masterplan,” Goenka added.

The restored buildings comprise the hotel’s 24 guest rooms, 43 villas and public spaces.

Goenka told Dezeen that the inclusion of restored buildings turned the resort into a museum of Chinese culture and heritage.

“Amanyangyun is a living museum, not just because of the antique houses but also the guest experience,” he said.

The hotel includes a cultural centre offering guests an education in Chinese cultural activities.

“Guests can learn calligraphy or they can become part of an incense ceremony,” Goenka said. “There are tea rooms and exhibition spaces.”

“The client wanted Amanyangyun to be designed in such a way that it showcases China’s culture and way of life.”

The layout of the hotel is based on the concept of “a walled village” consisting of several courtyards surrounded by guest rooms, a common Chinese housing typology.

“The organisation of the contemporary guest rooms around internal courtyards comes from traditional Chinese architecture,” Goenka expained.

“Guests move from one courtyard to another as part of their progression from arrival to their villas or the hotel,” he continued. “Each of these courtyards has a distinct character reminiscent of the courtyard houses and the villages in the Jiangxi provinces.”

Kerry Hill passed away in August of 2018, nearly a year after he was awarded the Outstanding Contribution award at the 2017 AHEAD Asia Awards for his work on hotels and resorts across the region.

This movie was produced by Dezeen for AHEAD. It was filmed at Andaz Singapore. Images are courtesy of Amanyangyun.

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Dezeen now has over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, where we publish our pick of the best architecture and design movies. Thanks to everyone for subscribing!

Dezeen’s Youtube channel features the latest videos about architecture, design, interiors and technology, including award-winning movies produced by Dezeen’s in-house video studio.

We reached 100,000 subscribers this month, and London-based artist Berke Yazicioglu created this illustration to help celebrate.

Interviews with leading architects

Recent highlights on the channel include Elevation –  our short documentary about how drones will transform cities.

We have also published a host of videos exploring the work of leading architects, designers and artists including Frida Escobedo, Christo, Richard Rogers and many more.

The channel also features branded video content produced by Dezeen for prestigious clients such as Adidas, Autodesk, Emeco, MINI and Moooi.

10 million views in 2018

The channel received nearly 10 million video views in 2018. We revealed the top 10 most-viewed videos as part of our yearly review.

Head over to YouTube to watch all the movies, and don’t forget to subscribe to our channel to receive notifications about the latest videos as we publish them.

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With a fractured wooden surface held together by a layer of flexible silicon rubber, the Stretch Board remains deceptively flat when there’s nothing placed on it… but the second you put an object with weight down on the surface, it begins dipping, displaying a property that feels almost like a taut fabric, and not like wood. This is the Stretch Board, a special material-type designed for a rather fun interaction with its share of benefits.

The Stretch Board can warp to the weight and shape of the objects you place on it. It adds an element of dynamism, turning any flat surface into a vessel, preventing items from rolling off. Place a couple of fruits or a tennis ball on it and they stay put, rather than rolling off. You can even use the Stretch Board’s unique properties in a tray, that may prevent things from sliding off or collapsing. Works best with items like saucers instead of wine glasses (given their higher CG). The interaction could even extend to furniture, turning a hard wooden chair into a comfortable cushion-like experience!

The Stretch Board is a winner of the Design Intelligence Award for the year 2018.

Designer: Taijiro Ishiko

Designers of New York collective Colony have collaborated with artists of their choosing to create one-of-a-kind pieces for this exhibition during NYCxDesign.

Colony is a design collective that was founded by trend forecaster Jean Lin in 2014. Each year for the annual NYCxDesign festival, it hosts a themed exhibit in its Lower Manhattan space.

For its latest showcase, Pas de Deux, Lin tasked designers to collaborate with artists for pieces in the installation.

“This year, I thought why not put a little bit of the curation back into the hands of the designers?,” Lin told Dezeen.

“That is such a great trend that is happening right now, where there are designers who are also acting as curators, so that was the impetus of the theme, and it grew from there,” she said.

Fourteen American designers from Colony’s collective collaborated with artists for their individual pieces. Some artists gave a personal touch to the objects, while others made works that are placed in tandem with existing designs.

There is no connecting thread for the works showcased. Instead, the collaborations feature a diverse array of talent, from textiles to choreography and painting.

“I’ve always said that I curate designers rather than pieces,” said Lin.

“It puts a lot of trust initially in the designers and their eye, and their design-vernacular that they’ve established in their studios over the years,” she continued. “This was just an extension of that.”

Among designs on display throughout Colony’s white-washed, warehouse space are painted chairs, consoles and woolly tapestries.

At the centre are two pale upholstered chairs designed by Paolo Ferrari. One has fringe on the back, created by New York-based Hiroko Takeda.

Both Takeda and Ferrari, who is based in Toronto, and have been members of Colony for years.

“That [collaboration] was kind of a dream one because it was all in the family,” Lin said.

Takeda has also created two woven textiles that are draped from the ceiling. In the exhibit, these are teamed with a letter scribed by a young whaler in 1892.

At the front of the gallery’s windows are wooden Tombstone chairs by Fort Standard that have been painted by American illustrator Ty Williams. Gregory Buntain’s Fort Standard and Williams are old friends.

The partnerships have also seen an aluminium chair designed by Klein Agency, reimagined with painting from Nicolai Sclater of Ornamental Conifer.

A dark wood Mesa console by Katrina Vonnegut and Brian Kraft of Brooklyn studio Vonnegut/Kraft that anchors the middle of Colony is decorated by two hand moulds by Aine Vonnegut – one of Brian’s family members.

Other designers present more unusual pairings. Quilter Meg Callahan, for example, has teamed two of her large blankets with a video screening of contemporary dance, projected onto an adjacent wall and to be representative of the repetitive movement in her own work.

“That’s part of the reason why I thought this theme was so exciting,” Lin said. “I didn’t know what they were going to come up with.”

Additional works on show include a pale wooden credenza by KWH, a technicolour round mirror by Hidenori Ishii, and a knot sculpture by furniture designer Ben Erickson, which is displayed beside a purple artwork by Matthew Kirk.

Washington studio Grain also presents two rug designs and a coffee table, forming a vignette with paintings by Shiela Laufer, while Allied Maker​ light fixtures decorate an orange wall.

Adding depth and sound to the space is a custom soundtrack paired with hundreds of opaque tapestries that ripple and flow overhead. Artists Dmitri Cherniak, Iain Nash and Jasper Lin created the kinetic sound installation for the exhibit.

Pas de Deux at Colony is on display from 16 May to 31 May 2019, at 324 Canal Street, and part of NYCxDesign. Also on display is a kinetic installation by Studio INI at Brooklyn’s A/D/O and a light showcase by Snarkitecture in Manhattan’s Meatpacking area.

Photography is by Charlie Schuck.

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