The covered garden would stretch the length of the Paris cathedral and along both arms of its crossing, while the building’s spire would be rebuilt as a multi-storey platform filled with beehives.
Studio NAB created the proposal in response to French prime minister Edouard Philippe’s statement that the rebuilt cathedral should be “adapted to issues of our time”.
The greenhouse would be filled with planters made from the burnt remains of the roof
“Our proposal is to rebuild a new cathedral, anchored in its time, looking to the future and representing the issues of our time,” Studio NAB founder Nicolas Abdelkader told Dezeen.
The proposal aims to respect the cathedral’s original silhouette by matching the greenhouse’s profile with the 13th-century timber roof that was destroyed in the fire. Its structure would be built from gold-coloured steel.
The space would be used as a garden and educational space for workshops on ecology.
Abdelkader imagines it being filled with planters made from the burnt oak beams of the historic roof, which would also contain the copper statues that were previously on the roof.
Instead of a spire, the roof would be topped with a tower of beehives
The spire would also be rebuilt. However, instead of a gothic flèche, the tower would contain multiple levels supporting numerous beehives. The open floors would be accessed from a central, spiral staircase.
“In reference to the hives that survived the fire and in order to reintroduce the ‘living’ in Paris, we could produce the famous ‘nectar of the gods’ in the heart of the new arrow became apiary,” explained the studio.
Abdelkader hopes that his studio’s proposal will add to this debate.
“We simply wanted to feed the debate in France about the future of Notre-Dame de Paris from a slightly different, perhaps more universalistic point of view, not just focused on creativity or choosing one ideal architectural response over another,” he said.
“Our historical heritage, of which Notre-Dame is a part, is the guarantor of our history for all and for future generations,” he continued.
“What legacy do we want to leave to our children? What could become as sacred as our beliefs in our religions? Nature? Respect for others? I believe they are the main questions raised by our reflection.”
Got you thinking, didn’t I? The answer is simple – eyes! No more shoving the crumbs under the carpet, because the Infocuum Vacuum has a camera mounted on the cleaning nozzle and a display near the controls, allowing you to see the garbage piled up under the sofa, carpets and other hard-to-see places. The wide-angle video camera is attached to the head and beams up the video in realtime, allowing you a clear view of that kind of trash that’s been accumulating, thus helping you to clean better.
For people like me, I guess it will make me self-aware, and pick up the popcorn when it spills on the floor and hides behind the sofa and not wait for vacuuming day!
Designers: Subin Song, Donghwan Song, Hyunji Kang & Yoongyeong Ha
Kelvin Ho designs interior concepts for boutique hospitality clients and high-end fashion retailers at Akin Atelier. The architect tells the Dezeen Jobs careers guide how he accumulated experience needed to found his own studio.
Completing his first internship at the studio of architect Lorenzo Natale, Ho came to appreciate the traditional and fundamental values of architectural design. He spent the following years developing his skillset at small studios.
“The architects I worked for were great role models and mentors that helped inform my relationship and philosophy to architecture and design,” he explained.
Ho cites his early working experiences as setting the trajectory for the rest of his career. He believes that young designers should thoroughly research the places they want to work before they apply for jobs.
I really believe that your first work experiences in architecture can really shape and set the trajectory of your career,” said Ho.
“It’s worth holding out for the dream studio and doing everything you can to get an opportunity to work there.”
Ho now leads a team of 15 at studio Akin Atelier, including architects, interior designers, design strategists and communications specialists. The practice designs luxury interior concepts for clients in the fashion, hospitality and cultural sectors.
Having stamina and an openness to learn are the vital qualities Akin Atelier look for in prospective employees said Ho.
“Surround yourself with a supportive network of people – professionally and personally,” he revealed, “everything we do and everyone we work with shapes our ability as designers.”
Creating the sets for the final season of fantasy epic Game of Thrones was a “logistical nightmare”, says production designer Deborah Riley.
“It was as intense as you can imagine,” explained Riley, who worked alongside directors David Benioff, Miguel Sapochnik and DB Weiss.
“I don’t want anyone to think this is television by any normal standard. It occupied my every brain cell at every waking moment.”
The set for Winterfell is located in County Down, Northern Ireland
The third episode of the six-episode eighth season, which aired on 28 April, features the longest battle scene ever recorded in television history. The Long Night includes a 90-minute battle epic between the living and the dead Whitewalker army.
Set in and around the fictional Winterfell Castle, the northern stronghold of the Seven Kingdoms, the episode was shot over 55 consecutive nights near the village of Strangford in County Down, Northern Ireland.
“We were exhausted. What you see on camera was reflected in everybody,” Riley told Dezeen. “It wasn’t just the characters going through it but the crew too. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of what it was like for us at the time.”
“Mud would go up past your ankles”
Riley, who has worked on Game of Thrones since season four, said the biggest challenge of the episode was building a set that could withstand the boggy ground in the area, which has been the set location for Winterfell Castle since season once.
“It was a logistical nightmare. The very ground that Winterfell was built on was not conducive to what really needed to be done,” she said.
“The amount of rain in Belfast and the lay of the land where Winterfell was originally built meant that mud would go up past your ankles.”
The walls of Winterfell Castle were constructed using plywood backing and hard plaster
Crew members had to use their hands to dig out the circular trench used by the living army to defend themselves against the Whitewalkers. A drainage system was also built from scratch to avoid the set from waterlogging.
“We had never done anything as intense as that before, working over a long period of time and in difficult conditions,” said Riley. “I’d never worked with that much heavy machinery before. At one point in time, it felt like we had every piece of heavy equipment in Northern Ireland out in Winterfell!”
The small flakes of paper used to emulate snow also had to be scraped away regularly to avoid the set “turning into papier-mâché”.
“It takes an army of people to do that and they’re not the people who get any of the glory at all. It was a phenomenal achievement.”
Making Winterfell Castle a “worthy stronghold”
To make Winterfell Castle believable as a “worthy stronghold”, an entire exterior was constructed using plywood backing and hard plaster.
We wanted to show parts of Winterfell that had never been explored before and also create big, strong outer walls that, for all intents and purposes, would feel like the castle was fortified. This was so it would feel like a battle in the true sense,” said Riley.
Fake snow had to be scraped away regularly to avoid it turning to mush in the rain
The inside of the castle was built at Linen Mill Studios in Belfast. Riley’s aim was to “humanise” the building by showing parts unseen in previous seasons, like the bakehouse and the soup kitchen.
“It was a matter of expanding the castle we already had, but expanding it in a way that had never been established before,” said Riley.
“You want to feel for those characters, you want to understand who they are and you want to see that they’re vulnerable.”
More dead bodies than ever before
Another challenge was handling the extensive number of dead bodies needed as props.
“Not only do you need the dead people but the armour that goes with them,” said Riley.
“We’d done a couple of battles before so we had a lot of prop dead bodies and dead horses but nowhere near the amount that we needed for season eight,” she explained. “We had a whole team of people just clothing these bodies and making them look like they’d endured a battle.”
The set for the castle’s interior was created at Linen Mill Studios in Belfast
The team also created plaster casts for groups of dead bodies, which were used in the background for wider shots.
“If we were to show dead people across the camera, the further away we went, the less detail they needed,” said the designer. “We cast three or four bodies together so we’d have clumps of bodies that we could lift around very easily.”
Fake blood also created issues over the length of the shoot.
“You can’t leave that during the day for the various reactions it would have – the water, the snow and other things would turn a bright pinky orange colour,” said Riley. “It sounds so simple but it was initially a real stumbling block.”
“It was a fantastic thing to be involved in but none of it was fun,” the designer concluded. “I was very proud to have survived.”
The next episode of Game of Thrones airs 5 May on HBO.
Read on for an edited version of the interview transcript:
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: Thanks for taking the time to speak to me. Can you begin by outlining your role on Game of Thrones?
Deborah Riley: I am head of the art department, which means that the first thing I’m concerned with and have access to are the outlines and the script, and then from that point onwards. I answer to the show runners and the directors David Benioff, Miguel Sapochnik and DB Weiss.
The show has phenomenal writing with phenomenal characters and in order to help them tell the best story possible, we wanted to provide them with a realistic setting that would allow an audience to believe in dragons.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: How long did this season take to prepare?
Deborah Riley: It was a full year’s work for me, from pre-production all the way through to when I finished in July last year. It’s never an easy thing to do and this was incredibly time-consuming. It occupied my every brain cell, every waking moment.
It was as intense as you can imagine. I don’t want anyone to think this is television by any normal standard. It’s really, really difficult and time-consuming.
Riley aimed to “humanise” the castle by showing parts unseen in previous seasons, like the bakehouse and the soup kitchen
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What a gargantuan undertaking. Where do you even begin?
Deborah Riley: The first thing for us to do for season eight was to figure out how to shoot all these battles, what we would need to provide for that to happen. This required us to work out a strategy for shooting: how much visual effects did they have to use?
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What about Winterfell Castle?
Deborah Riley: For Winterfell, we built the entire castle so the camera could be anywhere at any time. There was too much action, too much going on for them to be concerned about doing any rotoscope work later. All of the shots inside the castle are for real.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What was it made of?
Deborah Riley: It was a set so it was built with plywood backings and a hard plaster finish to help it survive the rain and the weather in Belfast. We were shooting in winter too, so that was a very big ask of the set.
We had to level the ground outside to prepare for the massive area for the battlefield itself. There was a huge amount of groundwork involved.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: Was the castle divided into rooms?
Deborah Riley: No. It didn’t work like that at all. Even if it did, there would be too many to count. By the time we finished, there was a massive interior composite built in Linen Mill Studios in Banbridge, Belfast. We had a massive composite of interiors, which you can see Aria running through in episode three.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What were your visual cues when designing Winterfell Castle? Obviously, it had featured in previous seasons.
Deborah Riley: You can’t have something that doesn’t feel like what it was before. It was a matter of expanding the castle we already had, but expanding it in a way that had never been established before.
I was really interested in humanising Winterfell, showing the back of house so we could have a better understanding of where the food came from, where the bread was made, and so on, so we could have a better idea of how they had been feeding these armies and how they’d been keeping the castle alive.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: It’s interesting you speak of humanising the castle. Why was that important?
Deborah Riley: You want to feel for those characters, you want to understand who they are and you want to see that they’re vulnerable, and the spaces have to reflect that too.
We wanted to show parts of Winterfell that had never been explored before and give them big, strong outer walls so, for all intents and purposes, would feel like the castle was fortified.
This was so it would feel like a battle in the true sense, meaning that there were obstacles the whites [Whitewalkers] would have to overcome in order to penetrate the castle.
The battle was shot over 55 consecutive nights
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What was the biggest challenge of season three’s great battle?
Deborah Riley: Working out logistically how it would work. It all starts out as words on a page but there’s so much to imagine, so much to resolve. There was a lot of work going into just the logistics of it. How can we build a set that can support continuous shooting for so many nights that we would be able to create these massive battle scenes?
It was a logistical nightmare. The very ground that Winterfell was built on was not conducive to what really needed to be done.
Winterfell is actually built in a swamp. It’s very marshy ground, so there was a lot of groundwork going in and we had to build these extraordinary mechanisms to make sure the set could survive long enough that it could withstand all of the pressures it was going to be put through.
The amount of rain in Belfast and the lay of the land where Winterfell was originally built meant that mud would go up past your ankles.
Obviously, when the positions for the sets were chosen in season one, they didn’t realise what would be coming. Had we had known, I’m sure they would have chosen a different location for it. But as always, had we known sooner, we would have been much more sensible when choosing a place to accommodate a battle but because that wasn’t the case, it required a lot of work from locations.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: I can imagine building the trench was hard work given the weather conditions.
Deborah Riley: We dug that trench but it kept filling with water so had to keep being dug out again. The very ground that Winterfell was built on was not conducive to what really needed to be done. It had to feel like a worthy stronghold.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What restraints did you use? Like floorboards?
Deborah Riley: No, it was literally scraping back the ground to create proper drainage on the property where there hadn’t been before. Logistically, there was so much involved and it required everyone to work beyond anything we’d done before.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: It sound like as much of a battle backstage as onstage?
Deborah Riley: The crew are absolutely unsung heroes. None of those prop dead people get there by themselves and it’s because there’s a crew standing right besides them the whole time.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: And all that snow must have been a nightmare?
Deborah Riley: That’s paper that turns to papier-mâché when it gets wet so we’d have to scrape all of it. It takes an army of people to do that and they’re not the people who get any of the glory at all. It was a phenomenal achievement.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What about the weaponry?
Deborah Riley: We had to make everything look like it’d been made of dragon glass. We had to make it look like the army’s weapons had been adapted with dragon glass. You can see that the Unsullied have adapted their shields to include dragon glass that had been clamped and screwed onto them.
The dragon glass weaponry is all provided by our armoury team, headed by Tommy Dunne. We were working with pre-existing designs.
The amount of dead bodies needed as props was greater than ever used on the show before
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What is the dragon glass actually made of?
Deborah Riley: We used a lot of obsidian but the fake props were actually bitumen, which stank to be honest. It just smelt like roadworks. It had the look of obsidian with the cheapest budget possible.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What about all the dead people?
Deborah Riley: Not only do you need the dead people but the armour that goes with them. This was a massive budgetary issue as we had to clothe each one in the appropriate army uniforms
We also had discs of dead bodies made. We were casting out dead bodies ourselves to try to increase the look of it and to make the battlefield look like it had so many dead people across it.
If we were to show dead people across the camera, the further away we went, the less detail they needed. We cast three of four bodies together so we’d have clumps of bodies that we could lift around very easily but anything close to camera were individual bodies that would fill with water when it rained, making them very heavy.
We’d done a couple of battles before so we had a lot of prop dead bodies and dead horses but nowhere near the amount that we needed for season eight. We had a whole team of people just clothing these bodies and making them look like they’d endured a battle – to put wigs on them and helmets.
There’s also a whole team of people that had to look after these bodies after the shoot because you can’t have them laying in the field overnight. You have to bring them in, take them out of the weather, otherwise, they won’t last.
The Long Night is now the longest battle scene ever recorded in television history
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What about the blood?
Deborah Riley: The blood, the blood! Prop blood is very expensive, and then there are various types of it. We experimented with these to see which blood we could use for the close-up shots. Again, you can’t leave that during the day for the various reactions it would have – the water, the snow and other things would turn a bright pinky orange colour. It sounds so simple but it was initially a real stumbling block to work it all out.
There’s different blood you can buy for different prices but with the amount we had to use, we had to be measured with the expensive blood and be careful with what blood we were putting where.
We had never done anything as intense as that before, working over a long period of time and in difficult conditions. I’d never worked with that much heavy machinery before. At one point in time, it felt like we had every piece of heavy equipment in Northern Ireland out in Winterfell!”
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: What would you do differently?
Deborah Riley: We had too much work to do in the time that we had. It was at the point where even getting more people didn’t help because you’d need people with a certain skill, a certain amount of work to happen in a limited space. There comes a point where you’re not working efficiently if you’re crowding.
We were exhausted. What you see on camera was reflected in everybody. It wasn’t just the characters going through it but the crew too. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of what it was like for us at the time
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: Was it enjoyable?
It was a fantastic thing to be involved in but none of it was fun. We did the best we possibly could given the time that we had and that was a huge achievement in itself. I was very proud to have survived.
We didn’t quite know what we were getting into until we were knee-deep in mud, it was really hard work.
When it’s something like a battle sequence, it’s important to convey that it’s not only the people in front of the camera conveying that, it’s a whole team.
Gunseli Yalcinkaya: Would you do it again?
Deborah Riley: Oh god yeah, I think we would all do it again if we had the chance. It was a real honour to be a part of Game of Thrones, but I would know better what I was getting myself into, that’s for sure.
The work you see on camera is exactly how it was, and that’s what it was for everyone.
An eccentric fictional family informed the vivid interiors of this pop-up shop in west London, which has been designed by creatives Selena Beaudry, Clemmie Myers and Natalie Tredgett.
Mrs and Mr Bateman is divided into seven colourful rooms inspired by the members of a fictional family
Nestled amongst a parade of shops in the neighbourhood of Notting Hill, the Mrs and Mr Bateman pop-up store offers a mix of art, fashion and home items that reflect the whimsical lifestyles of a made-up family called the Batemans.
A brass chandelier centres the Still Life room
The store and its background narrative were created by artist Selena Beaudry, vintage fashion dealer Clemmie Myers and interior designer Natalie Tredgett. Together they were keen to create an immersive retail space where customers “can escape into a momentary world and feel part of the story”.
“The Batemans travel the world and are patrons of the arts. Their one-of-a-kind collection tells us the story of who they are, where they have been and where they are going,” explained the trio.
“As the visitor travels through the installation, they are given insight into each persona through literal and abstract intimations; their interpretation allowing them to personally create the story that unfolds. The visitor becomes the voyeur.”
The focal point of Vincent’s Study room is a paint-spattered wall hanging
The space is arranged into seven decorative vignettes that reference a different character or setting of the story: Mrs Bateman, Mr Bateman, the Groomsman, the Dreamscape, Vincent’s Study, the Library, and the Still Life.
Each will present a medley of objects by both emerging and established designers or artists, all of which are available to purchase.
Walls in the store are painted bespoke colours created by Beaudry, Myers and Tredgett
One room is centred by a huge chandelier designed by London-based artist Margit Wittig, composed of coloured resin shapes connected by slim brass poles.
Surrounding walls have been covered with geometric-print wallpaper, while cylindrical display plinths have been crafted from textured glass.
Another room features a large, paint-spattered wall hanging by Bulgarian artist Iva Gueorguieva, which contrasts against a Navajo-style red rug. Furnishings here include the Slipper Chair, created by Beaudry, Myers and Tredgett using salvaged fabric from vintage clothing.
Everything on display in the pop-up shop is available to buy
An arched doorway leads through to an adjacent room that’s been painted emerald green and lilac purple, two of the six bespoke shades that the trio behind the store made in collaboration with eco paint company Konig Colours.
A further room boasts zigzag pattern walls and ornate wooden pieces provided by specialist furniture dealers James Graham-Stewart.
The ceiling here and throughout the rest of the store has been painted to seem like leafy branches are bursting through the roof, which the three women imagine as a “tree combining their three disciplines”.
Patterned wallpaper and ornate furnishings appear in the Groomsman room
Mrs and Mr Bateman will be open to the public until 11 May 2019.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has released a new custom typeface that its partners, sellers and consumers can use free of charge to establish their own brand identities.
The two fonts in the typeface, Alibaba Sans (Latin W1G) and Alibaba PuHuiTi (simplified Chinese), were debuted at the company’s annual UCAN design conference in Hangzhou, China, on 27 April.
Alibaba Sans is a custom font that is available for commercial use
The bespoke typeface will be implemented across all of Alibaba’s platforms to establish a common visual identity.
Led by its aim to “make it easy to do business anywhere”, Alibaba has also made the fonts available for commercial use to all of its partners, merchants and customers, who can download and use them free of charge.
The font is designed to be “energetic and young”
The company hopes this will offer digital resources to businesses of all sizes that are struggling to access reliable and inclusive design assets with which to establish and express their brand identities.
“We would like to make this new typeface an inclusive resource for all our partners and customers across the globe, and for free,” said Alibaba chief marketing officer Chris Tung.
“True to our group mission, we are taking a concrete step forward to helping small and medium-sized enterprises to participate in the digital economy through the power of design,” he added.
The Alibaba Sans font comprises 7,205 Latin letters in 11 different weights, including black
Designed by Monotype Studio’s type director Akira Kobayashi, the Alibaba Sans font comprises 7,205 Latin letters in 11 different weights, and is available in 172 languages.
Alibaba worked with Kobayashi to make a font that is highly legible on small screens for shoppers using the company’s e-commerce apps, while still maintaining its effect when stretched out in large formats, such as across an office building.
Alibaba Sans regular is another of the 11 weights available
According to Chiang-Hui Lin, head of corporate branding at Alibaba Grou, the Alibaba Sans font is “reliable” and “levelheaded”, but also “energetic and young”.
The Alibaba Sans lowercase “a”, for example, features a shortened arc and an extended curve on the inner rounded part of the letter.
Italics feature among the 11 different font weights
Lin said details like this make the font “distinctly Alibaba”.
“Brand personality is a very personal feeling, but the way we summarised it to Kobayashi was to see Alibaba as a 20-year-old, who’s young and bristling with energy,” said Lin.
This can be seen as words are typed out, explained Lin, as the bottom half of the letters tend to be more “sturdy”, while the upper half is rounder and more “rhythmic”.
Designs were debuted at the company’s annual UCAN design conference in Hangzhou
The Alibaba PuHuiTi typeface, on the other hand, was created by Yihong Tao from HanYi Fonts, and includes a total of 116,895 Chinese characters in five different weights.
Monotype was also responsible for recently overhauling the Helvetica font over 60 years after it was first created to give it a fresh new look for the 21st century.
Morris + Company has wrapped a metal arcade around a vaulted timber restaurant pavilion at Wildernesse House, a retirement living scheme in Kent.
Raised on a heavy masonry base to deal with its sloping site, the restaurant’s contemporary facade takes visual cues from the arched windows of the adjacent Grade II-listed main house.
The pavilion sits within a wider plan for the Pegasus Life development, incorporating a mews development also by designed Morris + Company, and a retrofit of the listed main house completed by Purcell.
Wildernesse House’s restaurant brings these various elements together, borrowing ideas of transparency from a 19th-century glasshouse that once stood on the site to create an open, public space.
“The restaurant is conceived as a centre piece to the site vision. It is designed to be clearly distinct from every other element on the site,” Joe Morris director of Morris + Company told Dezeen.
“Through its form, scale, appearance, materiality and detail, the building speaks of a more public programme. [This form] is driven not through a more wilful or painterly idealism, but one more functional, a result of the modularity of the offsite construction approach which the scheme followed.”
The restaurant was built using a modular construction based on a four-by-four-metre grid that is defined by columns, connected by arched sections and then topped with groin vaults.
Cross-laminated timber was used to create the columns and arches, while the vaults were formed from plywood.
The central squares of this grid extend upwards to create a lantern that houses the open kitchen. It doubles as a passive ventilation stack with openable windows that sit behind perforated panels.
Externally, this main form is clad with stained timber, and the whole is then encased in a metal structure of powder-coated aluminium.
Arranged on top of one another, the layering of these two skins splits the bays’ three segments: a strip in the centre of each is open to provide views into and out of the restaurant, and thinner strips either side are covered with perforated metal to provide natural ventilation.
To the south, the restaurant opens onto an outdoor seating area overlooking an adjacent apple orchard, creating an external space that leads into the courtyard of the main house.
“All of the building elements are connected to the landscape, with flush thresholds and large format windows, which continue to enshrine a sense of place,” said Morris.
Machined, fluted timber panels continue the structure’s visual language internally along a low datum and alongside doors.
Patterned floor tiles and a concrete worktop create a play between hard and soft finishes, referencing both the solidity of the main house and the delicacy of the former glasshouse.
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.
