Hasta La Ideas

Palma by Unbound Babes is a waterproof sex toy disguised as piece of jewellery that can twist, tilt and be tapped to produce different vibrations.

Made from surgical grade stainless steel, the vibrator is attached to a band so that it can be worn as a ring. The faceted shape of the vibrator tapers at one end to create a faceted surface to apply to intimate areas.

A vibrating motor is concealed inside the accessory, and the wearer can change the speed and pattern of vibrations by moving their hand or tapping the ring. The vibrating part can also swivel between horizontal and vertical positions.

New York-based Unbound Babes founder Polly Rodriguez came up with the concept for Palma in 2016 after seeing sex toy technology launches that weren’t hitting the spot.

“Everybody was coming out with vibrators that were paired with Bluetooth, so that you could have an app,” Rodriguez told Dezeen.

“But the overwhelming feedback from women was it creates a barrier to using it, especially with a partner. You have to you roll over and get your phone in the middle of a moment,” she added.

“People wanted more intuitive design was haptic so that it would react with your body.”

Having an all-women team at Unbound Babes is an advantage in the sex toy development arena, Rodriguez believes.

“We saw a lot of startups that had predominantly male teams designing features for the sake of features,” she said.

“We had people who really understood the barriers to incorporating these products into people’s lives.”

A vibrator that fits on a finger can easily be positioned over the clitoris without interrupting sex.

“70 per cent of women need clitoral stimulation in order to orgasm. And that doesn’t happen usually during regular penetrative sex,” said Rodriguez.

To create a vibrating element that increases the intensity as it tilts, the design team used an accelerometer similar to the kind you’d find in an iPhone to aid with screen orientation.

Buttons under the vibrating element allow the user to select one of five modes of vibration. The Palma also has setting that allows you to tap the top of the ring to record a pattern of vibrations for it to repeat.

It recharges via a magnetic USB charging dock in the ring case that the toy comes in, and it is fully waterproof.

Developing all the technology in the Palma and making it small enough to be wearable was a challenge, which is why it took years to develop.

“It took a full year of just going back to the drawing board because every time we would design it, it was just too big to be worn as a ring,” said Rodriguez

“It took us five different motors prototypes, going back and forth until we finally found one that we felt was strong and powerful enough.”

The ring factor also makes it an interesting twist on the tradition of men gifting women rings as part of a courting ritual.

“We had one amazing lesbian couple who proposed using Palma, which is definitely been my favourite use case so far.”

Rodriguez believes that having a sex toy that can be worn in public can be an important statement about women having more bodily autonomy at a time when their rights are being threatened under the current government in the US.

“This industry, historically, has been one in which people felt embarrassed or ashamed by these products where it felt dirty or wrong. Now women are reclaiming that space and that part of their lives,” she said.

“Look at the macro culture, Donald Trump getting elected, women becoming more physically representative of their views, wearing t-shirts that say ‘nasty woman’, getting on the streets and protesting – women want to control that narrative of their sexuality.”

Designers are responding to this increasing demand for sex toys that focus on pleasure for women, trans and non-binary people.

Dame Products has a vibrator called Fin in a silicone bulb that fits between the user’s fingers, and Wild Flower has created Enby, a gender neutral vibrator shaped like a stingray.

Photography is by Savanna Ruedy.

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« J’ai toujours aimé la façon dont les montagnes deviennent des motifs presque abstraits selon la météo », révèle Robert Götzfried. Le photographe allemand propose ici avec cette série intitulée « Abstract Mountains » un regard unique sur les Alpes Autrichiennes. Des images singulières que l’artiste a prises lors de ses longues balades à moto au cœur des Alpes. « C’est quelque chose que je fais depuis quelques années. De l’Italie à l’Autriche en passant par la Suisse et bien sûr, l’Allemagne ».

« Au printemps, lorsque la température se réchauffe, la neige commence à fondre et vous pouvez observer ces motifs très contrastés. Les roches mouillées deviennent très sombres et créent ce grand contraste avec la neige blanche ». Une jolie façon d’observer ces oasis de nature. « Je suis passionné par les conditions météorologiques brumeuses car elles rendent le monde plus calme. Quand il y a du brouillard, il n’y a que très peu de personnes dehors. La plupart du temps, lors de journées comme celles-ci, je peux parcourir de nombreux kilomètres sans croiser une seule personne ».

Retrouvez ses images sur sa page Instagram : @robertgotzfried

Dezeen promotion: Architecture practice BSA has created a “diverse spectrum” of workspaces within a disused warehouse in Saarland, Germany, as the office of ceramics company Villeroy & Boch.

Located in the municipality of Mettlach, the warehouse was simply known before as Factory N 09. It has now been transformed into contemporary offices for Villeroy & Boch, which tasked Merzig-based BSA, creative agency TRIAD and if5, with creating “the ideal workplace for every task”.

The ground floor of the 4,000-square-metre building now contains what the company describes as a “marketplace” – a large, open-plan area where employees can gather and relax in between meetings or have informal catch-ups.

Its focal point is a chunky flight of timber stairs that offer a spot for staff to perch throughout the day. It can also double-up as amphitheatre-style seating for major events.

The steps rise up through a central void that extends across the building’s three floors. Throughout there is a mix of boardrooms, group conference rooms hidden behind fringed curtains and a selection of flexible work areas with desks that electronically adjusted to suit the proportions of different workers.

Silent rooms offer a place for staff to concentrate. Business calls can also be taken in one of the dedicated telephone booths or Skype rooms, which come complete with sizeable monitors and wide-angle cameras.

“With its diverse spectrum of working spaces, the building breaks with conventional office structures in favour of open spaces and different working areas to foster communication and cooperation among all employees,” explained the company.

“The openness of the building created by the high space also symbolises how people work at Factory N 09, namely within a culture of open communication and creative discussions.”

Particular attention was paid to the toilet facilities in Factory N 09, and no two bathrooms in the building are the same. For example, some cubicles have been painted in “energy-boosting” bright colours, while others have been dressed with leafy plants to evoke jungle imagery.

All of them exclusively feature products by Villeroy & Boch.

“The toilets in the building are an excellent example of creative project solutions for sanitary facilities: no two restrooms are the same,” added the company.

Villeroy & Boch was founded by Jean-Francois Boch in 1748 in the French village of Audun le Tiche. Villeroy & Boch offers products in the bathroom, wellness and tableware sectors, and is active in 125 countries.

Not solely dealing in ceramics, last year the company carried out research into what hotels of the future would look like – predictions included voice-controlled guest rooms that are able to adjust light, temperature and music and automated check-in services that use facial recognition.

To find out more about Villeroy & Boch’s office, visit its website.

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The fact that Norman Foster wants to start building social housing again after 40 years is a sign that a lot of it may be about to be built, says Owen Hatherley.

In the 1970s Foster designed a council estate for the first and last time. Bean Hill, in Milton Keynes, was devised in the early 1970s by the young firm during the last period that the amount of council housing builds rivalled those of the private market.

It was planned as an experimental, Archigram-type scheme of clip-together small houses, in an informal, suburban layout. Shortages of materials and problems on site led to what you’ll find there now – scattered tin houses with great big mock Tudor pitched roofs attached in the 1990s to stop the incessant leaks.

Unlike other Foster projects in non-metropolitan England in the 1970s – say, the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, IBM in Portsmouth, or Willis Faber in Ipswich – it’s unlisted and unlistable. After this showing, it’s doubtful they’d have been asked to design housing again – until now, that is.

Alongside recent reports that show a sharp rise in council housing completions in Britain comes the news that Foster + Parners, by now a globe-bestriding architectural megacorp, is planning to get into the non-market housing market. This isn’t a sign of social commitment –  something that has never been much of a factor for Foster – but due to the fact that a lot of it might be built soon. So what could Foster bring to social housing today?

After its last showing, it’s doubtful they’d have been asked to design housing again – until now, that is

The lifting of the borrowing cap on local authorities makes building on a large scale more plausible than it has been since the early 1980s. The smarter councils have been setting up shell companies to build directly, which is surely a response to the fact that the previous policy of getting developers to contribute percentages of affordable housing has very clearly not had any impact on the housing crisis.

Action is sporadic, and sometimes, the new council housing is only debatably social (austerity has left most local authorities in Britain desperate for cash, so the new council-developed housing is sometimes, as at the overpraised Colville Estate in Hackney, sold on the open market).

But by now, the market is so obviously dysfunctional that even the departing PM Theresa May has talked about building council housing, something that the New Labour governments considered tantamount to Trotskyism. Meanwhile the 100th Anniversary of the Addison Act, which made mass council building possible, has led to a great deal of celebration of council housing. This has often come from councils that have otherwise been trying to get rid of their stock as quickly and cheaply as possible.

The market is so obviously dysfunctional that even the departing PM Theresa May has talked about building council housing

And this isn’t just in the UK. In the US, a similar housing crisis has led to demands for new public housing – and that in a country where non-market housing has an extremely poor rep, and has even been banned at various points in major cities.

So we’re almost certainly going to see more social housing in the next few years. What can we expect this to look like?

Social housing – extremely broadly speaking, housing that is provided outside of private business, sometimes, but not always, targeted at people who can’t afford to get onto the “ladder” – is built, even today, and it comes in a variety of forms. There’s the HLM system in France, which is probably most similar to the British council allocation system aimed mostly at working class communities.

Elsewhere, non-market providers of housing such as housing associations and co-operatives are still building to some extent in the residual social democracies of northern Europe.

It’s actually built at a far larger scale in Hong Kong and Singapore, both of which are still dominated by mass council housing. This is something that is seldom mentioned when these maritime city-states are held up as exemplars for post-Brexit Britain. (This is also one reason why hot money from east Asia is awash in London is that it’s relatively harshly regulated at home).

System-built towers in rows are still normal, even if they have standards well above those of the past

Most of this happens without the input of fashionable architects – these public housing programmes, for instance, run entirely parallel to the photogenic city baubles that aim to “put them on the map”. System-built towers in rows are still normal, even if they have standards well above those of the past.

Conversely you’ll find that architect-designed social housing in the west today consists overwhelmingly of small-scale infill, reflecting the chastened best practice that visually distinguishing social housing from market housing is unwise. This forgets that “built by the city” could be a sign of pride, as it was in 20th century Vienna and London, rather than a badge of shame.

Probably the majority of it is in France, especially in Paris, where reduction of a stark centre/periphery divide has been a priority of the city government. So the new housing might commonly continue a broken street line, or carefully follow the scale of its predecessors on site; more ambitiously, you can find Lacaton and Vassal‘s extraordinary renovations and extensions of mass housing estates – though building at the same scale as those estates is never seen.

You’ll also find a very small amount of US examples, such as basically charitable housing in the Bronx, a rare US example whose tiny flats are a rather dubious model, suggesting that social housing should be built to lower specifications than private (20th century reformers more often did the opposite).

Perhaps a firm like Fosters, skilled at creating airports on man-made islands or stretching viaducts across mountains, could be able to usefully apply their skills

Some of this is very fine housing. Something like the Sonnwendviertel in Vienna, for instance, with its integrated vegetable market, its cinema for residents, its delightful public spaces and its spacious flats, is a great model for anywhere to follow.

But when we’re dealing with places that have a housing crisis on the scale of London or New York, the idea that social housing has to be modest, bespoke and quiet may not be enough. This is a giant problem, caused by 40 years of inaction.

At least in the bigger cities, the solutions might need to be giant too, and might need revolutionary solutions – so far, only Peter Barber‘s proposal for a ring of new council housing stretching around London has come close to accepting that the housing crisis will not be solved by craft and derring-do.

Perhaps this is where a firm like Fosters, skilled at creating airports on man-made islands or stretching viaducts across mountains, could be able to usefully apply their skills.

However, there’s places you can actually get a look at what Foster doing social might actually look like. The firm designed a dozen or so private-public “City Academies” in British towns and cities in the 2000s, and they all look like mini-business parks. They were also built cheap – some of them now look nearly as knackered as Bean Hill.

Maybe that’s because building a social architecture can’t be about just pointing the existing industry at the problem and telling it “sort that”. It needs to have social ideas, too, and needs to be able to embody them in space. Most contemporary architecture is still a long way from that.

Photography of Bean Hill housing in Milton Keynes is by Tom Ravenscroft.

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Architects Eduard Balcells, Ignasi Rius and Daniel Tigges have designed a wood-clad concrete kindergarten for the El Tiller Waldorf-Steiner School in Bellaterra, Spain.

The concrete and pine kindergarten is one of six structures arranged like a small village around a central “rambla” – a Hispanic term for a promenade or high street.

Alongside the kindergarten, five other modular wood and steel pavilions were transported from two former sites to form the El Tiller Waldorf-Steiner School campus near Barcelona.

This kindergarten structure has been clad entirely in prefabricated panels, consisting of two layers of pine on both the interior and exterior with insulation between.

These panels have been arranged so the pine slats are either horizontal or vertical, creating a an interesting pattern on the facade.

Externally, this wood has been temperature-treated, and over time will turn silvery grey in colour.

“The combination of the thermal insulation of wood-fibre panels, together with the large thermal inertia of the concrete structure, almost eliminates the need for heating in winter,” explained Balcells, Rius and Tigges.

Internally, the kindergarten’s concrete structure has been left exposed, and deep, wooden window reveals provide space for both seating and storage.

The size of the building’s prestressed concrete frame meant that no columns were required – a crucial requirement in particular for the multipurpose hall at ground floor level.

Arranged over two levels, the kindergarten is divided with a large hall and administrative spaces on the ground floor, with classrooms above.

Built against a slope, small bridges connect the upper level with a playground space. To the west, the building faces directly on to the campus’ central street.

This simple layout minimises the need for circulation inside the building, with the design focusing instead on the journey into the classrooms and the changes in atmosphere and views as children progress through the school.

Waldorf-Steiner schools like El Tiller focus on encouraging children’s creativity and imagination, and limit the amount of testing and exams.

“There are no internal corridors, and access to the classroom follows a gradual exterior spatial sequence: rambla, courtyard, porch, reception hall then classroom,” explained the architecture group.

“The views expand as the child grows, and the rotation of classrooms on the topography gives them varying light qualities, both in intensity and colour, accompanying the experience of growing up and learning.”

Mattes Sekiguchi Partner Architekten also used timber to clad a Waldorf-Steiner school in Germany.

The concept of designing a school as a village was also recently explored in China with the Jiangsu Beisha Kindergarden, which looks like a cluster of little houses.

Photography is by Adrià Goula.

Project credits:

Architecture firms: Eduard Balcells Architecture+Urbanism+Landscape, Ignasi Rius Architecture, Tigges Architekt
Design team: Eduard Balcells, Ignasi Rius, Daniel Tigges
Structural engineering: Bernuz-Fernández
Mechanical engineering: Progetic
Quantity surveyor: Egaractiva
Agronomical engineer and landscape consultants: Factors de Paisatge – Manuel Colominas
Collaborators: Manel Romero, Elisabeth Terrisse

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