There’s an episode of Friends where Joey meets a woman who says she doesn’t own a TV. He looks baffled. “What’s all your furniture pointed at?”
The days of us configuring our living spaces around a media-relaying object go back to the radio (or arguably the family piano, when that was a thing). The radio was a piece of furniture in its own right, and it dictated that seating be placed within earshot.
The television set was also furniture, with a more dictatorial reign: Seating had not only to be within earshot, but due to its visual nature, had to adhere to the Joey Tribbiani rule of interior design.
Nowadays the chief media dispenser for many is the smartphone, which isn’t furniture at all. It’s been reduced to a size that makes it convenient for us to bump into people on the sidewalk, block escalator egress and obstruct subway entrances whilst staring into.
But in the home, it’s the computer that serves as our main media gateway. And computers live in, on or under desks. Computers aren’t a piece of furniture like their predecessors, but standalone objects that are either over-engineered and -designed to the point of fetishism (see: Mac Pro, most gaming PCs) or hidden away (see: iMac, HP black boxes).
Should they be furniture? A subset of DIY’ers (and predominantly gamers, it seems) think so and have posted their custom creations online. And while the designs differ slightly, in general there seems to be consensus on several elements:
1. The computer’s innards should be spread within a chunky horizontal surface that will double as the desk surface.
2. The guts of a computer, including the elaborate cooling systems, ought be celebrated and within full view behind transparent surfaces.
3. The same offset illumination used buy car-modders must be integrated.
The results look something like modern-day pinball machines, albeit in a perpendicular orientation and flat rather than angled:
It’s more common that the opaque parts of these desks are done in black or silver, and less common that you see anything resembling wood. But there are a couple of outliers:
They’ve all got an aesthetic that says “DIY” more than “designed,” but seeing that last one made me wonder: Would it be possible to do something cleaner-looking, along the lines of Braun’s classic record players?
Braun SK4
Braun SK6
Braun SK55
Perhaps not; with the computer desks, it seems the whole point is to display and highlight the innards.
I did find one outlier within the computer-as-desk community, however. UK-based Matthew Perks, the fellow behind the DIY Perks YouTube channel, has built a large computer-desk with the de rigueur elaborate cooling system, but with a couple of departures from his peers. For one, all of the computer bits are contained within a vertical rather than horizontal mass. This enables the second departure: The desktop surface itself is a large, handsome piece of wood that can hinge downwards when not in use, providing a clean appearance.
In my own experience, I rarely transform furniture that is meant to be transformed, and it usually lives in just one of its positions. But I still find this design (aside from the exposed hinges) more appealing than the alternatives.
If you’d like to see the full build of Perks’ desk, along with a step-by-step explanation, it’s below. (You might wanna save it for after work; it clocks in around 30 minutes.)
Product designers in the US, Australia, Canada or Europe: be aware of Operation National Sword. For some time now, much of our recycled waste has been shipped out to China. All those bottles, boxes, phones, appliances, plastics, metals, papers, the unneeded or unwanted products, that had the capacity to be recycled have been sent across the sea, out of sight, for someone else to properly recycle through a system of production. That is until the arrival of Operation National Sword, which as of last year, declared that China would no longer be accepting, “foreign garbage“. China has already stopped accepting most recycled material and by 2020, intends to “achieve zero imports of solid waste”. Which means the already stunningly ineffectual recycling infrastructure in the US has essentially lost a foundational component for its ability to function at all.
Caption A truck shipping products to be recycled, Shanghai, China — Photo by Paul Louis
Among designers, the last decade has seen incredible demonstrations in material alternatives to fossil-fuel-based plastics. There is healthy debate among industry leaders about the ethics of using recycled material vs. new bioplastic material. The market for alternative materials is on the rise; a necessary response to climate change and the fact that soon all seafood will likely be peppered with bits of plastic. Yet, the success of these great recyclable and compostable materials is contingent on the fact that users have access to a system of recycling or composting. As it stands, most people can’t, or don’t know how to recycle. With the implementation of National Sword, even those organizations that we’ve tasked to take care of all our recycled material, don’t really know how to recycle. For industrial designers, as ecologically well-intended as a product may be, the afterlife of that product remains largely uncertain. Fossil-fuel plastics must be replaced, but if bioplastic and recyclables don’t end up in the right place, they may end up doing severe ecological damage for centuries to come (at least).
The easiest and least helpful response to this is to think that the problem is user-error. Which was precisely the strategy of Keep America Beautiful (don’t believe the branding), a non-profit formed by Coca-cola, Anheuser-Busch, Philip Morris and other companies. With their “litterbug” rhetoric, and decades of dogged lobbying, the organization is in large part responsible for the gross lack of US legislation holding corporations responsible for the damage they’ve inflicted upon the environment. Their campaign has long ensured that scrutiny of environmental practices remains focused on the individual. Yet as any designer familiar with user-research will tell you, when “75% of American waste is recyclable, yet just 30% of it is actually recycled“, it’s not the users that are the problem, it is the system. Which is to say that designers, who are on the industry end of this equation, should be exploring ways in which we might reconsider the life-cycle of products, while advocating for stronger recycling infrastructure.
Keep America Beautiful dared to ask, why design better products, when we could have children clean up after us?
Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts picking up trash on Keep America Beautiful Day, in Salinas California, 1972 (via U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)
In his essay, “Design Away” scholar and designer, Cameron Tonkinwise writes, “Would not designers—as hunters, cullers, eradicators or, less violent, waste managers, cleaners, problem dissolvers—make an importantly ‘productive’ contribution to transitioning our societies to less stuffed futures?” Good design in this ecological crisis may actually mean the removal of design. Recognizing the irony of removing products by creating products, Tonkinwise makes the case that designing products that are able to remove the need for more products can help us focus on the ‘reduce,’ of the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra. Additionally, creating products that are able to inspire a deeper personal connection (would you ever consider a laptop, or a water bottle, to be an heirloom?), not to mention developing designs that can be repaired and cared for over the course of several years or decades.
“It’s really annoying when you’re tooling along on the tractor and the front wheel falls off.” – John Deere 3030 Diesel, Massachusetts, USA – Photo by Dwight Sipler
In fact, the Right-To-Repair Movement, is one that is gaining more and more traction in recent years. The movement is strongly supported by farmers who have suffered from the repair monopoly that John Deere has designed into their tractors, and the movement also extend to those who just want to be able to repair their iPhone without having to go to an official apple technician (Apple is currently under investigation for their monopoly on repairs). Listening to movements like this can offer insight for designers, to create products that offer greater longevity. As a counterpoint to the designed obsolescence of smartphones from Apple, Google, Huawei, and Samsung, consider the Fairphone which goes out of its way to offer repair solutions and replacement components for its users.
Tea bowl, Korea, Joseon dynasty, 16th century AD, repaired with “Kintsugi” gold laquer – Ethnological Museum, Berlin
Dish repaired with Resin from Andy Xiaodong Ma’s “Repairing Society” Master Thesis
At its best, product design creates for its users an object that need not be thrown away, or at least, not readily. With the arrival of National Sword, and mostly because of the decades of tenacious corporate lobbying, many of us find ourselves throwing products “away,” in a manner that is destructive on a planetary level. Infrastructure in the US and abroad has to be reformed. Part of that is advocating for better systems design, and part of that is designing products which needn’t rely so heavily on the fallibility of our current infrastructure. Products can be shared, repaired, and integrated into circular economy solutions (see UN Sustainable Development Goal #12). Yet, I realize that I may be preaching to the choir because what designer would ever really want their product to be thrown away?
Police riot helmets turned into disco balls and the stab-proof vest designed for Stormzy set, are among the items that graffiti artist Banksy is selling in his Gross Domestic Product online shop.
The online shop officially opened on 17 October, just a few weeks after the artist announced the launch of his own merchandise line with a pop-up shop installation in Croyden, UK.
Banksy claimed that he was forced to release the branded merchandise following legal action from an unnamed greeting-card company that was trying to “seize legal custody” of his name.
Products on sale range from as little as £10 for an empty spray paint can to £850 for the Union Jack stab-proof vest that British rapper Stormzy wore during his headline set at this year’s Glastonbury festival and a non-functional clutch bag made from a brick.
Stormzy’s stab-proof vest is being sold in the online store
The products each have tongue-in-cheek descriptions. For example the baby mobile is designed to “prepare your little one for the journey ahead – a lifetime of constant scrutiny both state sanctioned and self imposed”.
Banksy is also selling Tony the tiger rugs
Purchases are limited to one item per person with buyers required to register their interest by completing and submitting a registration form on the website.
This requires them to answer a tie-breaker question of “Why does art matter?”. Sales will be decided based on people’s answers to the tie-breaker question.
A baby mobile with rows of novelty CCTV cameras is also on sale
Through this system, applications are grouped by the item and time period they were submitted. According to the site, an independent third party will randomly select a time periods for each item and only evaluate applications received during the selected time period.
The tie-breaker submissions will be determined based on what the independent evaluator deems the “most apt and original”, with the number of applications selected corresponding to the stock of relevant items available for purchase.
Other products on sale include a clock printed with the trademark Banksy rat, and a tombstone made from a 230kg slab of Portland stone for “the person who has everything”.
Non-functional clutch bags made from bricks are also on sale
Other clothing items on sale include t-shirts taken from charity shops that have been vandalised by the artist with his own name printed in stainer ink, spray paint or oil stick.
Successful applicants for the items will be notified by email within two weeks of submitting their answers, and will be sent a link to a private checkout to complete their online purchase, while any incomplete transactions will be offered to other shoppers.
Tsuruta Architects has topped a conservatory extension in London with a faceted timber and glass roof that casts zigzag shadows over a wood-lined dining space.
Called Wooden Roof, the extension to a Grade II-listed house is clad in planks of charred wood.
Traditionally, glass conservatories are built pitched roofs to give views of the sky while also creating an efficient system for water run-off.
On this site, however, a pitched roof form was not possible due to height restrictions on the site.
“Our solution was to create a series of higher pitches in short lengths that push rain water rapidly to the longer gentle primary valley fall,” explained the practice.
The roof has been built using a diagrid frame of acetylated wood, used throughout the entire structure of the conservatory.
All the timber elements for Wooden Roof were CNC-cut and assembled like giant flatpack furniture.
“All of the cross junctions of the beams were structurally designed with no requirement of glue or any mechanical fittings, although glue was used for the ease of positioning during the assembly process,” said Tsuruta Architects.
The simple interior of the conservatory has been panelled with pale wood as a backdrop across for the shadows cast by the roof throughout the day.
A dining table occupies the centre of this space, and a small, wood-lined niche with a built-in wine rack sits tucked to one side in an alcove. The triangular wine rack echoes the design of the roof.
A corner window with a slim, black frame takes advantage of the northern light from the garden.
As the garden sits higher than the ground level of the conservatory, an external terrace space – what the practice calls an “empty stage” – was inserted between the two.
The charred-wood exterior both creates a contrast with the interior and helps to prevent rot and fungus on the facades.
Founded in 2006 by Taro Tsuruta, the practice has since completed a series of dramatic transformations to homes in London.
Architect: Tsuruta Architects Structural engineer: Webb and Yates Contractor: JK London Construction Ltd Digital fabrication: Tomasz Barszcz, Tsuruta Architects Garden concept: 1moku Video edit: Stephen Connolly
Si vous rêvez de parcourir d’Est en Ouest les Etats-Unis lors d’un road trip, vous allez sûrement être intéressé(e) par l’artiste Tim Anderson.
Qu’est-ce qui représente au mieux l’itinérance aux States ? Les motels (contraction de motor et hôtel), ces hôtels-restaurants-shops-stations essence aux abords des routes, là où l’on peut faire un break et se détendre en plein parcours.
Sur son compte Instagram, Tim Anderson photographie ces motels aux looks divers et variés, mais tous inspirés des années 80 tant par leur design que leurs couleurs chatoyantes et néonisées.
NicoleHollis is looking for a 3D artist or renderer in San Francisco. The studio designed its own offices inside a former industrial building, featuring a monochrome palette and a minimalist sensibility to help “clear minds of daily clutter”.
Coming to London for our Dezeen Day conference and the Dezeen Awards party on 30 October? To help you make the most of your trip, here’s a guide to the best shows in town.
The Hayward plays host to a major Bridget Riley exhibition while the Blavatnik Building (pictured above), Herzog & de Meuron’s extension to Tate Modern, is home to the wildly popular Olafur Eliasson: In real life show.
Dezeen Day delegates and Dezeen Awards party attendees can get a 10 per cent discount at The Hoxton Hotel in Southwark. Check your ticket confirmation email for details.
The Dezeen Awards party is sold out. A few tickets remain for Dezeen Day, which will set the global agenda for architecture and design. Buy tickets now.
Read on for our guide to the best exhibitions in London:
Din blinde passager is filled with a dense fog. Photography is by Anders Sune Berg
Art, design and architecture: in what is perhaps the city’s most Instagrammed exhibition of the year, Olafur Eliasson presents a series of interactive installations including a 39-metre-long, fog-filled corridor, a multi-coloured shadow play and an indoor rainbow.
Elsewhere, the exhibition offers a behind-the-scenes look at the artist’s forays into design and architecture, from a castle-like office he erected in a Danish fjord, to his Little Sun project which provides DIY solar-powered lamps to communities off the electricity grid.
Cataract 3 exemplifies Riley’s contributions to Op Art
Bridget Riley 23 October 2019 – 26 January 2020 Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London SE1 8XX
Art: British painter Bridget Riley is among the most well-known faces of Op Art – a style that uses geometric shapes to play with our perception and create optical illusions.
In the largest exhibition of her work to date, the Hayward Gallery is showcasing everything from the early, monochrome pieces to the seminal colour canvases and her only three-dimensional work, the walk-in installation Continuum.
Anthony Gormley’s Lost Horizon I is on display at the RA as part of his latest show. Photography is by David Parry
Anthony Gormley Until 3 December Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London W1J 0BD
Art: in what the Royal Academy of Arts is calling the most significant display of his work in the country for over a decade, Antony Gormley is taking over the RA’s main gallery with pieces spanning the past 45 years of his career.
Here, rarely seen early works by the preeminent British sculptor sit alongside new installations created specifically for the space, including the 24 cast-iron figures of Lost Horizon I, which are dotted around one room, from the floor to the walls and ceiling.
Mary Quant photographed by Ronald Dumont
Mary Quant Until 16 February 2020 Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL
Fashion design: last year, the V&A asked the public to dig through their wardrobes in search of rare items by swinging sixties designer Mary Quant.
Of the more than one thousand responses, archive items from 30 different women are featured in this self-titled exhibition, alongside some of Quant’s generation-defining creations, including brightly coloured tights, hot pants and, of course, the mini skirt.
Beazley Designs of the Year Until 9 February 2020 Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High Street, London W8 6AG
The exhibition does not, as intended, feature posters and flags created by Extinction Rebellion, as the group publicly withdrew its designs from the show back in June in protest against Beazley, an insurance company and the project’s sponsor.
Art and design: three installations by the United Visual Artists envelop visitors in a world of light and sound, where lasers create and unmake the surrounding space, and sound recordings of animals in their natural habitat are illustrated through evocative spectrograms.
The multidisciplinary collective, which consists of a range of designers alongside an architect and creative technologist, has previously flexed its creative muscles to create stage sets for Jay Z as well as for Burberry’s autumn/winter 2018 fashion show.
Architecture: The Royal Academy of Arts has invited 40 architects and collectives – from Denise Scott Brown, to Archigram and Dezeen columnist Aaron Betsky – to answer the titular question of this exhibition with an A3 image and a 100-word text.
The resulting exhibition explores how architecture can and should change in response to the current period of environmental, political and social upheaval.
Damien Hirst’s Subservience is on display as part of the Mandalas exhibition. Photography is by Prudence Cuming
Damien Hirst: Mandalas Until 2 November White Cube Mason’s Yard, 25-26 Masons Yard, London SW1Y 6BU
Art:Damien Hirst returns to one of his most well-known motifs – the butterfly – in his latest show at the White Cube gallery.
Following on from previous works, which used their wings to recreate stained-glass church windows, this series sees them arranged in hypnotic, concentric circles to form morbid mandalas.
This work by Joseph Maida is titled #jelly #jello #fruity #fruto #thingsarequeer in a riff on Instagram’s food porn culture
Photography: Martin Parr, Man Ray and Wolfgang Tillmans are among a cast of artists featured in an exhibition about food photography, tracing its history from the origins in traditional still lifes all the way to today’s Instagram-spawned ubiquity.
The exhibition will explore how, through the lens of different disciplines from fashion to art and photojournalism, food can be used to convey a vast range of emotions and themes.
TV Garden imagines a future where technology is part of the natural landscape. Photography courtesy of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
Nam June Paik Until 9 February 2020 Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG
Art and film: the revolution will be televised in this retrospective of work from Nam June Paik, often referred to as the “father of video art”.
Among the more than 200 works on show are TV Garden 1974/2002, a jungle of plants sprouting dozens of television sets, and the Sistine Chapel installation – which has been recreated for the first time since it was awarded the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice Biennale.
Photography and fashion: the largest exhibition ever to be devoted to British photographer Tim Walker includes ten new commissions, which were created specifically for the Victoria and Albert Museum and inspired by pieces from its permanent collection.
Alongside this, a selection of more than 100 photographs gives an overview of his expansive body of work, including portraits of Kate Moss, Björk and David Hockney.
Moving to Mars Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High Street, London Until 23 February 2020
Design: everything about humanity’s move to Mars – from the seven-month journey there, to what we’ll eat when we get there – is considered in this exhibition, which features original artefacts from NASA and the European Space Station alongside newly commissioned designs.
Highlights include clothes made of repurposed solar blankets and parachutes, a zero-gravity spacecraft table and a speculative installation imagining the planet inhabited by plants instead of humans, courtesy of Dezeen Day speaker Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.
I’m a Lady by Mary Sibande shows the artist’s avatar Sophie
Art and photography: through her first solo exhibition in the UK, artist Mary Siabande pays homage to the generations of domestic workers within her family, while challenging reductive portrayals of black women in her native South Africa.
Life-sized sculptures, modelled on the artist herself, sit next to photographs of Sibande’s alter-ego Sophie, who is transformed into various roles which transcend boundaries of class, race and gender.
Architecture and design: Whether used to create earthen tableware or an entire tiled house-front, whether hand- or robot-made – this exhibition explores the versatility of ceramic as a material and its resurgence in contemporary architecture.
Film, costume and sound design: on 17 September, BAFTA opened its doors to the public for the first time with a new permanent exhibition exploring the craft behind some of Britain’s most acclaimed films and TV shows.
The ever-expanding collection covers everything from the costumes of multi award-winning BBC series Killing Eve, to the sound design of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and the intricate hair and make-up artistry behind The Favourite.
Women-only co-working space The Wing has opened a branch in central London, with interiors that draw upon a “mosh pit” of references including Gaudí buildings and English gardens.
The Wing‘s head in-house designer Laetitia Gorra told Dezeen that she “didn’t hold back” when developing the interiors of the 1,114 square-metre London outpost.
The new space takes over a five-storey townhouse just a minute’s walk from Oxford Circus tube station and is the co-working company’s first international location and ninth branch overall.
In the new London office, Gorra has attempted to give each level of the building its own personality.
The first floor is meant to feel distinctly European – seat-backs and cushions in a huge communal workroom have been upholstered in a floral fabric that the designer sourced in Italy, while tasselled and velvet armchairs from Portuguese furniture brand Munna have been dotted throughout.
Cone-shaped sconce lights from Italian designer Sabrina Landini have also been placed at intervals across the wall.
“I feel in this space particularly, I went outside of my comfort zone. Personally, as I designer, I’ve become a lot more confident and comfortable in my design decisions and really comfortable with going with my gut,” Gorra told Dezeen.
“I took themes and blew them up – of course as the designer you’re a little nervous as to how that’s going to turn out – but I couldn’t be happier with the end result,” she continued.
“All the inspiration that I’ve drawn over the years, this was sort of an outlet – my head was like a mosh pit.”
The workroom has a host of bespoke hexagonal tables, but should guests want to take business calls in private they can also escape to one of the phone booths.
Each one is named after a famous British fictional character like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth and Miss Moneypenny from the James Bond series.
A series of floor-to-ceiling timber shelving-units align at the rear of the room to form The Wing’s library, which offers a curated selection of books written by and about women, women-identifying and non-binary figures.
Ornaments found in Paris’ Clignancourt flea market have also used as decoration.
The focal point of the second floor is an expansive beauty room that riffs on traditional chintzy English interiors – almost every surface, including the central sofa, is covered in paisley-print fabric by British brand Soane.
Mirrors sit in coral-coloured arched niches, accompanied by gold-wire baskets that contain grooming products.
At this level there are also a handful of nursing rooms should women want to stop by with their babies. Each one comes complete with a changing table, an extra-wide seat to make breast pumping more comfortable and a small fridge for storing milk.
“The name The Wing comes from being an extension of your home, sort of having everything that’s offered in your home plus a lot more,” explained Gorra.
“Personally, as a working mum, I’m always looking for ways that my life can be a little bit easier and having a place that’s a one-stop-shop really allows for that.”
There is also – for the first time at The Wing – a dedicated fitness room where members can partake in yoga classes.
On the third floor, corridors lined with bookable meeting rooms lead up to The Perch – a table-service cafe that offers dishes conceived in collaboration with notable women from the culinary industry.
Flower-print tiles run across the floor, selected by Gorra in a visual nod to the patterned ceramics on the facade of architect Antoni Gaudi‘s Casa Batlló building in Barcelona. Rattan dining chairs and scalloped pendant lamps have otherwise been used to dress the space.
Members can also grab a drink in the tea room on the fourth-floor, which is meant to evoke an English country garden – ornate wire-frame furnishings appear throughout, and some of the walls are gridded to resemble a trellis.
This level also has a gallery-style quiet workroom lined with portraits of successful women from a variety of sectors. Figures portrayed include politician Diane Abbott as well as actress and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Gorra says the decor feature is a direct move against the “stern-faced” paintings of men that often line the walls of corporate banks or law firms.
The fifth and final floor boasts an outdoor terrace where members can escape during the warm winter months and another communal work area that can double-up as an events space.
As the company looks to open more branches in London and across the globe, Gorra says she’ll simply continue to design for career-driven women instead of getting distracted by national differences in work culture.
“I’m focusing on designing for entrepreneurial women, and culturally I don’t think that’s that different…it’s eager women that are wanting to put their heads down and get stuff done,” she added.
The Wing’s London branch joins a growing number of women-only co-working spaces that are springing up across the city – earlier this year saw the opening of Allbright, which is ornamented with paintings and prints by female artists.
French architect Sophie Dries has combined a pair of mid-19th-century Parisian flats in a design that brings together street art and colour blocking.
The apartment was previously two separate homes, built during Haussmann’s major reconstruction of Paris. The renovation sees them brought together into a 100-square-metre residence for a family of four.
Dries designed a new layout for the property, with the entrance lobby, hallway and kitchen at the centre of the floor plan. Wherever possible, doorways were opened up and spaces were simplified, to make the property feel more spacious.
“We had to respect the Haussmannian spirit of the mouldings, fireplace and parquet flooring, but with a contemporary, new plan,” explained the architect.
“The Haussmannian style was refined and pared down, in order to introduce minimal lines better suited to a modern family.”
Different colour palettes were chosen for different rooms, creating striking contrasts with the period details, which are painted in simple white.
In some areas the flashes of colour are provided by textiles, like curtains and rugs, while some rooms feature bright coloured feature walls. But in each case, the colours are chosen to match artworks on display in the space.
The clients are art collectors, with a particular interest in street art, so works by the likes of Banksy, Invader and JonOne are dotted throughout.
“The clients are really into colour so we had the opportunity to play on it,” Dries told Dezeen. “We decided to have wall colours in consideration of the strong art pieces in each room.”
The kitchen features a bold use of colour blocking. Dark grey cabinets stand out against a soft red backdrop, which extends across walls, the floor, the ceiling and the worktops.
On the opposite side of the space, beneath a watercolour by Venetian painter Giulia Andreani, a custom-designed banquette seat frames the octagonal table that Charlotte Perriand designed for Les Arcs.
An arched doorway creates a geometric detail that is mirrored in the shape of a grey-lacquered stool designed by Philippe Starck.
“We really wanted to mix vintage pieces from the ’50s to the ’90s, together with contemporary furniture like the made-to-measure banquette,” explained Dries.
“Like in the architecture in an old building, the furniture is to be used by a contemporary family, so it has to be functional,” she continued. “It’s not a museum”.
In the new, open-plan living and dining space, walls are left white so that the parquet flooring can stand out, but some elements are picked out in shades of yellow, red and gold.
Midcentury classics – like Eero Saarinen‘s marble Tulip Table and a set of Hans J Wegner chairs – are accompanied by dyed linen curtains, straw marquetry coffee tables and a pair of purple-hued vases.
The master bedroom includes a teal-coloured wall that works in harmony with another Andreani painting. Other features include a hand-painted screen by artist François Mascarello and sculptural concrete nightstands.
There are two children’s room, for which Dries chose a strong shade of yellow. Wooden furnishings feature here, including a vintage desk and a small rattan armchair.
ÉCAL graduate Luisa Kahlfeldt has designed a new diaper that is more sustainable than even other reusable cloth nappies — an innovation for which she won the Swiss James Dyson Award.
Kahlfeldt‘s Sumo nappies are made entirely of a fabric called SeaCell, composed of seaweed and eucalyptus. The textile is antibacterial and antioxidant-rich, so it is beneficial for babies’ skin.
It’s also sustainable to harvest and produce, giving it an advantage over the textiles used in most cloth nappies on the market. And since Kahlfeldt has fashioned it into a mono-material design, it is also more easily recycled, with no need to disassemble its components.
While Kahlfeldt’s primary concern was to provide an alternative to disposable diapers — she says 17 million of them are binned every day in the European Union alone — it’s Sumo’s advances over standard cloth nappies that have earned it several awards, including the prestigious Dyson Award.
Kahlfeldt engineered SeaCell into three layers for Sumo — a soft and absorbent inner layer, an even more absorbent core, and then a waterproof outer layer that prevents any liquids from leaking out.
The waterproofing was enabled by a partnership with Swiss textile company Schoeller, whose EcoRepel technology waterproofs fabrics without affecting their biodegradability or recyclability.
Kahlfeldt says it also withstands abrasion and repeated machine-washing.
In most cloth nappies, the absorbent layers are laminated with polyester or polyurethane, so they cannot go on to be recycled. The addition of hooks and fastenings also typically obstructs the recycling process.
A particular challenge for Kahlfeldt was how to engineer stretchiness into the fabric without synthetic elastic bands. She achieved this with a method of knitting natural yarns called “Natural Stretch”, which she says give them up to 20 per cent elasticity.
Kahlfeldt praises SeaCell as a material with “really unique” properties that are ideal for babies.
“The incredible softness of the fabric and its inherent anti-bacterial quality make it the perfect material to sit next to sensitive, naked skin,” she told Dezeen.
The minimal look of the diaper developed as she experimented with the textile, through a collaboration with the German Institute of Textile and Fibre Research (DITF).
The nappy is a natural colour with contrast ribbing, and it ties together simply at the front.
“I really like the pure, wholesome and very natural aesthetic of the product — something that I think is still quite rare in the world of baby products, where you often find cliché colours and cartoons printed on the fabrics,” said Kahlfeldt.
The designer developed Sumo as her masters project at the Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), one of the world’s top design schools. She is currently working as a senior designer at Konstantin Grcic Design in Berlin.
Sumo was the winning entry from Switzerland in the national heats of the 2019 James Dyson Awards, which recognise the best in student design and engineering.
The design is now under consideration in the final, international round of the competition, where it is up against inventions such as the UK’s MarinaTex bioplastic and China’s self-santising door handle.
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.
Braun SK4
Braun SK6
caption: Laysan albatross chick rests upon discarded plastic material. (via NOAA) 
Caption A truck shipping products to be recycled, Shanghai, China — 
Keep America Beautiful dared to ask, why design better products, when we could have children clean up after us? 
Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts picking up trash on Keep America Beautiful Day, in Salinas California, 1972 (via U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) 
“It’s really annoying when you’re tooling along on the tractor and the front wheel falls off.” – John Deere 3030 Diesel, Massachusetts, USA – Photo by 
Tea bowl, Korea, Joseon dynasty, 16th century AD, repaired with “Kintsugi” gold laquer – Ethnological Museum, Berlin 
Dish repaired with Resin from Andy Xiaodong Ma’s “
