Hasta La Ideas

Depuis quelques semaines, l’East River, à New York, est illuminé par une sculpture flottante en forme de croix. Conçue par des designers de Playlab Inc et la Family New York Partner avec l’observatoire de Lamont-Doherty de l’Université de Columbia, la + Pool Light est faite de LEDs et mesure 15 mètres par 15. Non seulement design, la sculpture lumineuse change de couleur selon la qualité de l’eau du détroit. En temps réel, l’installation récolte des données telles que la clarté, la température ou le pH de l’eau, et les diffuse sur un site internet dédié.

Ouverte depuis le 4 octobre, la + Pool Light – qui se veut un symbole positif dans les démarches d’amélioration de la qualité de l’eau – restera sur l’East River jusqu’au 4 janvier prochain.

© Iwan Baan

© Iwan Baan

© Brett Beyer

© Brett Beyer

© Brett Beyer

© Noah Devereaux

If I had to oversimplify the world’s current industrial state in order to explain it to a small child, I’d say “Metal is expensive everywhere because China ate most of it.”

I’d also explain that we can’t just grow metal, but that we can grow trees. So that if it were possible to replace some things we make out of metal with things made out of wood, that would be desirable.

And sustainable. Particularly for a country like Japan, which is low on natural resources but lousy with trees. That’s why Kyoto University, backed by the Ministry of the Environment, is heading up a consortium of 22 research institutes, companies and universities to figure out how to leverage wood. And one of the answers they’ve come up with is cellulose nanofiber (CNF) derived from wood pulp.

(CNF is the same stuff that the University of Maine, which recently 3D printed that 25-foot boat, is developing as a production material.)

The Japanese group is looking at cars, rather than boats; makes sense as they produce a lot more of the former than the latter. Their CNF recipe of herbs and spices has yielded a material that they claim is 1/5th the weight of steel, but more than five times stronger. “[It] can be used as an alternative to resin, metal, and glass materials,” they write. “In concept cars, CNF [can be] used for parts such as door trims, bonnets, and roof panels, reducing the weight of parts by up to 50% and reducing the weight of the entire vehicle by more than 10%.” Less weight means less CO2 emissions.

As proof-of-concept, the consortium is showing off this concept car, which they’ve dubbed the NCV (Nano Cellulose Vehicle–note that the order of “CNF” gets flipped around in translation):

Knocking 10% off of the weight of a vehicle is no small beer, and the bigger picture is that they’d be doing it with a carbon-neutral, locally-available material that could be produced from forestry and agricultural waste. In addition, it’s “expected to develop the local economy by producing and utilizing CNF from local unused biomass resources. In addition, it has the potential as an alternative material for plastics and is expected to solve marine pollution problems.”

If you’d like to learn more about the material or the project, they’ve released a video on the NCV initiative, which we’ll embed below. (Warning: The editing is a bit slow.)

Bi-national studio 1100 Architect has renovated a cottage in New York beach town the Hamptons to create spaces where “old and new are impossible to distinguish from each other”.

The House in Amagansett takes its name from the Long Island hamlet where it is situated. Nestled into grassy dunes, the 1,609-square-foot (150-square-metre) dwelling serve as a “quiet retreat away from the city – a place to cook, entertain, read, work and swim”.

Designed by 1100 Architect – which has offices in New York and Frankfurt, Germany – the project entailed renovating a three-bedroom cottage dating to 1973. The dwelling’s interior layout was reconfigured to suit contemporary needs and to improve energy performance.

“We carefully studied the original dune cottage – designed by Harry Bates in the mid 1970s – and adapted its DNA to make a contemporary living environment, such that old and new are impossible to distinguish from each other,” said Juergen Riehm, a founding principal at 1100 Architect.

The interior was made more open, allowing for a clear sight line through the house and into the surrounding terrain. Large sliding doors usher in daylight and facilitate natural ventilation, in turn helping reduce energy consumption.

In one of the bedrooms, a sliding door was added, enabling it to flow into the main living area. The room now serves as a guest room, a study, or an extension of the public zone, depending upon the owner’s needs.

The cottage is fitted with simple finishes, such as white cabinetry and wooden flooring. Rooms are sparsely furnished with contemporary decor, such as plush leather sofas and a marble-topped coffee table.

Original elements were restored where possible, including a series of linear skylights in the public zone. The home’s cedar siding was also refurbished, as were wooden terraces and a fence that surrounds them.

Just outside of the living room, the team added a slender, concrete swimming pool and a wooden deck, enabling the owners to easily cool off during the warm summer months.

Founded in 1983, 1100 Architect has a diverse portfolio of projects, ranging from office and cultural buildings to single-family homes.

Other work by the studio includes a concrete holiday home on a Japanese island, which was designed to provide optimal views of the sea, and a student centre at the University of Pennsylvania that consists of a renovated historic cottage and an angular addition.

Photography is by Nikolas Koenig.

The post 1100 Architect refurbishes 1970s cottage tucked into Long Island’s sand dunes appeared first on Dezeen.

The first Christmas after the World Trade Center was destroyed, I needed to get out of New York, and flew to China for a vacation. In Shanghai I got my first look at the bizarre architecture that would henceforth define the cities of the 21st Century. The Twin Towers, with their rational shape, would never be rebuilt; morphous look-at-me buildings would be all the rage.

Dubai is nearing completion of their Museum of the Future, intended to draw eyeballs during their World Expo hosting in 2020. Designed by Dubai-based Killa Architecture Design, the torus shape “represents our understanding of the ‘future’ as we know it today and for the next 5 to 10 years. In contrast the ‘void’ represents what we do not yet know, and that the people who seek the unknown will continue to innovate and discover to help guide humanity towards a better future, whereby (sic) creating the continuum of replenishing the MOTF.”

As you can guess, the design has made it one of the most difficult-to-construct edifices in the world. The task of figuring it out fell to UK-based firm BuroHappold Engineering, who had to rely heavily on parametric design and BIM to get it done. Amusingly (to me), they started by undoing what the designers had done, to some extent. “The first computational task was to fine-tune the theoretical shape of the building,” the BBC reports, “to eradicate as much of the complex curvatures as possible. These millimetric alterations, which took a long time to finalise, were undetectable to the eye – but removed a host of complications further down the line.”

The full details of the hellish construction tasks required are detailed in the BBC link. But to nutshell it for you:

– The cladding is made from 1,024 fiberglass panels, of which no two are alike

– Each panel had to be individually molded

– The façade supplier required an entire year just to develop the production process for the panels

– The panel construction was so labor-intensive that only six could be made per day

– The more complicated panels “can take two or three days to install”

The BBC article describes the great pains taken by BuroHappold to get everything to come together, and I haven’t even touched on the complications required in designing the diagonal supporting grid of steel. The engineering firm is to be lauded. What I find ridiculous is that the building, which will have a LEED Platinum rating, is meant to focus on sustainability:

– Single-use plastic will be restricted in the building

– The restaurant within will serve “alternative proteins and cultured meats”

– Solar power will be used

– Elevators will feature regenerative drives

– Parking lot will be kept small to encourage use of public transportation

– Etc.

I say ridiculous because: How wasteful was the construction process? How sustainable is it to create 1,024 individual panels that can take days each to install, or to come up with morphous floorplans that we rectilinearly-raised humans must adjust to? How sustainable is it to design something that you’re not sure how exactly to construct? From a practical standpoint, what’s it going to take to keep this building clean?

“Rather than gadgets, we are focused on the human story of the future,” says [MOTF Executive Director Lath] Carlson. “We are looking at the big challenges that are going to be facing humanity, and the creative solutions that people might deploy to overcome them.”

Is a big challenge of the future that we don’t have enough weird-looking, ego-stroking buildings that only ultra-wealthy states can fund? I don’t doubt that there were tons of creative solutions utilized here, but they were all presumably done by the engineers, not the designers.

I know, I’m out of touch. Architecture and design blogs are going to fawn over this thing; it will be Instagrammed, Tweeted, TikTok’d and Facebooked; selfies will frame the taker’s head in the void. A psychologist would say I’m hanging on to the perfectly rational shapes of the Twin Towers because I grew up around them, and now they’re destroyed, and I’m trying to hang onto the past instead of embracing the future. Beauty is subjective, buildings are Rorschach tests. And when I look at this one, I see a building with a hole in it.

The demand for space-saving furniture has never been higher! With our cramped home and office spaces, we all need designs that are highly functional but also exceedingly compact. Designed by the German design studio Kaschkasch, the FJU desk is one such instance of a compact piece of furniture making the most of its structure. It is an extremely linear and simple wall desk, an example of a foldable workspace. It can be closed or folded up, to make use of the two tiers of storage (maybe as a magazine rack!) or as a sleek writing surface. The writing surface is spacious enough to contain your computer, laptop, iPad, books and etc. It’s ‘foldable’ quality is all thanks to an innovative hidden mechanism, owing to the genius of the designers. Crafted from oak, the FJU desk is coated with an organic finishing of muted charcoal.

The extraordinary desk was produced by Living Divani and debuted at IMM Cologne. With it’s simplistic and modular design it caught the eye of quite a few admirers, and I must admit I am one of them!

Designers: Florian Kallus & Sebastian Schneider of kaschkasch for living divani