Hasta La Ideas

The Air Hole is the wall-mounted air purifier that has been designed to live within even the most compact of studio apartments! Space can be limited within inner-city accommodation, but this should not restrict people from accessing clean air, especially when the air outside can be filled with toxins. The wall-mountable air purifier demands little space within the home, making it a desirable alternative to the floor standing variants we have become accustomed to. Airhole also has a rather subtle secondary feature that has been incorporated into the design to elevate its functionality even further; a digital clock has been seamlessly integrated into the face of the unit!

Designer: Lee Hyo Min

Shane Davis has overhauled an industrial building in Brooklyn‘s Gowanus area into a spot that functions as a vegan cafe by day, and a bar and restaurant, complete with a nightclub, after dark.

Located at the tip of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, Public Records is the brainchild of musician Francis Harris and Shane Davis, who was the project’s lead designer, and hospitality director Erik VanderWal.

Davis and the team renovated the historic brick building from 1912 to include three different venues: an all-day vegan eatery, an Audiofile record and cocktail bar, and a listening and performance space called The Sound Room.

“Public Records is a music driven social space,” Davis said.

The property was originally the headquarters for Brooklyn’s American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), and was later used by a church organ restoration company, a vintage guitar restoration shop and a retail space.

Much of the original structure was kept and upgraded with paint, including exposes pipes, pillars and ductwork.

“The history of the building was an inspiration,” Davis said. “The atrium is historic and was left intact,” he added.” Everything is super DIY.”

“The strategy was to leave as much of the original bones in tact while adding functional elements for sound attenuation,” Davis continued.

In the main area, where there is the bar and restaurant, is an atrium-like space with cream walls and matching concrete pillars. The slender columns support the gabled glass roof and expansive ceilings, while glass doors next to a built-in bar bring in more natural light.

A record player is tucked to a side area, and is a home for “rare record collectors” to be featured nightly. Walls and parts of the ceiling are also covered with cream sound panels to improve acoustics.

Wood chairs, plywood tables, built-in booths with pale grey cushions, plants and linoleum ledges decorate the bar and dining space. Davis found the dining chairs in London at an antique store and had them recovered in black to match the room’s speakers.

Guests are encouraged to enter Public Records’ eating area via an outdoor walkway that passes through the garden, along a brick wall.

The project also contains a smaller nook closer to its street entrance that accommodates a coffee counter, while the back of the property forms the nightclub venue.

The site is complete with a gravelled courtyard for outdoor seating.

“We knocked down the bar to garden wall and built a steel and glass support system that connects the bar to the garden, and reoriented the entryway so that guests enter through our garden navigating through three very old existing trees,” said Davis.

For the music space, called the Sound Room, interiors are dark and moody with perforated plywood panels cladding the walls for strong acoustics. The club is left bare and open for congregating and dancing.

“All gestures were made with sound immersion in mind and then how to make it beautiful in the process,” Davis said.

In contrast with the bar and restaurant area, the Sound Room is almost completely new.

British company ARUP consulted on sound engineering, which included creating wooden walls that were cut on a CNC router according to a sound model. It is “a room within a room, to achieve the most refined acoustic environment possible,” said Davis.

Other details in are a contoured ceiling, meant to diffuse sound, with lighting installed by Nitemind as well as an entry, coat check, restrooms and bar.

Custom speakers were designed and built by Devon Turnbull, founder of design studio Ojas, in collaboration with Global Audio Systems, and Isonoe built custom rotary mixers.

Davis and the team renovated the historic Brooklyn building in collaboration with the American Construction League and Space Exploration for documentation.

It forms part of a number of commercial outposts to set up shop in Brooklyn’s industrial Gowanus neighbourhood in the past few years. Another spot nearby is Gowanus Inn by Savvy Studio, as well as the office of local architecture studio PRO led by Mirriam Peterson and Nathan Rich.

Photography is by Cody Guilfoyle.

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Designer Daan Roosegaarde is the latest creative to collaborate with Carlo Ratti‘s Scribit project, creating a robot-drawn illustration based on his ongoing research into space waste.

Launched via a kickstarter campaign in 2018, Scribit is a small robot that draws erasable images on vertical surfaces in marker pens, effectively turning any wall into an automated whiteboard.

Designers Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) wanted Scribit to not only be a source of constantly updating artworks but also data, news, and information on social and environmental causes.

Roosegarde’s collaboration with the company represents a combination of the two. It is an exclusive, original illustration from Studio Roosegaarde about space waste — a problem that the Dutch designer terms “the smog of our universe”.

Titled What Connects Us?, it shows the globe with the known orbits of space junk superimposed on top.

There are an estimated 8.1 million kilograms of space waste circling the earth, where it poses a danger to spacecraft.

According to Roosegaarde, who has been exploring the issue through his Space Waste Lab design project, this junk — mainly old satellites, spent rocket stages and associated fragments — could be salvaged and upcycled into something useful.

“We need to look at space in a more effective way,” said Roosegaarde. “What is space waste? How can we fix it? What is its potential?”

Some of the ideas to come out of the Space Waste Lab, which included NASA and the European Space Agency among its collaborators, were to make the waste into shooting stars, use it to 3D-print moon habitats or assemble it into a gigantic sun reflector to reduce climate change.

Roosegaarde’s goal in collaborating with Scribit is to raise awareness about the issue at a time when human pollution is mainly thought of in terms of land, sea and air.

The little robot is pitched at both home and office environments as an alternative to an artwork hung on a blank wall or as a low-refresh screen.

“With Scribit, we aim to bring the Space Waste Lab’s mission into people’s homes, allowing them to view it and wonder,” said Roosegaarde.

The illustration is the third in a series of exclusive artworks made for Scribit Originals, the robot maker’s art streaming platform.

The series launched earlier this year with a work produced by artist Olafur Eliasson and his social enterprise Little Sun.

Scribit users can access the artworks alongside hundreds of others in the product’s app, or they can create their own work.

The robot can be set up by stringing it up between two nails and loading it with four marker pens.

Scribit was invented at CRA, the design and innovation office of Italian architect and MIT professor Carlo Ratti, and launched by its own spin-off company.

Its crowdfunding mission in 2018 was hugely successful, raising over US$2.4 million across Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

The company plans to exhibit its full Scribit Originals series at Milan design week in April 2020.

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Avec sa dernière série photo, le photographe français Ludwig Fabre nous fait voyager dans le célèbre parc Universal Studio, en plein coeur de la Californie. A travers des attractions diverses et variées, le parc mets en scène les personnages et films les plus populaires produits par le studio. C’est sans doute les couleurs vives et acidulés des installations qui ont conduit l’artiste à réaliser la série  » California Amusement Parks « . Particulièrement sensible à l’architecture et la composition, il livre ici une vision presque surréaliste du parc au ciel turquoise.

Salmon-coloured surfaces, curved furnishings and a cooking-themed wall mural appear inside high-end restaurant Hélène Darroze at The Connaught, which has been recently refreshed by Pierre Yovanovitch.

The restaurant is located in London’s Mayfair neighbourhood, set within luxury hotel The Connaught.

To mark its 10-year anniversary, French designer Pierre Yovanovitch was tasked with overhauling the dining space to more acutely reflect the “refined yet comforting” style of chef Hélène Darroze’s cooking.

“There was freedom in this project in that our main focus was to create an ambience that supported the strength of Hélène’s Michelin-starred menu,” Yovanovitch told Dezeen.

“It was different to designing a private residence in that we weren’t designing to fit someone’s everyday lifestyle, but instead were quite focused on the dining experience of The Connaught’s customers.”

Keen to strike a balance between “tradition and newfound contemporary soul”, Yovanovitch refrained from making any significant alterations to the restaurant’s architectural shell.

Instead, the existing dark-wood wall panelling has simply been stripped back to a lighter hue. A butterfly-print panel by British artist Damien Hirst that was mounted in the dining room before the redesign has also been left in place.

Surrounding surfaces like the ceiling, window frames and ornate cornicing have been painted a complementary shade of salmon-pink, an attempt by the designer to represent chef Darroze’s “femininity and light spirit”.

Splashes of red are provided by a handful of velvet cushions and a tasselled rug.

Yovanovitch worked with a series of craftsmen to custom-make all of the restaurant’s furnishings.

Oak dining tables are surrounded by curved, sand-coloured leather sofas and egg yolk-yellow armchairs. Plaster side tables and cast-glass wall sconces supported by thin brass stems have also been dotted throughout.

“We found many parallels in our process with working with skilled artisans to create custom furniture and lighting as compared to Hélène’s focus on working with only the most high-quality farmers, customizing her menu according to what these purveyors are able to source seasonally,” Yovanovitch explained.

There will also be the option to dine at the “chef’s table”. It lies just a few metres away from the kitchen pass – a long counter where chefs plate each dish – allowing diners to get an up-close insight into the culinary craftsmanship behind the menu.

The table is crafted from peachy travertine marble, while the floor underneath has been overlaid with grey terrazzo tiles. On the deep-blue ceiling above is an illustration by French artist Rochegaussen.

Titled The Utensils of Heaven, the piece features various white-ink depictions of cooking instruments like whisks, pots, colanders and cheese graters.

The overhaul also saw Yovanovitch create a new tasting room that will be exclusively dedicated to Armagnac – an oak-aged brandy made in southwest France’s Armagnac region.

Having earned two Michelin stars over the course of her career, chef Hélène Darroze is one of the 17 female role models that Barbie chose to immortalise in doll-form for International Women’s Day 2018.

Other figures included Australian conservationist Bindi Irwin, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and Olympic athlete Ibtihaj Muhammad.

Darroze’s self-titled restaurant at The Connaught isn’t the only project where Pierre Yovanovitch has applied a bold use of colour – earlier this year the designer updated the gift shop of art centre Villa Noailles by painting its walls pastel pink, yellow and cobalt-blue.

Photography is by Jérôme Galland.

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