Hasta La Ideas

With our hectic, fast-paced lives wherein we barely get a moment to breathe, paying attention to our well being has never been more critical. Benjamin Hubert’s Layer and Panasonic have decided to lend us a helping hand with this! Their recent collaboration led to the creation of ‘Balance of Being’, a collection of six near-future design concepts that were presented at IFA 2019. The collection has one and only one aim: to promote our wellbeing and help us feel better with products that can be used at home! It explores “how we can have meaningful engagements with products and how we take care of ourselves.” The products consist of a smart cooking appliance, a skin analyzing device combined with a smoothie maker, a smart head massager, an LED light treatment for hair and two more smart skincare devices (yes, skincare is high up on their list of concerns).

“Balance of Being aims to close this gap between technology and our lifestyles, focusing more on human interaction, comfort, enhancing our lifestyles, and providing truly meaningful experiences with technology allowing us to bond with one another instead of our devices,” added Rowan Williams, creative lead from Panasonic Design’s London team. And I must say, their products do seem to be a reflection of that.

The Grow device uses advanced LED light treatment to promote hair growth. Grow understand’s every individual’s hair condition and structure to identify the appropriate treatment for our hair and it’s follicles!

Lift is a smart cooking and food maturing appliance which uses advanced heat and pressure technology, along with a sensor positioned within the device to ‘lift’ the food to its optimal nutritional state or in other words to retain all the much-needed nutrients! The device was created with an intention to encourage all members of the family, including younger generations to participate in cooking and healthier eating.

The Shot is the device I find the most interesting! It’s a two in one skincare device and smoothie maker! The Shot uses a camera placed at the front of the device and AI to analyze our skin. After receiving the results, Shot creates a smoothie specially curated for our skin type and it’s unique needs using a concoction of frozen fruits and vegetables. The smoothie is jampacked with vitamins and minerals to enhance your health, giving you the perfect radiant skin you have always wanted by addressing your health concerns from the inside.

Tone is a skincare device that will sit comfortably on our necks while using LED and steam treatment to improve our complexion and health of our skin. It uses AI to examine our skin, and devices a personalized self-care regime, so our skin has the glow it truly deserves!

Need a stress-relieving head massage? Well, that’s exactly what Wave is here for. Wave is a smart massaging device that can be used to relieve stress anywhere at any time (yes, even at work)! The portable massager maps and evaluates the level of tension and then determines the length of time, method and intensity of the treatment.

Layer and Panasonic have added another handy skincare device, but one that works when we’re asleep! It understands the needs of skin even in our sleeping state, to provide us with a lighting and steam treatment that enhances our skin. Asleep or awake, it seems like the Balance of Being has got all our needs covered!

“We are curious about how we engage with products and the knowledge that they can build of us and our families,” said Panasonic Design’s creative director, Takehiro Ikeda. And it seems like their curiosity has lead to a series of products that provide assistance in almost every aspect of our personal health and well being. We don’t know when these products will be available to the public, but here’s hoping it’s sometime soon because we all need some self-pampering and as for me well I need it ASAP!

Intervention Architecture has refurbished and extended a semi-detached house in the Birmingham suburb of Moseley, adding a garden room clad with cedar battens.

Designed for an illustrator – giving the home its name of Illustrator’s Botanical House – the living spaces have been opened up as much as possible.

Light enters from the north-east facing garden and the additional room has a stronger collection with the greenery outside.

At the rear of the home, a large living, kitchen and dining space fills the entire width of the site, leading into the protruding extension with a sliding door.

Above, the more private first floor houses a bedroom and bathroom spaces, accessed via a staircase at the centre of the home.

The expanded living areas all spill out onto a paved limestone patio through a large openable bay window and an adjacent set of doors.

The original timber frames of these were replaced with black, Crittall-style aluminium frames, bringing a slightly industrial feel to the home’s lower level.

White formica plywood, concrete worktops and natural wood finishes are used throughout the living, kitchen and dining area, creating a contrast with the slightly rougher garden room which is accented by a bold green band around the lower half of the walls.

“Within the garden room, to further emphasise the inside/outside space, we used reclaimed honed terracotta hexagon tiles to add warmth and a rough texture within the interstitial area of the house preceding the limestone paving slabs,” explained the practice.

“We set out a bright luscious green to half-line the wall in this space, to create a continuation of the kitchen’s line of green gloss tiles for the splashback.”

This use of green highlights continues into the main bathroom, which has aquamarine tiles.

Black light fittings in the bathroom echo the black window frames.

A short hallway leads from the front of the house into these new, open spaces, where the interior flooring materials were chosen to provide a sense of continuity.

“For the flooring, we proposed a contemporary longer format of herringbone oak boards for the main space, to tie in with the smaller existing herringbone blocks found in the house hallway,” explained the practice.

Intervention Architecture was founded in Birmingham by Anna Parker in 2015.

The practice has completed several residential schemes in the city, including a colonnade-like house extension and the conversion of a coach house into a home and writer’s studio.

Photography is by Handover Agency.

Project credits:

Architect and interior designer: Intervention Architecture
Structural engineer: Hydrock
Contractor: Wow Developments

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Architecture firm Dialog has built a wooden pedestrian bridge, glass elevator and a tiny railway into a sloping terrain in Canada to lead from downtown Edmonton to the North Saskatchewan River Valley.

The Mechanized River Valley Access project by Dialog provides accessible entry to the network of trails and nature of the North Saskatchewan River Valley, the largest urban park in North America. Downtown Edmonton is cut off from the 18,000 acres of protected land because of an incline and busy highway.

“The large elevation difference and steep slopes of the river valley are part of its great beauty, but also makes access difficult for users with mobility challenges,” Dialog said.

Thanks to the small railcar, known as a funicular, and a glass elevator any visitor, regardless of mobility, can enjoy the scenery. In just five minutes, on foot, or three minutes if using the mechanics, visitors can go “from the vibrant urban core to nature and the river valley”.

To limit the ecological impact the Dialog closely monitored the environment during construction and used materials that matched the existing infrastructure of the river valley system.

This included rot-resistant Kebony wood, which will reduce the need for constant maintenance. Additionally the glass clad funicular cabins and elevator shaft are designed to minimise the structure’s visual impact on the surrounding landscape.

A challenge of the project was finding an orientation that would engage with the surroundings, but not disrupt the existing topography.

“The final orientation takes pedestrians on a safe, immersive journey along the river bank with plenty of opportunities to take in the views and linger along the way,” Dialog said.

Mechanized River Valley Access is divided into six sections, with the first a promontory that rests on top of the incline. The space is occupied by a large staircase, lined with galvanised steel railings, that takes visitors down into the river valley, a free funicular ride for less mobile guests and a large plaza that overlooks the terrain below.

Those in wheelchairs, cyclists, parents with strollers are all able to pass over the slope to the promenade below inside a glass cube attached to a track. The inclined elevator is powered by motor when travelling downhill and uses a winch connected to a cable to pull the cabins uphill.

Parallel to the funicular is a series of steps made with wood and stone. A broadwalk made from Kebony wood greets visitors when they disembark the funicular and staircase.

“The changes in grade do not allow the funicular to connect directly to the valley floor,” the architects added. “The design solution combines the funicular on a 23.5 degree incline to the middle of the bank.”

The next leg of the journey is a pedestrian bridge constructed using a pre-cast deck system that was installed onsite. It is raised above the highway which runs below and is lined with benches and rest areas.

At the river’s edge a 19 metre (62.3 foot,) cantilever extends outward to form a lookout deck that grants “an immersive, panoramic vantage point in the river valley”.

Visitors descend to the ground either by glass elevator or a staircase where they are met by another plaza with space for bike parking, several benches and more views of the landscape.

Dialog has offices in Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Calgary and San Francisco. The studio’s other projects include the New Central Library for Calgary completed with Snøhetta and office space for Telum, a collaboration with BIG.

Mechanized River Valley Access follows a series of public works projects in Edmonton, which is the capital city of Canada’s Alberta province such as a naturally filtering swimming pool and drum-like pavilion that Canadian firm GH3 has built inside Borden Park.

Photography is by Dialog.

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Background: O.school launched in 2017 and is focused on providing answers to questions surrounding sexuality and sexual health. “Our goal is to answer them without making the reader feel silly, judged, or shamed,” says Gina Vaynshteyn VP, content strategy. “We provide people with a community and space to learn about themselves and their desires, unabashedly–and…

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While conducting unrelated research for her dissertation, architectural historian and design writer Esther Choi stumbled across an elaborate, illustrated menu developed by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy for a dinner honoring Walter Gropius in 1937. The serendipitous find inspired Choi to start creating her own recipes inspired by artists and designers. Those dishes set off a series of dinner parties at Choi’s home, during which she surprised guests with plates like “Florence Knoll Rolls”, “Frei Otto Frittata”, “Superstewdio”, and “Rem Brûlée”. The playful recipes she developed over the years have been gathered in a gorgeous cookbook titled Le Corbuffet, published October 1st by Prestel.

“I hosted the first in a series of ‘Le Corbuffets’ in my Brooklyn apartment, a project which carried on until 2017. Offering meals to an assortment of guests, these social gatherings revolved around the consumption of absurd, pun-inspired dishes that referred to canonical artists and designers,” Choi explains on her website. “As a commentary on the status of art, food, and design as commodities to be ‘gobbled up’ by the market, the project deliberately twisted idioms to explore the notion of ‘aesthetic consumption’ through taste and perception.”

Some of the recipes are inspired by biographical details or aim to translate the qualities of an artist or designer’s work through the medium of food. In developing the “Richard Serradura”, for example, Choi wanted to riff on artist Richard Serra’s use of industrial materials and manufacturing processes by creating a dish made only of mass-produced ingredients. The Flan Flavin, on the other hand, nods to the artist Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light works with a lime-colored custard.

The recipes are paired with stylized, deconstructed images that don’t necessarily reflect how your finished dish will turn. If they seem overwrought, don’t be dismayed. The recipes themselves are surprisingly traditional and written to be both accessible and delicious, using easy-to-find and economical ingredients. In fact, if the pun-inspired names didn’t already tip you off, the book repeatedly pokes fun at the exclusivity of highbrow culture.

“The Gropius menu represented a culinary experience for the cultural elite that mirrored the precious inaccessibility of the cultural commodities that have come to characterize the art/design canon,” Choi elaborated in a recent interview. “The book’s recipes attempt to unpack this relationship by privileging resourcefulness over resources and trying to encourage creative production using a limited economy of means.”

This image pairs with Choi’s recipe for Fischli and Weisscream and loosely evokes the duo’s famous film, The Way Things Go.

Ultimately, the cookbook aims to suggest “there is something crucial in the idea that anyone can make anything—especially experiences meant for sharing—using ordinary things.”