Hasta La Ideas

David Adjaye has used pink-tinted concrete to form a “tough and gentle” store in Los Angeles for fashion retailer The Webster, which marks the British-Ghanian architect’s first project in California.

Adjaye Associates was enlisted to create the 11,000-square-foot (1,022-square-metre) flagship store for the luxury retailer at the base of the Beverly Center.

The pink-tinted concrete walls are intended to both complement and contrast the exterior of the brutalist-style building above.

The walls also form part of a series of work by Adjaye that plays with the material, such as the crimson Ruby City art centre in Texas.

“In the past five years I’ve started to work with a lot of saturated red and pink hues, which extends back to the early colour experiments I did at the beginning of my career,” said Adjaye.

“Pink felt like fashion, but I wanted to make something that was tough and gentle at the same time.”

The Webster‘s front is curved to mirror the front of the existing shop above. It is separated into two halves, with a much larger upper half that projects from underneath the shopping centre above, to create a covered entrance to the shop.

On the inside of the cantilevered wall, Adjaye has created a series of alcoves that are fitted with lights. It is designed to act as a large-scale digital screen that will showcase artworks at an “intentionally low resolution”.

Underneath, the firm has also built a shorter, curved concrete wall that wraps a moon-shaped pool of water. The wall can also be used as a bench that faces the street.

To break up the monolithic concrete mass and provide glimpses inside the store, the firm has lined the front with a long glass window.

The interiors continue the pink, stony aesthetic of the exterior with curving walls that enclose the changing rooms and concrete display plinths. A number of concrete columns punctuate the space and mark display areas for different brands and items.

The pink concrete has a smooth finish on the lower part and a rough texture above, while the terrazzo floor is covered in grey concrete with fragments of black cherry marble.

Additional materials used in contrast to the concrete, like the delicate bronze display racks and mirrors with bronze frames. The upper part of the walls in the changing rooms is covered in a floral, vintage 1950s wallpaper.

The Webster is Adjaye Associates first completed project in California.

Other US commissions for the firm, which has offices in London and New York, include Washington DC’s Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. It has also designed 61-storey skyscraper in New York which is currently under construction.

Photography is by Dror Baldinger, unless stated otherwise.

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Designer Julia Lohmann‘s Department of Seaweed is showing a pavilion made of kelp and rattan at the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, where world leaders have met this week.

Called Hidaka Ohmu, the organically shaped pavilion is formed from semi-translucent panels of a large seaweed – or macroalgae – called kelp, laid over a rattan frame.

The kelp is treated to remain flexible so that it can be stretched like leather.

It is installed against a window in the conference centre, and is designed to appears like it is growing out of it. A series of nodules protrude from its roof, with others attached further along the glass window.

The Davos pavilion draws on the sinuous Oki Naganode work that Lohmann installed at London’s V&A Museum in 2013, which was also made from seaweed panels stretched over a rattan structure.

Visitors can enter the Davos pavilion through an opening in its side, to sit on a bench inside that has views of the snowy Swiss landscape outside.

Lohmann’s pavilion aims to bring a multi-sensory experience of nature into the otherwise sterile conference building.

The colour of the kelp panels change from yellow to orange to brown, depending on the light and the time of day. It also gives off a salty scent of the sea.

The designer, who has previously designed laser-cut kelp lampshades, hopes that the structure will engage conference delegates with the issues facing the natural world, in particular the challenges of climate change.

“We need an empathic, more than human-centric way of engaging with nature,” said Lohmann.

“Every species has an equal right to life on this planet. We can use the same human ingenuity that has led to the climate crisis we are facing now – and design has a lot to answer for in this – to protect and regenerate the ecosystem that sustains us.”

The pavilion’s name comes from the particular kind of hidaka kelp that it is made from – the same sort of kelp or “konbu” used to make the Japanese cooking stock called dashi.

Ohmu comes from its resemblance to the insect-like creatures of the same name from the 1984 Japanese animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

The Department of Seaweed has also been running prototyping workshops where delegates can experience creating objects with seaweed themselves.

The aim is to make “science and our complex relationship with nature and natural resources tangible”.

Lohmann’s installation forms one part of Partnering with Nature, an exhibition at the conference curated by New York’s Cooper Hewitt museum, on the back of its Nature triennial that closed this week.

The German-born designer founded The Department of Seaweed in 2013, during her studies at London’s Royal College of Art and as designer-in-residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

She teaches in the design department at Aalto University in Finland, where she also conducts material and bio-colour research projects involving algae, as part of the institutions joint chemistry and arts programme.

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PET MINI is an Open Source, Recycled Electric Skateboard for urban transportation. With the goal to end stressful commutes while simultaneously giving you the perfect last mile recycled green vehicle.

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The incredibly popular multiplayer game Fortnite is now a regulated high school and college sport, courtesy of a partnership between Epic Games (the studio behind the game) and PlayVS, the governing body that handles registering individual schools and teams. Since the game’s release in July of 2017, it has logged 78.3 million users, raked in just under $2 billion in annual profits, and successfully attracted the coveted 12-24 age range. With professional matches and championships rivaling the Super Bowl in total viewership, potential for collegiate scholarships for the new sport, and a realization that professional gaming is a viable (and high earning) career, more and more students are being encouraged to play if they’re talented—a stark contrast to traditional efforts to dissuade playing video games. The country’s six conferences will begin their inaugural regular season on 26 February. Read more at Forbes.