Hasta La Ideas

Herzog & de Meuron has unveiled its proposal for a linear museum complex in Hangzhou that will sit beside China’s Grand Canal and celebrate the history of the artificial river.

It is the winning entry in a design competition for the Grand Canal Museum Complex, and will be built at the junction of the Hanggang River and south end of the Grand Canal – the longest and oldest artificial river in the world that runs over 1,000 miles between Beijing and Hangzhou.

Once complete, the museum will be distinguished by its long, linear form and a rippling glass facade that is designed by Herzog & de Meuron to resemble water.

“Our proposal aims to reflect the Grand Canal’s importance in Chinese cultural and natural landscapes, and to create a vibrant, contemporary gathering place at the Grand Canal,” explained the Swiss architecture studio.

“Inspired by the Grand Canal itself, our proposal starts with a significant line. This bold line, recalling an elegant Chinese brush stroke, houses the museum telling the story of the Grand Canal,” it continued.

“The water and the museum face each other, creating a visual and material dialogue between the subject and its narrator. The museum is reflected in the water and the water in the museum’s facade.”

Surrounded by water on three sides, the Grand Canal Museum Complex will contain 50,000-square-metres of exhibition spaces split over two levels. It is designed so that each floor can operate independently.

The galleries will be raised 12 metres above ground and wrapped by an “elegantly curved” facade, composed of concave cast glass elements that are intended to evoke rippling water.

Below the elevated galleries, the site will be transformed into a series of accessible meeting places and public event spaces.

These facilities will all be enclosed in “veil-like glass” walls, and Herzog & de Meuron hopes their position at the base of the complex will help to attract people to the site.

“Large public functions such as a grand ballroom and a banquet room are strategically located under the elevated museum, within a veil-like glass facade, and serve as magnets for activities as well as facilitate access for crowd-drawing events,” explained the studio.

Disrupting the linear form of the museum, the proposal is topped with a vertical cone-shape structure enveloped by a staggered facade.

This structure, described by the studio as a “mountain”, will puncture each storey of the Grand Canal Museum to connect them – forming a “vertical city in which different functions complement one another to form a synergistic whole”.

The Grand Canal Museum Complex will be complete with a series of restaurants, hotel and a terrace at roof level. The terrace will feature landscaping that will incorporate a rainwater management system.

Outside, the project will also introduce a tree covered promenade and a large urban plaza to the site that will feature various plants and flowers found throughout China.

For over 2500 years, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal has assisted with China’s agricultural, economic and cultural development. In 2014 it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Herzog & de Meuron hopes the Grand Canal Museum Complex’s appeal “will not only be in the cultural program it offers”, but also in the panoramic views it will provide of the water system.

Founded by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in 1978, Pritzker Prize-winning Herzog & de Meuron is a Swiss architecture studio known for numerous projects around the world including the Birds Nest Stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, and the Tate Modern extension in London.

Other recent projects by the practice include the Museum of the 20th Century in Berlin and two “horizontal skyscrapers” in Moscow.

Visuals courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron.

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The creative industries can feel bewildering for newcomers, who rely on the wisdom of more experienced practitioners to find their way. Here we explore how to support creatives who are just starting out, from giving constructive criticism to helping people refine their ideas

The post How to nurture new talent appeared first on Creative Review.

The Reversible Lid Ice Box combines an ice tray and an icebox to create one handy kitchen accessory that’s perfect for all your parties! Designed by DesignWright, the twin-wall icebox features a flip-over lid lined with bubble-inspired geometry. Showcasing 33 hexagons, you can fill up the lid with water, and put it aside to freeze. The geometric ice cubes that are formed can be easily transferred into the icebox, by simply pressing the lid, and ejecting the cubes into the box. The box can hold up to 130 pieces of ice. You can then shut the box using the lid, or fill up the lid with water again to freeze some more cubes!

The Reversible Lid Ice Box allows you to freeze and store ice cubes at the same time! So you’ll never run out of ice. And you can now cast aside your boring old ice trays, and instead, use this super cute accessory. It’s white/black ABS and silicone structure, plus its decorative lid give it a very bubble-like and minimal aesthetic! The Reversible Lid Ice Box is perfect for your next cocktail party.

Designer: DesignWright

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A curved corridor with full-height doors slices through Hiha Studio‘s renovation of this ground floor home near Barcelona.

Local architects Hiha Studio renovated the space, which previously had no outdoor space and suffered from a lack of light and ventilation, for the house’s owners.

Built in 1925 and refurbished into a two-bedroom home in the 1960s, the long and narrow 80-square-metre dwelling is sandwiched between two other buildings on a residential street in the municipality of Montcada i Reixac, just to the north of Barcelona.

The neighbourhood is made up of similar single-storey houses built in the first quarter of the 20th century. Typically, the ground floor houses are built on rectangular plots measuring four to five metres in width and 10 to 15 metres in length with a patio at the back of the house.

In keeping with the local housing typology, the renovated apartment’s facade is defined by three narrow rectangular apertures – two windows and a door. The simple windows are partly covered by a grid of decorative terracotta bricks.

The hollow bricks, which are typical of the area and can be seen on the neighbouring buildings, provide a degree of privacy and shade within the apartment. The grid pattern is echoed across the apartment’s dark grey door.

Inside, a long curved corridor guides guests from the entrance through to an open-plan kitchen and living area that looks out onto a rear patio.

The apartment’s other rooms are distributed along the curved corridor with a bedroom at the front of the apartment followed by an office and a bathroom in the centre. A small patio in the centre of the apartment provides natural light into the bathroom and office.

The rooms all have a slightly lower ceiling than the corridor, a design feature that is intended to highlight the curve and the transition from the open corridor to these more private and intimate spaces. These rooms are accessed through tall doors that skim the lowered ceiling.

Hiha Studio explained that when opened, the doors’ large, frameless design makes the space appear larger and more seamless, as if it were “a continuous space”.

Where the curved wall stops and the corridor opens out into the living area, the curve of the wall is continued as a lowered ceiling that cuts diagonally across the room.

The curved wall along the corridor and all of the walls below the lowered curved ceiling in the living area are painted light grey, which the architects said was done in an attempt “to prolong the continuity and the weight of the curve”.

The architecture studio said that this curved form is designed to break up the “linear and monotonous” layout which is typical of this type of dwelling. They said it also creates “an optimal light situation”, allowing daylight to filter along the corridor from the patio.

“Usually all the projects [in this housing typology] resolve this issue with a long corridor and we didn’t want it, we wanted to avoid the linear visuals,” said Bernat Ardèvol, who runs the Hiha Studio alongside architects Jona Oliva and Genís Plassa.

“We thought in the movement and sensation that everyone have when gets into Richard Serra work’s. And also this never ending internal corridors of the Colosseum.”

Tthe architects chose to use terracotta-coloured porcelain tiles to create a dialogue between the inside and outside of the building.

These ceramic elements are designed to sit in contrast to the apartment’s white walls and neutral carpentry and furniture. In the kitchen, a Corinto stone is used as a backsplash.

The architects installed a series of simple tubular LED wall lights called Linestra lights that were commonly used in the 1970s and 1980s in Catalonia.

“We usually use the same light in our projects,” Ardèvol explained. “We like it because it is elegant and goes unnoticed. We usually use it as a position light, just to have the minimum light to recognise the space/room. We don’t like to impose the lighting, we prefer that the client can decide what light and lamps they wants as a secondary lighting.”

Earlier this year, the Barcelona-based studio removed floors and inserted lofty voids to create a light-filled family home in a northeastern Spanish village.

Photography is by Pol Viladoms.

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Design student Lorenzo Spreafico has invented a prosthetic arm that could bring tactile feedback to people who can’t currently afford it.

Spreafico designed the T1 prosthesis as his final year project in the Product Design bachelors at the University of Leeds in the UK.

The 3D-printed plastic arm incorporates vibro-tactile feedback, relaying information about how firmly a person is gripping or touching an object via vibrations to their skin.

Spreafico was motivated to design the product after noticing that little progress had been made in bringing the experience of touch to prostheses.

“I realised there was a huge gap in prosthetics development: although we are making extremely advanced technology to simulate human movement and dexterity, there is much less work being done when it comes to simulating human touch,” he told Dezeen.

The touch-based technologies he observed were either nonviable for commercial use or were destined to be prohibitively expensive.

“Even when this technology will decrease in price and be more affordable for users, it’s still very likely to be part of a final product which costs from £30,000 to £100,000, if not more (which are the current prices of most prosthetic limbs),” he continued.

“That’s when I got the idea for T1: I wanted to realise a functional prosthetic arm, develop a simple tactile feedback system to be implemented into it, and make the whole product extremely affordable.”

The estimated retail price for the T1 is £3,000, which Spreafico said would make it one of the most affordable myoelectric prosthetic arms available.

He chose to focus on pressure simulation in order to keep the device low-cost. In reality, he said, the somatosensory system is incredibly complex and can detect changes in temperature, shear, humidity, texture and more, and trying to replicate all of these dimensions would soon lead to a much more expensive device.

The T1 is relatively simple. Pressure sensors on the fingertips connect to vibrating disc motors in the wearer’s stump to alert them to the level of force they’re applying to an object.

The user can regulate the level of vibration they experience via a knob, or turn the feature off completely if they’re in a situation where they want to avoid constant buzzing. They can select from three grip modes – open hand, pinch grip or precision grip.

And because the brain is so plastic, it soon learns to interpret the vibration adeptly, especially because Spreafico honed the prototype to make sure the pressure sensing and feedback are perfectly in sync.

Although the design student only had time for limited user testing of the final prototype within the scope of his university project, he met with initially positive reactions and hopes to continue to develop T1.

He believes that the inclusion of even this basic level of tactile feedback could be transformative for lower-arm amputees.

“The lack of tactile feedback in prosthetic arms creates an extremely unrealistic user experience,” he said. “It reduces accuracy in the control of movement and grip, making it harder for users to perform delicate actions with precision, and making it harder to adapt their grip strength to different activities.”

“Moreover, its lack reduces proprioception (the sense of self-movement and body position), and lowers the feeling of embodiment of the prosthetic arm. All of these aspects are the reasons why the lack of tactile feedback is one of the main factors that make rejection rates of upper limb prosthetic arms so high.”

Another factor keeping the cost of T1 low is manufacture. Spreafico designed the arm as one single component so it comes out of the 3D printer fully assembled.

Spreafico is now studying for his Masters in the Innovation Design Engineering programme at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London.

Another recent student-designed prosthetic device came from Desiree Riny, whose ultra-low-cost DIY system is intended for people who live without access to professional care.

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