Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen promotion: Berlin-based studio Läufer & Keichel has created a solid wood table for furniture manufacturer Zeitraum that features undulating legs designed to look like curtain drapes.

Designed to seemingly “defy gravity”, the Curtain table features two thin legs with soft curves that have been crafted from solid wood, which support a large solid wood table top.

The two legs are made up of single solid blocks of wood that have been carved to create an undulating effect, similar to the ribbon-like form of curtains.

Designers Julia Läufer and Marcus Keichel created the legs using the latest computer numerical control (CNC) technology, which uses a machine to process a piece of material according to specifications pre-set via a digital coded program.

Following the CNC cutting, the wavy forms are then sanded by hand and oiled to emphasise their “flowing movement”.

“The Curtain table resembles a fleeting snapshot of a moment in time: static in contrast to an organically flowing movement,” said Läufer and Keichel.

“Just like a sculpture, Curtain toys with our perception – the symbolism of the wave increases all the more as the material qualities of the solid wood fade into the background,” they continued.

“This harmonic symbiosis of form and material comes as a surprise, but also allows us to see the entire table as a self-restrained composition – rhythmically, the ‘curtains’ create an atmosphere of floating serenity and inner calm,” the duo added.

Manufactured by German wood-furniture brand Zeitraum, the Curtain table is available with a rectangular table top or a semicircular table top.

It can be made in either ash, walnut or oak wood up to four metres long while still boasting a continuous wood grain.

Refraining from the use of any chemically treated wood, Zeitraum’s furniture pieces are each protected with a coat of natural oil, which is applied to smoothly sanded surfaces to create a “silken” effect.

The applied oil penetrates the wood to a minimum depth of two millimetres, naturally preserving the surfaces and allowing the wood to breathe, absorb and release humidity, which cannot be achieved by polished and sealed surfaces.

More information on the Curtain table can be found on the Zeitraum website.

Photography is by Nava Rapacchietta.

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In collaboration with PechaKucha, Virtual Design Festival is broadcasting a live programme of talks from 3:00am UK time featuring speakers in Wuhan, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Orlando and Tokyo.

The live stream will feature contributions from a host of speakers including designer Yves Behar, former Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, and Mark Dytham, co-founder of PechaKucha and Tokyo firm Klein Dytham Architecture.

Also appearing are visual artist Shantell Martin, branding expert Matt Beispiel, environmental researcher Azby Brown, life and performance coach Eddie Selover, architect Peter Exley, and former PechaKucha intern Danna Wang, who is currently in Wuhan, China, having been quarantined in the coronavirus-stricken city after visiting family for Chinese New Year.

Deriving its name from the Japanese term for ‘chit chat’, PechaKucha is a presentation format devised and popularised by Dytham and Klein, and consists of a series of presentations where each participant shows 20 images and is given 20 seconds to speak about each.

The concept was originally created to prevent guest speakers from speaking for too long at architecture events.

The broadcast is part of PechaKucha’s Inspire The World series of webcasts, which will gather speakers from around the world to deliver presentations demonstrating creativity and ingenuity during the coronavirus pandemic.

PechaKucha’s creators Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham will also be appearing in a live interview with Dezeen’s founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs at 2:00pm UK time as part of our new Screentime series, in which we stream live and as-live video discussions with designers, architects and creatives around the world as part of Virtual Design Festival.

Virtual Design Festival is the world’s first online design festival, taking place from 15 April to 30 June. The festival launched yesterday with a film comprised of messages from designers around the world, as well as a live interview with trend forecaster Li Edelkoort. For more information, or to be added to the mailing list, contact us at virtualdesignfestival@dezeen.com.

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The latest collaboration spotlights some talented role models

Featuring sneakers and apparel for kids and adults of all genders, the latest adidas Originals + Girls Are Awesome capsule collection is a celebration of the women-centric media platform and its dedication to representation. Through events, partnerships and storytelling, Girls Are Awesome (helmed by CEO Pia Hagen and brand director Søs Bondo) hopes to increase visibility and bolster voices of women and girls—with the belief that doing so will lead to a more equitable society.

The collection—which includes two takes on the iconic Superstar sneaker (the Superstar Up and Superstar 360) as well as pastel overalls, coach jackets and T-shirts—is accompanied by a campaign highlighting talented role models that Girls Are Awesome admires: freestyle footballer Maymi Asgari, wheelchair basketball player Nagwa Brown, skateboarder/photographer Laura Kaczmarek, artist Simone Klimmeck, musician Kinck, rappers and music coaches Silhouette and Q.Marzi, singer Melissa Inya and actor May Simon.

Bondo tells us, “We always work with role models. For the shoot we wanted to gather a group of role models from within the four areas both brands work within: music, sport, art and culture. We selected a group of amazing people from our extended family who we feel encapsulate the vibe of what we stand for, at the same time standing strongly on their own as they’re all such great characters, good people, and all of them are so talented. These are our friends and they inspire us every day.”

While the platform also has their own small collection of apparel, Bondo says designing with adidas was an entirely different endeavor. “It was a first for us!” she says. “We had sessions with the adidas Original design team and co-created the line together. We started with a full range of colors and tried so many directions. We knew we wanted it to be bright, positive, playful and a bit street-y with bold details like the iridescent and bright orange. But to be honest, it took a minute to find the right colorways. We are so happy about the end result, it’s definitely as energetic, playful and bold as we wanted.” Many items employ pops of orange and purple—a color commonly associated with feminism and the celebration of women.

The ongoing partnership with adidas (which began in 2017) has drawn a lot more attention to Girls Are Awesome, and Bondo says the support has been immense. “We have been able to realize a lot of projects, elevate more role models and expand our network in Europe. One project we did was help the amazing Simone Klimmeck elevate her career as a tattoo artist by arranging for her to meet and work with her own role model, Grace Neutral. We also helped her open her own studio. Now that we have taken the partnership global we have started on different projects from LA to Berlin and we hope to do more in the future. Besides the projects we do together with local role models and communities it is also a fact that the collab collection will give us a whole lot of exposure. A week from now people all over the world will be supporting our statement and vision, starting conversations about representation and gaining the movement and community of Girls Are Awesome, all by wearing the clothes and shoes.”

Officially available 22 April, the collection will be online at adidas and Girls Are Awesome.

Images courtesy of adidas Originals

Architecture firm Bryanoji Design Studio has wrapped aluminium shingles around this angular house in a Massachusetts woodland.

Mill-finished aluminium shingles cover the exterior and roof to pick up on the hues and patterns of its surroundings in Princeton, Massachusetts.

“The house becomes one with the landscape, reflecting continuous gradation of surrounding colours, adding a sophisticated poetry to a simple life in the woods,” Bryanoji Design Studio said.

The cladding is made from 90 per cent recycled material and is combined with insulation and Energy Recovering Ventilation (ERV) to help reduce the house’s energy use, according to the firm.

Called Project Merri, the property is formed by two conjoining gabled volumes. One portion houses the social spaces in a large open room, while the other side is partitioned into bedrooms and bathrooms.

Inside, the house is decorated with simple materials such as plywood and oriented strand board cover the floors, walls, ceilings and rafters.

“This rather stoic approach, in return, expanded client’s freedom for space occupancy, an essential criterion for every single family home,” the studio added.

Repurposed items form decorative elements and furniture throughout the house.

In the kitchen, the cabinets are constructed using plywood sheets from old construction scaffolding. Recycled bleacher seats have been converted into light fixtures that span across the length of the open kitchen.

On the exterior, a series of 100-year-old marble steps were recycled from the State Capitol building of Rhode Island and refurbished materials taken from a local recycling centre form a swing bed on the porch.

Other details that furnish the house are a wooden ladder attached to a sliding track that provides access to a loft area inside one of the peaks, black and white mural of men working and wood stove with a tall black chimney pipe.

Bryanoji Design Studio is led by design director Takako Oji and has its office in Princeton, Massachusetts.

Other houses designed for rural Massachusetts sites are an elongated wood volume stretched over a hillside by O’Neill Rose Architects and a small cabin in a forest with a metal roof envisioned by WOJR.

Photography is by Ed Wonsek and Takako Oji.

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Though still in development trials, the new “Dormio” device invented by MIT researchers shows potential for aiding lucid dreaming—or more specifically, hypnagogic microdreams. Using the “steel ball technique” (popularized a century ago and used by Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison) as a starting point, the team built a biometric glove-like device that identifies the onset of sleep, and subsequently attempts influencing oncoming dreams based on preset parameters. When the wearer enters hypnagogia—”a semi-lucid sleep state where we all begin dreaming before we fall fully unconscious”—prerecorded auditory stimuli trigger responses, essentially testing the capacity for retaining information we find in dreams after we wake. Read more at Business Insider.