Israeli designer Sari Shani Hay has designed wooden built-in furniture to promote collaboration, play and rest in an elementary school in Tel Aviv.

The local designer created the interiors for a public school near the city’s Sarona neighbourhood that caters to children with disabilities and learning difficulties.

Hay said her aim was to celebrate the diversity of the student body, encourage interaction and different types of learning. She nicknamed the project The First Inclusive School.

“The goal was to translate the philosophy of inclusive education into a physical environment that promotes joyful experiential learning,” Hay said.

“This designed space inspires kids to be engaged in multiple ways while enhancing a feeling of belonging and empathy,” she added.

The 2,000-square-metre school building was built by L2 Tsionov Vitkon Architects. The local architecture studio worked in collaboration with Inclu Foundation, an Israeli non-profit that promotes personalised education and differentiating teaching methods.

Hay designed the interiors of two of the floors of six-storey school, officially called Bikurum.

Her designs include pale wooden volumes that serve as activity stations to promote learning. Other built-ins provide seating, cabinetry, desks and nooks.

Shades of green and blue are used to break up the white walls and grey floors. “The calm colours and natural wooden materials were used to avoid emotional overload,” Hay added.

The designer worked with a team of teachers and experts in disabilities to develop different aspects of the design. They include two, movable U-shaped benches that can be combined to form a circle in one classroom. The design is able to accommodate students in wheelchairs.

“The concept of a group circle was used to create a circular seating bench split into two halves, allowing for different seating arrangements wherever possible for any child wanting to join in, for example, a child in a wheelchair,” said Sarit Shani Hay Studio.

Other features include a wall design in the outline of a home that encloses a play kitchen. Geometric nooks in the walls offer personal areas for relaxing and reading.

Another classroom has a tall abacus with cubes on rods that spin. Letters and shapes are engraved on the sides to help children learn Braille and Sign language.

“This project gave us the opportunity to explore in-depth what happens when design meets pedagogy and how can we use design as a tool for social change – as a tool for promoting inclusion, and enhancing all children’s well being,” said Hay.

At the entry is a staircase with triangular nook underneath and two, smaller crannies. A stadium-like structure nearby is outfitted with cushions for climbing and sitting on.

The elementary school is complete with a yoga and meditation space and a room for physical therapy.

Hay, who launched her eponymous design studio in Tel Aviv in 1995, specialises in children’s furniture and designs. Her other projects include a colourful school in Tel Aviv for the children of refugees.

Other schools are Brooklyn’s Maple Street School, a preschool in Boston with colourful walls, one in China with a giant slide and a Spanish kindergarten made from prefabricated panels.

Photography is by Roni Cnaani.

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The folks over at Vanmonster.com wanted in on the “draw famous logos from memory” thing that’s been around for the past few years (see bottom), opting for car logos. One hundred people were asked to draw the logos of brands popular in the UK (where the sketch quiz was given), and we’ve picked some that overlap with US-popular brands.

And I have to say: I can understand screwing up Alfa Romeo’s logo, or reversing the quadrants in BMW’s rondel–but how on Earth do you mess up the Audi or Toyota logos? I can only assume some of the tested folks have never seen a car.

Alfa Romeo

Audi

BMW

Ferrari

Ford

Toyota

Volkswagen

You can check out the rest here.

Also See:

– People Trying to Draw Famous Logos from Memory, Part 1

– People Trying to Draw Famous Logos from Memory, Part 2

– A Visual History of the BMW Logo

– A Visual History of the Corvette Logo

In this time of Coronavirus, you may searching through your medicine cabinet, cycling through the supplements, vitamins, ointments, pills, creams, in search of something that will protect you from this increasingly omnipresent threat. As you do so you may become keenly aware of how bad communication design is for medical products. I don’t mind saying that drugstores are home to some of the most arcane packaging design that a product can get away with. Last week, I referred to the bizarre graphic design fairy-tales one sees printed on soap dispensers. Similarly, vitamins, supplements, and herbal health products offer an exhibition in poor communication design, but for different reasons.

This culture of design – perhaps a holdover from a time when people trusted pharmaceutical corporations – is no doubt advantageous for producers when it comes to the many health and nutrition products that lack substantial evidence of efficacy. As seen in the image above, even though there is a surplus of “information,” it is so horrifically designed you have to have a doctor or chemist standing there with you in the store to help you decode each individual product (luckily, there is usually a pharmacist but they tend to hang around those other medical products for some reason). For Hilma, a new natural remedy start-up, accessible information and the assurance of efficacy defines their products.

For the founders of Hilma, who are themselves consumers of herbal health products, settling for the ambiguous origins and bordering-on-campy graphics of products like Emergen-C felt like a concession. The medicine cabinet appeared to them a strange refuge for poor design, in a day-to-day experience that was otherwise flush with examples of well-designed products and services. More importantly however, they wanted to see a higher standard of naturally sourced health products, that focused on the growing concerns of consumers regarding product transparency.

Which has led to Hilma’s first product offerings: “clinical herbs” that they describe as “natural remedies backed by science”. Distinguishing them from other herbal supplement products, which are often not backed by reliable studies. One can spend a long time on Hilma’s website, going through the information they provide about their medical advisors, the ingredients they use, and the work they put into assessing their products, they even tell you how they conduct their studies. While there is always a threshold of understanding for someone like me who doesn’t know anything about medicine, they are at least offering the information they have in a clear and accessible way.

Which is more than can be said about a lot of herbal supplements. As Hilma’s website asserts, their ingredients are non-GMO, vegan, use only trace amounts of sugar, gluten-free, nut-free, and soy-free. Not only that but they also have a long “no-list,” for those ingredients that they will “never” use, but that their competitors use often. Catering their brand and their products to consumers who, with the help of the internet, have become savvy to general nutrition and ethical sourcing.

While this may appeal to those consumers who may just be looking for a stylish, vegan lifestyle product, the communication design standards that Hilma has set for their products may offer a more significant service to consumers. In the United States, access to a human doctor (as opposed to an iphone-doctor, or a fit-bit doctor, or some other tech-based-doctor) you trust is, bizarrely, not a realistic economic option for a great many people and the next best thing is affordable medical products that don’t require prescription. Making the need for more readable and accessible medical information a vital component of designing medical products for the modern American consumer.

To be clear, Hilma’s products, and no other health product for that matter, can or should replace a doctor you know and trust (again, a human doctor). I don’t know if good design could ever change that fact. Yet in the US, where many consumers will inevitably buy a $25 health product if it means dodging a $1000+ medical bill, the products that we do have access to must offer clarity and transparency as the baseline. As has been so clearly demonstrated in the current pandemic, access to reliable and readable information is important to both personal and public health.

The inscrutability of the many medicine bottles and packages we see at the drugstore is more than just poor design it is an illustration of how opaque most major pharmaceutical companies are when it comes to keeping their consumers informed about process and product. Whatever you may think about herbal treatment, Hilma’s communication and education as a significant component of the design of their product sets a high bar for modern medical products.

NOTE: As I mentioned above, I know nothing about medicine or health, and so this should not be understood to be medical advise regarding COVID-19.

Les bibliothèques sont des sortes de temples magiques où résident plusieurs univers de mots, propices aux voyages. Si elles sont habillées par d’innombrables couvertures de livres, il est désormais possible de les décorer avec d’autres installations minutieusement créées : les Book nooks. Ils prennent divers formes et correspondent à des goûts complètement différents. Faits à la main, ils peuvent représenter des choses aussi variées qu’un magasin de livres ou encore des monstres qui semblent prêts à s’échapper d’un livre pour sortir de la bibliothèque, entre autres. Une idée lancée par l’artiste japonais surnommé Monde, en 2018. Ce dernier avait alors présenté son travail à la Design Festa et avait rencontré un franc succès.

Credit Monde @monde55212068

Credit MiniatureDecorDesign by Alexandra on Etsy

Credit Monde @monde55212068

Credit MiniatureDecorDesign by Alexandra on Etsy

Credit Tom Taggart @tom.taggart.146

Credit Tom Taggart @tom.taggart.146

With hundreds of millions of people currently in isolation or lockdown, Dezeen’s India Block has selected 10 feature films that use architecture in exciting ways to watch as a distraction from coronavirus-induced boredom.

Parasite, 2019

The rich family’s house in Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning dark comedy about society practically steal’s the show. Sleek modernist lines and expensive furniture betrays little hint of the leech-black darkness below the surface.

Built by the fictional architect Namgoong Hyeonja, the mansion was actually the work of production director Lee Ha-Jun and was made up of multiple sets, cut together to look like one building.

Parasite is available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon.

Metropolis, 1927

Metropolis is a silent science-fiction film from the 1920s directed by director Fritz Lang, where a story of robots and class war takes place in a sinister city of skyscrapers.

Art directors Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht created a visually arresting city for rich buisenessmen, powered by underground machines manned by oppressed workers. Buildings in art deco, gothic and the Bauhaus style are layered to create an arresting vision of the future.

Metropolis is available to watch on Youtube and Google Play.

Bladerunner, 1982

Set in the future – Los Angeles in 2019 – Bladerunner’s sci-fi story of a bounty hunter tracking robot replicants is set against a neon backdrop of a dystopian city that pays homage to Fritz Lang’s metropolis.

Other visual and architectural influences on British director Ridley Scott included the sketches of futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia, the industrial north east of England where Scott grew up, 1980s Hong Kong, French Métal Hurlant comics, and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk.

Bladerunner is available to watch on Amazon and Youtube.

Ghost in the Shell, 1995

Mamoru Oshii’s anime cyberpunk tale of a cyborg hunting down a hacker in 2029 Japan takes its architectural cues from 1990s Hong Kong, the most futuristic Asian city of the day.

Art director Hiromasa Ogura visited the city and produced scores of photographs, sketches and paintings that formed the basis of the moody landscape fictional of the finished animation.

Ghost in the Shell is available to watch on Amazon.

Black Panther, 2018

Marvel’s superhero film Black Panther takes places in the fictional country of Wakanda – a secret high-tech African kingdom. Set designer Hannah Beachler looked to the work of architect Zaha Hadid to create an atrofuturist vision of a city free from colonialism.

“[Zaha’s work is] what I wanted people to feel for the modern architecture in Black Panther,” Beachler told Dezeen. “Very voluptuous, very curvy, no hard edges and the spaces feel both very large and intimate at the same time.”

Black Panther can be streamed on Youtube and Disney+.

Playtime, 1967

French mime Jacques Tatischeff directed and starred in comedy Playtime, which pokes fun at an absurdly modernist Paris from the future.

Scenes were filmed on huge sets constructed specially for the film. Dubbed Tativille, these stages required their own power plant, although to save money some of the backdrops of famous Paris landmarks were simply blown up photographs.

Playtime is available to watch on Criterion and iTunes.

High-Rise, 2015

Based on JG Ballard’s 1975 novel of the same name, High Rise charts the descent into chaos of a 40-storey luxury tower block in London, where the residents lose touch with the outside world as class war erupts.

British director Ben Wheatley told Dezeen the film isn’t a critique of the country’s post war architecture, but was informed by his dislike of tower blocks – and a bad night in a Danish hotel.

“In the architectural plan they had to put these pillars in to make the structure worked but they didn’t give a fuck about that room, so someone was going to suffer and it was the poor bastard who had to stay in that room,” Wheatley said.

“That kind of thinking went in to the rest of the High Rise building – it took no prisoners.”

High Rise is available to stream on Hulu and Amazon.

Rear Window, 1954

Alfred Hitchcock’s claustrophobic thriller Rear Window is told from the fixed perspective of a photographer stuck indoors with a broken leg who becomes fixated on snooping through his neighbour’s windows.

Greenwich Village apartments set around a courtyard become a stage for murder, intrigue and voyeurism. The film was made on a massive set built at Paramount, complete with a lighting system that could recreate different times of day and night, and a drainage system to manage a pivotal scene in a thunderstorm.

Rear Window can be watched online via the BFI and Amazon.

2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968

Adored by architects and designers everywhere, Stanley Kubrick’s sci fi journey to the moon 2001: A Space Odyssey has minimum dialogue and maximum visuals.

Spaceship interiors feature glowing white grid floors studded with cherry-red modernist furniture, and the film’s distinctive aesthetic has launched a thousand homages and exhibitions.

2001: A Space Odyssey can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon.

Isle of Dogs, 2018

Wes Anderson’s whimsical stop-motion animated tale of a boy and a quarantined island full of dogs is set in a dystopian Japan 20 years in the future.

Production designer Paul Harrod told Dezeen he was inspired by Japanese Metabolist architecture, particularly the work of Kenzo Tange, when designing the intricate sets.

Harrod also drew on Edo-period illustrations and Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Imperial Hotel in Tokyo to create the “hellish and beautiful” worlds of Trash Island and Megasaki City.

Ise of Dogs is available to watch on Amazon.

The post 10 films with amazing architecture to stream during coronavirus self-isolation appeared first on Dezeen.