Hasta La Ideas

Animal welfare charity Born Free Foundation has teamed up with animation studio Aardman on a new short that taps into the public mood around lockdown to address the issue of wild animals in captivity.

Titled Creature Discomforts: Life in Lockdown, the animation exposes the plight of animals held in zoos, aquariums and circuses who, unlike most of us, have endured their freedom being stripped away for far longer than the duration of the pandemic. The film was orchestrated by Engine, which also worked on Born Free’s previous film The Bitter Bond about ‘Instagram lions’ that received an honourable mention in the CR Annual.

The new short takes cues from Aardman’s popular series Creature Comforts, which pairs charming claymation animal characters with everyday human conversations. Due to lockdown restrictions, the teams necessary to create the clay animations couldn’t be brought together, with the studio instead opting for a 2D approach. While it can’t help but miss some of the obvious charm of Creature Comforts, the connection is easily established with the tone and sense of humanness.

The dialogue comes from people around the UK reflecting on their experiences of lockdown, often touching on feelings of isolation and the struggle to explain the situation to children.

“As with all Creature Comforts dialogue it was all spontaneous reactions and unscripted. That’s what gives it its authenticity,” explains director and character designer Peter Peake, who has worked in the animation department across the Creature Comforts series. “Given the restrictions of lockdown we approached our families and friends to be interviewed over Zoom, and luckily they were very eager to help out.”

The people were interviewed without knowing the context of the project, in a bid to capture as authentic soundbites as possible. “It was really important for us that they didn’t know what this was for. That way, we could be sure we were getting their honest feelings in lockdown,” explains Engine creative Pete Ioulianou. “When we matched them to the animals it worked straight away, that’s when the heartstrings started getting tugged.”

“The similarities between us in lockdown and wild animals in captivity became really apparent when we heard what everyone had to say,” adds creative Ollie Agius. “It was key for us to choose the right nuggets of the recordings so that they could fit with an animal behind bars. The best bit was seeing it all click together and seeing the locked up animals speak up for the first time.

“We made sure to record as many different people from all walks of life to get a good range of everyone’s experiences. Everyone from a lonely 89-year-old grandmother who hadn’t left her home since February to a young family who had just welcomed home their second child during lockdown.”

The team started by gathering the voice recordings, and built the characters and animation around that. “We were adamant that it couldn’t be scripted or done with actors. Once we had the perfect voice edit with the right amount of humour and emotion, we could start to picture which characters would fit best,” Ioulianou explains.

While the animation feels distinctly Aardman, the key difference is in the content of the dialogue. Creature Comforts is known for warm, recognisable snapshots of everyday life, yet Creature Discomforts comes with a heartbreaking message. “We really wanted to find the overlap between how humans were feeling during lockdown and how wild animals must feel in captivity,” he adds. “Creature Comforts gave us the chance to merge the two in a charmingly familiar yet heartwrenching way.”

Engine sought to draw a link between this collective lack of freedom and animals being held in captivity. “Lockdown is something we’ve all now experienced, so we were in a unique situation where we knew everyone was struggling one way or another. By drawing a comparison to wild animals locked up, we knew we’d create that tension and hopefully give the audience a new found empathy,” says Agius.

For creative director Steve Hawthorne, the pairing couldn’t be more apt: “The power of using Creature Comforts lies precisely in its relatability and mundanity. Because it’s the mundanity of the lives of millions of captive wild animals which is the problem. While some are actively abused, many aren’t. For the majority the horror is far more insidious.”

Credits:
Agency: ENGINE
CCO: Billy Faithfull
Creative Directors: Steve Hawthorne, Katy Hopkins
Creatives: Pete Ioulianou, Ollie Agius
Production: Aardman Animations
Director, character designer: Peter Peake
Animator: Jane Davies

The post Aardman draws on pandemic stories for new Born Free film appeared first on Creative Review.

Georgian designer Sandro Lominashvili has created an angular chair from 18 segments of wood, which are pieced together to form a structure that bears resemblance to the body of an insect.

Called Allo, the chair is constructed from various sections of walnut that have been cut with a CNC machine before being placed together like a puzzle and secured with wooden latches and glue.

This configuration forms the seat and spine. These raised elements also add to the ergonomics of the chair.

“The geometry of the shell was designed to be comfortable,” Lominashvili explained. “It is angled in such a way as to provide maximum comfort – this is what directed the angles seen on the chair body.”

Legs and armrests made from 25-millimetre-thick, square-sectioned steel pipes have been welded together and bolted to the walnut shell.

To create an almost foam-like effect, Lominashvili added extruded details on top of each section of wood. These were also made from CNC-cut walnut MDF and were glued onto the chair’s main body.

The designer then filled in any holes before powder coating the entire structure to achieve a matte-black effect.

Although it wasn’t his initial intention, Lominashvili likens the chair – with its T-shaped backrest that attaches to thin arms and legs – to the body of an insect, or more specifically an ant.

Lominashvili, who is based in Georgia, took visual cues from various other works by names including German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic and New York designer Karim Rashid.

He was particularly inspired by Grcic’s Chair One – which is constructed “just like a football” with various geometric sections assembled at angles to each other, created for Italian furniture brand Magis – and Rashid’s chiselled Vertex chair, which features triangular planes that join together to create a seat.

The Allo chair, which measures at 80 centimetres-tall by 55 centimetres-wide, is also designed to be stackable.

The designer named it after his full name, Alexander Lominashvili – taking Al from his forename, Lo from his surname, and combining the two together.

He plans to develop an upholstered version of the chair in the future, which would see the extruded sections covered in fabric.

Lominashvili has previously designed another angular chair – called Chair 3/4 – from steel tubes that has a square seat with four corners, but with only three attached to the frame.

Photography is by Tornike Aivazishvili.

The post Sandro Lominashvili’s ant-like Allo chair is constructed like a puzzle appeared first on Dezeen.

Aurora Arquitectos has united two classroom blocks at the Artave music school in the village of Caldas da Saúde, Portugal, with a bright yellow extension and stair tower.

The architecture studio renovated two classroom blocks that were located near each other and improved the circulation by adding an L-shaped extension, which connects the two buildings and creates open areas for meetings.

To clearly differentiate the addition from the existing structures Aurora Arquitectos chose a bright colour for all of the extension’s visible exteriors.

“The general concept was to create a connection between two existing buildings that worked as a space of meeting and relaxation during breaks,” said co-founder of Aurora Arquitectos Sérgio Antunes.

“We wanted this body to be independent in its architectural language so that it could be possible to read the existing buildings,” he told Dezeen.

The most visible element of the extension is a large stair tower that projects into a courtyard alongside the classroom blocks. Following the threads of the stairs, the structure protrudes above a concrete amphitheatre created in the courtyard.

“We hope it becomes an attraction point on this campus, where everything converges,” said Antunes. “The point on which you can go everywhere.”

Aurora Arquitectos chose yellow for the stair tower, and other facades, to make the building stand out even on gloomy days.

“This project is located in a region of Portugal where it rains a lot and where the days in the winter can be very gloomy,” said Antunes. “This building intends to be a counterpoint, and the yellow was a way to emphasise that contrast.”

The bright colours continue within the extension where the walls were painted bright orange and the floor bright red.

This was designed to contrast the extension’s ground floor and the renovated classrooms where greys were utilised by the architecture studio.

“The remaining colours are calmer,” explained Antunes. “The ground floor is in tones of grey in order to allow the yellow to float on the upper floors, increasing its contrast,” he continued.

“When one passes from a neutral to a yellow space, the effect is so strong that it seems you are breathing a different air.”

Aurora Arquitectos is a Lisbon-based architecture studio led by Antunes and Sofia Couto that was established in 2010. The studio previous created a brightly-hued hostel that within an old family home and turned a ruined building in Lisbon into fun family home.

Photography is courtesy of Aurora Arquitectos.

Projects credits:

Architect: Aurora Arquitectos
Team: Sérgio Antunes, Sofia Reis Couto, Tânia Sousa, Rui Baltazar, Ivo Lapa, Carolina Rocha, Bruno Pereira, Dora Jerbic, Anna Cavenago, Afonso Nunes
Building supervision: Pedro Sousa Cruz
Engineering: Manuel Silva, Traço Plano Engenharia

The post Aurora Arquitectos connects classroom blocks with bright yellow stair tower appeared first on Dezeen.

Imagine being able to admire your city’s beautiful landscape while traveling (something that isn’t really possible in underground subways, or in tightly packed buses). BOSCH is rethinking urban mobility in a way that allows public transit systems to be as convenient as private cars, with the added advantage of being able to admire your city from up above. Partnering with Art Lebedev Studio to envision what this new form of transport would look like, you’ve got yourself a full fleet of robust, autonomous cable cars, running on a well-planned network that covers all important parts of a city.

This cable-car system is incredibly effective for a multitude of reasons. It’s financially and physically easy to expand cable networks without disrupting existing architecture (building subway lines and stations can cost enormous sums of money). The cable cars even have an edge over buses because they can actually travel in straight lines, independent of existing roadways, or of traffic. These uniquely designed cable cars don’t even require special stations or stops, thanks to a feature built into each car that allows it to descend down onto the road every time someone needs to hop on or aboard. Working essentially like an autonomous flying car (even though it’s just suspended above the ground), these cable cars can efficiently pick you up and drop you off wherever you need. Each car seats as many as 5 people, offers a stellar elevated panoramic view of the city, is weather-proof, and runs on clean renewable electrical energy. The cars also come with WiFi on board too, obviously!

BOSCH and Art Lebedev’s conceptual cable car system currently exists as just a visual representation, but Art Lebedev’s website mentions Moscow may be the first city to ever see this revolutionary travel system!

Designer: Art Lebedev Studio for BOSCH

Images of exoplanets are extremely uncommon, but even more rare is an image of such a planet as part of a greater solar system like ours. Astronomers, however, have just shared one such photo captured by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. The picture of TYC 8998-760-1, located approximately 300 light years from Earth, reveals “a Sun-like star, orbited by multiple exoplanets.” This set-up is remarkably similar to our system within the Milky Way (where the Sun is orbited by planets, dwarf planets, many moons, and millions of asteroids, comets and meteoroids). It’s also inherently different. The sun in the image is described as a “very young version of our own” (at 17 million years old) and is orbited by “gas giants” (like Jupiter or Saturn) that are “320 times the distance we are from the Sun.” Despite the differences, the similarities prove to be fascinating, with lead researcher Alexander Bohn explaining, “The possibility that future instruments, such as those available on the ELT, will be able to detect even lower-mass planets around this star marks an important milestone in understanding multi-planet systems, with potential implications for the history of our own Solar System.” Read more at The Independent.

Image courtesy European Southern Observatory and Alexander Bohn