Getting creative with traditional material is the key to making architectural structures truly stand out. This Wall House designed by CTA Creative Architects shows that creativity by using hole-punctured bricks. It was specifically chosen to facilitate natural ventilation, bring in sunlight, and letting the house itself breathe.

This “wholesome” structure is a multi-generational family home in the city of Bien Hoa, Vietnam and the only thing they wanted was the living spaces to feel bright and airy. “According to recently published scientific research, indoor air quality is worse than outdoor air quality. Therefore, most of our discussions with the house owner tended to the idea of a house that is able to ‘breathe’ 24/7 by itself,” said the team. Most of the structure’s exterior is covered in perforated square bricks that allow fresh air and natural light to flood in. It also promotes upcycling in design – all of the bricks were salvaged from the building sites of properties nearby and were then punctuated to make four small holes in each of them. Material reusability is as important as creativity.

The team also managed to save burnt and blackened bricks and used them artistically to form dark patches of color which adds more texture and dimension to the exterior aesthetic. The bricks are arranged randomly to form an irregular, bumpy surface finish – unconventional like the material itself. A wide flight of tiered steps that lead up to the entrance has been printed with a holey pattern to matches the bricks, it almost looks like a permanent shadow cast on them on a sunny day. To further add to the natural breathing feeling, a small “garden” was planted around the periphery of the main room which makes the air quality better and also acts a much needed soothing contrast to the brick tones.

The house has an unobstructed and large living area which features two massive square windows that have been made in Wall House’s front elevation for maximum natural light. Another window element is the glass roof which illuminates the other corners of the house. All these details not only add to the ‘breathing’ quality of the house but also increase the expansiveness of the place. The rest of the material palette for the home was kept very simple – exposed-aggregate concrete cover the floor and dark wood was used for the kitchen cabinets. A black-metal staircase with a wire-frame balustrade leads to the first level of the home and also serves as a great spot to show off your quarantine outfits – I can’t be the only one who walks down in a different set of PJs for every meal right?

Designer: CTA Creative Architects

A high-altitude lavatory with gabion walls and a reimagined motel feature in this VDF school show of work from University of Colorado‘s College of Architecture and Planning.

The projects range from built to conceptual and were created by students as part of their graduate and undergraduate degrees in architecture.

While some designed interventions to improve the experience of tourists and trekkers in the Rocky Mountains, others imagined electric vehicle charging stations for Tesla, which are capable of responding to the context in which they are placed.

University of Colorado

University: University of Colorado, College of Architecture and Planning
Courses: BSc Architecture, MArch
Studios: BSc Architecture – Design Studio 4 and the “Normal, Colfax” Research and Design Seminar
MArch – Studio 4: Design-Build and Studio 6: Prototype Replication and Singularity

MArch Studio 6: Prototype Replication and Singularity statement:

“Through the design of a prototype for a Tesla-branded electric vehicle (EV) charging facility, this studio investigated the tensions and synergies between the repeatability required to create multiple manifestations of the charging facility and the need to remain flexible and adapt to the site while developing and maintaining brand identity.

“As a studio funded by the PCI Foundation, the students used precast concrete as the primary construction system, requiring them to address the repeatability of the precast members within a single prototype or through multiple manifestations of the prototype.”

University of Colorado Denver student housing by Macy Funk, BSc Architecture

“The University of Colorado Denver campus is unique in its diverse student body, which lives in private housing spread across the metropolitan area. The cultural diversity of the student body extends to every facet of the university’s identity and is foundational to its values.

“This project posits an on-campus housing solution for students that reflects their common desire to gather and learn from one another socially. The resulting building proposal is bisected and divided by a loose collection of cylindrical and ovoid cloisters.”

Studio: Design Studio 4
Tutor: Kevin Hirth

Vocational School by Regan Wood, Sara Rowsell and Alli Purvis, BSc Architecture

“Sited along a dense urban corridor, the vocational school responds to Denver’s legacy as an economy of largely self-contained labour and education. It consists of a simple, stripped structure that houses the life, work and training of its inhabitants.

“Students are provided with leasable space to practice their craft in close proximity to one another. The radical stance of the dense urban forms, reminiscent of similar buildings in the adjacent downtown area, is emphasised through the overlay of a rubberised roofing membrane that covers the surface of the school, landscape and other surrounding elements.”

Studio: Design Studio 4
Tutor: Kevin Hirth

Motel by Justin Watson, BSc Architecture

“The American West has a long tradition of itineracy. In Colorado alone, towns have swollen and shrunk with incredible speed due to the boom and bust of gold, oil, steel, tourism and agriculture. In the twentieth century, this itineracy was epitomised by the suburban station wagon, laden with luggage and ferrying families to far-flung destinations of leisure.

“The twenty-first century has seen this model disrupted by the pervasiveness of inexpensive air travel and the consolidation of the hotel industry. Roadside motels at the base of the Rocky Mountains once bustling with business now often represent a stepping stone for those close to homelessness, providing day-to-day housing at a cut-price rate.

“This project reimagines a roadside motel on a rural site in the plains just east of Denver. It hopes to offer a place for rest and relaxation to all inhabitants of the city while creating a new legacy for an often tarnished and abandoned building typology.”

Studio: Design Studio 4
Tutor: Kevin Hirth

Mobile Home by Trevor Carrasco, BSc Architecture

“This concept was produced as a part of an ongoing research project studying a decaying but well-preserved urban corridor built during the 1960’s. It reimagines a common low-cost prefabricated housing model as a monument.

“Formal characteristics were derived from vernacular structures nearby and reconfigured into a new figure in the landscape to foreground issues of social and economic inequity.”

Course: “Normal, Colfax” Research and Design Seminar
Tutor: Kevin Hirth

Cottonwood Cabins by the MArch Colorado Building Workshop students

“High on the Colorado Plateau, in a desert landscape characterised by juniper and ponderosa pine forests, six bunkhouses and an outdoor kitchen create a welcome refuge for trekkers at the Cottonwood Gulch base camp. The objective was to foster a sense of community while reinterpreting the local vernacular which is rooted in the surrounding landscape.

“The cabin’s construction is an investigation into mass timber building techniques. The screw-laminated timber acts as a single diaphragm, achieving greater spans and cantilevers than individual pieces of lumber could alone. The cabins are elevated above the landscape to give a degree of separation from the fauna of the high desert. On the interior, bunks are suspended from the ceiling offering trekkers the agency to occupy the space how they wish.”

Project website: coloradobuildingworkshop.cudenvercap.org
Studio: Studio 4: Design-Build
Tutors: Rick Sommerfeld, Will Koning and JD Signom

Longs Peak Privies by the MArch Colorado Building Workshop students

“Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park is one of the most frequented peaks in the State of Colorado that is more than 14,000 feet high. But since backcountry toilets were installed on the trail in 1983, the technology has deteriorated in the harsh climate to the point that waste now has to be removed by shovel, placed into five-gallon buckets and carried down the mountain using llamas.

“We collaborated with the National Park Service to design and construct new backcountry privies using lightweight prefabricated construction and emerging methods of waste collection to minimise the human footprint in Colorado’s backcountry.

“The final design consists of prefabricated, structural gabion walls. Within the gabions, thin steel plate moment frames triangulate the lateral loads within the structure while stones, collected on-site, are used as ballast. This innovative assembly allows for rapid on-site construction and an architecture that disappears into the surrounding landscape.”

Project website: coloradobuildingworkshop.cudenvercap.org
Studio: Studio 4: Design-Build
Tutors: Rick Sommerfeld and Will Koning

Electric Oasis by Kristina Bjornson and Malgosia Tomasik, MArch

“The notion of the prototype is deficient in the fact that it assumes a mass-produced scheme can be imposed on any landscape despite its individual needs. In creating a prototype for a Tesla charger station, we wanted to challenge the standardisation of architecture by encouraging unique modifications in the design process.

“We followed a kit-of-parts approach that allows the supercharger stations to adapt and react to their context, taking into account the climatic zone, urban versus rural setting, proximity to other charging stations and lot size. These criteria inform the envelope design, orientation, light filtration and overall scheme. Distinct characteristics of light infiltration were considered to develop a responsive parametric facade based on the unique orientation and climatic data of the site.”

Kristina Bjornson website: kvbjornson.com
Malgosia Tomasik website: goshatomasik.com

Engaging Flows by Shane Krenn and Lorraine Ziegler

“The typology of the gas station has traditionally augmented the notions of efficiency and in-and-out culture, separating the traveller from the local. We conduct an investigation on how a new prototypical architecture could facilitate lingering. Early discussions pointed us towards the clustering of programmatic volutes to guide flows, generate in-between spaces for impermanent programmes and reframe the context to situate the traveller alongside the local.

“As a conceptual prototype for Tesla, brand recognition and repeatability across differing contexts necessitated the development of a kit of parts. A series of concrete panels and fins yield a multiplicity of programmatic volute shapes, allowing the prototype to be adapted across environments.”

Shane Krenn website: shanekrenn.com/engagingflows
Lorraine Ziegler portfolio: issuu.com/lorrainezoranziegler

Virtual Design Festival’s student and schools initiative offers a simple and affordable platform for student and graduate groups to present their work during the coronavirus pandemic. Click here for more details.

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Designers will know that brand guidelines are only as useful as the client on the receiving end is prepared to make them. Months of work developing rigorous specifications and fine-tuning details can all be flushed away the moment they’re handed over. For clients, however, following – or indeed finding – guidelines can be an unwieldly, time-consuming chore, a never-ending trawl through a convoluted PDF that has likely been lost in a wormhole of computer files.

In a bid to update the way brand guidelines are created, shared, stored and referenced, Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth – the team behind publisher Standards Manual – are designing a tool called Standards that aims to bring an outdated process into the modern world.

Standards is being created in collaboration with Seattle-based design and tech agency Shore, while the identity, UX/UI and product experience have been designed by Order (a studio also founded by Reed and Hamish). The platform will house the most common elements of brand guidelines, including colour values, adaptable assets, typefaces and animation. It also promises to allow designers and clients to exchange comments on WIP guidelines and eventually sign off on a final set.

While sharing files and assets using cloud-based services like Dropbox is commonplace across the creative industries and far beyond, brand guidelines have been left in the past.

A web-based platform rather than a static PDF format should make the process far less painful, while also making guidelines more watertight in terms of version control and simpler to manage. It is the kind of solution that feels so obvious that it seems unbelievable that it isn’t already an industry norm.

The tool was designed based on learnings from guidelines over the years (of which Reed and Smyth will have seen plenty), and on how the system can be tweaked to fit for the design practice of today. Designers are now able to take an early look at Standards, with the full platform set to launch at the beginning of next year.

standards.site

The post Say goodbye to useless brand guidelines appeared first on Creative Review.

Chazelle’s film is a nine-minute romp through the history of cinema, taking in genres from Westerns to noir, the scenes threaded together via the experiences of a movie stuntman.

It’s beautifully shot but what truly sets it apart is the decision to film the whole thing vertically – the natural way we tend to hold our phones to film – which opens up a wealth of new angles and effects to explore.

“Part of the fun of this was to think purely in terms of the vertical aspect ratio,” says Chazelle in a making-of video that has been released alongside the film. “I just think back to when I was a kid and playing with much less sophisticated technologies, little VHS camcorders and things like that and just trying to do my version of Hollywood movies with what I had.

“One of things that’s really fun about playing with vertical aspect ratio is how you can play with what the eye sees when, and the way you can get an audience used to looking up and down rather than left and right, which is what they’re used to,” he continues. “I definitely think this little piece we’re doing is just the beginning step in terms of experimenting, there’s a lot more that can be done.”

Chazelle’s film follows works by other big-name directors, including Michel Gondry and Theodore Melfi, in the Shot on iPhone series.

Credits:
Agency: TBWAMedia Arts Lab
Director: Damien Chazelle
DP: Linus Sandgren
Production design: Shane Valentino
Score: Lorne Balfe

The post La La Land’s Damien Chazelle shoots latest Apple ad appeared first on Creative Review.

“Since I can remember I’ve always been the one capturing moments of the people around me … it was just something I did,” says London-based photographer Serena Brown. “It was when I was 16 that I actually started to experiment with what went into my imagemaking and learning what and who was important to me when I took photos.”

Brown says she’s incredibly inspired by her Ghanaian heritage. “It’s a big part of my identity that I want to bring into my work much more,” she says. Brown’s upbringing in London also plays a big role in the work she creates. “It’s what I know and the people here are what inspire me. I spent most of my time at Falmouth Uni on nine-hour coaches back to London to shoot because I just couldn’t connect creatively in the same way I can when I’m around the culture here,” she says.

Since graduating, the photographer has put an emphasis on making her subjects the heart of each image. So representing them in the most authentic way has become key, and it’s led her to adopting a documentary style through a fashion lens. “I really enjoy shooting people with stories to tell, finding people who are overlooked and looking for beauty in the everyday,” Brown explains. 

Using natural light, fresh-faced subjects and locations close to Brown or familiar to the people she’s photographing, she conveys a sense of honesty and community in every project. “My work celebrates being natural and knowing it’s okay to be different in whatever way that is. There’s a real richness in the experiences of the people I grew up with and I try to spotlight that in the work I do. I’ve always wanted to change how we see images of Black people in the white-washed media industry, and I think this will always be a major aim for me.”

Though still early in her career, Brown has already had a handful of big commissions including creating work with brands such as Nike, Footlocker, Converse, and Refinery29. “I’ve been really fortunate shooting for clients that I’ve always admired so early in my career and it’s nice that even my commissioned work is often mission driven,” Brown says. “It was super daunting at first but I always have confidence in my ability and my work which is probably why they trust me during the creative process.”

For Brown’s latest series, Class of Covid-19, she spoke to 16-18 year olds who had their worlds flipped upside down with exam cancellations. “I spoke to them about their concerns about class, institutional racism, higher education and their mental health,” she explains. “It was great to see big platforms like Refinery29 publishing the girls’ stories and amplifying their voices to a wider audience.” 

Amplifying voices relatively unheard in the creative industries is important to Brown, and she feels there’s definitely work to be done for it to be more inclusive. “Personally I’d love to see more working class people working in the creative industries. I don’t think it’s a career path that’s seen as achievable unless you have a way in or parents who will fund you at the start,” she says. “It was never encouraged when I was at school, yet I’ve seen so many people I grew up with branch off the academic route and still achieve success despite these barriers.”

From her own experiences Brown says one of those barriers in the past has been money. “I’ve definitely felt I was held back from being able to achieve certain things because I couldn’t afford to execute it, especially at university. These things definitely shouldn’t hold you back from creating though, and even if your route is a little tougher than others it’s so important to continue creating in whatever way that is,” Brown says. “I’d love to see more initiatives encouraging people from low income backgrounds to work in the creative industry because we need to level the playing field.”

In regards to projects she personally takes on, Brown pushes for diverse casting to ensure everyone is represented and overall she does feel like things are slowly getting to a good place.

As for the work she’s doing on herself, it’s all about building confidence. “I’m definitely still learning and pushing myself every time I shoot,” she says. “I can’t see my nerves waiting for my film to come back from the lab disappearing any time soon, but I love being able to work with brands to create important work.”

serenabrown.co.uk

The post Serena Brown’s images celebrate overlooked stories and everyday beauty appeared first on Creative Review.