Hasta La Ideas

Yaokun Wu is an industrial design student at Pratt Institute. He recently designed Flash Pak, a system of dispensing lifejackets in areas prone to flash flooding. If you’ve seen news footage of people caught in a flash flood, you know how terrifying it is; one second they’re walking down the street, the next they’re caught up in a raging torrent that lifts and shoots them down the street.

Wu’s idea is simple: Flash Pak is a lifejacket that’s attached to a lamppost or street sign. At the first sign of flooding, the bottom lid can be flipped open to dispense the lifejacket. But in an oh-shit situation where the street is suddenly overtaken by water, the lifejacket’s buoyancy carries it up the pole along with the water level. The idea is that those floating by could spot it and snag it.

Wu’s Flash Pak is one of six finalists in the upcoming 2020 Lexus Design Awards, having been selected from among 2,042 entries from 79 countries. The final judging will be on September 1st of this year.

If you’d like to submit an entry for the 2021 Lexus Design Awards, click here.

Architecture firm Collective has inserted a stage with a green curtain for hosting events in the back of the ONS Clothing store in New York City.

The flagship location of ONS, a menswear apparel brand, is located on 201 Mulberry Street in New York’s Nolita neighbourhood.

It is located inside an existing structure situated 1.5 metres below street level that was previously a garage.

ONS intends to use the stage space for hosting cultural events, such as exhibitions and pop-ups that it says will change regularly.

Steel railings, ceramic tiles and asphalt flooring are among the references Collective has taken from the streetscape to guide the store’s design.

To balance the dark colours and textures of the flooring the studio has inserted pops of colour using light blue tiles on the changing room pods and blue and green counter surfaces.

“The material we used in the store were carefully chosen for the feeling of the street – ceramic tiles, steel ramps, fibre glass objects while their bright array of blue and green colours balance out the crudeness of the black asphalt and steel,” Collective said.

Pale wood floors and wood panelling cover the walls in the front room of the store, which the studio conceived as a “standalone wooden box”. In the space there are two wood counters for displaying accessories, while rectangular cutouts in the walls to hold clothing racks.

An asphalt ramp replaced the existing wheelchair lift to create an accessible pathway from the street into the storefront and to the rear of the space where the studio has constructed a large stage.

“The ramp allows a natural flow of circulation from a higher point entering the very deep area at the back of the store, and at the same time, its hovering presence performs as an object in space,” the studio added.

There are several “props” on the stage including blue- and white-tiered shelving units, curved plinths for displaying products and potted plants, added as a decorative element.

Angular green drapes attached to a steel rack on the white ceiling and wrap around the space to form an adjustable divider. When closed the fabric curtains extend 30 metres forming a backdrop for the retail displays.

“Together with the rearrangement of the bright colour display props, the back room area of the ONS,” it continued.

“Flagship is immediately domesticated and activated into a stage for events, with a light touch of living room like domesticity and comfort.”

Collective is a studio that practices architecture, interiors and exhibition design founded in 2015.

It is led by Betty Ng, Chi Yan Chan, Juan Minguez and Katja Lam and has offices in Hong Kong, Madrid, San Francisco and New York.

Los Angeles clothing brand Lunya also has a retail space in Nolita that takes cues from “upscale New York” apartments, while other stores in the city include a jewellery store in SoHo.

Photography is by Eric Petschek.

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Erica Stine is a furniture design master’s student at SCAD. Emeco is the Pennsylvania-based furniture company behind the iconic Emeco 1006 “Navy Chair.” The two parties recently got to collaborate for a SCAD class project, which resulted in the Fly-Ash Chair of Stine’s design.

In seeking to design a furniture piece for Emeco, Stine looked past the aluminum used in the Navy Chair, and zeroed in on another material they could gain access to: Fly ash, a toxic byproduct from burning coal. Stine’s resultant Fly Ash Chair “utilizes coal waste local to Emeco production facilities in Pennsylvania,” Stine explains.

What is fly ash?

When coal is burned, energy is produced and waste byproducts are created. Some of this waste goes up the smokestack as flue gases. The rest of the waste is particulate matter called fly ash, and its contents are toxic, containing mercury, arsenic, beryllium, selenium and other undesirable elements.

In decades past, fly ash was simply released into the atmosphere. These days environmental regulations require fly ash be captured at the source using pollution control equipment. It is then dumped into landfill or dedicated ash ponds, which merely delays the problem; the toxic compounds within it can eventually leach into underground aquifers, i.e. the water supply.

Stine’s research indicates that U.S. coal plants produced nearly 111 million tons of fly ash in 2017. But she also learned that fly ash can be recycled; it can be used in place of Portland cement to create concrete. Furthermore, using fly ash can increase concrete’s strength and durability; Ancient Roman concrete, which is arguably some of the mankind’s most durable, contains volcanic ash (which is chemically similar to fly ash) as a binding agent.

As an additional benefit, using fly ash “reduces the need to manufacture cement,” Stine writes, “resulting in significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – about 14 million tons in 2017 alone.”

Stine won a 2020 Red Dot Design Award for the Fly-Ash Chair.

See more of Stine’s work here.

It was just yesterday that I wrote about Studio Neat, designers of the off-sized Panobook, getting knocked off; Orangered copied their design with their BetterBook.

Just now I was e-mailed by a rep for Grovemade, a Portland-based home office goods company. They, too have come out with an odd-sized sketchpad/notebook meant to fit above or below a keyboard, and thankfully this one’s not a direct copy of Studio Neat’s work. Here’s Grovemade’s Slim Leather Notebook:

These ring in at $50 a pop. Why so pricey? The notebooks use Grovemade’s system of brass discs for removable bindings (so you can replace, remove or re-order pages), the covers are veg-tanned leather, and the thing is made in the U.S.A.

I myself would never use Orangered’s BetterBook, even if one was given to me for free; I can’t knowingly support design piracy. I could swallow the $19 for Studio Neat’s Panobook because I’ve got a thing for small, plucky design firms. But I could never spend $50 on a sketchbook for myself; I consider them consumable tools rather than keepsakes.

I would, however, spend $50 on the Grovemade book if I was buying it as a gift for someone else. Brass and leather are too fancy for me, but I know others with elevated tastes who’d appreciate it, and maybe that year I’d win the holiday gift-giving arms race that we all engage in.

One thing’s for sure: Studio Neat presciently realized that people want, and are willing to pay for, sketchpads that fit on desks with computer set-ups.

São Paulo studio Arquipélago Arquitetos has built a house with walls made of rammed earth in the countryside of Brazil.

House in Cunha, or Casa em Cunha in Portuguese, is named after is location in the mountainous municipality of Cunha, which is a 2.5-hour drive from São Paulo and known for its ceramics.

Arquipélago Arquitetos designed the flat-roofed residence to stand out on its site at the top of a gently sloping property next to a large tree that offers shade. The reddish earthen tone contrasts with verdant surroundings, but depending on the season and position of the sun, the home appears to be integrated with the landscape.

“It was sought that the original fact of this construction in an isolated, wild place was a maximum signal of the arrival human presence in the landscape: straight lines marking the soft topography,” said the studio.

Set on a concrete foundation, the rammed earth construction is composed of earth, sand and clay to create a wet mixture that is placed in between flat panels to harden. The studio said this technique allowed for easy, efficient and affordable construction on the site.

“An authentic formwork system was proposed that avoided perforations with metal bars and developed a more efficient building site so that its modulated components could be disassembled and reassembled with ease,” it explained.

More rammed-earth walls were built further from the house to protect it and buffer from strong winds that pass through the site – mirroring a concept T Ryan Architecture also used for a rural house in Virginia.

In addition to structural support and protection, the wall material also provides thermal insulation.

“All the characteristics of hardness, thermal inertia, colour, brightness, tactile quality are factors due to the physical and chemical characteristics of that specific soil,” the studio added.

Earthy hues continue inside House in Cunha. Walls are composed of straw-coloured bricks from a local pottery studio that removes clay that is rich in aluminium from the region’s floodplains.

Ceilings are covered in wood to match the hallway and doors, while dark grey tiles cover the floors. Moving wooden panels with vertical slats also cover some of the windows, to filter sunlight and create privacy.

The house contains three bedrooms and two bathrooms on one side and an open-plan kitchen and living room with green sofas opposite. A fireplace and a wood stove in the living room are made of mud.

Glass walls run along the rear of the home and provide all of the rooms with natural light and access to a patio, which is elevated and formed by two walls. Steps lead to a large circular space in the ground for a bonfire.

In addition to this house, other homes in Brazil’s countryside are Rio House by Olson Kundig, Minimod Curucaca and Catuçaba house by Studio MK27.

Photography is by Federico Cairoli.

Project credits:

Rammed earth consulting: Fernando Minto, Pablo de las Cuevas, Domitila Almenteiro, Materia Base
Wood structure consulting: Alan Dias, Carpinteria Estruturas
Construction: Carlinhos

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