Smooth, soulful and sultry, “Bloody Waters” from H.E.R.’s debut full-length studio album, Back of My Mind, features Thundercat and KAYTRANADA. Mellifluous vocals by H.E.R. (aka Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson) glide effortlessly over the mellow instrumental, one of the 21 songs from the album, which also features cameos from Ty Dolla $ign and Lil Baby. She says of the record, “This collection of songs comes from feelings and thoughts that I’ve had in the back of mind. That’s where I live sometimes. Some things I talk about in my music and other things I may have been afraid to say or admit. I’m finding freedom in being truthful with expression.”
Industrial designer Peter Eckart is co-founder of German design firm Unit-Design, and also serves as a professor and vice president at the Offenbach University of Art and Design. Similarly, fellow German designer Kai Linke founded his own firm, Studio Kai Linke, and is a design lecturer at Art University Kassel.
Aside from both being industrial designers with their own firms who also teach, the two have a peculiar hobby in common: For the past 20 years, they’ve individually hung onto any disposable plastic cutlery they encountered where the designs interested them. Their collective collection is around 1,400 pieces.
“Plastic cutlery is a global phenomenon and also a global problem,” Eckart told It’s Nice That. “As disposable products, they are mass-produced, cheap, easy to transport and can be disposed of just as easily as they have been used. Ultimately, they are a symbol of our globalised logistics and throwaway culture.”
To highlight this, Eckart and Linke teamed up to present Spoon Archaeology, an exhibition of their collections on display at the London Design Biennale 2021. Despite the title, forks and knives will also be included, with the objects “staged as archaeological artefacts, design curiosities, and anthropological witnesses of an era that is about to end,” reads the project description, referencing the EU ban on plastic cutlery.
“The installation presents the material and immaterial cultural heritage of the past and present and invites guests to resonate sustainable solutions for the future by questioning traditional design culture.
“The installation further showcases methods for the critical examination of traditional design approaches, and broadens the view to other cultures. Linke and Eckart do not intend to solely create substitute products, they rather remind the viewer to learn from this collection, take responsibility and develop perspectives for alternative futures.”
For those of you not in London and who can’t make the Biennale before it ends next week, Eckart and Linke have posted a Spoon Archaeology Instagram account.
The duo have also compiled an insanely comprehensive “Spoon complexity map” covering tableware’s history from 17,000 B.C. to present day. The image below is likely too small to read, but you can see the large version here.
The multifunctional Thonet table 1140 can adapt from a desk to a dining table in the home, as well as being suitable for co-working spaces, libraries or seminar rooms.
The 1140 table has a light appearance with no stabilising frame
Featuring solid oak legs and a 42-millimetre-thick blockboard tabletop covered in wood veneer, the table is strong but appears light because it requires no stabilising frame.
Aisslinger originally designed the 1140 table for the BaseCamp student housing project in Lyngby, Denmark, where strength and stability were key.
Its rounded legs are joined to the table with metal connectors
“It was crucially important right from the start that we created a very stable piece, making sure the tabletop and legs were securely attached to one another,” said Aisslinger.
“You should be able to dance on this table but it shouldn’t need an elaborate support system underneath that just gets in the way.”
The legs of the 1140 table are distinctively rounded on their outer edge, meaning there are no corners to bump into, and joined to the table using a metal fitting that provides a discreet visual detail.
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The pandemic has taught us a lot about the new ways to do productive work. But trust me, getting your head straight for a focused work session in a chaotic environment is not that easy. Especially when the lines between your workspace and entertainment den are very blurry. As remote work and virtual leadership expert Ulla Vikman of Timanttia Consulting rightly said, “Someone who does a great deal of remote work would be distracted if the necessary tools, such as displays and paperwork, are constantly on all over their home. By intruding your thoughts constantly, these things tend to increase stress levels, and focusing becomes more difficult.”
Finland has been long a proponent of flexible working conditions for quite some time now, and proof enough is their topping the charts at the UN’s annual World Happiness Report. With time the country has evolved its remote work methodology in the form of smart interior design. This ingenious home office christened “sshhh 3” by Evävaara Design is the perfect example. The Finnish functional furniture expert has launched their mobile workstation design that keeps ergonomics and acoustic isolation at the forefront. It’s like your portable work-from-home setup that can move to any area of the home in an instant. When you want to wrap up for the day, close up the business, and it sits like a minimalistic cabinet without any visual asymmetries.
According to Evävaara, “In today’s world, we are constantly surrounded by irritants and noise that can make it hard to focus on something. Our products aim to create a quiet, personal space that allows you to focus.” That’s true, as sshhh 3 comes with its own set of optional accessories to create a comfortable working environment – all that’s needed is – to plug it into a socket for power. You can mount a 27-inch monitor on the back wall of the cabinet for a multi-monitor setup, and side doors double as shelves to hold everything from books, magazines to pinning your essential tasks. When your work setup is set to your liking, the four wheels lock in place, and the acoustic paneling on the felt and wood frame provides the ideal sound isolation by suppressing external and internal noise. While we can’t wrap up for the day and leave from office, at least you can close the door on this one!
Evävaara Design also offers a more compact version called sshhh 7 that has a lockable swivel table. This version is more suited for apartments and small spaces where isolation is needed without too much clutter.
Milan-based product designer Alessandra Galli has designed Enne, a light-duty ladder that practically disappears when folded up.
If it’s not obvious from the cut-outs in one of the rails, it’s made with a minimum amount of materials. “As for the manufacturing process,” Galli writes, “the steps were [cut out] from one of the two side pillars, thus optimizing the material and allowing the object to close completely on itself.”
While I wouldn’t want to climb it with heavy items or tools, it would certainly be convenient for occasional use in a space-tight environment.
A company called Origami Rack makes a variety of fold-flat objects: Carts, desks and shelving. I was looking at one of the latter, their R5 unit…
…and wondering what application this could possibly have; the similar but non-folding racks I’ve got in the basement are needed as racks all of the time, and never need to be folded up.
Then it occurred to me: There are plenty of organization projects I can think of where you need to temporarily remove a lot of items from a unit to re-sort them—imagine re-organizing a bookshelf, pantry, workstation etc.—and I think this would come in handy there. Maybe not something I’d spend the $139 on, but for one of those professional organizers that go to people’s houses to straighten their stuff out, I think this would be perfect.
The manufacturer says the R5 will hold 1,000 pounds—without the wheels, that is. Adding the casters drops the load capacity down to just 300 pounds.
Removing excess carbon from the atmosphere is a daunting but “very exciting” design challenge, according to sustainable-design guru William McDonough.
Describing climate change as a “design failure,” the American architect and designer said that solving it will involve “hundreds of technologies and systems.”
“It’s a design project needing lots of attention,” McDonough told Dezeen via a video call from his home in Virginia. “It’s very exciting to look at how many ways we can do this, but it’s daunting”.
The root of the problem is what McDonough describes as “fugitive carbon”. This is anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere that “meets the description of a toxin: it’s the wrong material, wrong place, wrong dose, wrong duration.”
William McDonough (top) wrote seminal 2020 book Cradle to Cradle (above) with chemist Michael Braungart
“Climate change is the result of breakdowns in the carbon cycle caused by us,” he wrote in the article, which was echoed in a speech given around the same time at the COP22 climate-change conference in Marrakech. “It is a design failure.”
Carbon is “an innocent element in all this”
He further set out his thinking in a blog post that called for “a new language for carbon“. This categorised carbon into three categories.
“Living carbon” moves through all living things in an endless cycle that makes life possible.
“Durable carbon” describes the earth’s carbon stores, including fossil reserves, limestone and long-lasting materials such as timber and recyclable polymers.
“Fugitive carbon” is carbon that mankind has taken from the first two categories and put into the atmosphere. The twin design challenges are to stop creating more of it while bringing the rest of it back to earth.
“The point I wanted to make there was that we had started referring to carbon as the enemy,” he explained. “It’s an innocent element in all this. I thought we needed a new language.”
“We are probably going to have to electrify everything”
Creating this new taxonomy allowed McDonough to start seeing atmospheric carbon as a design problem that could be solved.
“I see encouraging living carbon as positive behaviour; doing carbon-neutral things as neutral behaviour; and releasing carbon where it doesn’t as negative behaviour,” he explained. “I tried to get the language straight enough so I can design with it.”
One part of the solution is to simply “stop burning… let’s not use the word fossil fuels,” he said. “Because it means we intend to burn it.”
Switching from fossil energy will involve “massive efficiency and massive adoption of renewables. We are probably going to have to electrify everything.”
Hydrogen could be used for heavier uses such as long-distance trucking and heavy industry, he said. Carbon-free ammonia, which has a higher energy density than hydrogen and is less volatile, could power shipping.
McDonough warns about “the fallacy of the offset”
The other challenge is to remove fugitive carbon from the atmosphere. But this problem is hard to understand and solutions are hard to grasp, McDonough said, comparing it to an overflowing bathtub.
“You’ve got to go upstairs, turn off the faucet and pull the drain because even with these zero-carbon goals, even if we’re emitting zero, we’ve still overloaded the atmosphere. We have to start removing.”
“So let’s plant mangroves, let’s restore ecosystems everywhere we can, all over the planet, all the time.” However, he warned about a paradigm he describes as “the fallacy of the offset”.
Offsetting is a way of compensating for carbon emissions by paying for carbon mitigation elsewhere. To work, the offsetting investment has to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere, but it is often used as an accounting trick to justify emitting more carbon.
“I call it the fallacy of the offset,” he explained. “You gotta watch out for it. If somebody says, oh, I’ve got this much renewable power and I’m gonna offset my carbon emissions, you have to be very careful.”
“That would logically then say that if you doubled your renewables, you could double your carbon and still be net-zero. That doesn’t make any sense at all, because the atmosphere absorbs twice as much carbon.”
“So we got to be very careful about false equivalence. Renewables don’t equal to [removing] carbon.”
McDonough has been called “the father of the circular economy”
Born in Japan in 1951, McDonough is based in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he runs his architectural practice William McDonough + Partners and McDonough Innovation, a consultancy advising corporations and governments on their sustainability strategies.
He has advised bodies including the World Economic Forum and the G20 on sustainability. With actor Brad Pitt he co-founded the Make It Right Foundation, which was founded to rebuild the hurricane-devastated Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans.
In design circles, he is best known as the co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which he wrote with chemist Michael Braungart. The landmark publication called for a new design approach that learns from natural systems and eliminates waste.
“I’ve been called the father of the circular economy,” he remarked. “Cradle to Cradle actually leads into the circular economy, if you think about it.”
Humanity will need to adopt principles of circularity
To stop climate change, humanity will have to adapt the principles of circularity in order to capture fugitive carbon. McDonough describes the goal as the “circular carbon economy”.
This will involve “moving toward recyclates,” McDonough said, referring to materials that are capable of being recycled many times. “There’s going to be a big move to do chemical recycling of plastics to get them back to oil basically and start over. Plastics are an immensely useful thing, but not if they go fugitive.”
Biomaterials such as agricultural byproducts, bacteria and mycelium have huge potential too since they store large amounts of carbon.
“We’ve been working with mycelium for many years,” McDonough said. “They have amazing properties. They can be insulation, packaging, various kinds of acoustic material. They can be grown in a factory on agricultural secondaries such as wheat straw or barley straw.”
“Then with bacteria, we can actually make bricks. You’re building coral reef, basically. It’s room-temperature manufacturing. It’s quite astonishing. Those things are coming.”
However, using large amounts of land to grow crops for biomaterials runs the risk of creating monocultures that damage biodiversity.
“When you’re looking at it just through a utilitarian lens, we can see certain materials are quite astonishing in performance,” he said. “But a balance of utility and ecological restoration has always got to be considered in these issues.”
William McDonough + Partners’ headquarters for Apex Clean Energy will be the tallest timber building on America’s eastern seaboard
“I think it’s fundamental and it’s hugely important,” he said. “It’s critical because we need living wood in order to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. We need nature-based solutions to carbon in the atmosphere. And trees play a huge role in that.”
Mass-timber buildings are “coming very fast”
The use of timber as a construction material is “coming very fast,” he said, with cross-laminated timber, in particular, allowing architects to build high-performance mass-timber buildings, including tall structures.
William McDonough + Partners’ headquarters for Apex Clean Energy, under construction in Charlottesville, will be the tallest timber building on America’s eastern seaboard when it completes later this year.
The eight-storey CLT structure will have “a total potential carbon benefit of approximately 3,000 metric tonnes compared to traditional approaches,” according to William McDonough + Partners’ website.
Wood “holds up very well in fire too,” he explains. “Some people are surprised by that but wood will char before steel fails. High temperatures can take steel down long before a wood structure.”
Just ten per cent of waste wood is estimated to be recycled
However, cutting down trees to make products including furniture and paper is a potentially wasteful use of wood, McDonough argues. “Just think about carving wood. It’s a negative process, right? We’re cutting away stuff all the time.”
An estimated 15 billion trees are cut down each year for their timber but a substantial percentage of this is wasted. Timber accounted for over eight per cent of all landfilled municipal waste in the USA in 2018, and over eight per cent of all incinerated waste.
It is estimated that just ten per cent of waste wood is recycled, with the rest burned or sent to landfill, meaning all the carbon contained in the timber is returned to the atmosphere.
Paper production is another poor use of wood, McDonough believes. “I think we can look for other sources of fibre. Using something as beautiful as a tree to make a newspaper is a bit silly. The New York Times Sunday edition took five square miles of clear cuts. Just the Sunday version!”
Secondary agricultural materials including straw, which is usually burned, are better potential sources of paper fibre, he argued.
McDonough is particularly excited about new techniques for 3D printing with wood waste. “They’ve discovered how to 3D print with wood,” he explained, referring to a technique developed by Californian company Forust.
This takes waste sawdust and lignin, a natural polymer found in wood that is a byproduct of the paper industry, and “rematerialises” it as a printable material. “It could save a lot of trees,” McDonough said. “It’s kind of fun and it’s quite beautiful.”
McDonough’s grandfather was a lumberjack who worked in the great forests of the Pacific Northwest. As a result, he has “a lot of big tree karma”. He talks poetically about forests, remarking that “every tree is precious, every tree is a treasure, every tree is a carbon-capturing engine.”
However, the belief that simply planting more trees can solve the climate crisis is simplistic, he agrees. There is growing concern that forests are not secure enough to serve as long-term carbon stores since once they have been planted, the trees could die and rot or burn, or their timber could be put to short-term use.
In either case, the carbon goes straight back into the atmosphere. “What happens next? That is the question. You’re betting on a future you hope you can control. It is tricky business.”
Forests are “essential to culture”
But there are plenty of other reasons why forests are essential, he points out, including protecting biodiversity, conserving water and preventing erosion.
“I think taking care of forests is something that is essential to culture,” he argued. “There are so many reasons to do it beyond carbon sequestration. It’s still worth doing even if the carbon equations are skewed a bit because it’s about a 25-year cycle. The tree grows, dies, becomes carbon, goes up, comes back.”
“So how do we love the tree?” he concludes. “We don’t love it by cutting it down. It’s not just a resource. We love it by nurturing it.”
But surely trees do need to be cut down if the products made from them are going to serve as long-term carbon stores and help replace materials that generate fugitive carbon?
“It’s the same as eating food,” he responds. “You bless it. it blesses you. So you do have a relationship.”
This article is part of Dezeen’s carbon revolution series, which explores how this miracle material could be removed from the atmosphere and put to use on earth. Read all the content at: www.dezeen.com/carbon.
Pabellón RH is a concrete and glass pavilion designed by Mexican studio Morari Arquitectura to house a fitness centre and a collection of new and classic cars.
Pabellón RH, or Pavilion RH, is located in the suburbs of Morelia, the capital of the central state of Michoacán. The building sits on a tree-studded site with an existing contemporary residence.
The pavilion contains a car collection and fitness suite
Local firm Morari Arquitectura was tasked with developing a building to house a car collection, a fitness centre and a small spa.
The team conceived a two-storey structure – envisioned as an elongated pavilion – that is rectangular in plan. Rather than an extension of the home, the 410-square-metre building is meant to present as a separate structure.
The owner’s car collection is visible through glass doors
Rising from the upper level are a pair of sculptural forms that contrast with the building’s long, crisp lines.
The bottom level houses the automobiles, ranging from a 1960s Mustang to a 2018 Audi R8, while the upper floor holds a gym, massage room, sauna and a shower.
The lower garage level of Pabellón RH is made of concrete
“The ground floor responds to the scale of the cars and the function of exhibition, while the upper floor responds to the scale of the user and the function of containing,” the team said.
Two different materials were used for the facades. Concrete forms the lower level, while the upper part consists of masonry walls finished with grey stone – a strategy meant to harmonise the contrast between solids and voids.
An LED cieling lights the vehicle collection
“Both levels contrast and relate each other at the same time, presenting themselves as an open volume at its base, and closed on the top, with a pure and simple materiality,” the architects said.
The standard dimensions of a car informed the layout. The automobiles are stored within nine identical bays with glazed fronts that slide open and closed.
The austere space features exposed concrete beams and a luminous ceiling made of acrylic panels and LEDs.
“The LEDs are strips glued to the perimeter, so the light bounces and pours down diffusely,” the team said.
The steel spiral staircase leads to the top floor
A steel spiral staircase leads to the upper level, where one finds angled ceilings, skylights and cedar flooring with a light-grey polish. Rooms on this floor feel more enclosed than the garage below.
“The introspection of a massage room coexists with the exhibitionism of a gallery in an orderly way, each space fulfilling its function for the client’s comfort,” the team said.
This base is paired with a thin tabletop that Asplund describes as “almost floating”.
The table consists of a solid oak base and an oak veneer top, which are stained in either a natural, white, chestnut, teak or dark grey finish.
It is made of a solid oak base and contrasting thin veneer top
Now more than 30 years old, Asplund strives for a timeless expression in its furniture, which is handmade by expert craftspeople in Sweden.
“Our furniture should have the ability to make an impression on their own yet melt in into any interior and take on new roles in life with a function and beauty that finds new generations,” said Asplund.
The Palais series also includes coffee and side tables.
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Design studio Space Available and techno DJ Peggy Gou have joined forces to create a chair with integrated vinyl storage that’s made from 20 kilograms of recycled plastic waste.
Held together without the need for screws, staples or glue, the design consists entirely of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) packaging collected from the streets and waterways of Indonesia.
The chair (above) was designed by Space Available and Peggy Gou (top image)
“The trash is just everywhere, in the streets and rivers – it’s heartbreaking,” said Potato Head creative director Daniel Mitchell, who founded Space Available in the midst of last year’s coronavirus lockdown.
“It’s not the fault of the people, there’s just very little structural support, waste collection or education. Households are left to dispose of their own waste and most ends up in rivers or being burned.”
Two back fins were added for stability
Mitchell, who is based on the Indonesian island of Bali, partnered with Gou to bring awareness to this mounting issue via the medium of design.
“The aim was to create an everyday object that can start conversations and instigate awareness and change,” Mitchell explained.
Gou added an under-seat compartment in a nod to her growing vinyl collection
The chair itself features an under-seat storage unit for vinyl records in a nod to Gou’s growing personal collection and a hypnotic spiral pattern that is swirled into the melted plastic by hand before it has time to set and harden into sheets.
“We then use these sheets like wood and we work with local Balinese artisans who make the chair by hand in their workshop,” he explained.
To create the chair plastic waste is cleaned, shredded and melted in a mould
The final chair can be assembled without traditional fasteners or adhesives, simply by using plastic offcuts created in the process of trimming the sheets as welding rods.
Melted with a heat gun, they fuse the different components together in a method that Mitchell claims produces zero waste and allows the whole chair to be recycled again at the end of its life.
“The chair is made of just one material, which is really key for recyclability. When too many materials are mixed, it usually makes products very hard to recycle.”
The spiral pattern on the surface is created by swirling the plastic before it resolidifies
Although it is vital to recycle the plastic that has already been created, Mitchell argues that a ban on single-use plastics is the only real solution to the global waste crisis.
“Western countries send much of their trash here or to other locations around Asia, they just brush it under the carpet,” he said.
A compartment under the seat is large enough to hold vinyl records
“I think banning single-use plastic is the only way at this stage. But implementing that will be very difficult and there’s no immediate replacement within the current system,” Mitchell added.
“Awareness is growing but corporations and governments should be the ones taking responsibility.”
The aim of the project is to raise awareness about plastic pollution
A slew of other designers have created seating designs from recycled plastic in a bid to make a dent in the 300 million tonnes of plastic waste produced globally every year – or at least raise awareness around the issue.
While Tom Robinson used e-waste like old laptops to form his Evolve Chair, South Korean designer Haneul Kim fashioned a stool from discarded face mask and Norwegian brand Vestre used ocean plastic to create its Coast bench.
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