Hasta La Ideas

From the interiors of a midcentury George Nelson home in Montauk to the heights of Central Park Tower in NYC and more

Acclaimed architect and designer Lauren Rottet—the founding principal and president of the international architecture practice Rottet Studio; creator of her own signature furniture line, Rottet Collection; and a fellow at the American Institute of Architects as well as the International Interior Design Association—can breathe life into every space imaginable. Rottet, who went to school to become a doctor before she switched to architecture, joined SOM in the early ’80s. There, she contributed to pioneering structures throughout Texas. Her eponymous studio opened in Houston, in 2008, and has since expanded to LA and NYC (with some 65 million square feet of built design globally).

The scope of Rottet’s work is quite profound—from the flowing elegance within the The Conrad Washington DC to the unmatched grandeur of residential units and public spaces inside Central Park Tower. Rottet has also designed more than 70 ships for Viking Cruises, including one for the Mississippi River and another being built right now for the Nile. This diversity of projects, domestic and international, reveals her holistic, refined vision. Few, however, are as personal as her own enchanting and idiosyncratic Montauk, New York house.

In February 2012, Rottet found herself in the Hamptons for the first time. She’d spent more than a decade looking for a second home, away from her primary residence in Houston. Though she was leaning toward properties around LA, she went to visit one of her Rottet Studio partners, David Davis, out East. It was there she spied a listing for a house built by the iconic modernist industrial designer George Nelson and his partner Gordon Chadwick. Rottet called the realtor and went to visit. Two celebrated artists had been living there—Rob Pruitt and Jonathan Horowitz—and although it needed some work, Rottet knew it would be her home.

“I was in love with it,” she tells us, as we walked the grounds with her. Immediately, one is struck by the home’s innate character—from the original entry doors, to the ramp that leads up and into the second-floor kitchen and the unfamiliar, captivating and geometric structure itself. What the facade alludes to (but also disguises) is that that all rooms are hexagonal.

Rottet has sought to maintain the home’s heritage while introducing her voice, which began with embracing its eccentric shape. “If you cut every single corner off of a rectangle, you find that everything fits fine in a hexagon,” she says. “There are no dead-ends. Everything flows around what you need.”

“I am the kind of person who thinks I know what I am going to do pretty immediately, with the big picture,” Rottet begins. “But I’m really a researcher. I research the history, the ‘why?’ Living in a house where every room is hexagonal is challenging. For instance, you’re not used to drawing doors that don’t open all the way, but you learn that they don’t need to. By living with these rooms, I’ve understood them better. We restored the shingles on the inside, replaced the carpets with the hardwoods. Then we added all new light fixtures, but I kept so much the same.”

Several built-in units—functioning as storage spaces, desks and end tables—came with the house and adhere to its uncommon angles. From there, Rottet worked to allow things to grow around her organically. She placed her own furniture designs amidst vintage pieces—from a George Nelson clock to a Raymond Loewy bar cabinet. She paired collectible art from the likes of Larry Koons and Alexander Calder with a $10 Noah’s Arc painting from 1976, which she found at the Montauk yard sale on July Fourth. Work from young, emerging and established artists intermingle on the walls.

The home’s connection to the outdoors is stunning, with windows and skylights everywhere (and the pool, which she added, works with the bay sometimes visible in the distance). Even with fickle weather, beauty infuses the hexagons—Rottet describes watching foggy days roll in from the second floor like sitting in a treehouse. She also wakes up beneath the palm tree in her bedroom every day. It came with the house and maintaining it is part of her mission. Altogether, there’s an idyllic calmness to the space, even though so much personality abounds.

Central Park Tower, the headline-making super-tall, tapped into a different set of skills. “It’s for a very different audience,” she says, “a client may even buy a series of them as an investment. Our work is very refined and very edited, so we looked a lot more at how everything is made. It’s definitely all precious materials but there are distinct, beautiful details. It’s about more than the materials.”

I realized you can transform a whole room and a whole ambiance with a little stroke of light or a reflection

Quality of light unifies her Montauk and Central Park work. It’s a Rottet signature. “I grew up with a pretty conservative doctor father. I got to go to museums; that’s what I got to do for fun. Fortunately, I enjoyed them. And when we went to California and I got to see Larry Bell and the early Light and Space artists. I was just blown away. I realized you can transform a whole room and a whole ambiance with a little stroke of light or a reflection.”

Regarding her process, Rottet says she likes “to design as if it were a musical score. There are points that are intense, but you will not find intensity everywhere. You walk into a room and it grabs you like the beginning of a song. It crescendos up and then it retreats. It calms down, only to repeat again.” This quiet symphonic style is particularly evident in Rottet Studio’s NYC offices.

“I don’t look for inspiration, because I know it will come—though I do get designer’s block,” she says. During a recent case in the Montauk house, Rottet’s daughter collected items from around the house. Together, they lined up the various shapes—placing planters with design objects—to build new forms for sconces and light fixtures. It’s a playful approach for someone taxed with so much design thinking.

In addition to her signature collection, Rottet has also collaborated with Fascio lighting and Haworth, among many others, on product development. In many ways, her Montauk home is a showroom for her furniture and accessory designs and a clear expression of how they contribute to a space and converse with iconography.

Rottet’s ongoing renovation of the New York Stock Exchange mirrors this balance of future-forward intervention with preservation of history. Rottet went to great lengths to restore the historic lights of the building, as well as the artwork. She searched through the NYSE archival warehouses for other works that could reemerge, as well. “Our vision was driven by care and a respect for the building,” she says. “But they also wanted surprise and delight.”

Amidst all of these projects, Rottet has one driving desire. “It’s to go back to designing it all,” she says. “To return to when a designer and an architect were not stuck in their box. From an interiors standpoint we do ships, medical, hotels, single-family residential, high-rise residential and offices. We do high-end, and low-end but high design. We’ve fixed a lot of the buildings we’ve done interiors in. We’re big into landscape, too. Moving forward I want to do it all: from the landscape to everything that should be on a site.”

Hero image of Central Park Tower courtesy of Rottet Studio

In the rigidly traditional and often concretely gendered watch industry, an all-gender timepiece for Pride—that is more than an existing model with a rainbow flag strap—comes as a breath of fresh air. This year, Detroit’s Shinola introduces their Pride Detrola 43mm, a dynamic Quartz watch with a translucent case, mirrored dial and an exposed caseback that includes a subtle rainbow accent. To accompany the limited edition release, Shinola has pledged $120,000 to the Ruth Ellis Center (a Michigan-based support-service organization for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults of color) and SAGE (an advocacy organization for LGBTQ+ elders). And for those who do want a rainbow strap, one comes with the purchase, too.

Architecture firm Perkins&Will has gone too far with claims that a luxury timber home on a Canadian mountain removes more atmospheric carbon than it emits, argues Fred A Bernstein.

For much of last winter, Perkins&Will, an architecture firm with 25 offices from San Francisco to Singapore to Sao Paulo, used a photo of a wooden house in British Columbia as one of the “hero images” on its website.

The house, which sits alone on a mountaintop overlooking the Soo Valley 90 miles north of Vancouver, is certainly beautiful, but the firm had other reasons for splashing it across its homepage. The 321-square-metre dwelling, known as the SoLo House, is meant to be a model of sustainability.

Entirely off the grid, it is designed to operate with power from 103 solar panels on its south facade, a 96-kilowatt-hour battery pack to store electricity for nights and cloudy days (both of which are frequent in British Columbia), and a hydrogen fuel cell for winter.

With all that equipment, the house may well be able to function without utility hook-ups. But Perkins&Will has made a far more surprising and audacious claim: that the building’s structure is “beyond carbon neutral,” meaning that it will remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emitted in the first place.

It seemed to be giving its clients permission to build willy-nilly at a time of climate crisis

In a slickly produced video on the firm’s website, Perkins&Will architect Alysia Baldwin says the house “proves that buildings can counteract their negative consequences and act as a source of repair.”

The claim is important because people listen to Perkins&Will, a firm that has positioned itself as a leader in green building. “For nearly a quarter of a century, we’ve been at the vanguard of the sustainability movement,” its website declares. Journalists have tended to repeat its claims.

But this time it had gone too far. By constructing a showplace of a house on an otherwise pristine mountaintop, and claiming it had helped the environment by doing so, it seemed to be giving its clients permission to build willy-nilly at a time of climate crisis.

Looking at SoLo House, with its cathedral ceilings, its comfortable sectional sofas and its giant picture windows, then listening to Perkins&Will claim that its structure reduces atmospheric carbon, I’m reminded of the old punchline: “Who are you going to believe – me, or your lying eyes?”

Reducing a building’s contribution to atmospheric carbon means making it small, keeping it simple, building it near existing infrastructure, avoiding the need for heavy equipment such as batteries and fuel cells and using the lowest-embodied-energy building materials.

Reducing a building’s contribution to atmospheric carbon means making it small

Perkins&Will, normally an excellent firm, has done those things on other projects. But with SoLo House, it seems not to have even tried.

According to experts, 40 per cent of atmospheric greenhouse gases come from buildings. Some emissions are attributable to running appliances and systems – so-called operational energy. The rest comes from the power needed to produce the building in the first place, known as embodied energy.

Incredibly, Perkins&Will is claiming there is “no embodied energy” in the house’s structure (by which they mean the elements that keep the building standing). To its credit, the firm answered requests for information promptly, providing facts, figures and charts prepared by Baldwin and her colleague Cillian Collins, a senior architect.

Here’s how Baldwin and Collins arrived at their no-embodied-energy claim: First they estimated the amount of structural wood, steel and concrete in SoLo House. And then they turned to Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings, an app that approximates the amount of energy needed to produce given amounts of each building material and the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere as a result of that energy use.

Athena told them that producing the steel and concrete, harvesting the wood and so on in SoLo House released 122 tonnes of CO2 (sometimes called CO2e, for CO2 and its equivalents) into the atmosphere.

That should have been the beginning – not the end – of the process of calculating the building’s embodied energy. There are hundreds of other items that needed to be counted. Start with the roof. The walls. The windows (a massive item, given the need for triple glazing). The solar panels, the batteries, the hydrogen fuel cells. The furniture. The appliances. The plumbing. The heating and cooling systems. Lots and lots of insulation.

The list goes on. Each of those items has significant embodied energy. Transporting all of those materials to a remote mountaintop site adds more.

Perkins&Will failed to account for those sources of embodied energy. Baldwin was clear, in a letter to me, that the calculations were limited to the structure. But why would anyone stop there? According to Baldwin, it’s because structure “represents the largest contribution to a typical building’s embodied carbon impacts.”

It may also be because Athena only applies to structure. (Athena is meant primarily for comparing how the choice of a structural material affects a building’s embodied energy. An architect might enter plans for the same building, once with a concrete frame and once with a steel frame, and see how the embodied carbon figures differ.)

Of course, there are other ways to estimate the house’s total embodied energy; one method is to use an online tool called Tally, which provides information on the embodied energy of numerous building components. Counting everything isn’t easy, but other firms have done it.

Perkins&Will had a way of making it vanish, if not from the atmosphere then from the balance sheet

Even so, according to Athena, the house emitted 122 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. That sounds like a lot of carbon, but Perkins&Will had a way of making it vanish, if not from the atmosphere then from the balance sheet.

Much of SoLo House is made of wood. Wood, like all plants, is produced by photosynthesis from ingredients that include carbon dioxide. Thus trees are said to store (or sequester) carbon. They do, but probably not as much as people think, as I learned by studying the question at length.

Here’s Perkins&Will’s theory: If you cut down a tree and use the wood as a building material, that carbon sequestered in that tree becomes part of the building. Then, if you plant a new tree in place of the one you cut down, the new tree will sequester additional carbon as it grows. Thus the process (cutting down one tree, planting another) results, net-net, in carbon being removed from the atmosphere.

There are so many problems with that theory it’s hard to know where to begin. To name a few:

1) You have to be sure a new tree will be planted in place of the one you cut down; will get to be as big as the one you cut down; and will live a long, healthy life. (If a tree burns, or decomposes, as billions of trees do every year, its embodied carbon is released right into the atmosphere.)

2) You can’t waste any of the wood. That’s a problem because converting a tree into lumber usually turns half the wood into sawdust or chips, which could end up being burnt or allowed to decompose. This problem alone suggests carbon sequestration figures should be cut in half.

3) The wood has to stay in or on the building for a very long time. If the building needs repairs, and lumber is removed, it may be recycled, but it may also be burnt or allowed to decompose. And who’ll be watching in 20 or 50 years?

4) Let’s be honest: You could have planted the new tree somewhere else, and not cut down the first tree to begin with. For that reason, no number of trees excuses a wasteful building.

5) Even if the new trees do sequester carbon, the process will take decades. Scientists who study global warming warn of tipping points and thresholds, some of which could be reached within the next ten years. If new buildings help push atmospheric carbon levels to a point of no return, the sequestration accomplished by newly planted trees will be too little, too late.

6) It’s a logical impossibility. If you really believe SoLo House repairs the atmosphere, all you have to do is build enough SoLo Houses and climate change will go away. Now for our next trick …

No number of trees excuses a wasteful building

No wonder the theory is highly controversial. A whole lot of things have to happen just right for it to become a reality. As Baldwin wrote in an email: “We acknowledge that not all timber sources perform equally in the realm of embodied carbon reduction.”

“Much of the embodied carbon reduction achieved by timber is directly attributed to sustainable forestry management practices that ensure forestry operations are carried out in a way that allows forests to remain healthy and viable for future generations,” she added. “These practices include conservation and protection, land use planning, regulation of timber harvesting, establishing practices to ensure forest regrow, and continuous monitoring and reporting to government.”

She went on to admit that the tool used to determine the building’s sequestered carbon, WoodWorks Carbon Calculator, a product of the Washington-based Wood Products Council, considers “much of this storage to be temporary and therefore [does] not give the building a carbon credit for the carbon dioxide that will eventually be released from this wood some time down the road, through decay or incineration.”

But that didn’t stop the firm from banking on the theory when it performed its embodied energy calculation. Using the Carbon Calculator, it determined that the amount of lumber in the building would result in the removal – through the planting of new trees – of 145 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. That’s a bit more than the 122 tonnes the firm says the building’s establishing, concrete, and steel released into the atmosphere.

Converting a tree into lumber usually turns half the wood into sawdust or chips

So in this case, reducing E (embodied carbon) by S (sequestered carbon) produces a negative number – minus 22 tonnes, meaning that building the house decreased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. (Indeed, the house’s owner, Delta Land Development, refers to it as “climate positive.”)

Perkins & Will firm produced a chart to make this clear:

As Baldwin puts it, SoLo House “is able to store more carbon in its structure than was released during the production, manufacturing, and construction of the project.”

That’s a highly suspect statement. Based on everything I’ve learned, E (embodied energy) may be much greater than Perkins&Will says it is, and S (sequestered carbon) much lower.

In a letter responding to points in this article prior to publication, Perkins&Will wrote the following (the client, Delta Land Development, did not respond to requests for comment):

“Through careful selection of low embodied carbon and locally sourced materials, the project prioritized a mass timber structure. The design team used industry-accepted LCA [life cycle assessment] tools to quantify the carbon sequestration potential of the structure, and the timber structure is modelled to sequester 145 tonnes of CO2e as biogenic carbon.”

Reusing/recycling is always the greenest strategy

“Structural elements typically represent the largest embodied carbon profile of [a] project, and as such, the structure was prioritized from an embodied carbon perspective.”

“As designers, we rely on reputable industry tools to estimate the impact of projects. We used the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings to complete this assessment. Athena uses ongoing research by the Athena Institute and complies with ISO 14040 (environmental management, life cycle assessment, and principles and framework) and ISO 14044 (environmental management, life cycle assessment, and requirements and guidelines).”

“Per our previous correspondence, we shared the Athena Institute’s definition of biogenic sequestered carbon, which considers the whole life cycle of the material, including extraction, manufacturing, forms of transportation, installation, repair and maintenance, and end of life (assuming reuse of the wood).”

However, if Perkins and Will had really wanted to reduce embodied carbon, it would have thought about some of these strategies:

1) Putting the house in an easily accessible location, thus cutting out hundreds or thousands of trips by delivery people and construction workers. (Perkins&Will points out “that the wood was sourced from within British Columbia, and the building panels were manufactured in Pemberton, BC, which is located 30 minutes from the site.”)

2) Renovating an existing house. Reusing/recycling is always the greenest strategy. Renovation typically generates 50 to 75 per cent less atmospheric carbon than new construction.

3) Choosing a site where there are no trees to cut down. According to Perkins&Will, “A clearing was required for a driveway, solar access, and fire protection. It required harvesting 180m³ of second-growth hemlock timber. This wood was put into the BC forestry chain, becoming useful lumber.” Taking credit for sequestration by trees that may have been planted elsewhere, while cutting down enough trees on site to fill a five-meter by six-meter by six-meter container, is a whole lot of embodied irony.

4) Making the house a lot smaller. When it comes to saving energy, less is definitely more.

5) Choosing versions of steel and concrete with the lowest embodied energy (a lot of research is being done on ways of making those materials less “carbon-intensive”).

Perkins&Will appears not to have done these things — the actual work required to reduce carbon emissions. The danger is that people will believe its claims.

Carbon revolution

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.

The sky photograph used in the carbon revolution graphic is by Taylor van Riper via Unsplash.

The post “Taking credit for trees planted elsewhere is a whole lot of embodied irony” appeared first on Dezeen.

Keeping my desk clean at all times is one ritual I always follow – after all, a clean decluttered space for working is the basis of prime productivity and a feel-good factor attached to it. To do the cleaning rituals, I use a soft brush that picks up the dust from the surface of the desk, monitor, and other desk accessories. After the task is done, the brush has to go behind the scenes – either in the drawer or on the sidelines hiding behind the props on the wall shelf. Designer Jinwook Lee of the design studio This Is wants to break the stereotype and elevate the dusting brush’s status to a décor object on the desk.

To this end, Jinwook has come up with the idea of O Brush houseware that’s functional and more than meets the eye. It is a cleaning brush and dustpan combo for one’s who appreciate the perks of keeping their working environment visually clean. Looking more like some minimalistic gadget – the O Brush opens up to reveal the dustpan and brush for a quick cleaning task. When you’re done, simply plug in the brush into the housing in the dustpan and nobody ever knows what it actually is.

The O Brush accessory is something you want right away for your productive workstation setup – functionality and aesthetics-wise. Jinwook’s concept design certainly deserves to meet fruition. So, won’t you like to have this on your desk?

Designer: Jinwook Lee of This Is

Inspiration for design hits when you least expect it. Could happen when you’re binge-watching your favorite show on Netflix and it could happen as you’re tirelessly flipping through old art books itching for an idea to hit. For Timo Riemann, a Germany-based design graduate, inspiration seemed to have hit while he was busy watching a traffic cone across the street from where his school lecture was taking place. Envisioning the blueprint for a traffic cone that could unfurl into a stool, Riemann developed Pylon, a convertible stool that doubles as a piece of interior artwork and also saves space in the living room.

At first glance, the Pylon appears as an ordinary traffic cone. Brass hinges line the circumference of the cone’s round base and hint at the traffic cone’s secondary form. By unlocking one of the brass clasps along the base’s outer edge, the traffic cone unfolds and inversely furls back together to form a stool, complete with four-pointed legs. Described as a “cross-section between art and design,” Riemann’s traffic cone stool has a certain industrial appeal – the ideal interior furniture piece for a warehouse turned art studio. Pylon was constructed from laminated fiberglass, fiberglass-reinforced polyamide, as well as a collection of molds that harden Pylon into its full shape. In addition to its fiberglass structure, the brass locks and hinges that line Pylon’s base each were made one-of-a-kind to streamline Pylon’s metamorphosis from traffic cone to office stool.

Initially thought of by Riemann as a last-minute idea for a class assignment, Pylon’s blueprint practically opened itself up to Riemann before he hit the workshop to begin the stool’s construction. Stackable and versatile in purpose and design, Pylon is an exciting piece of furniture for the design enthusiast in each of us.

Designer: Timo Riemann

By simply unlatching one of the cone’s metal clasps, Pylon then unfolds to inversely connect once more, turning it into a stool.

One-of-a-kind metal clasps and brass hinges were integrated into Pylon’s base to ensure a seamless transition.

The Pylon stool morphs from traffic cone to office stool simply by inverted its structure and flipping it upside down.

Pylon was constructed from laminated fiberglass, fiberglass-reinforced polyamide, and a series of molds.