From the debut full-length album of Brussels-based duo Float Fall (aka Rozanne Descheemaeker and Ruben Lefever), “Little Words” is a warm daydream of a single with moody synths and melodic harmonies—all of which converge upon a captivating chorus. Their highly anticipated album will release this September.
Popcorn Monsoon does exactly what the name says – makes it rain popcorn! Everyone’s favorite movie theater snack that has also been a food staple for thousands of years finally gets the aesthetic machine upgrade it deserves. While the ancient Peruvians didn’t douse it with salt and butter like we do today, the process of heating kernels till they burst fluffy – whether using hot oil or heated air – has remained relatively the same. Carlier hasn’t invented anything but her Orville Redenbacher meets Alessi popcorn machine certainly makes the process of air popping (the healthiest method, mind you!) more colorful, playful, and dramatic! You can use a pot, foil-covered pan, specialty popper, microwave bag, or an air popper but the joy of hearing those mini Big Bang sounds remains the same.
“The drawings with which this project started were made to create a world of pure imagination that still makes sense in this one. Starting with shape and color makes a design process playful, later on, a surprising yet suitable function can be found and in this case, it translated into a popcorn machine. Like any other functional product, it had to be conceptualized and constructively thought through. Most popcorn machines are very dull and you can’t see the action – that’s what this machine blows up (literally!),” says Carlier. Add the kernels via a small cork-topped funnel, they will be heated up in cyclonic action, and eventually pour down like joyful, crunchy, edible rain!
Designer: Jolene Carlier
Astro Lighting has presented a selection of contemporary lighting designs on Dezeen Showroom, including pendant lights informed by neoclassical architecture and desk lights with integrated USB charging ports.
British brand Astro Lighting has launched five pared-back luminaire collections intended for a wide range of interiors, including residential and hospitality settings.
Distinguished by their elegant simplicity, the products showcased on Dezeen Showroom range from pendant lights and wall sconces to reading lights and desk lamps.
Among the five collections is Avignon, an art deco-style glass wall light that comes in rounded or square options and is intended for both domestic and hospitality interiors such as hotels, restaurants and libraries.
The light is embellished with a fluted front panel made from individual clear glass rods that encase and refract the light within. Its body is composed of zinc and is available in either a dark bronze or antique brass finish.
Hashira is a family of sleek metallic lights comprising pendants, sconces and surface-mounted downlights designed to illuminate small spaces within the home, such as hallways and corridors.
Informed by neoclassical architecture, the range is characterised by its dodecagon shape and slim profile. The lights have 12 extruded facets that catch and reflect the light, creating a captivating effect.
The Hashira range is available in a number of colour finishes including matt black, matt nickel and matt gold.
Miura is a compact lighting range encompassing desk lamps, reading lights and swing-arm sconces. The lights are distinguished by their tapered shades, circular bases and slender, tubular necks that are bent at a right angle to create a striking silhouette.
The desk lamp is equipped with an integrated USB port suitable for charging personal devices such as smartphones, while the wall light and swing-arm sconce feature subtle switches on the base.
Similar to the Hashira range, the lights are available in matt black, matt nickel and matt gold finishes.
Astro Lighting aimed to provide a modern update for classic gooseneck task lights when creating Lucca, a slim reading light with a diameter of just 25 millimetres.
The light, which is best suited for bedsides, study rooms, libraries or reading corners, comes in an array of minimalist, contemporary finishes.
It features a low-glare LED with either surface or recessed options, as well as a flexible matt black bezel and silicone arm that can be easily wiped clean.
Cambria Pendant is a minimalist drum-pendant light that has a soft, neutral design, which lends itself to a wide range of domestic interiors that require functional but understated overhead lighting. The pendant light is part of the wider Cambria collection, which also includes wall and ceiling lights.
The pendant light features a polycotton fabric shade that comes in a choice of white or putty colourways, as well as textured or pleated shade options.
Three E27 lamps are used to ensure efficient day-to-day performance. These are affixed to a black braided fabric cable that connects to a discreet metal ceiling rose.
The light has been designed for straightforward installation: it features a push-fit terminal block that enables loop-in and -out wiring and a tool-free connection. The base fixture conceals all screws, which creates a seamless finish.
Astro Lighting is a British interior lighting specialist established by John Fearon and James Bassant in 1997.
Its products are designed in Britain and range from ceiling, wall and pendant lights to floor lights, spotlights and table lights, as well as reading lights and other accessories.
Many of its products adopt circular economic principles in that they are created using sustainable materials and manufacturing processes, have repairable or replaceable components and can be recycled or responsibly disposed of at the end of their lifespan.
About Dezeen Showroom: Dezeen Showroom offers an affordable space for brands to launch new products and showcase their designers and projects to Dezeen’s huge global audience. To launch a new product or collection at Dezeen Showroom, please email showroom@dezeen.com.
Dezeen Showroom is an example of partnership content on Dezeen. Find out more about partnership content here.
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Dezeen Showroom: Daniel Garcia Sanchez has created a space-saving folding desk for Woodendot that doubles as a decorative shelf.
In one swift movement, the Alada desk can be transformed into a display shelf for small decorative items such as picture frames, candles or plants.
The desk was conceived in response to the growing need for flexible workspaces in the home.
The aim is to help users delineate their work time from their private time.
“Separating your personal time from your work time when doing home office can be challenging,” explained Sanchez, who co-founded Woodendot alongside Maria Vargas in 2013.
“The need for that closing time, for that literal act of saying ‘work is over for today’ was something I couldn’t find no matter how much I looked. This is where the idea for Alada was born. What if you could just close your workstation and forget about it until you need it again?”
The multifunctional desk also features hidden storage space when folded up to conceal slimline objects such as notebooks or laptops.
It can be installed at any height and its minimal footprint allows it to fit even into small spaces.
The Alada desk is available in oak wood with a natural or white lacquered finish, as well as in ash wood with a choice of white or black lacquer. Other custom finishes are available on request.
Product: Alada
Designer: Daniel Garcia Sanchez
Brand: Woodendot
Contact: info@woodendot.com
About Dezeen Showroom: Dezeen Showroom offers an affordable space for brands to launch new products and showcase their designers and projects to Dezeen’s huge global audience. For more details email showroom@dezeen.com.
Dezeen Showroom is an example of partnership content on Dezeen. Find out more about partnership content here.
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Industrial designer David Wojcik has a broad range of interests: He’s gone from interning at Porsche Design Studio to co-founding a logistics company, serving as creative director of a design agency and co-founding an IT company. But he is, in the end, an industrial designer, and industrial designers solve physical problems. With his Bloop concept, he tackles a heavy one faced by healthcare practitioners in developing countries.
“I was inspired by a magazine article which addressed the issue of the missing blood products in developing countries,” Wojcik writes. “As a result, 40 million of people can’t have a surgery because of the risk of bleeding to death. Due to major bleedings during pregnancy complications over 800 women die in emerging economies every year. In consequence the idea came to me not to waste the leaking wound blood and let it ‘flow on the ground’, but rather to collect it and give it back it to the patient immediately, so that the patient’s life can be saved.”
“Bloop works by a simple siphon principle allowing a patient’s blood to flow uphill without pumps. Initially, a blood thinning medicine inside the vessel flows down the tube. This creates gravity, which makes the wound blood flow downwards. The blood is then filtered and discharged in a blood bag at a level lower than the surface of the blood filled wound. As soon as the blood bag is filled, it will be replaced with an empty one and the first unit of collected – and filtered – blood can now be given back to the patient.
“Depending on the financial and infrastructural development of medical facilities, Bloop can be scaled up and extended to a high-end (yet low-cost by comparison) version, thus benefitting developed countries also.”
Check out more of Wojcik’s work here.
What’s the Porsche of hex keys, a set where some designer or engineer has really sweat the details?
Well, check out this 9-piece set from Wera Tools, which are color-coded by size, have abrasion-resistant etchings of the size in the handles, and also feature debossed size numbers in the carrying clip for redundancy’s sake.
Wera finds that round handles “are better in the hand and make long and painless work possible,” they write. “The plastic coating also ensures a comfortable grip, especially at low temperatures.”
The non-sharply-faceted shape of their heads reducing rounding, they claim, while allowing “up to 20% higher torques” to be transmitted.
“The spherical output profile enables the tool axis to be deflected or pivoted relative to the screw axis, so that it is possible to screw around the corner, so to speak.”
I’m sure these are cheaper in Germany, but ‘Stateside these will set you back about fifty bucks.
Summertime and a chilled can of beer are synonyms for that refreshing feeling. Sure, if you are someone who resonates with this notion, you wouldn’t mind a chilled beer cooler always by the side more often than not. But is it possible to lug a beer cooler always with you? Heineken’s cute little autonomous beer cooler gives you reason enough to think on those lines. Yes, the Heineken B.O.T. (Beer Outdoor Transporter) is a notorious Wall-E with fancy branding to always be by your side, delivering your brew chilled to the perfect temperature.
On first look, you can mistake this one for a mini John Deere mower with a missing front half. However, it can haul 12 chilled beers on its big wheels that virtually follow anywhere you go – giving the machine a charming personality. The tiny robot features four wheels, two big wheels, sensors, a brain running AI, and the capacity to hold a dozen cans in addition to ice. Owning this one will surely make you popular among buddies for its pure chill factor, literally. Heineken B.O.T. is an excellent example of how tech makes life convenient and differentiates from the tons of promotional materials available in the market! The video indicates the design can probably handle rolling on the grass at a park, and nothing running on more rugged terrain. It also shows a small screen and a speaker that allows the robot to greet its person!
Before you ask the question, when is this autonomous beer cooler be available to purchase. The bad news is, it’s only going to be the privilege of a few lucky ones. This limited edition beer cooler bot is up for grabs via a competition held on July 1st. Heineken will take submissions from interested people who like the idea of B.O.T. For now, there is not much known about the dynamics of the competition, but ones who love their beer will want to own this cute little buddy at all costs.
Designer: Heineken
While Ford’s design team deserves kudos for the Ford Bronco‘s overall form, if we zoom in on a few key details, you can see just how above and beyond they went.
It being an off-road adventure vehicle, removable doors were desirable. Removable doors exist on Jeeps, but the problem is that once you pop them off, the mirrors go with them. Ford’s design team, led by chief designer Paul Wraith, wanted to eliminate this UX hassle, and decided to mount the mirrors independently from the doors. But to make things work like a dream for the driver turned into a nightmare for the design team. “It was one of the most complicated parts of the vehicle,” Wraith told The Drive‘s Kristen Lee. Moving the mirrors created conflicts with “the A-pillar structure, the airbag, visibility of the mirror, the air vents. Everything is jostling for position.”
The team eventually figured it out, and tackled the second part of the problem: What precise sequence of steps does the user take to remove the door, and using what implements? How can we design this process to minimize damaging the door? Where does the door go once it’s removed? How can a user easily get the bulky door back onto the hinges, and maneuver the door back into place without scratching the paint?
In the following video demonstration, you’ll see the designers came up with solutions for each and every issue. Never mind including the tools; the bag that goes over the door, before it’s fully removed, has a well-located handle; the door itself features a grab point at the opposite corner; the bag is padded on the bottom to avoid damage to the door; there’s even a graphic on the bag showing you which door it fits—and even where in the vehicle to store it, amidst the other doors and/or roof panels.
If you watched the second half of the video, you hopefully caught that sweet detail in the rear roof removal process, whereby the unplugged wiper fluid hose and electronics cable get neatly plugged into dummy docks, keeping the cables out of the way. Really nice work.
If Ford had just brought the Bronco back with a visually updated form, they probably would’ve moved a ton of them. But I’m loving that they revised the brand with 21st-century design attention, and allowed the design team to go the extra mile. This level of attention is similar to what Apple used to give, and it will hopefully spur the competition to step up their game. Jeep’s designers have to be watching this and fuming.
Burkinabe architect Diébédo Francis Kéré‘s studio has built a university in Burkina Faso, western Africa, which has walls made with locally sourced clay and screens of eucalyptus wood.
The facility, named the Burkina Institute of Technology, forms part of Lycée Schorge Secondary School campus in Koudougou that was also designed by Kéré Architecture.
It was built to expand the campus, owned by the Stern Stewart Institute, and offer high school graduates an opportunity to continue their education.
The 2,100-square-metre building is composed of a series of repeated modules that contain classrooms, lecture halls and auxiliary spaces.
The modules are placed in a staggered formation to facilitate airflow in and around the building. Those that contain the classrooms are arranged around a rectangular courtyard at their centre.
Each module of the Burkina Institute of Technology is made with local clay that has been combined with concrete and then poured and cast in-situ into large formworks.
The formworks are the size of one whole classroom and were designed to be disassembled and rebuilt to cast each module.
This building technique is informed by the studio’s construction of a primary school in Gando, for which it has used the same method. It is a quicker and more flexible construction method than using traditional clay bricks.
Clay was also chosen as it is locally abundant and helps to cool the institute’s interiors through thermal mass.
The cooling properties of the clay work in tandem with mechanical air conditioning, and openings in the walls and a saw-tooth roof profile.
The rooftop openings are designed to release warm air through the stack effect – a technique that naturally ventilates buildings by expelling rising hot air.
Around each classroom are shaded corridors and walkways, framed by screens of locally sourced eucalyptus wood. These screens unify the institute with the Lycée Schorge Secondary School, which is lined with the same wood.
Eucalyptus wood has also been used inside to cover the hanging ceilings inside the classrooms, adding visual warmth to the interiors and complementing the clay walls.
The building is complete with an extensive landscape design that has been planned to protect the university during the rainy season, as the site is located on a flood plain.
It works by channelling water into a large underground tank that is then stored and available for irrigating mango plantations on the campus.
Kéré Architecture was founded by Kéré in Berlin in 2005. Other recent projects by the studio include the Tippet Rise Art Center pavilion in Montana, USA, which was crafted from dead trees.
It is currently also developing Benin’s parliament, which is modelled on the African palaver tree.
The photography is by Jaime Herraiz for Kéré Architecture.
Project credits:
Architect: Kéré Architecture, Diébédo Francis Kéré
Design ream: Jaime Herraiz Martínez, Andrea Maretto
Contributors: Juan Carlos Zapata, Valentin Billhardt
Construction supervision: Diébédo Francis Kéré, Nataniel Sawadogo, Jaime Herraiz Martínez
Landscape design: Kéré Architecture
Client: Stern Stewart Institute
The post Kéré Architecture uses local clay to construct Burkina Institute of Technology appeared first on Dezeen.
Frank Gehry‘s new tower in Arles fits with both the ancient Roman city and today’s environmental agenda, the architect claimed in an exclusive interview with Dezeen.
Speaking to Dezeen in Arles last week the Pritzker Prize-winner said The Tower, which has a steel-and-concrete frame and a glazed drum at its base, responds to current concerns about the carbon footprint of architecture.
“We fit into it,” said the Canadian-American architect. “But I can’t explain it. I respond to every fucking detail of the time we’re in with the people we live with, in this place,” added the 92-year-old when asked about the building’s environmental performance.
“So it’s all taken into account as best I can,” he continued.
“You know, I believe that’s the most important thing to do,” he added, gesturing to the face mask in his hands. “To live in the place and time you are in and what the issue is, you know, even with these fucking masks.”
Sustainable elements include natural ventilation of the circular glazed podium while some of the building’s energy comes from renewable sources. However, precise details of the building’s embodied carbon have not been disclosed. The team did not submit the building for environmental certification under the French HQE programme.
The Tower finally opened last week along with the rest of the vast Luma Arles cultural campus after a 14-year gestation period.
It serves as an entrance pavilion, lookout tower, exhibition-and-events space and beacon for the 27-acre campus commissioned by Maja Hoffmann, the art-collecting founder of Luma Foundation and the heiress to the Hoffmann-La Roche (now Roche) pharmaceutical fortune.
Founded in 2004, the philanthropic foundation “focuses on the direct relationships between art, culture, environmental issues, human rights, education and research”.
The Luma name comes from Hoffmann’s children, Lucas and Marina, echoing the way her father, the eminent environmentalist and World Wildlife Fund co-founder Luc Hoffmann, named his philanthropic conservation body MAVA Foundation after the initials of his children.
“I try not to repeat myself”
Gehry and Hoffmann, who is Swiss but grew up on her father’s estate in the Camargue wetlands near Arles, first began discussing the building in 2006. This was long before sustainability topped the architectural agenda but when shiny icons were still very much the rage.
Their conversations began nine years after the opening of Gehry’s titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and three years after the completion of his stainless-steel Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
But Gehry said that each project is a one-off rather than fitting into an evolution of his architectural approach.
“I try not to repeat myself,” he said. “I just think about it at the time I’m doing it, the people I’m working with, like Maja, the community.”
“So I don’t think of it,” he added. “I mean, naturally, there’s like this historical lineage but it’s just how I feel at this time in this place.”
The 1997 Bilbao building introduced Gehry to the world, rebooted the city’s economy and self-image, and fuelled the trend for iconic cultural buildings in cities hoping to replicate “the Bilbao effect”.
Gehry sounds a little bemused by the term. “I don’t really care about that, but it’s nice that it changed the community,” he said, as one of his team interjected, pointing out that he received death threats when the building was first proposed.
“When I went to Bilbao it was sad,” he continued. “They were having a hard time economically. The kids growing up left Bilbao to go to college. They didn’t stay there.”
Gehry’s Guggenheim is credited with turning around the fortunes of the post-industrial city in Spain’s Basque country.
“I didn’t mean to change the city”
“This has changed the economy,” he said. “People come. I’ve been told they earn over eight billion Euros since the building opened. When you go there now it’s friendly and open and happy.”
“People are always telling me how I changed the city,” he added. “I didn’t mean to change the city, I just meant to be part of the city.”
But Arles is no Bilbao. The UNESCO world heritage site is already a magnet for visitors coming for its spectacular Roman remains, its connection with artist Vincent van Gogh and Les Rencontres d’Arles, its world-renowned annual photography festival.
Located in a former SNCF railway engineering works on the edge of town, the Luma Arles campus adds another world-class attraction to the tiny city, which has a population of just 50,000.
The railway sheds, repurposed into workshops, galleries and performance spaces by Selldorf Architects, are monumental in scale but these are eclipsed by Gehry’s 56-metre-high tower. It is by far the tallest building in the area and dominates Avenue Victor Hugo, the main route into Arles, on a rise above the campus.
It towers over French architect Marc Barani’s low-slung and discreetly minimalist École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, the French national photography school that sprang from the photo festival and opened in 2019, which lies directly across the road.
Arles, once a Roman provincial capital, sits on a low hill beside the river Rhône just before it enters the Camargue wetlands (which Hoffmann’s father is credited with saving and where he established the Tour du Valat nature reserve) on its way to the Mediterranean, which is over 40 kilometres away.
“I don’t antagonise. I don’t try that”
The idea to build a tower came from Hoffmann, who expressed a desire to be able to “see the sea from the tower”. But despite the requirement to build tall, Gehry said he did not intend to build a provocative structure.
“Well, I try to make it the scale of where we are,” he said when reminded of the backlash from neighbours when he built his seminal 1978 home in Santa Monica. “And I try to make it user-friendly and not off-putting. So, you know, I don’t make it black. And I don’t antagonise. I don’t try that. That’s not my way.”
The design process involved making dozens of scale models, many of which are exhibited in the vast exhibition space beneath the tower. These show how various approaches were explored including stacks of cubes, piles of oblongs and fabric-like forms.
However, none of the early models shows the twin concrete lift towers that break up the sculptural form at the rear of the tower.
“There are over 100 models made of metal, wood… it was a long, long journey,” said Gehry.
Over his career, Gehry has pioneered new approaches to creating architectural form, including scanning roughly made paper and card models and manipulating them in 3D software.
But this time, the models were made by his team. “I don’t make them myself,” he said. “I used to. It is a collaborative effort.”
Gehry cites numerous local influences on the tower’s form. Vincent van Gogh, the artist who lived in the city between 1888 and 1889 and painted many of his best-known works here, is one of them.
Gehry has compared the stainless-steel facade to the brushwork in Van Gogh’s painting of Les Alpilles, a low range of mountains to the north-east of Arles that features distinctive limestone outcrops. He has also cited the nocturnal Starry Night painting as an influence.
The Roman architecture of Arles is another influence, with its famous amphitheatre informing the glazed drum at the base of The Tower.
“Certainly the Roman amphitheatres were in my mind but I didn’t want to copy them,” he said at the press conference that marked the building’s opening, when he joked that The Tower is “my first Roman building”.
“But I thought that having a drum on the boulevard that became the foyer for the whole building was a simple way of inviting people from all sides, from all directions, as well as having a strong symbol, presence on the street.”
The drum is naturally ventilated, one of a number of energy-saving features that were reverse-engineered into the project to make it more sustainable as the project rumbled on.
Others include a biodiesel plant and solar panels that provide some of the power for the campus, and the use of interior cladding made from local materials including agricultural waste, algae and salt to replace the originally specified gypsum drywall.
The latter interventions were carried out by designers at Atelier Luma, a design research lab located at the campus and headed by curator and educator Jan Boelen. There was apparently some tension over these interventions: when another journalist asked one of Gehry’s team about the materials, he replied: “That wasn’t us”.
Gehry took further inspiration from Romanesque architecture, including landmarks he visited when studying architecture in Paris in the 1950s.
“I visited here,” he said at the press conference. “I was living in Paris and studying Roman architecture. I was very moved by the architecture.”
Speaking to Dezeen later, he rattled off a list of Roman-influenced medieval buildings around the country he recalls visiting in his student days, admiring their stonework.
“Autun, Vézelay, Tournus… I guess that’s Romanesque. Yeah. I liked the stone blocks but I didn’t want to repeat that.”
Rather than stone, The Tower is faced in 11,000 hollow, non-structural blocks made of stainless steel sheets that have a textured pattern on them, allowing them to reflect the harsh Provençal light in a softer way.
“So we studied metal because it reflects the light. But I wondered if it could be soft and feel comfortable. Which it does.”
Inevitably, the building has its detractors. Does criticism concern Gehry? Or does he prefer to give people a bit of time to get used to new buildings in their neighbourhood?
“It’s more like the latter,” he replied. “I don’t presume anything. Really. I call it friendly or happy insecurity.”
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