Hasta La Ideas

London-based production studio Unit9 has created a tensegrity structure at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed that can be transformed into a race track using an augmented reality app.

Named Lotus Aeroad, the 50-metre-long sculpture was built outside Goodwood House as the centrepiece for the motorsport festival, which took place from 8-11 July.

The lightweight tensegrity structure was informed by the design philosophy of British car brand Lotus, which sponsored the structure.

“Lotus Aeroad is inspired by Lotus founder Colin Chapman’s philosophy of ‘simplify, then add lightness’, which led us to use tensegrity as a design and engineering principle,” Unit9‘s creative director Kate Lynham told Dezeen.

Balanced on a supporting frame, the structure was made from a small number of steel tubes and stainless steel cables.

According to the designers, it forms a cantilever that mimics the “rooster tail” shape of the Lotus Evija, which was the brand’s first electric hypercar.

“The sculpture employs the engineering concept of tensegrity – a structural principle where tension and opposing forces create exceptionally strong and rigid structures with minimal mass,” said Lynham.

“We wanted the structure to be made more from air than any other material.”

The team developed the structure using computer-based form-finding techniques. The designers decided on the direction and form of each component, and then a computer programme was used to create a structure that would be able to stand on its own.

“In order to follow the correct shape and hence ensure each member carries the anticipated force, the erection has to be extremely accurate,” said Stephen Melville, the founding director of Format Engineers.

“This has to be carried out in empty space, akin to an unstable 3D jigsaw puzzle that needs many of the elements to be in place before it stands under its own weight,” he continued.

Visitors to the Goodwood Festival of Speed could download the Lotus Aeroad app to transform the structure into two race tracks using augmented reality.

Unit9 believes that this created “a richer experience and bring additional elements to the sculpture, without increasing the weight or load”.

“In-person attendees can use the AR app to transform the sculpture into a dramatically curved race track that brings to life the Lotus Elise, Evore, Exige and, most excitingly, the brand-new Lotus Emira as it zooms around the feature,” said Lynham.

Virtual attendees at the Goodwood Festival of Speed were also able to download the app and watch the cars race around the structure from their phones.

“At-home digital viewers can view the entire structure in AR, scaling it to fit their environment wherever they are in the world,” explained Lynham.

The Goodwood Festival of Speed is a motorsports festival that takes place once a year at Goodwood House in West Sussex, England. Previous installations at the motorsports festival included Gerry Judah’s Aston Martin’s structure which was designed to celebrate the Aston Martin DBR1 car.

Another tensegrity structure that has made news headlines recently is Project Bunny Rabbit’s All Along the Watchtower. The bamboo structure is one of two winners of the Antepavilion architecture competition, which happens every year.

In June, police threatened to remove the structure from its location on the roof of the Hoxton Docks. Police raided the building on the hunt for members of climate activist group Extinction Rebellion. The group is known for its tensegrity structures and supporters of Extinction Rebellion had attended workshops at Antepavilion to help build All Along the Watchtower.

Project credits:

Client: Goodwood Festival of Speed
Brand partner: Lotus Cars
Digital innovation and production partner: Unit9
Construction: Format Engineers
Fabrication and installation: Littlehampton Welding

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Moussafir Architectes and Nicolas Hugoo Architecture have created two residential towers connected by a podium containing live/work units as part of the La Chapelle International development in northern Paris.

Built on a former railway station in Paris’s 18th arrondissement in the northeast of the city, the development occupies a city block.

Moussafir Architectes and Nicolas Hugoo Architecture each designed a timber, glass and concrete tower containing 105 townhouse-style apartments at either end of the development.

In response to the masterplan for the seven-hectare La Chapelle International development, which called for a uniform podium forming a base for two towers, 18 small live-work spaces clad in gridded-metal cladding were placed between the two towers.

The street-level podium, which also contains common areas for the towers and two shops, displays the same orthogonal facade structure across the entire city block.

The residential towers present greater aesthetic variation while maintaining overall consistency with the rest of the scheme.

The taller G2 tower was developed by Jacques Moussafir’s firm, while Nicolas Hugoo’s studio designed the G1 tower to complement the facade it created for the concrete podium.

The hybrid premises containing housing and small workspaces are called Small Office Home Office (SOHO) units and are intended for use by artisans, small businesses and self-employed workers.

The SOHOs aim to merge professional and residential spaces by applying a uniform material palette throughout the interiors. Each unit has a business entrance facing the street and private access from the communal area at the centre of the block.

The upper levels of the SOHOs are arranged around six staggered semi-private terraces. The terraces slot in around six compact patios that allow daylight to reach living areas on the ground floor.

The densely packed accommodation is intended to reference the traditional Parisian streetscape, while the sloping roofs evoke nearby train sheds.

A material palette featuring steel and aluminium surfaces creates a cohesive, industrial aesthetic across the inward-facing elevations.

“We imagined the fifth facade as a new ‘metal blanket’ made of perforated and ribbed aluminium that seems alternately to be either extruded to form hipped roofs or stamped to generate patios and terraces clad with galvanised steel grating,” added Jacques Moussafir, whose firm designed the SOHOs.

The G1 apartment building, which was designed by Nicolas Hugoo Architecture, was designed to feel light and open to the surrounding city, with projecting balconies providing views in all directions.

Larch joinery brings rhythm and organisation to the facades, which incorporate fixed and opening windows interspersed with anodised aluminium panels.

The lightweight aesthetic is enhanced by the lack of visible structure on the building’s exterior, along with the prefabricated concrete balconies that narrow at the edges.

The building is organised around a compact circulation core, with functional spaces situated closest to the centre to free up the outer areas for the living spaces and bedrooms.

The second tower, known as G2, was designed by Jacques Moussafir. It features cubic proportions and accommodates six apartments on each floor.

As with G1, the apartments are arranged with living areas towards the edges to optimise the available light and views.

The building’s structure is provided both by the central core and by the waffle design of the concrete facades. This configuration means that long spans are not required and frees up some of the corners.

“Borrowing more from civil engineering than other current construction techniques, this expressive structure is built with concrete poured onsite with large dimension metal formworks,” said the project team.

Varying the orientation of the terraces allowed for the creation of four different floor plans across the ten levels. This arrangement also helps to break up the facades into a non-uniform pattern that expresses the positioning of each apartment.

Jacques Moussafir founded his eponymous studio in 1993 and now works across various fields including cultural and residential projects.

The studio’s previous work includes a Parisian home with a staircase that can be glimpsed through patterned shutters and a concert hall in Tours, France, covered with a synthetic material that resembles a quilt.

Nicolas Hugoo worked as a project manager at Moussafir’s firm for five years before co-founding the Bang Architectes collective and eventually setting up his own agency focused on managing urban architecture projects.

The photography is by Herve Abbadie unless stated.

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“It sort of looks like Green Lantern’s ring, and gives you all sorts of superpowers too.”

Meet the Tool Ring, a finger-worn EDC that can do everything from open bottles and boxes to tighten screws, and even sign documents while you’re at it. The uniquely shaped ring comes with space to dock various hex-shape bits, making it possibly the smallest toolkit in the world.

Designer: Vanik Piliguian of Carbn Design

Click Here to Buy Now: $35 $60 (41% off). Hurry, only 5/40 left!

The Tool Ring is exactly the kind of product you get from someone like Vanik Piliguian, an Industrial Designer born in a family of jewelers. Made from titanium the ring acts as a holder for the Tool Ring’s ecosystem of hex-bits, which include a Philips-head screwdriver, a ballpoint pen, a box-cutter, and a flashlight. Independently, the ring sits comfortably on your finger and even has a unique appearance that is also capable of being used as a mini pry tool for opening lids.

The Tool Ring’s design is characterized by the three hexagonal slots integrated into its form. These slots allow you to slide in the Tool Ring’s hex-bits (although you can use other standard PH2 hex-bits too) and use the ring as an instrument of your choice. The top slot offers the most functionality, allowing you to do things like twist screws, point the flashlight, or even cut open boxes with a fair deal of dexterity.

The slots on the side are perfect for storing bits that aren’t in use, and the way they’re positioned aligns them up with your finger, so they don’t obstruct your hand’s movements. To ensure that the Tool Ring holds onto the bits securely while you use them, the slots come with rubber inserts, providing extra friction so the bits don’t slip off while in use.

The ring’s design brilliantly intersects the aesthetic appeal of jewelry and the functionality of multitools. Its titanium construction makes it reliably robust, and the edges of the ring are rounded off for added comfort, thanks to a round of machine tumbling to remove any burrs. It comes in a polished or a satin finish, and a bunch of anodized colors too – purple, blue, gold, and a personal favorite rainbow finish that just emphasizes the ring’s jewelry background.

Talk about form, function, and fashion! You can either get the ring with a single hex bit (and pair it with your existing PH2 toolkit), or grab the entire set including the ring and 4 bits for an early bird price of $65. This includes the box-cutting knife bit, a ballpoint pen bit, and a water-resistant 10-lumen flashlight bit.

Click Here to Buy Now: $35 $60 (41% off). Hurry, only 5/40 left!

It looks like equal parts Iron Man and the Winter Soldier, and it makes really cool whirring and clicking noises too!

Most people look to 2019 with a certain fondness and nostalgia, but the year proved quite difficult for Ian Davis. Not only did he lose 4 of his fingers in a freak workshop accident, but he was also diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, an aggressive type of cancer. To add figurative salt to his wounds, Davis found out his medical insurance didn’t cover costs for a prosthetic hand because ‘he only lost his fingers and not his entire hand’. Determined not to be shaken by this strange detour life forced him to take, and also empowered by his sheer willpower to keep creating, Davis decided to build a prosthetic of his own.

Relying on his professional knowledge as a mechanical engineer, and taking to 3D printing, Ian embarked on a journey to rebuild his hand and his life. “Being a maker, it was a tough deal,” Ian said as he had to use his hand for everything. Davis even documented the entire process on his YouTube channel through a series of videos that show assemblies, versions, updates, and upgrades. In his latest upgrade, Davis demonstrates the prosthetic’s ability to splay (or spread out) the mechanical fingers… something he says is very rare, if not entirely absent, in commercial prosthetics. The fact that the entire prosthetic limb is engineered from scratch gave Davis the ability to repair and augment his creation, something he wouldn’t be able to do with complex, commercially manufactured prosthetic limbs… especially given America’s strict laws against the “Right To Repair”.

What’s really noteworthy about Davis’ creation is that it’s entirely mechanical and doesn’t rely on electronic components, software, and batteries. In a Reddit thread, he mentions that the mechanical hand has many obvious benefits over an electronic one. For starters, it doesn’t need charging (and conversely never runs out of charge either), but it’s also MUCH faster than electronic limbs. It takes an average of 0.2 seconds to open or close the fist, as opposed to electronic prosthetics that can take 10 times longer. Let’s also state the fairly obvious in that it even looks absolutely INSANE, with the steampunk metal digits and the tiny #15 industrial chain running through them… as well as the whirring and clicking sounds they make as they move.

It’s a relentless process of trial, error, and improvement for Ian Davis. He started working on the concept back in July of 2019, and slowly and surely built new features into his hand to make it better, with the latest addition being the splaying function. Moving forward, Ian also plans to implement an Arduino with a display to gain individual control of the fingers and some servo motors to advance the design.

“My end goal is to get picked up by one of the major prosthetic manufacturers and design hands for them in their R&D department, creating real-world solutions for partial hand amputees. Durable products that you can take to work and actually get jobs done with. Allowing people to get back to their lives, doing things that they loved before the time of their life-changing accidents”, Ian says.

Designer: Ian Davis

New York practice Kevin O’Sullivan + Associates has completed a waterfront house in the Hamptons with balconies for looking out at the sunset.

The practice was approached after the clients had discovered the site in a small cove in the Hamptons village of Sag Harbor.

Called Sag Harbor 2, the design prioritises northwest views of the water and sunsets, combining communal spaces with unique areas for each family member.

“Our aim was to create a home that had a place for everything and to create individual moments of joy for all four members of the family,” said Kevin O’Sullivan + Associates (KOS+A).

The site is sheltered by trees on either side and gently slopes down towards the water.

To maximise views, the family’s bedrooms have been raised to the first floor. Where it faces the water the home is almost entirely glazed. On the opposite side tall, thin windows provide more carefully controlled views.

These bedrooms are surrounded by a balcony that wraps around the first floor, accessible via full-height sliding doors and sheltered by an overhanging roof.

On the ground floor below are two guest bedrooms and the main living spaces.

A large kitchen, dining and living area is arranged around a shuttered concrete fireplace that also conceals the staircase.

Sliding doors in this living area open onto an area of decking with dedicated cooking spaces for outdoor dining and a staircase leading down to a swimming pool.

The darker areas of the basement of Sag Harbor 2 houses a garage, utility and mechanical spaces as well also a sauna room, gym and a dedicated room for the client’s fishing equipment.

This lower level has been finished externally with tumbled limestone to give the home a strong base.

The upper levels of Sag Harbor 2 are clad with teak and contrasting charred cedar for the guest bedroom block, which projects slightly from the main house.

In the interiors, dark wood has been used in areas of the walls, floors, ceilings and furniture, contrasting with areas of lighter colour, stone in the bathrooms and the board-marked concrete in the living room.

“We strive to keep the materials natural and the palette calming,” said  KOS+A.

“Tried and true materials lend a timeless quality to any style of architecture.”

KOS+A have completed numerous projects in the East End of Long Island, including a house in Amagansett clad entirely in cedar shingles.

The photography is by Read McKendree.

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