Hasta La Ideas

This almost seems like an ID student project, but it’s actually in production: The Lönneberga Stacking Bed, by German furniture brand Richard Lampert. It’s a sofa that turns into two twin beds, using the simplest design possible.

In addition to the simplicity of the design, I like the little shelf that just hangs on the edge:

One downside is that here is no back and the bolster relies on gravity, meaning it must be against a wall in sofa mode. Another is that it presumably takes two people to perform the bed/sofa transformations. Other than that, the Lönneberga certainly lives up to the Richard Lampert motto:

“So wenig wie möglich, so viel wie nötig.”

(“As little as possible, as much as necessary.”)

A beastly monochrome reinterpretation of the iconic 4×4 vehicle that has redefined off-roading adventure on this planet for seven decades. Truly this attractive monster defined by sharp looks is every millennial as well as urban junkie’s dream come true.

Land Rover Defender is a tough luxury off-roader that’s proved its mettle over the years – being a true reflection of the brand’s 70 years of innovation and improvement. Now a designer attempts to restomod the legacy in his own imagination for a 4×4 off-roader that’s a modern interpretation of the classic four-wheeler.

Automotive designer Matteo Gentile calls his off-roading beast the Bond Defender. An advanced off-roader imagined being the Bond’s accomplice in fighting the bad guys. Just in time for the latest No Time to Die movie which goes through a dangerous rescue mission of a kidnapped scientist. Strangely, Matteo chooses the Harrison (American automobile manufacturer) brand name for the Bond Defender. Anyways, the 4×4 has the evident DNA of the old and the new Land Rover Defender designs that have seen many subtle changes in look, over all these years. The front has the classic influence apparent in the grille and headlights, while the rear bears a more modern Defender aesthetics.

The contours of the original Land Rover have been shaved off for a sharp aerodynamic look all over. This gives the Bond Defender muscular appeal that you would actually want to show off on the mountain trails and desert sand dunes. From the looks of things, the fat tires look eerily similar to the NASA-inspired airless bike tires by Smart Tire Company or the recently popular bicycle tire by The Q. Putting the next generation tires on an off-roader makes complete sense as treacherous roads are rigged with unpredictable dangers for the tire’s compound and punctures.

Designer: Matteo Gentile

Pratt Institute graduate students Charlotte Böhning and Mary Lempres have designed a collection of carbon water filters made completely without fossil fuels, using waste from their own kitchens.

The four-piece range, called Strøm, includes a sustainable substitute for Brita filter cartridges, purifying sticks that can be added into cups or bottles and a self-cleaning pitcher and carafe.

Traditional water filters consist of activated carbon housed in plastic cartridges, both of which are generally derived from non-renewable coal and petroleum.

But for their designs, the graduate students have developed a new fossil-fuel-free material, made by turning food waste into carbon-rich biochar and combining it with natural resins, so it can be shaped like a thermoplastic.

The resulting composite acts as both filter and vessel at the same time and, unlike the 100 million polypropylene cartridges that end up in landfills every year, will decompose in soil over the course of a single month.

“By utilizing an existing waste stream, we can reduce the negative lifecycle impact of water filtration,” Lempres told Dezeen.

“While carbon filtration immobilises harmful contaminants, the plastic cartridge’s only function is to hold the activated carbon,” she continued. “Meanwhile, sourcing, manufacturing and injection-moulding the polypropylene are the largest contributors to the filter’s impact.”

Activated carbon is used in water purification due to its high porosity, which gives it an outsized surface area equivalent to one football field for every four grams of material and gives it the capacity to absorb a variety of contaminants including bacteria, pesticides and even nanoplastics.

Böhning and Lempres’ material achieves a similar effect through the use of biochar, which they make by burning banana peels, sheep bones and other food waste from their kitchens, as well as from local farms and restaurants, in a special kiln in the absence of oxygen.

This process, called pyrolysis, does not allow the carbon in the biomass to form carbon dioxide during combustion and instead turns it into a porous, highly absorbent char while permanently storing away the carbon contained in the food, which would otherwise have been released into the atmosphere during decomposition.

“Fundamental to our interest in biochar is the ability to create circularity by turning waste into a functional, carbon-sequestering material,” Böhning added.

“One of the advantages of pyrolysis is that when the biochar reaches a landfill, it will continue to store carbon stably as opposed to food waste, which due to the conditions in a landfill would produce methane.”

The biochar is mixed with a binder of bee propolis and tree resins to create a material that can be cast, injection or hand moulded to form disposable filtration pellets for use in the cartridge and carafe, as well as the actual Strøm vessels themselves.

Böhning and Lempres say the final products don’t just match but actually outperform traditional filters and work on several substances that don’t react to activated carbon.

Magnetising the biochar in a ferrous salt bath allows it to draw heavy metals out of the water, while the addition of animal bones into the char helps the material to filter out fluoride.

Meanwhile, the propolis, which consists of a mixture of tree sap as well as beeswax and saliva, acts not just as a binder but also helps to prevent bacterial growth and grime build-up.

“Bees use it to mummify the carcasses of any unlucky hive intruders like mice to stop the spread of disease,” explained the students and hobbyist beekeepers.

“So it has significant antimicrobial, antiviral, anti-fungal and anti-inflammatory properties. However, it needs to be harvested ethically so as to not disturb the hive.”

According to the duo, the final material is more affordable and accessible than activated charcoal, due to being made from waste materials, as well as being longer lasting.

While the Strøm cartridge and carafe are powered through filter pellets that can be replaced in order to expand the lifespan of the products, both the pitcher and the squiggly purifying sticks need to be discarded once their filtration capabilities have waned.

But as all the products are made from the biochar-propolis composite, the students say they are completely backyard compostable and will decompose in soil in around a month.

The biochar can even help to enrich the earth, as it has been used as a fertiliser for centuries and is increasingly being used to turn soils into more effective carbon sinks.

But Böhning and Lempres, who are completing their masters in industrial design at the Pratt Institute, are currently still investigating whether the toxins, metals and plastics immobilised in the filters could also have adverse effects.

Nevertheless, their Støm project was awarded the design school’s second annual Material Lab Prize, which recognises student projects that give waste streams a new purpose.

Berlin startup Made of Air has previously made use of biochar‘s ability to sequester carbon to create a bioplastic that stores more CO2 than it emits and can be turned into everything from furniture to facades.

Elsewhere, Snohetta has experimented with using the material to create low-carbon concrete, which it hopes to use in its restoration of the Knubben harbour bath in Arendal, Norway.

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A playful network of large pipes containing walkways and bridges wraps around this children’s community centre in Beijing by local practice We Architech Anonymous (WAA), housed in a series of refurbished 1970s industrial buildings.

The Playscape, which has been shortlisted in the landscape project category of Dezeen Awards 2021, was designed for a children’s healthcare provider that specialises in exploration and play, and created as a “tool for sensory learning”.

A cluster of former grain warehouses form the basis for the project, with the courtyard in their centre transformed into an undulating, steel-framed landscape that creates a series of new interactions among the existing buildings.

“Beijing is a city where many children do not have access to an adequate-sized outdoor space within their close locale,” said the WAA. “Children are often drawn to risk, creating a feedback loop of design refinement and safety concerns…we allowed a managed element of risk, where children can learn to be more confident to tackle problems independently.”

Cut-outs revealing bright yellow play-spaces, built-in trampolines and a series of mounds that can be scaled to access the roofs of the original warehouses animate this central landscape, which also acts to stitch together the previously disconnected buildings on the site.

Inside these former warehouses are a series of play spaces for a range of ages. These include crawlspaces and climbing areas with hanging fabrics, a suspended tensile net area and classrooms for more directed learning, as well as a library and restaurant.

Externally, new openings and textured perforated brickwork subtly updates the warehouses, with minimal interior changes made in order to highlight the contrast between the industrial structures and the newly inserted playscape.

“The new additions for play are visually distinct from the industrial vernacular…this had a greater functional outcome and also generated more interest for children,” said the practice.

The surrounding pipework incorporates viewing areas and half-covered sections as it moves around the structure, culminating in access to a roof terrace atop one of the warehouse buildings, where skylights give views into the play areas below.

“A full loop can be made and children can travel from the terrace under the mound through slides which vary in height from seven metres to 4.3 metres,” described the practice. “The network impresses upon them alternative directions to goals, and that sometimes the second-shortest route is more fun.”

These pipes also work to connect the warehouse buildings back into the surrounding area, providing access and views out over an adjacent public park.

The project was shortlisted in the 2021 Dezeen Award’s landscape project category, along with Qidi Design Group’s landscaped garden in Danyang, among others.

Previous projects for children in Beijing include a kindergarten by MAD, which transformed an 18th-century structure with a bright red rooftop walkway and playscape.

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It was the right choice to give Grafton Architects’ Kingston University London this year’s Stirling Prize, says Catherine Slessor, but the award is still struggling to find its purpose.

So Grafton Architects have now collected the set. Following the PritzkerArchitecture Prize and RIBA Gold Medal, the 2021 Stirling Prize has been awarded to the Town House at Kingston University London, one of the darker horses on a shortlist of frankly bewildering range and scale, encompassing everything from a featherlight wisp of a bridge to an arboreal mosque.

Grafton was certainly not the bookies’ favourite – that dubious distinction went to Marks Barfield’s Cambridge mosque. But in resisting the more “televisual” blandishments of Amin Taha’s Clerkenwell cliff face, the wispy Tintagel bridge and the arboreal mosque, this year’s Stirling jury, headed by Norman Foster – who knows a thing or two about arboreal structures – made the right choice.

Kingston feels more restrained and suburban, in keeping with its peripheral London locale

Kingston forms part of a remarkable series of buildings Grafton have designed for educational establishment from Milan to Toulouse. Arguably it’s one of their more understated projects, compared with the swagger and heft of Lima’s University of Technology and Engineering, with its vertiginous cat’s cradle of balconies, beams and floor slabs, and the Marshall Institute for the London School of Economics, currently erupting from the south-west corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

It too has an arboreal structure inspired by the 17th-century stone trees in the fan-vaulted undercroft of nearby Lincoln’s Inn Chapel.

By contrast, Kingston feels more restrained and suburban, in keeping with its peripheral London locale, yet still packs a visual and experiential punch with its arrangement of loggias mediating between street and building, sheltering and animating the ground plane in a gesture of civic generosity.

Grafton is greatly drawn to the idea of spatial and civic generosity, which formed the theme of their 2018 Venice Biennale under the nebulous auspices of Freespace, described as a “means of taking the emphasis off architecture as object”, according to partner Yvonne Farrell.

[This] seems like the kind of building that is needed now more than ever as things falteringly get back to “normal

Yet curating a Venice Biennale is a habitually poisoned chalice and the critical consensus was that Farrell and Shelley McNamara were better architects than curators. And so it has proved.

After a pandemic year in which students have had a particularly torrid time, marooned in their bedrooms, many suffering from poor mental health, Kingston’s basic ambition to provide a place in which to study, meet and hang out, while enjoying views of the city and each other seems like the kind of building that is needed now more than ever as things falteringly get back to “normal”.

It is architecture as an armature for activities and interaction, civically thoughtful, formally lucid, soundly constructed, all underscored up by a concern for sustainability both now and in the long term. Though that might sound dull, it’s far from it. To date, it has just lacked the catalysing presence of its student and staff users, finally out of their bedrooms and back together in real, tangible space.

Also giving expression to a social and community programme was the Cambridge mosque, but while the florid curlicues of its structure are undeniably delightful, demonstrating the expressive potential of timber, it nonetheless felt architecturally overwrought.

Carmody Groarke’s collection of glum sheds in the Lake District struck a chord with readers of the Architects’ Journal, who voted it their favourite, but the same practice’s more workaday structure to protect Mackintosh’s Hill House while it dries out, raising discussion of how to simultaneously conserve heritage while reframing it for public consumption, was surely a more compelling project.

The wispy Tintagel bridge also had its fans – and who can forget that the Millennium Bridge in Gateshead was a shock winner in 2002 – but despite being more elegant than Wilkinson Eyre‘s clumpy quasi-Calatrava effort, the nagging question still remains about whether a bridge can be a building. And the answer still probably has to be “no”.

Which leaves the two residential projects. At one extreme was Stanton Williams’ much needed decent-but-unremarkable housing for key workers; at the other, Amin Taha’s manorial stone townhouse, better known for its planning imbroglio than its architecture.

Neither had the elusive imprimatur of a Stirling winner, though Peter Barber’s McGrath Road scheme, which scooped the Neave Brown Award for housing, seemed like a scandalous omission from the shortlist.

Similar arts awards have been grappling very publicly with issues of relevance, diversity and purpose

Beamed live and direct from Coventry Cathedral as part of the City of Culture festivities – the phoenix metaphor was also inescapable – the awards ceremony itself was an attempt to pick up where we left off 18 months ago, with 2020 consigned to pandemic history and the RIBA awards juggernaut seemingly back on track, with table sales and a champagne sponsor.

But with the Stirling now 25 years old, the idea of the annual quest for a national “Best in Show” seems increasingly problematic. Similar arts awards – the Booker and the Turner, on which the Stirling was templated – have been grappling very publicly with issues of relevance, diversity and purpose.

The Stirling dial is being moved slightly, with the stipulation that buildings must now be in occupation for two years, rather than fresh off the catwalk, enabling, in theory, a more nuanced evaluation, but like all architectural awards programmes, it still treads a fine line between publicly championing design and being a money-making enterprise.

Grafton’s win chimed with a sense of reset and responsibility

Entry to the 2022 RIBA Awards costs between £100 and £700, depending on project contract value, with the carrot and stick inducement that as well as the champagne moment of winning, a track record of awards success is seen as crucial to a practice attracting clients and getting work.

Beyond the incestuous parameters of the profession, awards such as the Stirling also reflect the wider national mood.

And in this at least, Grafton’s win chimed with a sense of reset and responsibility, as architects confront not only a post-pandemic milieu, but more urgent existential threats such as the climate emergency and tower block cladding scandal. Hopefully, this sense can prevail beyond the froth of awards season. But once the champagne sponsor has packed up its tent, I wouldn’t want to bet on it.

Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is the president of architectural charity the 20th Century Society and former editor of UK magazine The Architectural Review.

Photography is by Dennis Gilbert.

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