Hasta La Ideas

Architects should reuse existing buildings where possible to reduce embodied carbon and emissions, according to Christopher Trott, head of sustainability at Foster + Partners.

Other ways of lowering emissions include not building basements, reducing spans, using less materials and making greater use of wood, Trott said.

“The kind of immediate things that we can do are things like reusing existing buildings and perhaps reducing spans in existing structures,” Trott said. “You can simply use less material and perhaps avoid basements where they’re not necessary.”

Trott was part of a live panel debate on Dezeen discussing the outcome of the COP26 climate conference, which he attended in Glasgow earlier this month.

Making buildings reversible is another way of reducing emissions, he said, although he felt that viable alternatives to steel and concrete are a long way off.

“Timber is a great material for the right types of buildings. It’s not going to solve all buildings, it’s going to solve certain types of buildings and it’s come a long way,” he said.

However, Trott added that mineral-based materials such as concrete and steel would still be used “for quite a long time yet”, and said that architects should ensure that components are designed for long-term use.

“Some of the things that are being built now, provided they can be deconstructed or reused well into the future, that’s an investment,” he said. “It’s not a problem, it’s an investment. It’s still there to be used in future generations of exactly the same buildings.”

Trott’s comments came shortly after Foster + Partners had its proposal for the Tulip, a skyscraper tourist attraction in the City of London, rejected by the UK government partly over concerns about the “highly unsustainable concept of using vast quantities of reinforced concrete for the foundations and lift shaft to transport visitors to as high a level as possible to enjoy a view”.

It is thought to be the first example of the government referencing embodied carbon in a planning decision letter.

In a conversation with US climate envoy John Kerry at COP26, Foster + Partners founder Norman Foster said “higher standards” on embodied carbon are needed.

“I think it’s fair to say that the world is still catching up on embodied carbon… it’s a journey that I think most [in the building industry] have been on for four or five years, they haven’t been on for much longer than that,” said Trott.

He added that changing the manufacturing industry to produce more environmentally friendly construction products is “really difficult and is going to take a while”.

As sustainability lead at Foster + Partners, Trott said his job “is to help us make our buildings, our urban scale projects and our products more sustainable. I have a hand in all of the projects one way or another,” he said.

Trott was speaking during a talk hosted by Dezeen as part of skylight manufacturer Velux’s Build for Life online conference.

“Difficult to turn down projects”

On the panel with him was Cécile Brisac, co-founder of London studio Brisac Gonzalez, who said architects’ hands “are a little bit tied at some points” when designing for private developers that do not have a strong environmental agenda.

“However much we try to drive change, our power is fairly little actually compared to the clients,” she added.

Referring to a quote from prominent environmental lawyer Farhana Yamin that architects “are enablers of business as usual”, Brisac said: “Well, it’s quite difficult to sort of turn down every single project because it’s not meeting all the climate targets. You know, you can only do as much as you can do, and you can try to push things as much as you can.”

Also on the panel, Cassie Sutherland of sustainable urbanism network C40 Cities said that minimising embodied carbon in new buildings should become “the norm and not the exception”.

“I think that now is not the time where we can kind of say, alright, we’ll let that one go, I won’t push back on that one… and it is very difficult when it comes down to a business decision and whether you’re going to take that project or you’re not,” she said.

“Our time is to act now, we must act now, we must be taking strong action. And I think there is an issue… about the lag time between regulation coming in, and then the buildings being built. And I think, again, we’re kind of running out of time to deal with that lag anymore.”

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Dezeen promotion: visitors to this year’s Design Miami will be able to see themselves represented as an array of natural species in an interactive digital projection created by Austrian design studio Mischer’Traxler for French champagne house Perrier-Jouët.

Mischer’Traxler‘s installation called Embodied Nature features a shelving system that surrounds an open section of the wall, in which a silhouette of the viewer formed from various species is projected. The image reflects the visitor’s movement, which is intended to immerse them in the installation.

The shelves include more than 100 artistic representations of species from all over the world, which are hand-made from delicate metal mesh.

The display is intended to reference the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ that aristocrats and scholars created to display collections of rare and exotic items from the 16th-century onwards.

Every species in the installation is represented at the same scale, including microbes, bacteria, plants, flowers, animals and birds. The models are labelled to help visitors understand more about the relationships that exist between them.

Embodied Nature will be presented at the Design Miami art and design fair by Maison Perrier-Jouët as part of its commitment to redefine the relationship between humankind and nature.

“This emotional dimension is essential in our view,” Mischer’Traxler said. “It is what captures the attention of the viewer, making them more receptive to the educational and philosophical message of the work.”

“We are designers, not scientists,” the studio added. “It is important therefore to remember that Embodied Nature is an artwork, the result of a creative interpretation. It gives us, for instance, the freedom to represent species alongside one another that would never be a part of the same ecosystem in the real world.”

Perrier-Jouët regularly works with contemporary artists and designers to offer them an international platform for their creativity and has showcased the outcomes of these collaborations at Design Miami since 2012.

The French champagne house first collaborated with designers Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler in 2014 on a kinetic installation featuring plants that appeared to sprout as people walked away.

In 2015 the duo filled a room at London’s V&A Museum with blown-glass bulbs containing hand-made insects, and at Design Miami in 2020 Perrier-Jouët presented a chandelier-like version of the Curiosity Cloud installation comprising 22 insect-filled bulbs.

Perrier-Jouët’s ongoing exploration of the relationship between art and nature is informed in particular by Art Nouveau, a style of architecture and design that emerged in the late 19th-century and was characterised by its references to nature.

Alongside the Embodied Nature installation, Perrier-Jouët will also present limited edition gift boxes designed by Mischer’Traxler for the Belle Epoque 2013 and Belle Epoque Rosé 2013 vintage cuvées.

The boxes feature watercolour paintings that portray aspects of the vineyard ecosystem and the relationships that exist between the various living organisms required to sustain it.

To view more about Embodied Nature visit Mischer’Traxler’s website.

Design Miami takes place from 1 to 5 December. For details of more architecture and design events, visit Dezeen Events Guide.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen for Perrier-Jouët as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post Mischer’Traxler and Perrier-Jouët present interactive Embodied Nature installation at Design Miami appeared first on Dezeen.

Have you ever not been able to find your Legos, because they were stored in a box that was not itself shaped like a Lego? Well, me neither, but that’s no reason to get all judgey. Lego licensing partner Room Copenhagen makes polypropylene storage boxes shaped like 2×2 and 2×4 Lego blocks, and yes, they actually stack. They come in both lidded and drawer versions:

If you’re looking for something a little classier, like for a home office or nightstand, they also make oak versions, which also stack:

Lastly, they make this parental foot-saving device:

The Shuffle Chair is an interesting furniture experiment by design engineer Niklas Hagemann. “Inspired by the idea that two telephone-books, when shuffled together, are virtually impossible to pull apart (see Mythbusters), I created a paper chair held together by the friction between individual sheets of recycled paper,” he writes.

“With a single paper clip to stop the bottom two pages from unravelling, the chair is held together entirely by the friction between the pages (~500).”

“Sketches showing how the paper slots onto the frame.”

“Tests with old newspapers proved the principle, a first frame prototype buckling under load, making the final steel frame, close-up of the pins which were inspired by the way paper slots into a ring-binder.”

“Chair assembly animation.”

Hagemann did the project back in 2012, when he was studying design engineering at the Royal College of Art. Today he’s a Research Fellow at MIT Senseable City Lab, where he’s working on latching and docking systems for autonomous boats.

Buckle up, folks. BMW has released both design sketches and images of their forthcoming XM—a hybrid pairing an electric motor with a freaking V8–and it’s a doozy. I’ll show you the renders first, then get into some opinions.

I think what’s happened here is, BMW’s design team has bludgeoned me into submission with their increasingly frenetic car designs and gigantic grilles, and has altered my expectations to the point where…I’m sort of warming up to this one. At the very least, it doesn’t bug me like the new iX does. I think that’s because the iX looked like its design team had internal arguments, with half the squad pushing gentle surface changes and the other half fighting for hard creases, and the resultant design was all over the place. With the XM, it looks more like the design was overseen by a singular designer.

There are still about 24 extra surfaces too many, but at least the gesture lines better relate to one another. I can’t call this design restrained—they’re going for a techno-aggressive kind of vibe—but it’s at least cogent. I feel Kia’s EV9 concept pulled off this “Westworld” look better, but there’s no denying this XM provides a better account than previous designs of the new direction that BMW’s going in, however strange.

My comments above, however, relate to the renders and the design intent. Once we get down to the actual sheet metal, we can see the massive gulf between an expressive drawing and something that actually needs to be manufactured in real 3D space. The real car suffers for it. For instance, in side profile the beltline’s ambiguous direction doesn’t do the car’s proportions any favors:

The beltline doesn’t look as terrible in 3/4 view…

…but that signifies another problem, no? I think a car’s got to look good from all angles. It’s the entire reason why car manufacturers go to the trouble of creating clay models. Recently I was at the launch of the new Range Rover, watching it spin on a turntable, and there’s not a bad angle to be had. That vehicle’s minimal lines are, for me, a good example of less is more.

The XM’s grille is still massive, but at least here they’ve ditched the buck-toothed proportions from their other models, so it looks less offensive.

The taillights are a bit much for me. They remind me of those performers who dance around with a long red piece of fabric tied to a stick.

I do find the exhaust ports kind of nifty.

This detail below I find kind of dissonant. The circular badge doesn’t seem to jive with the contours of the carve-out:

And the front corners of the car suffer the same way they do under most manufacturers. Why does this area always look like the designers are trying to bend the time-space continuum?

There’s something interesting going on in the interior. While the front seats and dash are about what you’d expect, leather and techno surfaces…

The backseat is downright strange. First off, it’s upholstered in velvet.

And the headliner is textured with polygons.

As for why–and to learn what the design brief was for this vehicle–this video of Domagoj Dukec, Head of BMW Design, and Frank van Meel, CEO of BMW M discussing the car is well worth a watch: