Hasta La Ideas

Dutch studio Powerhouse Company has created the Netherlands’ first mass-timber university building — a square lecture hall that references modernist and monastic architecture.

The three-storey Tilburg University Lecture Hall, located in Tilburg in southern Holland, has a footprint of just 33 by 33 metres.

The square-shaped building was designed with a circular and sustainable approach and constructed using demountable and recyclable building components.

Powerhouse Company looked to the campus’s surrounding modernist buildings for inspiration for the design – in particular its first structure, Jos Bedaux’ 1962 Cobbenhagen building, a limestone building with an inner courtyard that was informed by medieval monastic gardens.

The architects created a formal link to these buildings through the lecture hall’s limestone facade and rhythmic window placement, while endeavouring to create a calm atmosphere and connection to nature in the interior.

Powerhouse Company described it as a building that “appears as though it has always been there”.

“The lecture hall is a timeless and sustainable addition to the campus architecture of Tilburg University,” said Powerhouse Company partner architect Stefan Prins. “It breathes the atmosphere of the library and the monastery.”

The Tilburg University Lecture Hall has a hybrid structure made largely of cross-laminated timber (CLT), with a concrete core and steel trusses.

The building’s 4.6 kilometres of timber beams and three metres of steel trusses were assembled using a dry construction method in order to be demountable for future use. Similarly, the limestone facade panels have been hung, rather than glued, so they can be recycled.

Inside, there are a mix of 14 lecture rooms, study areas and a foyer. The spaces range from a main hall described as “lofty” and “sculptural” to cosy window nooks and solemn work benches dotted with cruciform reading lamps.

The largest lecture hall was a particular focus of attention for the architects, who created wooden rib floors spanning nine metres to give the room the desired acoustic performance and avoid high beams.

This room also features curved finishes and fixtures, and a glass facade giving views onto the forest.

“Our details look simple and self-evident, but pioneering the technical junctions in collaboration with different disciplines was a challenge,” said Powerhouse Company BIM Engineer Romano van den Dool.

“This untrodden road was inspiring and taught us a lot.”

Throughout the 5,000-square-metre space, wooden furniture forms an intrinsic part of the design and an extension of the timber structure.

The architects wanted the natural palette and clean lines to create an ambiance of serenity and calm, while using varied window placements to frame a range of views of the outside world.

These include glimpses of the sky, a single tree and views of people walking to campus.

From the outside, the building has four different facades, each with different detailing and window spacing, and each responding to the different features on that side of the campus.

One side faces forest, one side parkland, another accommodation, and the last looks onto the main route to the nearby train station.

The building is energy-neutral, with its flat rooftop providing ample room for solar panels. Powerhouse Company used parametric design to optimise the photovoltaic array, which provides enough energy to surpass the building’s needs.

Other design features reduce the building’s energy consumption, such as cooling with outside air and an aquifer system that uses heat stored in the summer to warm the building during the winter.

“Together with our client, we upped our ambition during the design process, resulting in a carbon-neutral, completely circular, and BREEAM Outstanding design,” said Powerhouse Company associate architect Janneke van der Velden.

Powerhouse Company is a Rotterdam-based practice founded in 2005. Its recent projects have included a building in China topped with a circular walking trail and a carbon-neutral and “climate-resilient” floating office on the Maas River in Rotterdam.

The photography is by Frans Parthesius.

The post Powerhouse Company creates serene mass-timber lecture hall for Tilburg University appeared first on Dezeen.

Berlin‘s centre could become the largest car-free urban area in the world following a campaign supported by 50,000 citizens.

Campaign group Berlin Autofrei has proposed a law to limit private car use within the Ringbahn train line in the German capital, an area of 34 square miles.

The city government will now formally consider the petition, with a decision due to be announced in February.

If successful, the law would limit vehicle use to those with special exemptions, such as delivery vehicles, emergency services or people with disabilities.

Residents would only be permitted to use a car or van up to 12 times a year, for special circumstances such as moving house.

Public transport networks would be expanded, and roads would be redesigned to increase space for pedestrians and cyclists.

Proposed law aims to reduce carbon footprint

The ambition is to reduce the number of road accidents, improve air quality and reduce the city’s carbon footprint.

“Our law improves the quality of life for all Berliners,” said Nina Noblé, one of the campaign organisers, in a statement released in 2021.

“We want people to be able to sleep with their windows open and children to be able to play in the street again,” she said.

“Especially children and senior citizens are endangered by cars. Also, grandparents should be able to ride their bicycles safely and have plenty of benches to take a breather on.”

Campaign received more than double the signatures needed

The campaign has been building momentum since the submission of the draft law in February 2021.

Campaigners needed 20,000 signatures to formally begin the legal process, but were able to gather 50,333. If the city rejects their proposal, they will need to increase the number to 175,000.

If the city refuses at that stage, the proposal will go to a public vote.

A similar campaign was successful in Berlin in 2018. Following a citizen referendum, the city passed a mobility law mandating the rollout of a city-wide cycling network.

Berlin Autofrei’s organisers believe that more needs to be done to improve quality of the life for the city’s residents.

Their proposed law includes electric as well as petrol vehicles, on the grounds that they still create pollution and cause accidents.

While the city has not published a cost figure for the plans, the campaigners estimate they will save the city €420 million, or £350 million, every year.

“The Senate has no meaningful transformation plan towards sustainable and equitable transport,” said Manuel Wiemann, another of the organisers.

“E-buses and a few kilometres of bike lanes in five years are simply not enough,” he said. “There are too many cars on the road in Berlin polluting the air through tyre wear, occupying far too much common space and unnecessarily endangering human lives, whether electric or diesel.”

Berlin is not the only city exploring the possibility of car-free streets.

Oslo has been slowly removing cars from its city centre since 2017, Barcelona is pedestrianising every third street in its Eixample district, and Paris hosts regular car-free days.

The pandemic has led even more cities, including London, New York and Milan, to test the impact of turning roads into pedestrian zones.

Berlin Autofrei’s proposals follow a 2014 report commissioned by the city, which found that 58 per cent of Berlin’s streets are dominated by traffic, even though cars only account for one in three journeys.

The photography is courtesy of Berlin Autofrei. Main image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Industrial designer DPP Da’Peng conceptualized an all-in-one broadcast device for content creators to have a one-stop shop for quality production.

With content creation becoming one of the most sought-after fields to work in these days, broadcast equipment is getting some major buzz. Whether you have a podcast or are an aspiring influencer, access to quality broadcast equipment is the first step towards making it viral.

Designer: DPP Da’Peng

Depending on the type of content you create, the necessary equipment will vary, which means content creators typically own all kinds of different equipment. Keeping that many wires and devices in one space can get messy.

Decluttering the experience of content creation, industrial designer DPP Da’Peng conceptualized an All-in-One Live Broadcast device that takes care of every aspect of content creation in one go.

In designing their All-in-One device, DPP Da’Peng hoped to solve the issue of passive wheat dissipation present in broadcast equipment currently on the market. Finding an issue with the size of current heat sinks, Da’Peng notes,

“Due to the limitation of volume and microphone recognition sound, a large area of [the] metal aluminum heat sink is required to assist the machine to dissipate heat and work normally. So balancing heat sinks and design criteria is the primary issue.”

In finding the equipment’s final form, DPP Da’Peng conceptualized their all-in-one broadcast device in two different iterations. In its first version, Da’Peng visualizes the device supported by a tripod. Propped upright, the multi-functional camera is envisioned in a cubic form with an integrated heat sink sandwiched between the camera’s lens and body.

The second iteration, also situated atop a tripod, appears more like a compact projector. Unlike the first rendering, Da’Peng’s second camera’s lens module is oval-shaped while the body takes on a rectangular silhouette.

Both cameras feature intuitive record buttons and the lens rotates 90-degrees to switch between landscape and portrait modes. In addition, the heat sinks of both iterations are kept to a minimum and a wireless design takes care of the mess that comes with current broadcast devices on the market. The tripod is also optional, so when creators want to use the cameras like they would a webcam, both devices can easily mount computer screens.

Both iterations of Da’Peng’s broadcast device feature rotating lenses. 

The first iteration’s heat sink is wedged right between the lens and the camera’s body. 

The lens rotates 90-degrees to offer landscape and portrait capture modes.

The post This all-in-one broadcast device is the wire-free mess content creators need first appeared on Yanko Design.

All product designs, big or small, great or dismal, start with a sketch. OK, technically, they start with the germ of an idea, but these ideas need to be given visual form sooner or later. Many designers are partial to using paper and pen or pencil at the start but eventually bring their ideas to the digital realm sooner or later. With the advent of powerful mobile devices like the iPad and the Apple Pencil, it has never been easier to put those concepts directly on the screen when inspiration strikes. Navigating the app landscape, however, can be a bit of a doozy, so here are the five best apps for your iPad or iPad Pro to bring those creative ideas to life, at least digitally.

Procreate

You might presume that the venerable Photoshop would be at the very top of the list, but clearly, it isn’t. It wasn’t until later that Adobe finally realized the large market for Photoshop on iPads, but by then, others had already tried to fill its large shoes. Of the many apps that tried to capitalize on its absence, there is perhaps none more popular than Procreate.

Technically, Procreate could be considered as a painting app, but just like Photoshop, it has become a sort of jack-of-all-trades when it comes to digital content creation. It has all the tools you’d need in visualizing your design concepts from start to finish, fleshing out details as you go on the go. It’s easy enough to simply just sketching with the dozens of brushes available, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Procreate can help you animate your designs, a handy tool for products that have interactive moving elements. It even has a unique 3D Model Painting feature that can make your concepts pop out of the screen, figuratively, of course. Along with the iPad’s portability, Procreate gives designers the digital equivalent of an art studio whenever and where ever they need to work on their latest ideas, all for a flat fee of $9.99.

Designer: Ivan Belikov

Designer: Georgie

Concepts

As the very name suggests, Concepts is an app that was specifically designed to support designers in creating concept designs and illustrations. Unlike Photoshop and Procreate, Concepts works with vector lines, similar to Adobe Illustrator, though you probably won’t even feel it because of how fluid and natural sketching feels like. What it does mean, however, is that you have very fine control over each and every line or curve, and those lines remain smooth and crisp whether you zoom in or out and at any resolution.

Concepts’ defining feature, however, is its infinite canvas, designed to adapt to the way designers work and think. Rather than constraining them to pages with fixed sizes, designers can explore ideas and sketch them out as far as they can. The canvas size will adjust to their needs, not the other way around.

The app’s tools are designed to closely mimic their real-world counterparts, offering a toolset that’s familiar to designers. Even its color wheel resembles the popular COPIC format, a clear indication that this app was made with designers in mind right from the start. Concepts is available for free, but certain features require in-app purchases. Alternatively, there is also a subscription option that also unlocks more features that you won’t be able to buy.

Designer: Jonny Gallardo

Designer: CYNIC

Sketchbook

Autodesk is a name that has been near and dear to many designers’ hearts, particularly those in the industrial design fields, for its AutoCAD products. The company, however, also once had its own sketching app, and Sketchbook was, in fact, one of the very first of its kind to embrace mobile devices. Sketchbook has now struck off on its own, but it still brings with it all the features that made it a household name in the digital art market for a while.

Admittedly, Sketchbook might not be as feature-rich as Procreate or Photoshop, but what it lacks in features it makes up for in agility and speed. By no means does it mean that it doesn’t have a decent set of features, and the app is quite capable of translating your ideas into images on a digital canvas. It boasts of hundreds of brushes right off the bat, and each one can be customized to your needs and tastes.

One of the key strengths of Sketchbook is its ease of use and minimalist interface. The user interface gets out of the way, and you can even work all the way without seeing a single button or slider. Best of all, it’s completely free with no hidden purchases, so what you see is really what you get, and it is available on all major platforms, so you won’t miss a beat when switching between your iPad and your Mac.

Designer: Sketchbook

Designer: Michael DiTullo

Affinity Designer

With a name like Affinity Designer, you’re pretty much sure that the app is designed for designers. Its expressed intent is to be a professional tool for creating concept art, designs, and even branding imagery, pretty much all the things designers will need in their work process, especially when it comes time to create a more refined version of a sketch for the final presentation.

Like Concepts, Affinity Designer uses vector lines to create shapes and curves, giving the designer more control over how something looks without degrading the quality of a line. It does, however, also offer typical raster-based paintbrushes when you need more pixel-precise control, particularly when trying to paint textures or recreate more organic materials. The app boasts an unlimited number of layers and 1,000,000x zoom, though you’ll technically still be limited by how much memory your iPad has left.

One of Designer’s most unique features is the ability to have multiple instances of the same object across your work, so that editing one will instantly update the rest. It also presents your artboards in a Pinterest-like gallery that should be familiar to many designers. Affinity Designers has a flat price of $9.99 and has no further in-app purchases or subscription fees.

Designer: Denny Lambo

Designer: Yaron David

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is, of course, the granddaddy of digital art and graphic design software, and its absence on Apple’s tablets was acutely felt for years. Sure, the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil didn’t arrive until 2018, but the likes of Procreate have already been making do with what’s available for almost a decade. In the meantime, Adobe chose to bring several watered-down experiences to iPhones and iPads, focusing on very specific use cases only, biding its time for Photoshop’s full entry into the mobile space.

That has finally happened, somewhat, which is also why Photoshop isn’t placed that high on this list. This new version, first revealed in 2019, is supposed to be the same Photoshop on the desktop, but one that is being ported to the iPad in bits and pieces. Functionality still isn’t on par with what most Photoshop users will be familiar with, and it will take a lot more time for things to settle down. It does have some of the basics, but the focus seems to be more on being able to access your Photoshop files from Creative Cloud from an iPad rather than on a completely independent mobile workflow.

There’s also the fact that it’s the most expensive option in this bunch if you don’t have an Adobe subscription yet, something that’s absolutely necessary to use the app beyond its free trial period. There’s, of course, some hope that Adobe will pick up the slack, but with its new focus on making Photoshop work flawlessly on Apple M1 Macs, iPads might have again been pushed to the background for a while.

Designer: Erica Horne

Designer: Paola

Bonus: Good Notes

All of these apps empower designers to put pencil to paper digitally, so to speak. They let them sketch their ideas on a nearly infinite canvas, anywhere the Muse beckons, with all the conveniences (and sometimes drawbacks) of a digital workflow. Sketching and making beautiful designs, however, isn’t all that a designer does, of course. A large part of the process involves writing down notes or annotating drawings, which is where this bonus app comes in.

GoodNotes is regarded to be one of the best note-taking apps for the iPad, recreating much of the look and feel of traditional paper notebooks but without physical limitations. While it places a heavy emphasis on the pen-driven experience, it allows you to insert almost any kind of digital content into a note, from a typed text to an image. It does also have basic drawing features, so you can even just use it for sketching out your ideas as a rough draft before moving them to the more specialized apps listed above.

Designer: thalamustudy

The post Top 5 Sketching Apps on iPads for Product Designers first appeared on Yanko Design.

Goodbye Hubble, you’ve served us well… but the James Webb Space Telescope is now here to look even farther into the future and help us decode the secrets of the mysterious universe. The revolutionary telescope was launched into orbit just this month and is touted to be the largest and most advanced telescope to ever be put in space… in fact, it’s so advanced that it can actually look back in time, with its largest mirrors helping reflect light that’s traveled for 13.7 billion years to reach us. That’s about as old as the universe is, so the telescope can, in theory, help us observe the beginning of the universe.

It seems only fair that a scientific feat this big gets its own merchandise, right? Well, although NASA hasn’t released miniature telescope replicas just yet, Etsy maker Houha Designs created an incredibly detailed scaled-down model of the telescope that you can buy and build from scratch!

Click Here to Buy Now

The entire model comes flat-packed, and is laser-cut from sheets of Mat board (or metal-lined paper board) that need to be glued together. The skill level for assembling the telescope is rated between intermediate to advanced, and suitable for ages 14 and up. When completed, the telescope and its oblong hexagonal base will measure 8x5x5 inches overall.

Designer: Houha Designs

Click Here to Buy Now

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