Hasta La Ideas

Present ideas for people who make or admire art

There are so many places to observe and appreciate artwork, and yet it’s such a gift to have art in your home, whether it’s an original painting, one of multiple prints, limited edition risographs, lithographs or even artful museum merchandise. Books about different genres, artists, designers, buildings, styles and photographers are another way to immerse ourselves with works of wonder—and learn about the history and politics behind art too. Our Art Nerds gift guide includes all of the above and more. For all other types of present ideas, browse our complete BUY section, which is updated every day.

Hero image courtesy of Pomegranate Press

A curved, twisting shell of textured aluminium plates covers Espace Mayenne in Laval, France, a multifunctional sports and entertainment venue designed by local practice Hérault Arnod Architectures.

Located on a former military site, the project forms part of a wider scheme to develop an area on the northwestern edge of Laval, which also includes a 250-metre-long outdoor velodrome and the landscaping of the surrounding wetland and woodland.

Drawing on this rapidly-changing natural site, Hérault Arnod Architectures adopted a flowing, organic form for Espace Mayenne that appears to change depending on the direction from which it is viewed.

“This is an area undergoing change,” the practice said. “The building’s organisation respects the landscape structure and the memory of the site, combining ecology, compactness, economy of means and the creation of a mass plan saving parcels for future programmes.”

Espace Mayenne combines three venues; a gymnasium with a climbing wall, a conference hall and a stadium-like space seating up to 4,500 people that can be easily converted to suit sports games or concerts.

The three venues are united by two atrium areas on the lower ground floor and ground floors, separating the entry routes for technicians, staff and artists, and public audiences.

Sweeping around the southern side of the building, the ground floor atrium is lined entirely with glazing to open the building up to the landscape, with a ceiling of pale timber slats that follow the flowing form of the exterior.

“[The lobby’s] organisation allows a fluid circulation of the different public flows according to various scenarios of occupation – the three venues can be in use at the same time or not,” said the practice.

The largest space, the Grand Hall, is designed to be easily convertible from a sports arena layout with bleacher seating around its perimeter to a performance layout, with a stage along its northern edge framed by the drawing of diagonal curtains.

A range of wall finishes for the hall were designed in collaboration with acoustic designers Sempervirens, including corrugated concrete and wool felt wall finishes and hundreds of small wool felt panels organised in a geometric pattern on the ceiling.

Surrounding the exterior of the building is a skin of aluminium panels with three horizontal bands of different textures, sitting above a wood-clad base and to the west extending downwards to cover the outer wall.

“The facade is like a skin wrapping itself around the rooms, resulting in a shifting shape that constantly changes depending on the viewpoint,” said the practice.

“It is composed of three horizontally stacked stripes that deform themselves in order to envelop the volumes as tightly as possible,” it continued. “[They] overlap and rotate around the building, generating fluidity, unity and movement.”

Other recently completed sports centres include the pre-engineered, metal-clad Obama Sports Complex in Los Angeles by SPF Architects, and the Cárdenas sports complex and skate park in Mexico by Quintanilla Arquitectos.

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Benjamin Hubert’s studio Layer has developed a concept for an edibles subscription service that would deliver sweets and teas laced with tiny doses of hallucinogenic drugs, in anticipation of a future where the substances are legalised.

The Keia service would see users sign up to receive small, regular doses of a psychedelic, with the aim of improving their mental and emotional wellbeing.

These would come in the form of three different consumable products: a rice wafer topped with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), a loose-leaf ayahuasca tea and a pastille containing psilocybin – the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Layer envisions the products being packaged in biomaterials drawn from the natural world that are meant to inspire feelings of awe and appreciation.

Hubert says his team initiated the project to “start a conversation on a topic we find interesting” and to shake some of the stigma that surrounds psychedelics, which have been the focus of increased medical research in recent years.

“The project hopes to look at ways we can dispel previously held notions of psychedelics and remove them from the context of more extreme hallucinogenic stereotyping,” he told Dezeen.

“By reframing psychedelics into a less niche space and less alienating formats, perhaps we can change how accepted they can become in the mainstream whilst still keeping a touch of the unexpected.”

Keia’s psilocybin pastilles are imagined as gummies in a range of shapes, with swirling patterns reminiscent of glass marbles. Layer says preliminary research on microdosing suggests an edible like this could help to calm anxieties, increase creativity and improve empathy.

The LSD rice paper wafer, which the studio says has the potential to lift energy levels and improve focus, is pastel-coloured and folded into delicate origami-like shapes.

The final consumable is meant to be drunk rather than eaten and consists of a plant-based hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca. Originally developed by indigenous communities in Amazonia, Layer claims it can help to relax stress levels and increase feelings of compassion and connection to others when taken in microdoses.

For the Keia concept, the necessary tea leaves and stems are compressed together into a pebble-like puck, dotted with the occasional bright flower petal.

Each product is envisioned in boxes of eight to ten pieces – enough for one month’s supply – with packaging that was designed to reflect its contents. The packaging for the psilocybin pastilles, for example, would be grown from hemp and mycelium, which is the rootlike structure of a mushroom.

The ayahuasca tea container would be moulded from pressed tea stems, coffee grounds and wheat bran, while the LSD packaging would be made using wheat farming waste, in a nod to the fact that LSD was born from experiments with the ergot fungus that grows on certain grains.

Some of the materials used in Layer’s packaging concepts are within the capabilities of mass production already, although others are “a little further out”, according to Hubert.

Keia’s overall branding is meant to position psychedelics as part of the wellness market, without completely stripping the drugs of their distinctive qualities.

To evoke a connection to nature and mindfulness, Layer introduced elements such as the classical serif brandmark and a muted colour scheme informed by woodlands.

“It would be relatively straightforward to remove personality and move the designs into a safe, established consumer-expected vitamin or health-products space – think gummies and apothecary bottles,” Hubert said.

“Maintaining a visually compelling and unusual blend of nature, medicine, consumables and materials whilst not being off-putting or reverting to hallucinogenic stereotyped ideas was the challenge.”

While a service like Keia would currently be illegal almost everywhere in the world, Hubert says the prospect of legalisation was “close enough” to drive Layer to explore the project, with some US states having already decriminalised psilocybin.

The psychedelic drugs market is projected to more than double in size between 2020 and 2027 to reach a value of $10.75 billion, according to a recent research report.

Another design studio that has imagined products for the future consumption of psychedelics is NewTerritory, which designed a concept for an inhaler that puts the focus on breathwork and mindful ritual.

These concepts share some commonalities with recent product designs for cannabis, which is also often positioned as a wellness product in the US and Canada through dispensaries such as Dosist and Edition.

The post Layer imagines “unexpected” edibles for microdosing psychedelics appeared first on Dezeen.

Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao has designed La Ropa sucia se Lava Encasa, an installation at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria that features a large washbasin and patchwork quilts to “produce a conversation about care”.

Bilbao installed La Ropa sucia se Lava Encasa (Dirty Clothes are Washed at Home) at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) to argue that clothing, not architecture, is the body’s “first layer of protection”.

A large concrete washbasin and colourful patchwork quilts draped on geometric clotheshorse-style hangers are arranged across a single room to invite visitors to reflect on the countless people, mostly women, around the world who do our laundry, according to the architect.

“[The pieces] are used to produce a conversation about care and who produces that care in our lives and in our societies,” Bilbao told Dezeen.

Shaped like an interlocking grid, the basin is informed by the real-life Lavaderos de Sabina Grande, an 18th-century communal laundry basin in the town of Huichapan in Mexico.

The tapestry-like patchwork quilts are made up of surplus textiles and clothing that were donated for the installation and sewn together by people across Melbourne, Mexico City and Berlin, who attended workshops held by Bilbao’s eponymous studio.

Pieces of discarded denim, gingham and other fabrics come together to create these sculptural quilts, which are interwoven with red ribbons that detail the names of people connected to each of the textiles.

The surrounding walls are decorated with large-scale drawings and mixed-media collages that depict the history of communal washhouses and laundries all over the world.

These designs intend to communicate how this kind of labour has impacted women in particular, while also drawing attention to the social bonds that laundries can and have created over time.

Bilbao explained that the installation intends to urge visitors to consider how a commonplace practice like laundry has the potential to bring people together and care for each other.

“It’s urgent that architecture becomes a tool for a systemic change,” she noted. “We can’t continue to produce [architecture and design] the same way if we intend to move forward so we have to find different ways to sustain our bodies on this planet.”

La Ropa sucia se Lava Encasa is the inaugural project of the MECCA x NGV Women in Design Commission – a series that will invite international female architects or designers to create “new and significant” work for NGV over the next five years.

Earlier this year, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio created a sculptural pavilion for an exhibition called Women In Architecture at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen.

Bilbao was also among the architects who donated drawings to a charity auction held in the wake of the 2020 Beirut explosion in aid of rebuilding the city after the disaster.

La Ropa sucia se Lava Encasa is on display at NGV from 6 October 2022 to 29 January 2023. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

The photography is by Kate Shanasy. 

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Promotion: with Copenhagen due to host the UIA World Congress of Architects, the city aims to set an example for how architecture can help to reduce the impact of climate change.

Voted the world’s most sustainable city by TimeOut in 2021, the Danish capital features buildings and public spaces designed to be both eco-conscious and climate-resilient.

These include the BIG-designed CopenHill, said to be the “cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world”, and the 3XN -designed UN City, which won the European Commission’s GreenBuilding Award in 2012.

Other examples include the flood-resilient Klimakvarter (climate district) in Østerbro and Dortheavej Residence, an affordable housing development built in timber.

The 28th UIA World Congress of Architects, hosted by the International Association of Architects, takes place in Copenhagen from 2 to 6 July 2023.

The ambition is to set out a plan for how architecture can help to target the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

As the host city of the congress, Copenhagen has also been officially designated as World Capital of Architecture by UNESCO – a title it holds until 2026.

Copenhagen believes its own urban planning strategy can set the template for how to achieve this goal.

This includes strict regulations on the sustainability of new architecture, energy-efficiency improvements for the city’s existing buildings, and a citizen-centric approach to urban development.

The city has invested in one billion DKK (£117 million) in cycling infrastructure since 2005, with the result that 45 per cent of citizens bike to work or school every day.

As well as improving cycle lanes, it has backed cycle-focused projects including the Lille Langebro bridge and the Karen Blixens Plads, which provides sheltered parking for over 2,000 bikes.

Redevelopment of the city’s harbour has created economic opportunities and improved quality of life for locals – the water is now clean enough to swim in.

Cold water from the harbour is also used to support a district cooling system, saving 70 per cent of the energy that would be required for traditional air conditioning.

Energy use is a concern for Copenhagen’s hotels – close to 70 per cent of the city’s hotel rooms hold a form of 3rd party eco-certificate.

Other exemplary new buildings include the Forfatterhuset Kindergarten, featuring nature-filled gardens, and the community-focused Ressourcerækkerne apartment building.

The city attributes its sustainably minded approach to the work of pioneering architects such as Jan Gehl, who has promoted human-centric architecture in the city since the 1970s.

Today, locally based studios including Henning Larsen and COBE are among those championing sustainable practices including timber construction, life-cycle analysis and circular economic thinking.

Henning Larsen recently unveiled plans for Marmormolen, “one of the largest contemporary wood structures in Denmark”, while COBE recently completed the city’s first ultra-fast charging station for electric cars.

For more information about sustainability and architecture in Copenhagen, visit the Visitcopenhagen website.

Partnership content

This video was created by Dezeen for Visitcopenhagen as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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