Hasta La Ideas

Architecture studio Studio Prineas has added a three-storey concrete extension to a 19th-century fisherman’s cottage to create a home overlooking the harbour in Sydney, Australia.

Located on a steeply sloping site in the Birchgrove area of Sydney, the home consists of two distinct elements an old timber fisherman’s cottage and a concrete tower intended to contrast with it.

Containing the home’s four bedrooms the contemporary concrete structure links the street level to the existing house nine-metres below.

On the street level the roof of this structure contains a car parking space while a lift is marked by a concrete box and stairs lead to the home below.

“From the outset, we saw an opportunity to retain and celebrate the original weatherboard fisherman’s cottage by introducing a contrasting architectural sensibility an off-form concrete ‘tower’ that nestles against the sandstone cliff edge,” said Studio Prineas principal Eva-Marie Prineas.

“The verticality of the tower navigates the site’s dramatic drop and facilitates an experiential journey through the site.”

While the extension contains all the private living spaces of the house the entire fisherman’s cottage was converted into an open-plan living, dining and kitchen space.

The location of some of the original walls and timber flooring of the cottage were highlighted with blackened steel framework that was added to support the structure.

A kitchen with a long island bench was placed alongside one wall of the clatter, while a seating area was located on the other. The largely glazed font wall of the cottage opens onto a large deck with harbour views.

Below the cottage a swimming pool was embedded into the cliffside.

A glazed link with two open courtyards on either side connects the original cottage to the private living spaces located in the new concrete extension above.

Dark timbers were applied to create a more grounded appearance to contrast the lightness of the timber cottage.

Within the tower each of the bedrooms have views across the bay.

In the main bedroom, leather-clad sliding walls are used as moving dividers of the spaces that both accommodate privacy and family gatherings.

A solid stone bath doubles as a bedhead while mirrored walls visually extend the depth of the relatively small-scale room.

The home’s concrete tower also creates a vertical edge for hanging gardens across the building’s surface.

Studio Prineas worked with local landscape studio Bushy Landscapes to source indigenous plantation, adding another layer of history to the site.

“We wanted the building to give back to the harbour and embrace connections with the site – to not solely focus on views from the post-colonial cottage, but embrace the site’s pre-colonial, ‘non-built’ heritage,” said Prineas.

Other recently completed houses in Australia include a courtyard house wrapped in concrete walls in Melbourne and a oceanside home in Sydney suited for both calm and play.

The photographer is by Gavin Green.


The post Studio Prineas adds concrete tower to fisherman’s cottage in Sydney appeared first on Dezeen.

Tucked away in the lush greenery of Bavaria, Germany is a wooden family home located next to a quaint lake. Designed by Appels Architekten, the home features a simple and minimal architectural form. “Conceptionally, it distinguishes between private rooms and a generous open space for daily family life,” said the studio.

Designer: Appels Architekten

What makes the home quite intriguing is the fact that it comprises a sculpture of wooden cubes with all the private rooms artistically placed within them. In between the wooden cubes, there are multiple open spaces, that allow light to playfully enter the home during the day, and light it up, in the winter as well. The open spaces also provide lovely views of the garden, treetops, and the lake. The roof of the home has a rather fanning shape, which perfectly contrasts the sloping terrain, and gives a bit of versatility to the interiors. The home has been deftly placed on a plateau above the lake, almost concealing it. It is surrounded by dense wooden trees.

“The setting in its natural environment, the generous ceiling height, the amount of daylight, and the honest materialization create a pleasant atmosphere and a pleasant indoor climate,” said the studio. The entire configuration of the home is rather unique and eye-catching. It features a form that is geometrically interesting, inviting you to explore the home further. The openness of the structure creates a gentle connection and coexistence between the home, and the rest of the community, giving the residents an opportunity to either live in privacy or step out and interact in some communal living. The private rooms have been placed around a family space, where all residents of the home can gather and engage.

Since wood was used to construct the home, it can be considered quite sustainable as well. Being a renewable resource, the use of wood reduces carbon dioxide emissions during construction, as well as the need for non-renewable primary energy. The construction process included a degree of prefabrication, allowing a lot of the construction to be done off-site. It leads to shorter assembly times, and only a few site trips for the architectural team. The home is powered by fossil-fuel energy via air-source heat pumps and storage tanks.

The post This wooden home in Germany is a sustainable sculpture of wooden cubes first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Revopoint RANGE makes use of the company’s new infrared structured light projector, which captures a large area of 360mm x 650mm (at 600mm distance), allowing you to scan objects as massive as an entire car or a room in just a few minutes. The RANGE works as both a fixed or a handheld scanning device, recording both 3D and color data to provide an accurate model with precision of up to 0.1mm, as well as accurate color information. The models you scan can then be used in the metaverse, for reverse engineering and modeling, or even for 3D printing, covering a wide variety of applications across a whole host of industries.

Designer: Revopoint Design

Click Here to Buy Now: $474 $729 ($729 off). Hurry, only 184/700 left! Raised over $1,300,000.

The benefit of the Revopoint RANGE lies entirely in its name. The device has a scanning area of 360mm x 650mm (that’s nearly a 1.2ft x 2ft bounding box), allowing you to cover large grounds in less time. The RANGE also uses a state-of-the-art dual camera system, with a projector emitting invisible infrared light to offer scans at even higher accuracies than scanners that use lasers or blue light. The fact that the light projector emits invisible light makes the RANGE perfect for scanning humans and animals too. Hold the Revopoint RANGE as close as 300 mm (12 inches) or as far as 800 (31 inches) from your subject, and its ability to work as rapidly as 12-18 FPS means you can scan an entire human in under 2 minutes, or an interior setting in just a handful of minutes, complete with color information, and accuracies of 0.1mm. RANGE also lets you scan transparent and reflective objects, thanks to a scanning spray that creates an opaque film on the object, and then disappears entirely in just a few hours.

Future of Interior Design – Deliver impressive interior design customization by scanning furniture, fittings, or even whole rooms and creating full-color vivid 3D models for use in interior design software like DreamPlan or MagicPlan.

Streamlined Car Modeling – You can quickly capture and measure the exact dimensions even when scanning complicated geometric surfaces.

Capturing History – Its handheld scanning mode, lightweight, and compatibility with iOS and Android devices make it a portable, versatile tool capable of capturing large artworks without needing to move or touch them.

From Head to Toes in Under 2 Minutes – Simplify the creation of human 3D models for video games, AR, and VR applications with the whole body and head scan done in under two minutes.

Accurate 3D Models – With a single-frame precision of up to 0.1mm and a point distance of up to 0.3mm, the RANGE’s new dual IR cameras with aspheric lenses reduce image aberrations and ensure that the micro-structured infrared light evenly reaches the sensors.

It’s a Colorful World – RANGE’s RGB camera can capture an object’s color as you scan, ready to be merged with the 3D model after meshing the data to create accurate fully-colored, nearly lifelike 3D models.

These scans can then be used in a whole host of industries. The highly precise models are perfect for reverse engineering, modifying, and upgrading. Transportation designers can use these models to run simulations, upgrade designs, do wind tunnel tests, while workshops could use these models to create custom panels and trims. Interior designers could create an entire 3D bank of furniture and decor that can then be placed in virtual rooms to understand how they look. Models can be edited, with colors, textures, and materials altered. The color information captured by the scanner proves highly valuable to animators too, who can directly scan humans and rig them without spending hours and days painting on layers of skin, hair, eyes, clothes, etc. The output models can even be 3D printed, either in a single-material filament or in full color!

Scans Made With the Range

The Revopoint RANGE is designed to be universally applicable, versatile, yet affordable. It can be used indoors or outdoors, and in handheld or stand-mounted formats. Using a stabilizer along with the RANGE offers better control and faster scanning, while Revopoint also supplies large turntables for big objects, with weights of up to 200kgs (441lbs). The RANGE starts at just $328 (thanks to a 55% discount for super early bird backers), rivaling their popular POP2 and MINI models, which had an average starting price of $799. The Revopoint RANGE is compatible with Windows 81011 (64-bit), Android, iOS, and Mac devices, and requires just a USB cable for power and data transmission.

Click Here to Buy Now: $474 $729 ($729 off). Hurry, only 184/700 left! Raised over $1,300,000.

The post REVOPOINT’s new affordable handheld scanner lets you easily turn large objects into accurate 3D models first appeared on Yanko Design.

Elevating your monitor to the appropriate eye level is the least of what the Anker 675 is capable of. The slick stand also houses multiple USB-C ports (going all the way up to 100W output) and USB-A ports, along with a 4K HDMI port, an Ethernet port, and an SD card slot. If that wasn’t enough, the 12-in-1 monitor stand also has its own 10W wireless charging pad that lets you juice your phone while you’re working on your desktop or laptop. The stand comes with a crawl-space underneath it too – perfect for stashing your keyboard, notebooks, or just hiding cable clutter.

Designer: Anker

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Designed to be a multiport on legs, the Anker 675 cleverly achieves a bunch of things to make your workplace much more comfortable. For starters, it elevates your work setup – quite literally, if I might add. The monitor stand lifts your monitor up by a cool 3.54 inches, preventing you from needing to hunch over as you work. The stand’s about 21.2 inches long and 8.6 inches wide, fitting most regular desks pretty comfortably. If you’ve got a laptop or a multi-display setup, the 675 may pose some space constraints for smaller tables, although it makes up for that with a whole bunch of features, starting with that 12-in-1 multiport built right into its slick design.

The multiport features practically every single connector you’d need in a modern work setup. You’ve got three USB-C ports, including one ‘Connect to Host’ port that outputs a staggering 100W to let you directly power your laptop right from the Anker 675. A DC power input provides juice to both the stand as well as your primary machine. There’s no way for the monitor to draw power from the stand, which seems like its one real drawback, although a 4K@60Hz HDMI port lets you directly hook your monitor to your laptop via the stand. The Anker 675 also has three USB-A ports that work for both power and data delivery (including one USB-A 3.1 Gen 2 port), slots for SD and MicroSD cards, an Ethernet port capable of 1 Gbps speeds, and lastly, a 3.5mm audio jack.

All ports are cleverly located in places that make them easy to access while allowing you to neatly route cables from under the stand. The stand’s multiport system also reduces the need to have a power strip cluttering your table, along with a host of wires and cables. You’d ideally need just two plug points – one for the monitor, and another for the Anker 675, which powers all your other devices, from your laptop to your phone. Speaking of which, the monitor stand also has a 10W wireless charging zone on its side that lets you juice your smartphone or TWS earbuds whenever you want.

The Anker 675 comes with a reliably built aluminum chassis that sits on metal-finished plastic legs. The legs come with silicone-strips on the base that prevent the stand from accidentally shifting around while you work (and scuffing the table surface in the process). The entire device is designed to be compatible with both Windows and Mac-based machines (it works with the iMac too), working right out of the box without any setup required. The only setting up you’ll really need to do is physically placing the Anker 675 on your table and neatly routing all your wires and cables through its built-in cable management system located on the underside of the stand.

The Anker 675 ships with the 180W DC adapter and the AC power cord that plugs into your power socket. There’s also a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 cable included along with the hardware, and the entire device is protected by an 18-month warranty and Anker’s promise for lifetime customer support.

Click Here to Buy Now

The post Anker made the ultimate monitor stand with its own built-in multiport hub and wireless charging pad first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hollywood had us dreaming about augmented reality way before “metaverse” became an overhyped buzzword. Of course, fiction and reality don’t always see eye-to-eye, pun intended, and experiencing this augmented reality has been less than ideal, if not unreachable, for most people. The problem has been making AR hardware available and accessible to more people, not to mention comfortable to wear, unlike your typical helmet-like headsets. AR glasses are the ideal solution, but the technology just isn’t completely there yet to make that happen. In the meantime, creative and adventurous people are making their own designs and interpretations of this largely unexplored territory, and this open source device turns any eyewear into AR glasses, though with a very distinct aesthetic that might look a tad ridiculous to some.

Designer: Brilliant Labs

The AR hardware problem has always been a matter of size. While gear like the Microsoft HoloLens or even the new Meta Quest Pro is powerful, they’re also bulky and heavy. AR glasses, on the other hand, not only have significantly limited hardware but also have to make sure that the wearer’s line of sight is still clear. Putting a display in front of both eyes might seem ideal, but just having the screen on one or the other eye is more realistic.

This is the kind of design that the defunct Google Glass adopted, and Monocle has taken it to the extreme. Just like its namesake, it’s a circular device that goes over just one eye, leaving the other free of any obstruction. Unlike existing AR glasses today, though, it doesn’t come as a complete eyewear product. Instead, you clip the Monocle onto any pair of glasses, which is especially useful if you wear a prescription.

The device isn’t exactly the sleekest way to get an AR experience with your regular glasses. It has to be thick to hold all the electronics in a single piece, including a 720p camera, a 640×400 OLED display, Bluetooth, and a battery. It’s pretty much a small, partly transparent puck that you attach to your glasses, ensuring that everyone will know you’re looking at them with more than just your human eyes.

What makes Monocle different from commercial AR gear is that both its software and its design are open source. Anyone with enough knowledge, experience, and patience could, in theory, do their own thing, perhaps tweaking the design to make it perhaps a bit less conspicuous. For the rest of us, however, Brilliant Labs is selling the finished product for $349, which includes a charging case in the box.

The post DIY AR glasses get a bit geekier with this monocle clip-on first appeared on Yanko Design.