Music-lover Roman Plaghki is a design engineer at 3D printing company Materialise. Tasked with developing customized offerings for their automotive clients, Plaghki and his team began looking at using Materialise’s technology to produce 3D-printed speaker covers. But rather than designing arbitrary grids, they wanted to leverage technology to inform the design.
By using computers to visualize the waveforms generated by specific songs, the team was able to translate those values—amplitude, frequency, beat, pitch, tone, etc.–into a design language.
This took a lot of “fine-tuning what it meant to visualize a song,” they write, “how to best personalize the speaker grill with 3D printing, and how to make it an attractive yet feasible product. This took hours of creating algorithms, dissecting what makes each song unique, and collaboration among the team.”
“With unlimited texture and pattern options, end-users can choose both the song they want on display in their car and the exact look that represents their style.”
“Smog,” the second single and music video from Indigo De Souza’s forthcoming album, All of This Will End (out 28 April), departs from the singer-songwriter’s previous guitar-driven indie sound. Leaning into the synth-pop genre, “Smog” swings between the loneliness of isolation and the freedom of being by yourself. While it’s powered by a spacious, energetic beat, the track has De Souza written all over it, overflowing with an authentic and infectious range of emotions—from its swelling chorus to its vulnerable verses.
Kumihimo, or “gathered threads,” is a traditional Japanese way to make braids and cords.
Two different looms of specialized design are used: A takadai loom with sliding parts and a circular marudai loom.
In this fascinating video, an expert Kumihimo craftsperson manually passes bobbins through a takadai loom, using a stick to beat the threads tightly into the braid between passes. Afterwards, they show you how the round marudai loom is used:
You can learn more about the process at this entry by Japan House, who prepared the exhibition of which the video is a part.
Featuring vocals from singer-songwriter and rapper Teezo Touchdown, SBTRKT’s new track “Waiting” sounds quite different from what many have grown to expect from the English musician and producer. The short but poignant song will appear on his upcoming album, The Rat Road—SBTRKT’s first in seven years. As he says, “This album has been my most sonically ambitious record to create, following my own musical path, which isn’t based on others’ perceptions of what SBTRKT should be… Musically, it’s an expansion on my previous records, with a purposefully wider and more layered sound. All instruments on this song and the album were played, recorded, produced and mixed by me.”
Promotion: how light technology can be used to prevent virus transmission and the impact of neighbourhoods on public health were among the discussions as part of this year’s Interior Design Show (IDS23).
IDS23 celebrated its 24th year with talks from industry experts that explored how designers are adapting to an increasingly complex world.
IDS23 took place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from 19 to 22 January 2023 and its theme was called “Moving Parts: Design for a Complex World”, which spotlighted the latest design trends in Canada and throughout the world.
The show focused on how designers are adapting and responding to the changing ways of living and working, including how they are sourcing, producing and distributing products in an ever-changing landscape.
IDS23 included over twenty conference sessions, such as Dezeen Trade Talks, which was chaired by Dezeen US editor, Ben Dreith
The event featured over 200 exhibitors, 40 seminars and 21 keynotes, including Dezeen Trade Talks, which was chaired by Dezeen US editor, Ben Dreith.
Dezeen Trade Talks featured a panel named The Future of Toronto: The Next Five Years, and speakers included co-founder of Toronto-based architecture studio Partisans, Pooya Baktash; founder and principal at design studio Unison Group, Sabine Grimes; CEO and co-founder of Monumental, Zahra Ebrahim; and architecture critic at Canadian news platform The Globe and Mail, Alex Bozikovic.
The talk explored what the future of Toronto might look like, including the opportunities and changes that need to be made to get there.
“The key context for understanding Toronto is that the city region is growing faster than anywhere in the Americas or in Europe,” said Bozikovic. “That’s being driven entirely by immigration. This is a fantastic opportunity for the city because we are going to be bringing in a lot of people with outside perspectives and a tremendous amount of talent.”
“Making room for all of those people to live and allowing the City of Toronto to evolve in its physical form I think is going to be a very big question. We have a very long way to go towards achieving the political and regulatory change, and then ultimately figuring out what we want a denser city to look like.”
Founding partner of design and architecture studio WXY, Claire Weisz also spoke at the event
Also included in the Dezeen Trade Talks was a talk by the founding partner of design and architecture studio WXY, Claire Weisz who discussed “designing for complexity”.
Weisz emphasised the importance of neighbourhoods and their direct impact on public health. She also discussed the urgency of open conversations dedicated to housing issues – such as what affordability means today and equal access to education while focusing on the cities of Toronto and New York.
“Places are complex,” said Weisz. “And complexity can be an asset – not something to design our way out of.”
“This is important in terms of the climate crisis we’re in the middle of,” Weisz continued. “And the real value we have is in the concept of neighbourhood – our neighbourhoods and where we live are big indicators of public health.”
Weisz emphasised the importance of neighbourhoods
During another IDS23 talk, Industrial designer Todd Bracher discussed his product design and engineering experience in addition to examining what the “future of the home” might look like, and how he is using light as a design tool.
In his talk Bracher discussed how using light technology can help tackle a number of issues, including how it can kill viruses such as Covid-19, and how his studio Better Lab has developed glasses that help support individuals with the eye disease Myopia.
Industrial designer Todd Bracher also spoke at the event
Among the other discussions at IDS23 were a number of trade talks by Azure magazine, featuring discussions with material and interaction designer Bonnie Hvillum and global design strategist and founder of Decantropy, Ian Rolston.
Also included was a panel called From the Ground Up: Designing the new Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, which included the founder of Omar Gandhi Architects, Omar Gandhi; visual artist Jordan Bennett; and founding partner of KPMB Architects, Shirley Blumberg.
The show also included a number of exhibitions
The show also included an exhibition created by design studio PICNIC design, which spotlighted a number of cutting-edge products that aim to provide solutions to the challenges the design industry has and is facing.
The collection includes taps and shower heads that come in chrome, silver steel, soft black, warm brass and dark bronze metallic finishes.
The handle in the collection has a cylindrical shape with a metal bar at the centre that separates it into two halves. Users can choose from metallic finishes, marble or colour options for each half of the handle.
The taps are available in a range of metallic finishes
The collection was designed to offer customisable options for sinks and showers that would suit any bathroom interior.
Users can update their taps and handles with different finishes after installation to suit changing bathroom needs.
Varied Forms designed the series for sinks and showers
“Our products allow you to create faucets that are unique to each project and each customer,” said Varied Forms.
“Whether at the start or in the future, our taps can continue to be reconfigured once installed, ensuring they can always be unique, on-trend and in perfect condition without the environmental impact of needing to change an entire product.”
Dezeen Showroom offers an affordable space for brands to launch new products and showcase their designers and projects to Dezeen’s huge global audience. For more details email showroom@dezeen.com.
Dezeen Showroom is an example of partnership content on Dezeen. Find out more about partnership content here.
In this interview, British architect David Chipperfield, who was named the winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize today, explains how he believes his determination made up for a lack of natural talent.
Speaking to Dezeen as part of our Face to Face podcast series, which was originally published in 2020, Chipperfield told Dezeen’s late founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs that he sometimes feels “like a bit of a fake”.
“Determination and commitment can compensate for a talent,” he said. “This is a discussion I have with my wife a lot, I don’t believe I’m that talented as an architect, probably just more persevering.”
Chipperfield explained that, despite completing numerous award-winning buildings all around the world, he still suffers from imposter syndrome, claiming that he feels like “a sham” compared to some of his contemporaries.
“I’m not a talented figure like Renzo”
“I still feel like a sham – I still feel like I’ve cobbled together something that aspires to being a grown-up architect,” he said.
“You go to Renzo [Piano]‘s office and I was impressed and depressed at the same time – because you think this is a real grown-up office and I’ve had to cobble it together, I guess.”
“I’m not a talented figure like Renzo – I’m a good catalyst, I think I am a good provoker, I am a good strategist – I have a sense of purpose but I don’t have innate creative talents to the level of someone like Renzo or maybe Frank Gehry or Álvaro Siza,” he continued. “So in that sense, I feel a bit of a fake.”
Chipperfield now joins Gehry, Siza and Piano – who respectively won the award in 1989, 1992 and 1998 – as a winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
He is the fifth British architect to win architecture’s most prestigious award following James Stirling in 1981, Norman Foster in 1999, Zaha Hadid in 2004 and Richard Rogers in 2007.
“I would have failed” without Zaha
In the interview, Chipperfield explained how he studied with Hadid at the Architecture Association in London and she helped him pass the course.
“Zaha, until her dying days, reminded me that if it hadn’t been for her, I would have failed and that she got me my diploma,” he recalled.
He went on to work at both Foster and Rogers’ studios before establishing his own practice in the mid-1980s, despite not being taken by the high-tech style that was being pioneered in their offices.
“I wasn’t particularly interested in high-tech, funnily enough,” he said. “Although I had the opportunity to go to Paris and see the Centre Pompidou during construction with Richard and I thought that was just the sexiest building I’d ever seen.”
He runs one of the world’s most successful studios with offices in the UK, Germany, Italy and China. His studio has completed numerous high-profile buildings including the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany, which won the Stirling Prize in 2007.
Other key projects include the Neues Museum, Ernsting’s Service Centre, Folkwang Museum – all in Germany, America’s Cup Building in Spain and The Hepworth Wakefield and River and Rowing Museums in the UK – all of which were shortlisted for the Stirling Prize.
The annual award aims to recognise living architects’ built work and contributions to the built environment. It is considered the most significant award in international architecture.
His work includes numerous museums, galleries and offices around the globe, with his buildings shortlisted eight times for the prestigious Stirling Prize.
Read on for 15 of Chipperfield’s key projects:
Photo by Richard Bryant/Arcaid
River and Rowing Museum, 1997, UK
Set on the south bank of the Thames, just outside of Henley’s town centre, the River and Rowing Museum was Chipperfield’s first major building in England. The museum is divided into two volumes, which are connected by a glass and concrete footbridge.
It is clad in untreated green English oak and features pitched roofs that were informed by Oxford’s river boathouses and traditional wooden barns. Each of the volumes has glass bases that are elevated on top of concrete pillars that help the building withstand flooding.
Photo by Christian Richters
America’s Cup Building, 2006, Spain
Built in collaboration with Spanish studio B720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos, the structure was designed to host Europe’s first America’s Cup in over 150 years. It is characterised by four stacked, horizontal concrete planes, which protrude and cantilever around the perimeter of the building and function as large, wrap-around viewing decks.
The ground and top floors of the building house restaurants, lounges, a wellness club and amenities for athletes and sponsors. The first floor is dedicated to retail spaces and a publicly accessible viewing deck.
Photo by Ute Zscharnt
BBC Scotland Headquarters, 2007, UK
Located at a site in Glasgow‘s Govan Graving Docks – an abandoned shipbuilding site on the River Clyde – Chipperfield’s BBC Scotland Headquarters were built in 2007. The building is used to film television outputs, radio broadcasts and digital media.
Inside the building, a large atrium is located at the centre of the headquarters and includes a snaking staircase with stacked breakout areas that help to control circulation while encouraging employees to use the terraces for social and work purposes.
In 2007, David Chipperfield Architects won the RIBA Stirling Prize for the Museum of Modern Literature at Marbach am Neckar in Germany.
The pavilion-like building is partly embedded into the brow of a hill beside the 19th-century Schiller National Museum. It is finished with a material palette including concrete and limestone, which the studio chose to give “the architecture a strong, physical presence”.
Ciutat de la Justícia is a vast nine-building complex housing law courts in Spain. Opened in 2009, it sits at the border of Barcelona and l’Hospitalet to unify their government’s legal departments in one place.
The buildings have blocky, monolithic forms with load-bearing concrete facades, each finished with recessed windows and their own muted colour palette.
David Chipperfield Architects and Julian Harrap Architects renovated Berlin’s 19th-century Neues Museum on Museum Island in 2009.
The studios performed a sensitive renovation and restoration that also resulted in the rebuilding of the missing northwest wing and southeast bay – both of which were destroyed by bombing during the second world war and had remained derelict since. New exhibition rooms were built using pre-fabricated concrete elements that consisted of white cement mixed with Saxonian marble chips.
In 2007, David Chipperfield Architects won an international architecture competition to design an extension for the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. The extension is clad in blocks of recycled glass and consists of six structures, which are organised around four courtyards and gardens.
It was designed to complement and reflect the existing character of the original building. Inside publicly accessible spaces are bridged by glass passages that lead to the exhibition rooms. A temporary exhibition space was topped with a saw-tooth roof.
With a form inspired artist JMW Turner’s paintings, the Turner Contemporary comprises six, identical jagged volumes, each with mono-pitched roofs, that are clad in an acid-etched glass skin.
Its seafront location in Margate, Kent means the gallery was built and fitted with design features that allow the building to withstand harsh sea conditions such as flooding and overtopping. It was constructed with a concrete frame and raised on a plinth. Its mono-pitched roofs mean water can drain easily and quickly.
Comprised of 10, naturally-lit exhibition rooms, that are each located within 10 interlinked trapezoidal volumes, The Hepworth Wakefield is a gallery in Yorkshire that Chipperfield designed in 2011.
As a result of the building’s location on an industrial heritage site, the gallery’s exterior was designed to respond to the surrounding warehouse and industrial buildings visually. Inside and located beneath pitched ceilings, gallery and exhibition spaces were scaled to complement the work of the Wakefield-born artist Barbara Hepworth.
Museo Jumex is a Mexico City gallery designed and built in collaboration with architecture firm TAAU. It includes a white travertine exterior and a sawtooth roof that brings light into the interior of the top-level galleries.
The gallery was set on fourteen columns and a plinth which helps to encourage social activity resulting in a plaza-like space for the community.
The raised ground floor also enables access from the through to the upper floors of the building, which contain multifunctional spaces including, exhibition areas, workshops and permanent collections.
Blanketed in red-pigmented concrete, the Inagawa Cemetery Chapel and Visitor Center was designed for a cemetery in the Japanese town of Inagawa, a hillside municipality in the Hokusetsu Mountain Range of the Hyogo prefecture.
The buildings are located at the base of a hill and sit beside a grand flight of steps that stretches diagonally up the terraced hillside to a shrine.
The chapel and visitor centre was placed diagonally from each other and are sheltered beneath inclined roofs that help to visually guide views up the hillside.
Located in the centre of Seoul, the headquarters was created for AmorePacific, Korea’s largest beauty company.
The building totals 30 storeys tall and was developed around a central courtyard. The exterior of the building was punctuated with openings and voids that lead to the central atrium, which maximises daylight and natural ventilation to the interior of the building.
To mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy of Arts, David Chipperfield Architects rejuvenated a former Senate House at 6 Burlington Gardens and connected it to the institution’s main building, Burlington House through a modern intervention.
The renovation and restoration of the buildings were completed in collaboration with conservation studio Julian Harrap Architects. The two buildings were connected via a concrete bridge that overlooks a new sculpture garden and provides a new public route between the Piccadilly and Burlington Gardens entrances to the Royal Academy of Arts.
Fronted by a stone facade with slim columns and colonnades, which were informed by the work of the 19th-century architect Friedrich August Stüler, James-Simon-Galerie functions as a gateway to a series of cultural buildings that are located on an island in the Spree river in Berlin.
The area is part of a site that David Chipperfield Architects has been re-master planning since 1999. The facade was constructed using reconstituted stone with a natural stone aggregate that was chosen to complement the surrounding limestone, sandstone and rendered facades of nearby buildings.
David Chipperfield Architect’s renovation of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe‘s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Germany began in 2012. The project saw the studio perform a “surgical” refurbishment of the building’s concrete structure, its steel and glass exterior and update its services.
This renovation was the first time that the structure had undergone a major renovation. Updates to the Neue Nationalgalerie’s envelope meant its insulation, glazing and the steel frame of its canopy were updated and improved, alongside repairing its concrete shell.
Chipperfield is the 52nd winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is considered the most significant award in international architecture.
Top image: David Chipperfield has won the 2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Above: the River and Rowing Museum was an early major project. Photo courtesy of Richard Bryant /Arcaid
The 2023 jury hailed him for “steering clear of trends” and recognised his “commitment to an architecture of understated but transformative civic presence”.
“Such a capacity to distill and perform meditated design operations is a dimension of sustainability that has not been obvious in recent years,” read the jury’s citation. “Sustainability as pertinence not only eliminates the superfluous but is also the first step to creating structures able to last, physically and culturally.”
More recently David Chipperfield Architects created the James Simon Galerie in Berlin. Photo by Simon Menges
He worked for fellow Prtizker Architecture Prize-laureates Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, before establishing his eponymous studio David Chipperfield Architects in London in 1985. Today, his studio has offices in Berlin, Milan, Shanghai and Santiago de Compostela.
Chipperfield is the architect behind Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Photo by Simon Menges
In response to the news, the architect said he was “so overwhelmed to receive this extraordinary honour and to be associated with the previous recipients”.
“I take this award as an encouragement to continue to direct my attention not only to the substance of architecture and its meaning but also to the contribution that we can make as architects to address the existential challenges of climate change and societal inequality,” Chipperfield added.
One of David Chipperfield Architects’ first major projects was the linear River and Rowing Museum on the River Thames, which he completed with his studio in 1997.
While practising as an architect, Chipperfield is an author and educator at various institutes including the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and Yale University. He also curated the 13th Biennale Architettura in 2012.
He will be awarded the prize at the 2023 Pritzker Prize ceremony in Athens in May.
Chipperfield created the Amorepacific Headquarters in Seoul. Photo courtesy of Noshe
Historian Barry Bergdoll was also on the panel, alongside critic André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, lawyer Stephen Gerald Breyer and Pritzker Architecture Prize executive director Manuela Lucá-Dazio.
Here’s the strangest seating design I’ve seen in a while: My Deer, by Utrecht-based designer and Eindhoven grad Jeroen Wesselink, appears to be a rotomolded hunter’s trophy.
“My Deer, a stylish and refreshing stool, available in a black and white (other colours by a minimum order of 10). If you don’t need it, hang it upside down on a wall hook and presto, it changes into a colourful, sleekly stylized deer head. Ideal for public spaces, where the seats can be transformed into a decorative gaily-coloured herd on the wall in just a wink.”
These appear to be made-to-order, though prices aren’t listed.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
