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Global architecture studio SOM has installed a block-long timber truss bridge called Timber Bridge, which connects Manhattan’s High Line to the renovated Penn Station.
Designed by global studio Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), the 128-ton, two-section, Warren truss bridge was constructed out of glued-laminated timber (glulam), an engineered wood product made by combining multiple smaller pieces, which is capable of supporting large structures.
The 300-foot (92 metre) long bridge is part of the Moynihan Connector, which connects the High Line, an elevated walkway in Manhattan, to the Moynihan Train Hall transit hub.
Designed by SOM, the bridge connects the High Line to Penn Station
The bridge was lifted onto Y-shaped steel columns rising 25 feet above Dyer Avenue at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel.
“This structural solution requires minimal connections to the ground, allowing the existing roads to remain undisturbed and maximizing the use of renewable materials,” SOM said.
It was lifted onto Y-shaped steel columns
“The dynamic visual landscape allows pedestrians to see the timber structure rise over the diagonal pathway and creates a visual link to the trees from Magnolia Court,” SOM said.
“This solution establishes a sense of place and guides pedestrians to their destinations on both sides of the Connector.”
The full Moynihan Connector project includes two bridges that form a union with a landscaped park by James Corner Field Operations. The two bridges stitch together a variety of elevated public spaces.
They extend the current terminus of the High Line through an existing public plaza in the Manhattan West development to the transit hub of Moynihan Train Hall and Penn Station.
The second bridge is called the Woodlands Bridge and connects at a 90-degree angle and runs along 30th Street to The Spur of the High Line.
Composed of five-foot-deep precast concrete containers set on exposed weathered steel columns with angled brackets, the Woodlands Bridge introduces immersive landscaping to the public amenity. The containers hold trees and extensive plantings in various soil depths along a diagonal pathway.
The trees are arranged to ascend from shortest to tallest from east to west on one side of the bridge and in reverse order along the other side.
Both bridges have Corten steel decking and bronze handrails, but have “distinct identities” according to SOM Design Principal Kim Van Holsbeke, who also noted that they “expand the High Line’s rich tapestry of experiences”.
SOM created the structure from Alaskan yellow cedar
The Moynihan Connector is set to open in June 2023, nearly 15 years since architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro and James Corner Field Operations completed the first section of the walkway.
Designed by Alvar Aalto, the Paimio Sanatorium is considered one of the architect’s functionalist masterpieces. Any of you ID majors who took a History of Architecture course will remember the rounded balconies and the airy interiors. And though it was designed for tuberculosis patients in the 1930s, during the time of COVID the design saw a resurgence of press, with publications eager to present spaces designed to promote health and recovery.
Aalto designed not only the building itself, but the Sanatorium’s furniture, lighting fixtures and even the washbasins in the rooms. It’s that latter object we want to focus on here. A little-known fact is that Aalto, who competed in a design competition for the commission, had gotten sick by the time the winning results were announced:
“I was ill at the time I received the [Paimio Sanatorium] commission, and was able to experiment a little with what it means to be really incapacitated,” Aalto wrote, as quoted in “Inseminations: Seeds for Architectural Thought.” While bedridden, Aalto experienced discomfort that led him to criticize the design elements of the room he was in. “There was no inner balance, no real peace in the room that could have been designed specially for a sick, bedridden person…. [With Paimio] I therefore tried to design rooms for weak patients that would provide a peaceful atmosphere for people….”
“…Incredibly small details can be used to alleviate people’s suffering. [For example, the] washbasin. I strove to design a basin in which the water does not make a noise. The water falls on the porcelain sink at a sharp angle, making no sound to disturb the neighboring patient, as in the physically or mentally weakened condition, the impact of the environment is heightened.”
Following its manufacture, Aalto chose the noiseless washbasin for his own bathroom.
Honestly, in time I’ve really come to love office pods or work booths. Office pods have gotten supremely popular ever since COVID-19 hit, not only do they create little isolated spaces to work in, but they also provide a whole other level of privacy, that would have been otherwise unimaginable and completely unattainable in a commercial office. There are quite a few versatile options on the market when it comes to office pods, and a pretty neat one I recently came across is the Arche acoustic pod.
Designed by the French workplace brand Leet Design, the Arche acoustic pod is a high-tech, soundproof, and sleek-looking work booth. It was designed in collaboration with designer Marouane Sadki. The Arche acoustic pod comes in two intriguing variants – a two-seater meeting pod, and a single-person phone box-style booth. Although, both of the booths do share similar aesthetics, and have a distinct rounded exterior silhouette made from recycled steel. The two versions feature glass panels on both sides and smart ventilation technology which ensures a steady air flow inside the booths, to prevent them from getting hot and stuffy.
The pods have also been equipped with other features such as adjustable lighting, a thermal presence detector, a decibel sensor, an LED vacancy indicator, and a ‘confidentiality threshold’ – which notifies users when noise levels inside the pods become too loud. All the various features can be controlled using a digital dashboard, which allows convenient calibration, based on the user’s individual preferences, as well as remote updates to maintain the steady performance of the booth.
“With its innovative features, adaptability, and emphasis on sustainability, the Arche + pod is poised to redefine workplace privacy and comfort, making it an essential addition to the offices of the future,” said Leet Design. The booths have been developed and built in France while laying a strict emphasis on sustainable materials. The pods can be disassembled and assembled for maintenance purposes, or to lengthen the lifespan of the product, making it quite easily manageable design. The interior finishes of the pods can be customized with a diverse range of upholstery and colored finishes to ensure the pods harmoniously merge with the interior style of the office.
A quiz show-style game that focuses on social, political and economic issues surrounding climate change is on show at the Korean Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale, which is revealed exclusively on Dezeen.
Korea’s exhibition is titled 2086: Together How? and was curated by artistic directors Soik Jung and Kyong Park. The exhibition questions how people might work together and collaborate to endure current and future environmental crises up until the year 2086.
The Korean Pavilion was curated by Soik Jung and Kyong Park
In a report conducted by the UN, 2086 was projected as the year in which the global population is expected to peak at an estimated 10.4 billion people. It is projected to remain at that level until 2100, before starting to decline by around 10 million a year.
“The concept of ‘2086: Together How?’ is to interrogate our Faustian ideology of progress and how we have sought unlimited material pleasure through industrialization, westernization, and liberalism, and our reparations of the past colonial exploitations is the first step in our reconciliation with nature,” Jung and Park told Dezeen.
It is titled 2086: Together How?
A main component of the exhibition is a quiz show-style game titled “The Game of Together How” that invites visitors to answer multiple-choice questions on issues surrounding climate change, which are presented to players via on-screen fictional scenarios.
“The idea behind ‘The Game of Together How’ is to put everyday people into a reality TV quiz show-like situation where they can have a fictional but direct contact with ‘climate endgame,” said Jung and Park.
The exhibition poses different fictional scenarios showing how Korean cities would be affected by the expected peak population
“It also connects them to the future scenarios and choices they may have to make to survive in 17 questions posed, and at the same time connecting them to their past activities and cultures that produced the environment crisis,” said the curators.
“By keeping scores of their decisions, we could fictionally predict their chances of survival in seven different ecological categories from 2023 to 2086, during the period of exhibition.”
It includes collaborations between architecture studios and activist groups
Alongside the game, a trio of collaborations led by architecture studios and community activists focus on the potential future outcomes of South Korean cities as a result of rising populations.
Seoul-based studio Society of Architecture and local activist group Udangtangtang used Gunsan, a former South Korean fishing city turned US air base with a declining population, as a case study for their contribution to the exhibition.
The studios recreated a partially demolished home to exhibit designs that respond to the city’s declining population. They also explored ways in which Gunsan’s nomadic people could reintroduce nature and native wildlife into abandoned and derelict areas through guerrilla-style events.
“By teaming up architects with local community leaders and activists, we have generated various future possibilities for decentralization, localism and collective projects and actions,” said Jung and Park.
“Altogether, we are looking for the revival of local legacy, independent economy and cultures, self-sufficient cooperative capitalism, and a more balanced life with nature.”
There is a video game that poses questions for visitors
The installation focuses on the historic village of Baedari in East Incheon, South Korea, and the work undertaken by its community top stop the construction of a highway in the area.
Studios have looked at different Korean cities as case studies for their installations
“Having stopped the completion of a major highway that destroyed much of its community, Baedari’s resistance raises urgent questions about its future between post-Anthropocene and neo-Holocene life,” said the pavilion’s notes.
The pavilion also features Migrating Futures, a project by New York-based studio NHDM focused on foreign migrants in South Korea, and Korean artist Wolsik Kim’s A Community of Difference, which envisions a future in which borders no longer function as physical boundaries.
According to the curators, rather than respond with solutions and answers, the pavilion aims to pose questions surrounding issues of globalisation and “capitalism of desires.”
“We should free ourselves from the ‘capitalism of desires’ and return to ‘capitalism of necessity,’ and begin our reparation with nature through our reparation of colonial history,” they said.
“Through our exhibition, we hope that people would begin to think about why are we so ‘isolated’ when we are supposed to be so ‘connected’ through the globalization of information, finance, and even culture?”
The pavilion looks at ways we can reconcile with nature
“Why are we so insecure about our future when so many of us are living at unprecedented levels of wealth, consumption, and freedom?” they added. “Why then is the idea of progress taking us closer to extinction than to our perfection that it promised?”
“Then they could realize that not only will the environmental crisis force us to come up with a better ecocultural paradigm, more importantly, it will be our best and last chance to become a better humanity.”
Dezeen is live reporting from the Venice Architecture Biennale, which takes place from 20 May to 26 November 2023. See Dezeen Events Guide for all the latest information you need to know to attend the event, as well as a list of other architecture and design events taking place around the world.
“I just have been so bored by almost all the product designs these days,” says Brooklyn-based product designer Harry Isaac (they/them), “even from companies that are praised for their good product designs.”
“I just want everything to be so much weirder, and more colorful, and bright and experimental and fun. So I’m on a mission to redesign some of the everyday things I use in my life in order to make that happen.”
Isaac started with this camcorder, circa 2001.
After disassembling the housing, they fastidiously measured every boss, attachment point and support fin, then recreated the housing in CAD. Then the parts were printed, piece-by-piece, in an FDM 3D printer.
And talk about patience: It took Isaac 25 iterations to get everything to line up perfectly.
They then switched to a resin printer, as they wanted a translucent housing.
For color, they briefly considered green, before deciding on this brilliant orange.
Here’s Isaac showing you the finished product, which looks incredible:
I was going to write “Someone get this person a job,” but earlier this year Isaac quit the job he already had, in favor of supporting themself through freelance work while getting to spend more time on personal projects (like this camcorder redesign). “When making for others I always feel like I’m looking down, heads down on the task put in front of me,” Isaac writes. “When I make for myself, I feel like I’m looking up and out at the world and letting it inspire me to make something.”
“The simplest distillation of what actually gets me excited work-wise is that I just love making things. The act of breathing life into an idea is one of the purest joys I know.”
As part of NYCxDesign, Dezeen is teaming up with women’s body and hair care brand Flamingo to host and livestream a talk exploring how to design products for the wellbeing of women. Watch the broadcast here from 11:00am New York time.
The talk takes place at the HBF showroom in New York City
Called Women’s Wellbeing and the Power of Design, the talk will explore how the nuance of the female experience shapes design practices in today’s world.
The panelists will discuss how they approach designing products, brands and spaces specifically for women.
The event is part of NYCxDesign, an eight-day festival running from May 18 to 25.
Cher Russo is the Flamingo creative director
Russo joined Flamingo in 2022 as creative director and has since launched several campaigns focussing on reimagining body hair and care to be more responsive to women’s actual needs and preferences.
Russo’s 15-year began at marketing agencies such as Huge and Wednesday, before moving into in-house creative lead roles at beauty brand Estée Lauder and more recently beauty brand Glossier.
Birsel is known for her design work with Herman Miller
Birsel is an industrial designer and founded design practice Birsel + Seck with her partner Bibi Seck. She has designed products for companies including Amazon, Herman Miller, IKEA and Toyota.
She is the author of a workbook titled Design the Life You Love, which combines self-help with design principles, and delivers lectures to organisations on how to apply design thinking to management processes.
Ly’s architecture practice has designed wellness spaces for women
Ly is the founder and principal architect of Alda Ly Architecture (ALA). ALA has designed two branches of Tia, a women’s healthcare space in New York.
The talk takes place 18 May 2023 at the HBF showroom in New York City. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
Partnership content
This article was written as part of a partnership with Flamingo. Find out more about our partnership content here.
In 2021, a no-details-available company called Advencher successfully Kickstarted an in-cup coffeemaking device called FinalPress. Made of stainless steel, it was essentially a miniaturized French press that uses your coffee cup as the vessel. Response was strong: Seeking just $7,000 in pledges, they landed $405,985.
Now the company’s back on Kickstarter with a new version. It apparently works the exact same way as the old version; they don’t say what the design improvement has been, although the laser-cut filter now features a hexagonal pattern.
Here’s how it works:
This one, too, has been a smash. At press time they’d landed $461,533 in pledges—with 28 days left to pledge. Buy-in starts at $80, and they say they’ll start shipping this July.
Dezeen Showroom: taking cues from Brutalist design, Australian designer Ross Gardam has released a lamp composed of blocky geometric shapes made from cast crystal glass.
Named Vestige, the lamp is the result of a collaboration between Gardam and glass artist Peter Kovacsy, whose sculptural work is informed by the remote wilderness of Western Australia.
Vestige has a solid, blocky form
The Vestige lamp has a simple silhouette made up of an upright rectangular block merged with a hemispherical shape, reminiscent of the simplicity of Brutalist architecture.
Bubbles in the glass create a speckled texture when illuminated, intended to celebrate the lamp’s unique materiality.
The lamps are made from cast crystal glass
“Intentionally ambiguous, the brutalist-inspired sculptural form reveals its archetype when illuminated,” said Ross Gardam. “Vestige celebrates the allure, texture, and volume of glass.”
Designed for tabletop use, Vestige lights come in one translucent finish and are mounted onto a raw aluminium base accompanied by a cone-shaped dimmer.
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.
Venice Architecture Biennale curator Lesley Lokko has criticised the decision by Italian authorities to deny visas to three members of her Ghana-based team at the opening press conference for the event.
Speaking at the press conference to mark the start of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, Lokko described the decision as the “ugly rear” of Italian immigration policy, but said that it should “not become the defining story” of the biennale.
Lokko thanked the biennale team, donors and her team of curatorial assistants who are the “essential lifeblood of the exhibition”. However, she drew attention to the fact that three of her curatorial assistants were not able to travel to Italy.
“There are reasonable doubts as to your intention to leave the territory”
“Not all teams are equal,” she said.
“The rejection document from the Italian Embassy in Accra states ‘there are reasonable doubts as to your intention to leave the territory, or state, before the expiry of your visa’,” she continued. “No explanation has been given to what the doubts were, reasonable or otherwise.”
Lokko then criticised the decision and the response to it by the Italian ambassador to Ghana.
“In a press release in response to journalists seeking clarification on the issue, the Italian ambassador to Ghana wrote: ‘Our embassy is deeply committed to promote collaboration with Ghana in all sectors, including the cultural one. And we spare no efforts to facilitate the participation of any artist to take part in exhibitions, or events scheduled in Italy, where we are at the forefront of policies to promote African cultural heritage as tangible and intangible’,” explained Lokko.
“This is not the forefront of policy,” she responded. “This is its ugly rear.”
“For the moment, this is a headline story”
Lokko acknowledged that “much will be said about the fate of three young Ghanian men”, but stated that the decision stressed the importance of artists and designers continuing their work.
“For the moment, this is a headline story, but it cannot become the defining story of this exhibition,” she said. “That’s too easy, too predictable, too cheap.”
“This is not a new story. It’s an old and familiar tale, if not to many in this audience then to the global majority who are not here.”
“There are participants in this show who understand that this is precisely the time to go to work. Over the coming months, thoughtfully, intelligently, carefully, participants will use the platform of this exhibition to work together, to address the complex questions that have been raised,” she continued.
This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale is being curated by Lokko, who is the first person of African descent to have curated the event, which is the most significant event in the architectural calendar.
Lokko has aimed to place Africa at the centre of the biennale for the first time. Speaking to Dezeen in an exclusive interview, she said that the continent was a “powerful place from which to examine the issues that will dominate the next century”.
“For this exhibition, two keywords shaped practitioners’ responses: decarbonisation and decolonisation,” she added.
The photography is by Tom Ravenscroft.
Dezeen is live reporting from the Venice Architecture Biennale, which takes place from 20 May to 26 November 2023. See Dezeen Events Guide for all the latest information you need to know to attend the event, as well as a list of other architecture and design events taking place around the world.
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