Hasta La Ideas

Located just outside of Redmond, Washington with a view of the Ames Lake, is the Treehouse Camp Residence, a picturesque home nestled on a site that once held a Boy Scout Camp from the 1950s through the 1990s. The stunning residence is home to a family with two young children. It is tucked away within the forest but is yet pretty close to the water’s edge.

Designer: Stephenson Design Collective

The home occupies almost 3900 square meters and was designed by Stephenson Design Collective. The lakeside locale is considered a protected area, and hence the architect took special care to ensure that the home and its construction gently interacted with the natural surroundings, without immensely disturbing them or causing them any harm. The architect had to be extremely sensitive while designing and constructing the home, which they were successful at, resulting in the creation of a beautiful glass, concrete, and wood home that pays tribute to the surrounding Pacific Northwest forests, as well as the Danish heritage of the owner of the home.

The homeowner is the CCO of the video game Minecraft, and hence Stephenson Design Collective quite interestingly drew inspiration from the game’s usage of blocks while designing the home. The entire Treehouse Camp Residence is made up of stacked blocks. The ground floor features a board-formed concrete exterior that merges with the surrounding forest and includes public spaces such as the kitchen, office, and guest room. The upper floor has been beautifully clad in charred shou sugi ban siding. The upper story gracefully extends and cantilevers past the ground floor, to provide additional space to accommodate three bedrooms, a family room, and laundry which are connected via a suspended bridge. The home also houses a basement, with a glass-walled wine cellar, media room, and home gym.

On the ground floor, the open living room, kitchen, and dining room subtly open out to the outdoors, creating a serene indoor-outdoor connection, and functioning as an excellent space for entertaining or enjoying meals alfresco. This experience is made even more interesting, with the 16-foot cantilevered upper floor which provides protection. Massive sliding doors provide stunning and unobstructed views of the surrounding lake and trees, creating a picture-perfect backdrop!

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The maison’s CEO outlines the future of the brand

When people hear the name Manolo Blahnik, they often think of the iconic high heels immortalized by Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City (and, of course, And Just Like That). However, there’s far more to the brand’s global reputation and continuously pioneering collections. We recently sat down in Accord, New York’s INNESS to discuss the brand’s past, present and future with Kristina Blahnik, who not only serves as the maison’s CEO but is also the niece of brand founder Manuel “Manolo” Blahnik Rodríguez himself.

Can you tell us a little bit about the history of Manolo Blahnik menswear?

Actually, it’s a longer history than the women’s history of Manolo Blahnik because he started with menswear. He told me one of his first shoes was a shoe called the Hockney, which was a lace-up Derby with a very, very thick cream rubber crepe sole. I’ve seen pictures of it. Then he did boots in it. Then he did his first women’s shoe in crepe as well—but it was inspired from the Hockney shoe.

His attention was pulled toward womenswear because he was able to be more creative, wider; it was unboundaried. I think the boundaries of menswear tightened for a certain number of decades and they’ve widened again. I think now menswear can be anything. It can be colorful in some instances, it can be high heels, it can be platforms, it can be lace-ups, it can be slippers, it can be ballerinas.

You have dedicated menswear stores, as well?

In 2018 we decided we wanted to open our first dedicated men’s store, next to our women’s store in Burlington Arcade in London. And that’s when we really looked at our men’s collection and our archives and really took it all apart and rebuilt it for the modern man. Then we opened stores in Japan and in Paris. But the iconic space for us is our Madison Avenue store. When we were looking for space, we were introduced to 717 Madison Avenue and I stepped back, I went to the other side of the road and said, “this building is magnificent.”

How would you say the brand has evolved since to fit the modern day consumers? Has the design or the aesthetic remained classic?

I think we’ve really carefully looked at our passions. There is an element of classic. Manolo [himself] is a very classic tailored man, but equally, he’s a classic tailored man who will wear a lavender suit. It’s about being slightly unconventional and uncompromising and sticking to what really matters, which is comfort and quality.

I think at this point now, what you want is something you can put your foot in immediately and walk out of a store or walk out of wherever you are and go, “I’m happy, I’m comfortable. I don’t need to worry about that part of my body, but if I do look down, I’m going to be happy about it.” I think our view on that is if you put a bit of color in there, which is Manolo’s passion every season, that’s where we set ourselves apart from your more traditional brands.

Where do you draw inspiration from with the bright colors and the patterns?

My uncle starts with a really intellectual base. That can be a collage, with all sorts of reference points disparate to the point where you’re going. I don’t understand the connection between them. It can be Babylon meets Gore Vidal—you can’t even bring those two things together! But he has this amazing ability to bridge two disparate elements and bring them together and create a whole new aesthetic. When I started joining the family business, I asked him, “what is your personal motto?” And he said in Italian to me “Without tradition, we are nothing.” And then his own take on it was “but with fantasy we are free.” This was a quote that he was given by Luchino Visconti in a dinner that he was at with Anna Piaggi in 1971.

I think that’s a really important point about who we are and what we always strive to be: we’re not trying to be fashion. We’re trying to be something that is relevant to the past, present and future without being transient.

We see ourselves as a timeless investment brand. I personally don’t want to acquire something for the sake of acquiring it for that moment in time and then discarding it because it wasn’t a considered choice. I want us to be able to offer something to someone that in 10, 15, 20 years time is still relevant to them and their wardrobe. We heavily invest in what we do because, as I’m a previous architect, I believe the more energy you put into something like building a cathedral that took a hundred years time, it’s more likely to be standing in a thousand years than something that took a week to build and is probably not as stable.

What would you say to somebody who is looking to get their first pair of Manolos?

I would say be curious and be ready to be challenged in terms of “can we make you smile?” Because there’s no point in getting anything ever unless it genuinely makes you smile.

It’s extraordinary in that sense that you offer so many options for so many personalities that you can choose. 

What you have now is a bit of renaissance toward classicism and traditional footwear, because everyone has a lot of sneakers. But Anything goes now. You can mix anything with everything. And this is what I find really interesting because your ability to create your own identity is much wider now than it ever was. You don’t have to subscribe to the suit, tie and Oxfords.
That doesn’t exist anymore. Those rules have been rewritten because it’s more about individuality and having style. That style doesn’t require a certain set of criteria or rules.

Our best-selling colors are pink and electric blue. It’s not brown, it’s not black. It’s not gray. That is what the people that come to us are looking for.

Anything new we can expect coming up?

More color, no surprises. More places where you can find men’s shoes. More storytelling, more fun moments, because that’s really what we’re about.

Images courtesy of Brett Warren

Festival set designer Simon Carroll has created the spiralling Hayes Pavilion from salvaged timber and mycelium at Glastonbury festival to challenge the industry’s over-reliance on polystyrene foam.

Encircled by a long bench, the Hayes Pavilion was designed as both a gathering space and a conversation piece, exploring whether mycelium can be used as a more sustainable material for building the elaborate sets found at festivals like Glastonbury.

The structure consists of a 26-metre-long timber frame, shaped roughly like the number six with one long wall clad in mycelium – a biomaterial grown from the root structure of fungi that is increasingly being explored as a natural insulator and fire retardant.

To form the wall, mycelium insulation boards created by UK company Biohm were cut up and combined in much the same way that set designers in the film and music industry will carve elaborate sets out of cheap polystyrene panels.

Carroll, who has worked in the industry for two decades and was responsible for Glastonbury’s own Lonely Hearts Club stage, set out to explore whether mycelium could offer a viable replacement for the fossil plastic, which cannot be processed in traditional recycling streams.

“I have seen the impact of what we do,” he told Dezeen. “The festival industry and the theatre side is a lot more resourceful – mainly because of finances – and they do tend to try and make sure that materials are upcycled.”

“But eventually, they end up in landfill or incinerated. And the film industry, unfortunately, is notoriously bad for it.”

For the Hayes Pavilion, Carroll worked with a group of material researchers and set designers from across music, film and TV to push mycelium to its creative limits.

“We tried all sorts of different approaches based around the way that we currently approach the use of polystyrene,” he said.

That meant cutting, sanding and glueing the panels together using a gelatin-based adhesive to create an undulating three-dimensional surface and colouring it using a seaweed-based bioplastic coating by industrial designer Aleksa Kostur.

With the aim of keeping the pavilion’s footprint as low as possible, Carroll used various reclaimed materials in its construction.

The exposed timber framing system was made using salvaged wood from a 200-year-old Douglas fir that was upended in Wales during Storm Arwen, while the roof is made using repurposed tents from a company that rents festival marquees.

To ensure stability, industrial timber was used to form the decking supports holding up the pavilion’s raised, oriented strand board (OSB) floors, which protrude out beyond the footprint of the structure to act as a bench where festivalgoers can perch.

“Mycelium provides a communal network to a forest and I wanted to try and bring that idea into the design in terms of giving people a place to sit and talk and engage with the project,” Carroll explained.

Connected via steel bolts and mounting plates, the wooden structure can be entirely demounted and flat-packed so it can be reused for future editions of the festival.

Carroll plans to return the Hayes Pavilion to Glastonbury every year as a vehicle for exploring new green technologies and approaches that are promising to revolutionise the industry.

The mycelium panels would be retired after the inaugural edition to make space for other innovations. But Carroll claims that, unlike polystyrene, the panels can be composted once they are no longer needed, even with their bioplastic coating.

To verify these claims and assess the overall impact of the project, the designer enlisted sustainability consultant Pauline Bourdon to complete a whole carbon assessment of the structure.

“A lot of the time when we do big builds and things like this, time is an awful pressure and that then means that we have to make sacrificial choices,” Carroll explained.

“We are trying more and more to understand what the impacts of those are, whether that be material choices or staffing choices.”

Although Biohm’s mycelium insulation boards are close to receiving regulatory approval, Carroll says that more material development will be necessary to adapt them for use in set design.

This is largely down to the material inconsistencies that are revealed when the ready-made panels are cut and sanded to create more intricate shapes.

“I had originally come up with the concept of quite a different design in terms of its styling and I realised very quickly that we’re not quite where we need to be,” he said.

“We are at very early stages and it’s given us the ability to now feedback and to continue developing a product that is more suitable.”

Glastonbury is also working to reduce its environmental footprint in other ways.

This year, the festival will be entirely powered by renewable energy and renewable fuels, while the sale of disposable vapes will be banned in an extension of last year’s ban on single-use plastic bottles.

Reversible pavilions that are designed for disassembly have become increasingly popular among architects and designers in recent years as the industry grapples with the environmental implications of creating temporary installations.

Among them is Vestre’s stand from the 2020 Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair, which was repurposed to form an installation at Milan design week the following year.

The post Glastonbury’s mushroom mycelium pavilion explores sustainable stage design appeared first on Dezeen.

An exhibition of the 1950s sets, props, miniature models, costumes and artwork used in Wes Anderson‘s latest film Asteroid City has opened at 180 The Strand in London.

The exhibition was designed to immerse visitors in the film’s fictitious world – a desert town in 1950s America famous for its meteor crater and celestial observatory.

Its aim was to give visitors insight into the “1950s Americana world the film is set in”, said Asteroid City associate producer Ben Alder.

Asteroid City was filmed on flat farmland in Spain, with the buildings made for the film set up to appear like a town.

“Everything you see in the film was physically built and laid out in a way that gave the actors and crew the sense of living in this real town,” Alder told Dezeen.

“The exhibition is a great way for people to see how much work went into all the elements of the film, like the costumes, because you can spend more time looking at how they are made and how much care went into them.”

Pieces in the exhibition are spread across three main spaces, with audio clips and parts of the film projected onto walls referencing scenes relevant to the nearby displays.

“The idea was to use the largest open space for the sets to give people the sense of how big they were on the film, and you can imagine how massive our Asteroid City town was,” said Alder.

“Then there’s another space that’s a more traditional gallery-type curation where you can see smaller objects and props, going into the details of the characters,” Alder continued.

Mimicking the exterior of the cafe featured in the film, a temporary wooden structure decorated with menu lettering and a desert scene spans the entrance of 180 The Strand.

Sets displayed in the exhibition include white wooden residential shacks, a train carriage and a bathroom scene.

Other life-sized scenery props include telephone booths, billboard posters and humourous vending machines that dispense martinis and bullets in the film.

“There are moments where visitors are invited to be in the sets and interact with them,” said Alder.

“Not only can visitors see all the pieces from the film really closely but they can go inside some of the sets – they can sit inside the train compartment, recreate the scene with [actor] Scarlett [Johansson] in the window, or go into the telephone booth – which is something really special that not a lot of exhibitions have.”

Some of the character costumes are arranged together with set pieces to recreate scenes from the film.

Also on display are puppets made by Andy Gent, who previously created puppets for Anderson’s films Isle of Dogs and Fantastic Mr Fox, and a series of glass flowers used in a stop-motion animation sequence where they transition from blooming to wilting.

The exhibition ends with a recreation of a luncheonette featured in the movie, where visitors can order food and drink.

It has a 1950s-style decor, with stools lined up along the service bar, pastel-coloured blinds and the image of a desert landscape framed inside fake windows.

Asteroid City is out in cinemas now.

Anderson is known for his distinctive film aesthetic, typified by retro influences and pastel colours. Interiors that have been informed by the director’s style include a pastel-yellow breakfast cafe in Sweden and a bottle shop in Los Angeles with mid-century influences.

The photography is courtesy of Universal Pictures and 180 Studios.

The Asteroid City exhibition is on display at 180 The Strand in London from 17 June to 8 July 2023. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Architecture practice Studio Saar and engineering studio Webb Yates Engineers have unveiled the Craft Not Carbon pavilion in London’s Crystal Palace Park as part of the 2023 London Festival of Architecture.

Made in collaboration with timber specialists Xylotek, the pavilion was designed to be a community hub throughout the festival and provide a shaded area for visitors.

Craft Not Carbon has a 3.9-metre tall larch timber structure comprised of four triangular columns supporting a square-shaped roof, which measures eight metres on each side.

The roof has a grid-like structure divided into squares. Each section is filled with a woven bamboo sheet with opposite corners fixed at high and low corners, making the sheet twist.

The pavilion’s materials were chosen for their reduced carbon impact compared to other construction materials and local craftspeople made the woven bamboo canopy.

“Our idea was to use lower carbon materials and embrace social maintenance,” Webb Yates Engineers director Steve Webb told Dezeen.

The woven construction of the canopy was also chosen over more durable materials with the intention that local craftspeople would repair the structure as needed in the future, which according to Webb was a cost- and carbon-effective choice.

“Our calculation was that the cost of making the sunshade durable in aluminium was far greater than the cost of employing a full-time weaver, to not only make the panels but to fix them as they rot or get damaged by high winds,” said Webb.

“We believe this approach is more sustainable, created a pleasurable and secure job for a craftsperson and gave the whole structure a far warmer and more humanistic appearance.”

According to Webb, the shape of the structure meant a minimal amount of material was used – just 0.4 metres-cubed of larch and 0.3 metres-cubed of bamboo.

“The form of the trussing and the pringle-like shapes of the panels made the pavilion very materially efficient, so we got a lot of bang for our buck,” said Webb.

When creating the Craft Not Carbon pavilion, Studio Saar and Webb Yates Engineers were informed by the Crystal Palace building designed by architect Joseph Paxton, which was located in the park before being destroyed in a fire in 1936.

“Paxton’s design for Crystal Palace introduced new ways of thinking about construction, including prefabrication and on-site assembly, while it relied on the expert skillset of local craftsmen to create intricate glass structures,” said Studio Saar managing partner Anaya Signal.

“In a similar way, the Craft Not Carbon pavilion suggests new ways of approaching construction practices by putting craft and impermanence on the forefront of design,” she told Dezeen.

Signal hopes the pavilion will demonstrate how other structures in the UK can adopt local craft in construction.

“Responding to the theme of the 2023 London Festival of Architecture ‘In Common’, the Craft Not Carbon pavilion aims to set an example and spark the conversation in the UK on how local crafts can be revived and employed to reduce the carbon emissions of a project while contributing to the local economy,” Signal explained.

The pavilion will remain in Crystal Palace Park until 30 June, after which it will be dismantled and relocated to a different location decided by Bromley London Borough Council.

Other outdoor structures that have recently been constructed in the UK capital include another London Festival of Architecture project that involved installing playful seating throughout the Royal Docks and a glulam structure with a pleated plywood roof created for this year’s Serpentine Pavilion.

The photography is by Agnese Sanvito.

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