Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Showroom: the Dreams tile collection from Spanish brand Decocer has rounded edges and pastel colours that intend to create interiors with a “cloud-like softness”.

The Dreams collection has a scooped shape that references modernist fish-scale tiles as well as the overlapping feathers of birds.

The tiles come in a range of gentle hues — Sugar, Cream, Cloud, Almost, Mint and Aquamarine — that can be mix and matched to create unique compositions.

“Rooms featuring highly practical ceramics can also be enlivened with shapes, textures, colours and lines that create unexpected effects,” said Decocer export manager Verónica Obrero. “The options for decorating with Dreams are almost endless.”

The Dreams tiles have an organic-looking, lightly speckled surface and measure 7.5 by 20 centimetres.

Decocer is part of Tile of Spain, an association of over 100 tile manufacturers.

Product: Dreams
Brand: Decocer
Contact: comercial@decocer.com

Dezeen Showroom

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.

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Dezeen Showroom: the delicate lattices of crystallised rock salt are the reference for Italian tile brand Casalgrande Padana‘s Supreme collection, which can be used across walls and floors.

Casalgrande Padana describes the Supreme collection as “a fascinating journey to the centre of the earth to discover the colours and tactile features of rock crystal”, which include delicate transparencies that augment the veining.

The stone-effect porcelain tiles are available in four colours, including grey, dark, sand and taupe, each of which recalls a rock salt from somewhere around the world.

The light-coloured sand evokes fleur de sel from the Portuguese Algarve, while the grey is similar to salt from Brittany and the dark echoes the appearance of South Asian near-black kala namak.

The Supreme collection is available in a wide range of formats and finishes, including a slab tile of 120 by 278 centimetres, and can be used across walls and floors for a continuous look.

It is suitable for use both in and outdoors, and across residential, public or commercial settings. Casalgrande Padana also suggests it for luxury yachts.

Product: Supreme
Brand: Casalgrande Padana
Contact: info@casalgrandepadana.it

Dezeen Showroom

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.

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Decorative brick-clad buildings fold around courtyards at Aga Khan Academy Dhaka, a boarding school in Bangladesh designed by British practice Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios.

Located in the capital Dhaka, the academy was created for the Muslim spiritual leader Aga Khan by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios with local studio Shatotto Architecture.

Aga Khan Academy Dhaka comprises a series of four-storey volumes that are clad in brick and nestle within a highly-developed urban site bordered by a large motorway.

They are arranged around green outdoor spaces intended to offer relief from these built-up surroundings while creating external areas for both play and education.

“The rate of development around the site has been intensive and fast,” studio partner Ian Taylor told Dezeen.

“The incorporation of extensive planting – including roof terrace landscaping – improves microclimate and air quality, and creates friendly outdoor learning areas, and social settings in the centre of what is otherwise a very harsh built-up city centre location,” he continued.

The school is the latest addition to a series of four academies owned by Aga Khan. It is intended to address local cultural values while meeting the needs of the global educational network.

Its focal point is a central tree-lined field, known as a Maidan. Informed by traditional Bangladeshi university design, this will be used for spiritual and recreational activities.

“The central Maidan, following historical Bangladesh precedents in university design, creates a green lung in the city fabric, and distributes the school buildings to provide access to good ventilation from the prevailing wind directions throughout the year,” explained Taylor.

Alongside the main field, the complex comprises a series of smaller courtyards that are connected by concrete canopies for shelter and feature brick benches and planters.

One of these courtyards features an amphitheatre-like arrangement of steps punctuated by short brick walls where larger gatherings of students can take place.

The courtyards are bordered by the series of four-storey brick-clad buildings that house classrooms for 1,200 students along with residential and administrative spaces.

According to Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, brick was used for the school buildings in order to reinvigorate “local craft skills” while creating a “strong contrast to the predominant use of render and concrete in the new surrounding buildings”.

Across the facades of each building, differently shaped perforations have been introduced in the brickwork to showcase traditional local techniques.

In other places, recessed windows, screens and protruding brickwork columns provide shading to the classrooms and make space for covered balconies and walkways.

Inside, the white-walled classrooms vary in size and accommodate facilities for nursery, primary and secondary school-aged pupils. An additional building containing administrative offices, meeting rooms, computer rooms and a library is located in one corner of the complex.

Working with engineering studio Max Fordham, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios arranged the classrooms to be passively heated and shaded throughout the year and minimise energy consumption.

“The classrooms are orientated to minimise solar gain in summer, with external walkways and adjacent buildings set out to provide passive solar shading from the morning sun throughout the year, whilst also providing good daylight and views out,” said Max Fordham director Iain Shaw.

Other schools featured on Dezeen include a school in China spread across brightly coloured blocks and a brick music school topped with a roof made from coconut wood.

Elsewhere in Bangladesh, Sthapotik recently completed a mausoleum with a “chandelier” of skylights and brick turrets.

The photography is by Asif Salman.

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Dezeen and Bentley’s Future Luxury Retail Design Competition closes for entries at midnight on Friday. Enter before the deadline for the chance to win up to £15,000.

The competition, which is free to enter for anyone over the age of 18 in any country around the world, invites architects and designers to define the future of luxury retail.

Contestants are to propose innovative ideas for both digital and physical luxury retail experiences in 2030 and beyond, in and out of the automotive world.

Full details of how to enter the contest are included in the competition brief and rules.

Entrants are free to design any retail experience in the world of contemporary luxury lifestyle, whether it be real-world, digital, or a combination of both.

Designs must refer to Bentley‘s rich heritage of expert craftsmanship and technological innovation. Judges will be looking for ideas that provide a bespoke and personalised experience for customers.

£30,000 prize money up for grabs

Competition entries will be judged by a jury comprising architects, designers and experts who specialise in retail, along with a Dezeen editor and representative at Bentley, who will select the finalists and determine the overall winner.

A shortlist will be published on Dezeen in August 2023, with the finalists and winners revealed later in the month.

The winner will receive a top prize of £15,000, while the runner-up will receive £10,000 and the third-placed entrant will receive £5,000.

How to enter

Entrants must produce visualisations depicting their concepts, along with supporting text to describe their idea explaining how it meets the brief.

For more information about how to enter, including how to enter, visit www.dezeen.com/bentley-future-luxury-retail-design-competition.

Partnership content

The Future Luxury Retail Design Competition is a partnership between Dezeen and Bentley. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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Mega-projects such as The Line should be avoided in favour of improving urban design within existing cities, Gehl Architects CEO Helle Søholt says in this interview.

Speaking to Dezeen ahead of the UIA World Congress of Architects conference, Danish urban planning and design expert Søholt argued that it is more important for cities to focus on existing infrastructure.

“In general, I think the era of the mega-cities should be over,” she said of The Line, a 170-kilometre linear city being constructed in the Saudi Arabian desert.

“I think we need a much more granular approach to urban development globally where we build on existing urban infrastructure, because there are definitely opportunities to get more out of the resource investments that we’ve done in previous generations,” she added.

“So from a sustainability point of view, and from a social sustainability point of view, I think we need to better utilise the infrastructure investments that we’ve already made before engaging in these new mega-projects.”

The Line is part of the wider Neom development, which also includes an octagonal port city masterplanned by fellow Copenhagen architecture studio BIG, and is among a number of new cities being planned around the globe.

There has been an “acceptance of the ideas” about social sustainability

Søholt is one of the session chairs at the UIA World Congress of Architects conference, which is taking place in Copenhagen this week as part of its UNESCO World Capital of Architecture 2023 title.

She co-founded Gehl Architects in 2000 along with the veteran urban designer Jan Gehl, whose philosophy of prioritising pedestrians, cyclists and public space in cities based on research about human behaviour has been hugely influential in the Danish capital.

The city is now frequently ranked among the world’s most liveable.

Having studied in his urban design department at Copenhagen’s School of Architecture during the 1990s, Søholt was invited by Jan Gehl to help set up his studio when she was just 28.

“At that age, I didn’t have any leadership experience, but when you build a practice you basically build the plane while flying it, and sort of build competencies of the practice at the same time as you’re developing your own leadership skills,” she recalled.

Gehl Architects was established to implement the ideas that Gehl had been advocating for decades.

Around the turn of the millennium, the concept of human-centric urban design was far from the mainstream and in its early years the practice mostly campaigned on “changing the planning paradigm” away from prioritising transport networks, Søholt explained.

“Back then there was not the same focus on sustainability, there was not the same focus on social sustainability and social aspects, making surveys about what people do and like and what they need in urban developments,” she said.

More recently – particularly since the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the value of green public spaces and healthy communities – many cities around the world have started to embrace the approach.

“To a large extent there has been an acceptance of the ideas, but now we need to go deeper,” said Søholt.

While she says it is “absolutely amazing” that the arguments Gehl Architects has been making for two decades have gained so much momentum, she warns that more action is still needed.

“There is still a risk that we go back to our old ways of modus operandi because the policies haven’t necessarily changed and the processes in cities haven’t necessarily caught up, so we have a long way to go on that front,” she argued.

“This is not about control”

Politics are increasingly a major challenge, with initiatives to increase walking and cycling options and reduce car usage often highly divisive.

Earlier this year conspiracy theories emerged around the 15-minute city concept, with a UK politician claiming in parliament that the idea seeks to “take away personal freedoms”.

“A larger and larger and more vocal part of our societies are against ‘systems’,” reflected Søholt. “Whatever system it is, they’re just against it. So they resent plans, they resent policy, they resent anything that is seen as control.”

Søholt argues that rather than limiting people’s freedom, adding more transport alternatives opens it up.

“I have never felt as limited in my personal freedom as when I lived in the US and I could only get around by car,” she said.

“In Copenhagen where I live now, I can choose whatever mode of transportation that is most useful for my trip – I can walk, I can bike, I can take the metro, I can take my car, I can take a train. This is not about control and limiting people, it’s about opening up.”

To navigate these challenges, Gehl Architects uses a combination of data about people’s behaviours and close engagement with communities to deliver its projects.

“We have to bridge the development of policies and systems with the basic daily needs of people,” Søholt explained. “That’s why I’m so focused on deep listening, understanding people’s needs, engaging people and using data to support our decision-making.”

“We try to build upon people’s real needs and needs that people have been advocating for themselves. Because in that sense, there is a greater chance that they will keep advocating for it.”

This focus on democracy and engagement dovetails with the promise at the heart of this year’s UIA congress, which is “leave no-one behind”.

“That whole more holistic approach to urban development that Copenhagen to a large extent has been successful with is definitely an overarching driver for a lot of the content,” remarked Søholt.

Although Søholt admits that promoting cycling and walking was initially more about the social benefits than sustainability for Gehl Architects, the concept has become a major plank of many cities’ climate strategies.

“We need cities like Copenhagen to keep innovating”

Now she believes that Copenhagen has an opportunity and an obligation to be a world leader in the push for reducing consumption and waste in cities.

“If we are to keep being the leader within urban development we definitely need to go further into some of these topics,” she said.

“Copenhagen has proven that it is possible to change lifestyles; we didn’t have 50 per cent of the population cycling, and now we do. But in order to take it to the next level we need more of these lifestyle changes.”

For example, it must attempt to leverage its status as one of the world’s most successful cities by pushing harder on the transition to a circular economy, she argued.

“I think there’s definitely a risk that Copenhagen will now rest on its laurels and fall back – just celebrate all the good that has happened and fall behind,” she said.

“We need cities like Copenhagen to really keep innovating,” she added. “So the whole circular economy – like how can we have material banks in a city, how can we have resource hubs where people can manage waste in new ways – that’s a huge topic that I don’t think the city of Copenhagen has yet completely solved.”

The City of Copenhagen is introducing 750 new waste sorting stations by 2024, but Søholt believes that monitoring how people use them will be more important than physical infrastructure itself in the move towards circularity.

She refers to this concept as “enabled emissions” – which goes a step further than the embodied emissions within buildings and manufactured goods.

“The city is like a rail track on which our behaviour runs,” she said. “If we change the rail track, we can also impact people’s behaviour and lifestyle choices on an everyday basis.”

“We need to not only think about the emissions that are built into built environments, we also need to include the enabled emissions based on what people do.”

The portrait is courtesy of Gehl Architects.

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