Danish architecture studio BIG has released images of the exteriors of two stone-clad skyscrapers by New York’s High Line as they near completion.

The One High Line development consists of two condominium towers, described by BIG founder Bjarke Ingels as “good neighbours”, which will enclose a central, public courtyard with retail spaces at the base.

The towers, which are located between the Hudson River to the west and the High Line to the east, measure approximately 300 feet (91 metres) and 400 feet (122 metres), with the larger of the two facing the water.

The West Tower contains 149 condominium residences over 36 floors, while the East Tower contains 87 over 26 floors. Residents of both towers will share an amenity space on the third floor, which is enclosed in a double-height bridge passageway that connects the building’s bases.

BIG gradually offset the floor plate of each tower to form stepped spirals that extend upwards from the development’s courtyard.

“The whole philosophy is that from this point of departure, the two towers tried to be good neighbours to each other,” Ingels told Dezeen. “It requires certain adjustments of proportions, those proportions trickled down and end up creating all these moments.”

“The incline of the [West Tower’s] facade is inheriting from the response of the [East Tower] and it resolves itself when the bridge merges,” Ingels said.

“So it’s almost like from a very simple beginning, you make two strong choices and those choices end up shaping the entire architecture,” he added.

“You actually end up having some of the complexity you sometimes find in historical buildings and neighbourhoods that add charm and surprise happening as a result of these interactions.”

The building’s forms were also designed to twist out of the way of one another, so that they don’t block the surrounding views of the Hudson River, the High Line and the surrounding neighbourhood.

Additionally, the architectural language of the Chelsea neighbourhood informed the design.

“We thought in a way inspired by the Chelsea buildings where you have the warehouses where you articulate the columns and the slabs,” said Ingels. “So you get these very large framed windows.”

The buildings are clad in a light travertine stone and have interiors, which have not yet been unveiled, by Gilles & Boissier and Gabellini Sheppard.

As for the retail spaces surrounding the courtyard, Ingels told Dezeen that a holistic treatment centre in collaboration with Deepak Chopra is in discussion.

Other amenities will include a 75-foot lap pool, fitness studio, golf simulator, and billiards and game room.

As of November 2023, Dezeen was told the building’s exterior and the “majority of the interior” is complete, with residents now living at the towers. The courtyard is set to be completed in early 2024.

When asked how he felt about BIG’s One High Line joining a line-up of residences along the High Line that includes work by Thomas Heatherwick and other major architects, Ingels told Dezeen: “I think it’s coming together quite nicely. The kind of ensemble.”

Upon the release of the building’s design renderings in 2018, the development was called The XI but was eventually rebranded to One High Line, with Witkoff & Access Industries as developers.

According to the BIG team, it is the last major plot in the Meatpacking District to be developed.

North of One High Line, BIG recently completed its first supertall skyscraper and first commercial high-rise in New York City, called The Spiral.

The photography is by Evan Joseph.

The post BIG releases photos of twisting One High Line skyscrapers in New York appeared first on Dezeen.

Chinese car manufacturer Nio has launched Blue Sky Lab, its own sustainable fashion brand, which has been shortlisted for a 2023 Dezeen Award.

Blue Sky Lab creates garments and accessories using materials left over from the car manufacturing process including seat belts, airbags and other car-grade fabrics to demonstrate how waste can be “creatively repurposed”.

Nio claims the label is “the world’s first sustainable fashion brand launched by an automotive company and brought to mass production”.

Blue Sky Lab made its debut in 2021 at the Shanghai Auto Show and has since reused nearly 55,000 metres of waste fabric.

These car-grade surplus materials can help to create new high-performance products, according to the brand.

“Blue Sky Lab enjoys an innate advantage by adopting auto-grade materials in its fashion products as these materials outperform their consumer-grade counterparts to a large extent,” the brand said.

“We think more about improving our products rather than blindly catering to the external environment. For example, the recycled materials from the airbags are light and durable with high strength, a perfect fit for lightweight fashion items.”

The materials are simply sterilised and repurposed into a variety of products in line with the brand’s minimal futuristic aesthetic.

“Regarding environmental protection, most visual communication tends to adopt nature and green elements,” the company said.

“However, rather than being confined by such a monotonous style, we have chosen to find inspirations from our DNA and business areas including innovative technologies, manufacturing and industrialization, and lifestyle in carrying out product design.”

“Blue Sky Lab has joined with global design talent including Nio’s designers, Japanese architect Shuhei Aoyama, French leather goods designer Vincent du SARTEL, Finnish designer Rolf Ekroth, NIO user designers and designers from Parsons School of Design, Li-Ning and Allbirds,” the brand added.

The brand told Dezeen it has mass-produced over a hundred different fashion items since its inception alongside tables, stools and lighting fixtures.

The brand also partnered with an independent product testing and certification agency to calculate the carbon footprint of its bestselling products.

“Compared with their counterparts made of traditional raw materials, their footprint per unit is 18 to 58 per cent less,” the brand said.

Blue Sky Lab has been shortlisted in the sustainable consumer design category of this year’s Dezeen Awards.

Here, the brand is competing against the world’s “first refillable” edge styler and soap-in-a-can brand Kankan.

The post Carmaker Nio unveils fashion made using waste from its own production appeared first on Dezeen.

Camping doesn’t appeal to me at all but there are a lot of people out there who would like to spend a night in the great outdoors one way or another. Tents and camping equipment have improved so much over the years and now it’s not just about pitching a simple tent on the grounds, although some still like to do that if they want to go rough and rustic. But if you prefer something a little more “sophisticated”, there are now a lot of options out there.

Designer: Life Cube

One such camping tool is the Life Cube tent, particularly the LC-8 model that will appeal to recreational campers. The previous version of this inflatable tent was ideal for disaster relief and military operations, the company decided to create a smaller and more portable version that can be used by campers and other occasional outdoor enthusiasts. And it can be used on the ground, on top of a truck, and even on the water. They also say it can fit up to 6 people although just from looking at the photos, it might be a little cramped.

If uninflated, all the parts and components of the LC-8 tent can fit into two carry bags that can fit into a car trunk, weighting just around 45kg. You would need around 10 minutes to set it up and inflate it if you’re using a 12-V inflator. Fully inflated, it’s around 8 x 7 feet with a 6.5 foot high roof. You can strap the body into the base and either pitch it on the ground, set it up on a truck bed, or use it as a floating base camp on a lake as long as you tie it to a dock or a tree. Around 2 (probably strong) people can carry it around once inflated.

The Life Cube LC-8 is a but more expensive than the usual tents as it is priced around $2,750. But if you’re often in need of a portable tent anyway, you’ll get your return of investment quickly. And since it’s also derived from the heavy-duty military-grade design of the original LC-12, then you know it should probably last for a long time.

The post Inflatable tent can be pitched on the ground, water, and trucks first appeared on Yanko Design.

Dezeen Showroom: designer Patricia Urquiola has updated her Lowland sofa for Italian brand Moroso, giving it an overall softer composition as well as a new name – Loveland.

The Loveland three-seater sofa adapts the previous design – which was created in 2000 – with lower-positioned armrests and a more rounded backrest shape, which gives the seating a gentler, more pebble-like appearance.

The modernist steel base is also superseded with warm and contemporary wood, arranged at sculptural angles.

“The new design choices enhance the architectural qualities of the series while maintaining the sophisticated rationalist mood of this sofa, as a stand-alone piece or in a composition,” said Moroso.

The brand sees the evolution of Lowland into Loveland as an example of “a different approach to sustainability”, where instead of spending resources to develop a whole new product, an admired classic is instead tweaked to make an evergreen piece.

Available with or without armrests, the Loveland sofa comes upholstered in fabric or leather, and with a choice of Honey, Tropical Wood or Coffee finishes for the wood base.

Product: Loveland
Designer: Patricia Urquiola
Brand: Moroso
Contact: info@moroso.it

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The post Loveland sofa by Patricia Urquiola for Moroso appeared first on Dezeen.

A comprehensive look at the beloved Japanese artist’s work

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Culture

Yoshitomo Nara’s Time-Traveling Solo Exhibition at the Aomori Museum of Art, “The Beginning Place”

A comprehensive look at the beloved Japanese artist’s work

Julie Wolfson

22 November 2023

Aomori, Japan’s Aomori Museum of Art celebrates the work of local artists, with an enthusiastic focus on their hometown hero, Yoshitomo Nara. Now ten years after his first solo exhibit at the museum, Nara’s The Beginning Place exhibition has opened with much excitement for the world-renowned artist (born nearby in Hirosaki). 

The Aomori Museum of Art opened in 2006 and was designed by the architect Jun Aoki, who was inspired by one of the largest and most well-preserved villages from Japan’s Jomon Period, the Sannai-Maruyama archaeological site. While the museums’ celebration of Nara’s work is ongoing, The Beginning Place marks a new chapter in this story with a comprehensive look at his work since the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, alongside earlier pieces, weaving the past and the present into a layered tapestry of themes from time and space to house and home. The exhibition fills several indoor galleries and extends to the exteriors of the museum.

Exhibition curator Shigemi Takahashi explains how the theme of fresh starts is depicted. “The idea of beginning is so important in artistic expression,” says Takahashi. “An artist, who works over many years, needs to keep coming up with ideas and making them work. The Great East Japan Earthquake on 11 March 2011 was an extremely significant event for the artist, forcing him to rethink his sense of values and his attitude toward creation. The artist then began to look back to past times and landscapes in order to find the roots that support his own creation.”

In a region of Japan that sees the changing of the seasons, “Nara’s Aomori-Ken” dog looms over viewers as a much beloved symbol of the museum and the region. Visitors flock to see this massive sculpture under blue skies, rainy days and topped with mounds of snow in the winter. “The snowy Aomori region where Nara was born and spent his childhood plays a very important role in this process,” says Takahashi. “The Beginning Place refers to the specific place of his hometown, where his sensibility was nurtured. And secondly, in a broader sense, it refers to the place where something is born. We hope that the exhibition itself will be a place where something new and hopeful is born for visitors.”

With the many themes explored, Nara’s prolific output is on full display. “His early works made extensive use of collage, literally attempting to create layers,” Takahashi says. “The visual impact of the collages are indeed modest, and if you don’t look carefully, you won’t even notice that they are layered. However inconspicuous, the fact that something invisible is enclosed in the lower layers is important to the artist.” 

Some of Nara’s most recent large scale portraits of girls reveal a colorful mosaic style. In March 2020 at LA County Museum of Art (LACMA), after just a few days of planning and installation, Nara returned to Japan and the realization set in that the delay was indefinite and the future murky. Nara began to paint a portrait he named “Study,” referring to a signal of something that is about to begin. In this large scale portrait, he depicts a girl’s face that is not clearly defined, emerging almost from within a fog, reflecting the uncertainty and unpredictability of his experience. He achieved this effect by pressing the surface of the paint with more hesitation than definitive lines. Nara added “Study” to the LACMA exhibit when it finally opened in the spring of 2021.

For the most recent painting in The Beginning Place, Takahashi explains some insights into Nara’s evolving painting techniques. “Recently in the process of creating his paintings, he often arranges the canvas in a mosaic of different colored flecks, from which the forms emerge,” she says. “Underneath a simple figure, such as a bust of a girl, there are many layers of colors, and these layers have tended to become more multiplexing as time passes. The time he has lived seems to be woven into the increasingly thick layers.” In the emotional “Midnight Tears,” a girl emerges from the dark background. Her hair, face and clothing are flecked with layers of color. A tear wells up in her eye and appears to be about to roll down her cheek. 

A new large sculpture entitled “Peace Head” (2021) is also included in the exhibition. “It is a three-dimensional work of a huge head made of aluminum and painted with white urethane,” says Takahashi. “The prototype is a small clay sculpture the size of a fist. The clay is kneaded in the palm of the hand, as children play with clay, and parts such as the eyes and nose are carved in with chopstick-like wooden sticks. With this work, the artist says he tried to be as mindless as possible. It can be said that the artist is interested in the resonance of the forms that emerge when everything that is unnecessary is stripped away.”

The Beginning Places includes a recreation of Jail House 33, a significant place in Nara’s early years. The coffee shop, which became known as Thirty-Three, opened in 1977 and was a community gathering place to drink coffee and listen to rock music. Nara, who was then in high school, had met the musician Masaki and helped him transform a garage by hand-building the rustic space. Nara frequented the cafe after school and worked as a dishwasher and spun records in the DJ booth. Though the Thirty-Three closed in the mid-’80s it has been recreated in the museum with the help of available documents, images and by speaking to people who had been there. Nara’s love of music has been a recurring theme throughout his career.

For an artist known for painting on found pieces of wood, corrugated cardboard and envelopes, even the special tickets created for The Beginning Place offer an opportunity to have whimsical keepsakes made on scraps of apple wood boxes. On it a young girl with her eyes closed is under a sign that has the word tomorrow crossed out and says, ”tomorrow’s far away.” This quote could be a thesis for this time traveling experience with Nara’s life and work.

Yoshitomo Nara: A Beginning Place is on view until 25 February 2024.