Hasta La Ideas

Promotion: the OMA-designed, multifunctional BLOX building on the Copenhagen harbourside aims to promote interdisciplinary thinking to help build a more sustainable future.

Home to four organisations that focus on architecture, design and creativity, BLOX welcomes more than 250,000 visitors each year, while more than 1,000 people work at the building.

With BLOXHUB, Danish Architecture Center, DDC – Danish Design Center, and Creative Denmark all located in the building, it aims to be a “cross-disciplinary ecosystem” focused on collaboration.

“We need to collaborate closer than ever and innovate across sectors, competencies and borders,” said Majken Kalhave, executive director at Creative Denmark and a member of the BLOX management team.  “Otherwise, we will not be able to translate our common agenda of sustainability into practices.”

The focus on collaboration between disciplines aligns with the calls to action made at the recent UIA World Congress of Architects, which was hosted in Copenhagen last year. At the event, BLOXHUB hosted a series of nine science talks including with the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCD) director Saleemul Huq.

By providing a space for professions across the built environment and creative industries, BLOX aims to encourage discussion and dissemination of information needed to create within an increasingly complex world.

“Both the private and public players are taking in new knowledge and getting better at exchanging it,” said Kalhave. “You cannot do it alone if you want to build spaces that cater to all of life,” she continued. “We are here to support that movement.”

Each of the organisations within the building share this aim, with BLOXHUB, focused on sustainable urbanisation, DDC – Danish Design Center aiming to create sustainable growth through design, Creative Denmark highlighting the work of creative industries in the country and Danish Architecture Center being an international destination offering tours and exhibitions.

All four organisations are currently involved in the EU-supported Desire project, which aims to transform neighbourhoods across Europe.

“It is an important project for us,” said BLOXHUB CEO Torben Klitgaard, who is part of BLOX’s management. “It exemplifies how our combined skill sets can be put to use and address several challenges at once, such as citizen involvement, climate resilience, and biodiversity prioritisation.”

Along with encouraging collaboration between disciplines, one of BLOX’s core aims is to involve the public alongside professionals in the growing discussions surrounding the future of our cities.

Through talks, exhibitions, workshops and tours, over a quarter of a million people are exposed to the professional discussions taking place within the building.

“Citizens are primary stakeholders in the building process and BLOX reflects that,” continued Klitgaard.

Earlier this year Danish Architecture Center filled its space with models that explore the history and future of the city’s buildings and landscapes. Named Copenhagen in Common, the exhibition showcased the city’s best and worst architecture.

Next year it will explore architecture’s physical and mental impact on people through its Aware exhibition, which is being created in collaboration with Danish architecture practice 3XN. This exhibition continues BLOX’s ethos of engaging visitors to make systemic change.

“If we want to rethink our systems, we must take into account what is instinctively meaningful and desirable. To achieve this, we must apply creativity to make the sustainable choice irresistible,” explained Kalhave.

Having opened in 2018, the BLOX building contains a co-working space and apartments, as well as four sustainability-focused organisations. It was designed by Dutch studio OMA as a “mini-city”, with a series of stacked green-glazed blocks arranged around a road that runs through the site.

Find out more about BLOX on its website.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen for BLOX as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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Construction is something that we probably cannot do without as we continue to build houses, buildings, and other structures. The quest for coming up with sustainable construction is ongoing as we look for materials that are eco-friendly and the process in creating them to be as sustainable as possible. There are a lot of waste in our world that can actually be used for other purposes instead of just becoming biomass as they are mostly used now. A breakthrough in terms of interior wall cladding is now available and it comes from the most unlikeliest of sources: corn cobs.

Designer: StoneCycling and Studio Nina van Bart

CornWall is an alternative to interior wall cladding that uses organic corn cobs, subjecting them to up to 150 degrees Celsius so as to activate and create “strong bonds”. Aside from using sustainable materials, the heating process is also eco-friendly as it uses sustainable energy. The electric heating process uses the solar panels on their factory’s roof. So from the materials to the process itself, we are seeing something that will lessen or leave no carbon footprints at all.

Mostly corn cobs are left on the fields or fermented or burned as biomass. But with this process, they are able to turn them into wall cladding. It is better than the usual ceramic wall cladding that is used or even composite materials like high pressure laminate (HPL). Another advantage to this is that it is able to store more carbon dioxide because of the absorbed CO2 already in it. It is also 100% reusable as it can be removed from interiors through the demountable anchoring system.

Based on the product photos, it doesn’t look much different from the usual wall cladding. It actually looks like those cork coasters that we’re seeing now. It comes in different colors loke DarkBlue, MustardYellow, TerracottaPink, etc. Hopefully we see even more construction materials that use sustainable materials and processes so we can have an industry that is more eco-friendly.

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Local studio Oliver Leech Architects has extended a Victorian terrace house in south London, introducing a four-metre-wide skylight at its centre that offers views of a wildflower meadow roof.

Located in the Poet’s Corner conservation area of Herne Hill, the studio was tasked with retaining the late 19th-century building’s character while opening up its “disconnected and dark” interiors.

Prioritising natural light, Oliver Leech Architects expanded the ground floor with an open living, dining and kitchen space, which meets the existing building with a large skylight and a window seat overlooking a small courtyard.

“Natural light is the most important theme and design tool that we think about when designing our houses as a studio,” founder Oliver Leech told Dezeen.

“Here we used the light to draw you into the house through the darker hallway and towards a huge fixed skylight in the centre of the house.”

“We saw this central skylight as the central anchor to the new house, surrounded by all the key spaces,” he added.

While the layout of the home’s front rooms remains largely the same, they now open into the large new living area, creating an axis through to a concrete and brick patio garden accessed through full-height, sliding glass doors.

The extension itself has been sunken down by 40 centimetres to provide additional ceiling height, with the level change traversed via a set of oak steps beneath the central skylight.

This skylight slopes forward to provide a view of the wildflowers planted on the extension’s roof, framed by the lime-washed ceiling that curves around the edges of the window reveal.

In the extension, a second skylight provides additional natural light for the dining table and kitchen, where deep green kitchen counters are finished with veined marble tops.

“This [skylight] has been designed to introduce a slice of sunlight into the dining and kitchen spaces and offers completely different lighting conditions throughout the day,” Leech said.

“It is important to connect the house to nature and this is a small way to do this.”

A long window bench alongside the dining table provides a space to sit overlooking a stepped brick flower bed, leading from the sunken concrete patio to a paved brick seating area at the end of the garden.

On the first floor, two smaller bedrooms have been replaced with a larger en-suite room, alongside a guest bedroom and additional bathroom, and two children’s bedrooms occupy the second floor.

Throughout, a largely muted colour palette of white punctuated by deep greens and blues was adopted to provide a “calm backdrop” to the client’s possessions and artworks.

Oliver Leech Architects was founded in 2016. Previous projects by the London studio include an accessible home in Surrey designed to be a “new model for assisted living” and a weathered-stone clad house in the Cotswolds.

The photography is by Jim Stephenson.

Project credits:

Client: Nick and Rebecca Croome
Architect: Oliver Leech Architects
Interior design: Oliver Leech Architects
Structural engineer: Croft Structural Engineers
Main contractor: Sutton Construction
Planning consultant: Jacquie Andrews
Stylist: plainHjem studio
Lighting: Astro Lighting
Kitchen: Hush Kitchens
Concrete flooring: Steysons
Aluminium glazing: Maxlight
Timber glazing: Bois Rois
Joinery: Weymont & Wylie
Tiles: Domus, Habibi, Marrakech Design
Timber flooring: Reevewood
Bricks: Weinerberger

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London’s Design Museum has named Attua Aparicio the winner of the 2024 Ralph Saltzman Prize for emerging designers. Here, the Spanish designer shares five projects that illustrate her material-led process.

After moving to London in 2009 to study design at the Royal College of Art, Aparicio originally explored the possibilities of applying craft techniques to industrial materials, such as plastic and steel, as one-half of design practice Silo Studio together with Oscar Lessing.

But since the duo parted ways in 2021, her solo projects have focused instead on pushing “primitive” materials to new limits, whether turning clay into load-bearing shelves or using waste borosilicate glass to create self-glazing ceramics.

“One thing I wasn’t fully comfortable with in Silo’s work was I wanted to avoid working with plastics and materials that could make the environment worse,” Aparicio told Dezeen. “So I looked at different materials but the one that I settled on was ceramics.”

“I never thought I was going to work with one material for so long,” she added. “But it has so much room.”

Aparicio was nominated for the third annual Ralph Saltzman Prize by Italian designer Martino Gamper and will receive a £5,000 bursary to further her work and the chance to exhibit it in a display at the Design Museum from 1 February until 15 April 2024.

“Attua Aparicio’s exploration of different materials’ properties and manufacturing techniques results in fascinating objects that push our understanding of form and its use to convey emotion and form attachments,” said the Design Museum’s chief curator Johanna Agerman Ross, who chaired this year’s judging panel.

“While her interest in using waste glass and questioning the notion of waste points to a preoccupation with sustainable practices, her research points to a reinvention of a sustainable aesthetic.”

The Ralph Saltzman Prize was founded in 2022 by the Design Museum and the Saltzman Family Foundation to spotlight young design talent and honour the legacy of Ralph Saltzman, the late co-founder and president of materials company Designtex.

Read on for five key projects to know from this year’s winner.

Expressive proverbs, 2019

This collection of 100 decorative plates, born during a residency in China’s porcelain capital of Jingdezhen, was one of Aparicio’s first experiments in fusing ceramics and glass.

This combination has historically proved elusive to ceramicists, as glass has a lower melting temperature than clay, causing it to run off like water and accumulate at the bottom of the kiln.

Aparicio solved this conundrum by using borosilicate glass – a relatively novel kind of glass that is used to form laboratory equipment and solar panels because it has a higher melting temperature – allowing Aparicio to turn it into glazes and incorporate it into the clay itself, creating self-glazing ceramics.

Most importantly, borosilicate glass is also a plentiful waste material, as its chemical composition does not allow it to be recycled in the traditional glass recycling stream and stringent purity standards prevent it from being reused in its original setting.

“If you need a glass eye to be very clean because you have to wear it your whole life, it’s fine to use a raw material for that,” she said.

“But for other uses, maybe this kind of obsession with purity is not so important. Even if the borosilicate waste cannot be used for solar panels, maybe these solar panels can be then used again to make glazes for ceramics.”

Solaris de Esgueva, 2022

This shelf is the first furniture piece Aparicio created using her signature hand-building technique – a riff on a conventional coil build, which she calls digit texture.

Instead of seamlessly blending the edges of the stacked clay coils, which form the base of her pieces, she uses her thumb to press the two layers together, creating a kind of scalloped edge.

“I set a simple rule for myself,” Aparicio explained. “I only allow myself to go forward, so once I put the finger down I just move onto the next one and I can never go back and correct the shape.”

“Letting the shape develop as I build without having full control makes the outcome much more improvisational and organic.”

To form the totemic shelving unit, the ceramic sections are stacked on top of ashwood planks decorated with hand-drawn illustrations by Aparicio’s sister Saelia Aparicio, rendered in the same deep blue as the “rudimentary” borosilicate glass and cobalt oxide glaze.

Jardinière, 2022

Aparicio was among 13 designers, including Martino Gamper, Max Lamb and Bethan Laura Wood, who reimagined a traditional plant pot as part of the group show No Ordinary Home at the 2022 London Design Festival.

Her towering Jardinière planter uses the same digit texture technique as the aforementioned shelving unit but is formed from layers of differently coloured clay, leading the ceramic to resemble a sedimentary rock.

“Normally in ceramics, the most standard way of working is you first make the form and then you apply colour later with a glaze,” Aparicio explained. “But I like to be able to introduce colour while I build the piece.”

“I think of it like weaving because you can add colours as you make,” she continued.

Unlike many ceramicists who work with intricate textures and glazes, Aparicio says she only ever fires her pieces once in a bid to limit the amount of emissions produced by the energy-intensive process.

Sprout, 2022

The Sprout bench is another experiment in creating large-scale, load-bearing furniture pieces out of clay. This is made possible with the help of a metal core, which is anchored around the ashwood seat.

“The limit with ceramics, in my case, is the size of the kiln,” Aparicio said. “So I was looking at ways of making things bigger by making them in parts.”

“I think of it like a spinal cord,” she explained of her system. “So the ceramics are the bones and the wood is like the cartilage in between.”

The only ornamentation is provided by the chickpea-sized pieces of borosilicate glass, which melted all over the clay in the firing process, as well as the psychedelic pastel-blue wood dye used on the ash.

“I drew it on just to enhance the graining,” she explained. “It’s like makeup for wood.”

A♡J neon lights, 2023

During last year’s Alcova show at Milan design week, Aparicio showcased a series of lights made in collaboration with her boyfriend, glass maker Jochen Holz.

The pieces incorporate both virgin borosilicate glass – used to form the neon tube lights – and waste offcuts of the same material, which were used to form the glaze.

“The neon lights Jochen makes are so magical,” Aparicio said. “They glow but you don’t know where the light is coming from.”

“The way they work is: there’s an electrode at either end and the neon gas is conductive,” she added. “And when the electricity goes from one end to the other, the gas gets excited and glows.”

“The electrodes are my least favourite thing about the neon lights, so I wanted to hide them using the ceramic. The tubes are so light and they seem so fragile, so I liked the thought of having something that holds them and also hides all these electronics.”

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The world’s first full-scale timber wind turbine has started turning in Sweden, with a tower built by wood technology company Modvion.

The 105-metre-tall tower, located in the region of Skara, is Modvion‘s first commercial wind turbine tower, and follows on from a smaller 30-metre-high demonstration project the company completed in 2020.

While its rotor blades and generator hub are made of conventional materials, the tower is made of laminated veneer lumber (LVL), a type of engineered wood made of thin veneer strips glued together and often used for beams and load-bearing building structures.

The company says that this type of wood is not only strong enough to withstand the forces of a turning turbine, it is much more environmentally sustainable to build with than the currently used steel.

While wind power plays an important role in providing the world with green renewable energy, there are still ample carbon emissions created during their construction — in part because of the steel towers.

Modvion describes its wood towers as reducing the carbon emissions from wind turbine construction by over 100 per cent, due to the combination of a less emissions-heavy production process and the carbon storage provided by trees.

“Our towers, just in the production of them, they emit 90 per cent less than a steel tower that will do carry the same work,” Modvion chief financial officer Maria-Lina Hedlund told Dezeen. “And then if you add the carbon sequestration, then you actually end up with a minus — so a carbon sink. This is great if we want to reach net zero energy production, and we need to.”

Hedlund, who is also an engineer, describes LVL as having a construction “similar to carbon fibre”, with strips of veneer just three millimetres thick sandwiched and glued together, giving it a high strength-to-weight ratio.

This lightness is a benefit, reducing the amount of material needed overall. With a heavy material, there is a “bad design spiral”, says Hedlund, as the weight of the tower itself adds to the load that it needs to carry.

And while some LVL has all their veneer strips facing in the same direction, Modvion uses its “own recipe” specifying the directions of the fibres, improving the material’s performance even more.

The production process involves timber boards being made to order in a standard LVL plant and then delivered to Modvion’s factory. There, they are glued together into larger modules and bent into a rounded form in a step called lamination, and then very precisely machined to fine-tune the shape.

“In the wood industry, you usually see centimetre tolerances, while we are in the sub-millimetre scale,” said Hedlund.

The modular nature of LVL construction addresses another problem Modvion has observed with steel: that with turbines getting ever bigger to give more power, it’s becoming impossible to transport steel towers to site.

They are built as essentially large cylinders and transported by truck, but the base diameter desired for the tallest towers is getting to be taller than some bridges and roads can allow.

“We’re now reaching a point where they will not get through anymore,” said Hedlund. “So we will see a transition in the wind power industry to modular construction, because this is the way to get them there. And one of the big advantages of building in the material we do is that it’s naturally built modular.”

While steel could also be built modular, it would require bolts rather than glue to join it together on site, which Hedlund says is a disadvantage.

“Bolts are not very nice when you have so much dynamic loading, because it will loosen over time,” she said. “So first of all, you have to have to put them in place which is a lot of work, and then you have to also service them over the lifetime.”

The Skara turbine has a capacity of two megawatts, which represents the maximum power output the turbine can achieve under ideal conditions. This is a bit lower than the average capacity for new turbines built in Europe.

On the outside, the tower has a thick white coating that makes it look similar to steel, and it’s rotor blades and generator hub, which are not supplied by Modvion, are made of conventional materials like fibreglass. This may change in the future, however, with another company, Voodin Blades, working on the technology for wooden blades.

Modvion was founded in 2016 by university peers David Olivegren and Otto Lundman. While its current focus is wind turbines, it is dedicated to wooden technology more broadly, and Hedlund told Dezeen that the team believes it has “the world’s strongest joint for timber construction”, which could also be put to other uses.

Another recent milestone for wind power came in the form of a wind-powered cargo ship, which had been retrofitted with two 37.5-metre-tall sails.

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