Hasta La Ideas

Design strategy collective Urban-Think Tank has designed and built a prototypical house as part of an initiative to improve housing conditions for slum dwellers in some of the 2700 informal settlements across South Africa (+ movie).

Urban-Think Tank, which was involved in the Golden Lion-winning research into the Torre David vertical slum in Caracas, has this time teamed up with ETH Zürich university to search for ways that architects can help improve the environment and security of these slums that house approximately 15 percent of the country’s entire population.

Working under the title Empower Shack, the team organised a design-and-build workshop in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town that is one of the largest in South Africa, and developed a design for a low-cost two-storey shack for local resident Phumezo Tsibanto and his family.

They then worked together to replace Tsibanto’s existing single-storey dwelling with the new two-storey structure, giving the family a new home with a watertight exterior and its own electricity.

The designers are now exploring different configurations of the prototype that will allow it to adapt to the needs of different residents, extending up to three storeys when necessary.

This in turn becomes part of a wider strategy for rationalising the layout of the entire community, known as blocking out. This involves creating access routes for emergency vehicles and providing basic services such as sanitation and water.

“Our work on the Empower Shack project is not the result of the usual architectural pursuit for a new housing typology,” said Urban-Think Tank co-founder Alfredo Brillembourg. “While we are absolutely trying to innovate upon the design and technology of low-cost housing, we’re more concerned with the general ‘system’ that surrounds housing in the context of informal South African settlements.”

He continued: “This includes the infrastructure that makes housing decent, such as power and sanitation, along with the urban configuration of homes. The Empower Shack project seeks to address these larger challenges, and in doing so, hopefully changes not just the built landscape of places like Khayelitsha, but also the social, political and economic structures that shape residents’ lives.”

Brillembourg and partner Hubert Klumpner are now showing their findings from the two-year research in an exhibition at the Eva Presenhuber Gallery in Zurich.

Here’s a project description from Urban-Think Tank:

Empower Shack

Can art and architecture lend a voice to segments of the population that go unheard? Empower Shack is a new exhibition presenting an ETH Zürich and Urban-Think Tank project on South Africa, supported by Swisspearl (Schweiz) AG. A collaboration between the Brillembourg & Klumpner Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, South African NGO Ikhayalami (‘My Home’), Transsolar, Brillembourg Ochoa Foundation, Meyer Burger, the BLOCK ETH ITA Research Group, and videocompany, the Empower Shack team was established as a response to conventional approaches in dealing with urban informality, which are unsustainable and painstakingly slow in meeting the immediate needs of the vast majority of South Africa’s urban poor.

With its roots in a research, design and build workshop aimed at developing an innovative, replicable, affordable and sustainable shack prototype for Cape Town’s Khayelitsha (the third largest township in South Africa), the exhibition uses film, photography, drawings, painting and large-scale architectural installations to explore the complexity of living conditions in informal settlements, and the social role of architects in helping to address the economic, ecological and security challenges faced by residents.

With a population of over 50 million and the continent’s largest economy, South Africa is often seen as a source of relative stability and prosperity in the region. Yet economic inequality remains high. Around 1.5 million households (approximately 7.5 million people) live in 2,700 informal settlements scattered across the country, which faces an overall shortage of 2.5 million houses.

While the government’s record on housing delivery is laudable, the scale of need means informal settlements will remain for the foreseeable future. In response, authorities have slowly begun shifting the focus to incremental upgrading, including committing in 2010 to improve the quality of life of 400,000 households in well located informal settlements by 2014 through improved access to basic services and land tenure.

Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, along with their research and design teams and collaborating partners are engaged in an ongoing project to develop and implement design innovations for rapid and incremental informal settlement upgrading.

The examples featured in the Empower Shack exhibition are intended to provide immediate strategies to alleviate a national crisis, while remaining embedded within community-driven processes around resource allocation.

With Empower Shack, Brillembourg and Klumpner reinforce their broader vision for practical, sustainable interventions in informal settlements around the world. They argue the future of urban development lies in collaboration among architects, artists, private enterprise, and the global population of slum-dwellers.

Brillembourg, Klumpner and their team frequently exhibit internationally in venues such as Kassel (2004), MoMA (2010) and the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture, where they were awarded the Golden Lion in 2012. Through artistic and didactic presentations, they issue a call to arms to their fellow architects to see in the informal settlements of the world a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in the service of a more equitable and sustainable future.

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News: British designer Thomas Heatherwick has unveiled plans to create a new art gallery at the V&A Waterfront museum in Cape Town by hollowing out sections of a grain silo complex.

Presented at the Design Indaba 2014 conference this week, Heatherwick Studio‘s proposal is to give the V&A Waterfront a building dedicated to contemporary African art within the cluster of 42 concrete tubes that make up a historic grain silo structure.

“How do you turn 42 vertical concrete tubes into a place to experience contemporary culture? Our thoughts wrestled with the extraordinary physical facts of the building,” explained Thomas Heatherwick.

“There is no large open space within the densely packed tubes and it is not possible to experience these volumes from inside,” he continued. “Rather than strip out the evidence of the building’s industrial heritage, we wanted to find a way to enjoy and celebrate it. We could either fight a building made of concrete tubes or enjoy its tube-iness.”

A elliptical section will be hollowed out from the centre of the nine-storey building to create a grand atrium that will be filled with light from a glass roof overhead. Some silo chambers will be carved open at ground level to accommodate exhibition galleries, while others will accommodate elevators.

Heatherwick added: “Unlike many conversions of historic buildings that have grand spaces ready to be repurposed, this building has none. The project has become about imagining an interior carved from within an infrastructural object whilst celebrating the building’s character.”

Layers of render and paint will be removed from the existing facades to reveal the raw concrete of the silos, while windows will be created from bulging transparent pillows.

“Thomas Heatherwick understood how to interpret the industrial narrative of the building, and this was the major breakthrough,” said V&A Waterfront CEO David Green. “His design respects the heritage of the building while bringing iconic design and purpose to the building.”

Named Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), the building will be a partnership between V&A Waterfront and entrepreneur Jochen Zeitz, whose art collection will provide the museum’s permanent exhibition within some of the 80 proposed galleries.

Education facilities and sit-specific exhibition areas will be provided within the existing underground tunnels. Other features will include a rooftop sculpture garden, an art conservation facility, bookshops, and cafe and restaurant areas.

Heatherwick will partner with local firms Van Der Merwe Miszewski, Rick Brown Associates and Jacobs Parker on the delivery and fit out of the museum.

Read on for the press release from V&A Waterfront:

V&A Waterfront unveils architectural plans by Heatherwick Studio for the historic Grain Silo Complex

Imagine forty‐two 33-metre high concrete tubes each with a diameter of 5.5 metres, with no open space to experience the volume from within. Imagine redesigning this into a functional space that will not only pay tribute to its original industrial design and soul, but will become a major, not-for-profit cultural institution housing the most significant collection of contemporary art from Africa and its Diaspora.

The brief given to Heatherwick Studio was to reimagine the Grain Silo Complex at the V&A Waterfront with an architectural intervention inspired by its own historic character. The project called for a solution that would be unique for Africa and create the highest possible quality of exhibition space for the work displayed inside.

The V&A Waterfront’s challenge to repurpose what was once the tallest building on the Cape Town skyline caught the imagination of internationally acclaimed designer Thomas Heatherwick and his innovative team of architects.

This was a chance to do more than just appropriate a former industrial building to display art, but to imagine a new kind of museum in an African context.

The R500‐million redevelopment project, announced in November 2013 as a partnership between the V&A Waterfront and Jochen Zeitz will retain and honour the historic fabric and soul of the building while transforming the interior into a unique, cutting‐edge space to house the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA). Considered the most extensive and representative collection of contemporary art from Africa, the Zeitz Collection has been gifted in perpetuity to this non‐profit institution by ex‐Puma CEO and Chairman, Jochen Zeitz. The collection will be showcased in 9,500m2 of custom‐designed space spread over nine floors, of which 6,000 m2 will be dedicated exhibition space.

Heatherwick Studio, based in London, is recognised internationally for projects including the UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, The London 2012 Olympic Cauldron, the New Bus for London and the redevelopment of Pacific Place, a 640,000m2 complex in the centre of Hong Kong.

For the Zeitz MOCAA project, Heatherwick Studio will partner with three local delivery partners; Van Der Merwe Miszewski (VDMMA), Rick Brown Associates (RBA) and Jacobs Parker. Jacobs Parker will be the lead designer for the Museum fit out.

The key challenge has been to preserve the original industrial identity of the building, which is heritage listed, and to retain choice pieces of machinery to illustrate and maintain its early working character. Heatherwick Studio has met the brief with characteristic boldness and creative flair. The final design reveals a harmonious union of concrete and metal with crisp white spaces enveloped in light.

The solution developed by Heatherwick Studio was to carve galleries and a central circulation space from the silos’ cellular concrete structure to create an exceptionally spacious, cathedral‐like central atrium filled with light from an overhead glass roof. The architects have cut a cross‐section through eight of the central concrete tubes. The result will be an oval atrium surrounded by concrete shafts overhead and to the sides. Light streaming through the new glass roof will accentuate the roundness of the tubes. The chemistry of these intersecting geometries creates an extraordinary display of edges, achieved with advanced concrete cutting techniques. This atrium space will be used for monumental art commissions not seen in Africa until this construction.

The other silo bins will be carved away above ground level leaving the rounded exterior walls intact. Inside pristine white cubes will provide gallery spaces not only for the Zeitz MOCAA permanent collection, but also for international travelling exhibitions. Zeitz MOCAA will have 80 galleries, 18 education areas, a rooftop sculpture garden, a state of the art storage and conservation area, and Centres for Performative Practice, the Moving Image, Curatorial Excellence and Education. Heatherwick Studios have designed all the necessary amenities for a public institution of this scale including bookstores, a restaurant and bar, coffee shop, orientation rooms, a donors’ room, fellows’ room and various reading rooms. The extraordinary collection of old underground tunnels will be re‐engineered to create unusual education and site specific spaces for artists to dialogue with the original structure.

Cylindrical lifts rise inside bisected tubes and stairs spiral upwards like giant drill bits. The shafts are capped with strengthened glass that can be walked over, drawing light down into the building.

The monumental facades of the silos and the lower section of the tower are maintained without inserting new windows. The thick layers of render and paint are removed to reveal the raw beauty of the original concrete.

From the outside, the greatest visible change is the creation of special pillowed glazing panels, inserted into the existing geometry of the grain elevator’s upper floors, which bulge outward as if gently inflated. By night, this transforms the building’s upper storeys into a glowing lantern or beacon in the harbour.

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silos for Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront appeared first on Dezeen.

Big Game est un court métrage d’animation imaginé par six étudiants de l’école d’animation à Cape Town, en Afrique du Sud. Réalisé en 8 mois, ce film de Matthew Furnell, Jarrod Hasenjäger, Miro Kolenic, Romy Latters, Aarin Lehmkuhl et Sarah Scrimgeour raconte l’histoire d’un monstre solitaire appelé Bobo.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our final movie from Design Indaba in Cape Town, Ben Terrett, head of design at Government Digital Service, explains the design principles behind the new Gov.uk website, which combines all the UK Government’s websites into a single site.

“There were thousands of websites, and we folded them into Gov.uk to make just one,” says Terrett. “The reason to do that really is to ensure that the user doesn’t have to understand government to find something out. They just go to one place and it’s there. They don’t have to know which department has what information.”

Terrett explains that the core idea behind it was to make it as simple and intuitive as possible for the user. “People only go onto government websites once or twice a year to find out a particular thing,” he says. “So people shouldn’t spend time relearning how to use it. The core of all our work is focussing on user need.”

Terrett sought advice from Margaret Calvert, the graphic designer who, along with Jock Kinneir, designed the UK’s road signs, which have been imitated around the world. Terrett cites her work as one of the iconic pieces of British design he took inspiration from: “There is this huge catalogue or canon of projects that have got this fantastic heritage of this public sector sort of design work,” he says, also citing the London Underground tube map and Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer network. “The more you look at it the more they were trying to do a very similar sort of thing to what we’re doing.”

The Gov.uk site only uses a single font and has been stripped of any graphical flourishes. “Something we’re trying to do in particular is let design get out of the way and let the user get to what they want,” Terrett says. “You shouldn’t come to the website and go: ‘wow, look at the graphic design’. We haven’t yet achieved that in most web interfaces; they’re still getting in the way [and] you can see the graphic design everywhere. We need to get past that.”

Terrett believes that, with new technology like Google Glass simplifying or even removing the user interface altogether, websites will eventually catch up. “Google Glass and other things that we don’t know about yet will prompt people to think harder and work harder on that stuff,” he says. “But there’s a long way to go and I think it’s a fascinating challenge, a really exciting challenge.”

The Gov.uk website is shortlisted for this year’s Designs of the Year award, alongside high-profile projects such as Renzo Piano’s The Shard and the Olympic Cauldron by Thomas Heatherwick.

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

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out of the way” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Google Creative Lab creative director Alexander Chen explains how he created a digital string you can pluck like a viola and discusses Google Glass and the future of user interface design in this movie we filmed at Design Indaba in Cape Town last month. 

Chen presented a number of his personal projects at Design Indaba, which involve novel ways of making music on a computer. “I grew up playing the viola and I’ve always written and recorded my own music,” he explains. “I was learning that alongside computer programming and visual design [so] I always wanted to combine the things together.”

For a project called Mta.me, Chen created a virtual stringed instrument based on the New York subway system (above). “I’d just moved to New York and I started to think ‘what if the lines on the subway map could be a musical instrument?'” he says.

In Chen’s map, the different subway routes become strings, which vibrate at different frequencies based on their length. Chen then animated the map so that the strings are plucked by other subway lines that intersect them. “I took it one step further,” he says. “I looked up the subway schedule and using computer code had the subway performing itself.”

Chen then goes on to talk about his work at Google Creative Lab, where he helped to produce the original concept video for Google Glass, as well as the final movie demonstrating the new user interface, which Google released in February.

He believes that wearable technology like Google Glass demonstrates how digital technology in future will be more integrated into our lives. “Technology continues to disappear more and more,” he says. “I don’t know if I want to make any strong predictions, but I hope that technology disappears more and more from my life and you forget that you’re using it all the time instead of feeling like you’re burdened [by it].

“I hope it becomes more like the water running in our house and the electricity running through our buildings: we use it when we need it and then we forget about it for the rest of the day and just enjoy being people.”

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.

The post “Digital technology will
continue to disappear” appeared first on Dezeen.