Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from Miami, show director Marianne Goebl discusses the trends that emerged from Design Miami 2013, including a renewed focus on female designers such as Charlotte Perriand and Maria Pergay. 

Design Miami 2013, which took place in Miami from 4 to 8 December alongside the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, featured a large number of vintage furniture pieces by iconic 20th-century designers.

“Design Miami’s intention is to offer a journey through design history,” Goebl explains in the movie. “At the same time we present a strong pillar of contemporary experimental work.”

One of the standout pieces on show this year was a one-room prefabricated house designed by French modernist architect Jean Prouvé, which was on sale for $2.5 million.

“For the first time we have a full-scale architectural structure [at the show], which Jean Prouvé designed in 1945,” Goebl explains.

Prouvé was well-represented throughout the show, but so was the late architect’s frequent collaborator Charlotte Perriand.

“It’s also a year of seminal women designers,” says Goebl. “We have a solo show on Charlotte Perriand, where you can discover an interior that she designed in Paris for the Borot family.”

She continues: “We also have an interior dedicated to Maria Pergay’s furniture made from stainless steel from the 1970s.”

Other pieces of vintage furniture included Soviet art deco furniture presented by Moscow’s Heritage International Art Gallery.

“For the first time an exhibitor from Russia is showing some kind of propaganda furniture that was designed in the 1930s to 1950s,” Goebl explains.

Goebl then goes on to discuss the work of contemporary designers on show, claiming that there is a growing trend towards merging digital and analogue experiences.

“There’s a field that is not categorised yet,” she says. “For example, Maarten Baas‘ Grandfather and Grandmother clocks, or the Clock Clocks by Human Since 1982.”

Goebl claims that the collectible design market has now fully recovered after a few rocky years during the recent financial crash.

“The market had been affected by the crisis in 2008 and 2009,” she says. “But since 2010 we’ve really registered a continued, healthy growth.”

We drove around Miami in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Jewels by Zequals. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

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News: architects Rem Koolhaas and Foster + Partners will work alongside Hollywood power-couple Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin to create a new ocean-side cultural quarter at Miami Beach in Florida (+ slideshow).

Faena Miami Beach will include an arts centre by Rem Koolhaas/OMA, a beachside condominium tower by Foster + Partners, and a restoration of the landmark Saxony Hotel by husband-and-wife team Luhrmann and Martin.

The all-star cast has been assembled by Argentinian hotelier and property developer Alan Faena, who presented the plans during the Art Basel and Design Miami fairs in the city earlier this month.

“In Miami Beach we are creating a new epicenter for the city,” Faena said. “Acting as curators, we are commissioning a group of standout talents to create an urban installation without equal.”

Faena Miami Beach will stretch six blocks along Collins Avenue, between 32 Street and 37 Street, and extend from the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Creek waterway.

Koolhaas’ Faena Arts Center, due to open next year, consists of a cubic volume and a cylindrical volume, both featuring diagonally banded facades.

The development will also include two further projects by Koolhaas: the Faena Bazaar retail building and Artists-in-Residence Center and Faena Park, an automated car parking garage.

“We were invited to design three buildings – an arts center, retail bazaar and car park,” said Koolhaas. “These distinct functions are linked by a sequence of public domains including a plaza, courtyard and marina dock.”

“Culture is at the core of Faena’s vision, and has been the driving force for our collaboration in Miami Beach,” Koolhaas added. “By curating their neighborhood with programmatic diversity, Alan’s sphere of influence will likely extend beyond this development to the rest of Miami Beach.”

Foster + Partners’ 18-storey residential tower, Faena House, will feature distinctive wraparound, Argentinian-style “alero” covered terraces on each floor (“alero” is the Spanish term for a projecting eave).

“We were talking about the nature of indoor and outdoor living, remarking on how much one used the alero, the outdoor terrace,” said Brandon Haw, senior partner at Foster + Partners. “This really became very much the leitmotif of the project.”

The aleros will be up to 37 feet (3.3 metres) deep and the glazed walls of the apartments will feature sliding glass doors up to 12 feet 6 inches (3.8 metres) wide, allowing the terraces and interior spaces to be used seamlessly.

The building will also feature a lobby with water pools to help cool the ground floor.

Film director Luhrmann and production designer Martin, whose credits include The Great Gatsby and Moulin Rouge, will oversee the renovation of the Saxony Hotel. Built in 1947, this was once one of the most glamorous luxury hotels at Miami Beach. Luhrmann and Martin will oversee the design of the 168-suite hotel – including the interiors and the staff uniforms – as well as curating entertainment in the theatre, cinema and public spaces. The hotel is due to reopen in December 2014.

The project is the latest in a string of new developments by high-profile European architects in Miami, which is rapidly establishing itself as the most architecturally progressive city in the USA. New apartment towers by Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron and Bjarke Ingels Group have been announced this year, while OMA recently won a competition to rebuild the Miami Beach convention centre.

Faena Miami Beach is the first project outside Argentina by Faena, who previously turned a stretch of abandoned docklands at Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires into a thriving arts-led urban quarter, featuring the Faena Hotel designed by Philippe Starck and the Faena Aleph residential buildings by Foster + Partners.

Visualisations are by Hayes Davidson.

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Jacques Herzog of Herzog & de Meuron explains how the Pérez Art Museum Miami was designed so that everything is visible and there is no strict barrier between inside and outside, in our second movie from Miami.

“The building is a naked structure; everything you see is at the same time carrying, so structural, and space-making, so spaces defining and containing,” Herzog tells Dezeen.

“There is no inside/outside, there is nothing that is masked, so everything you get is doing all you expect from architecture. In that sense it’s a very honest or very archaic architecture.”

Herzog & de Meuron‘s Pérez Art Museum Miami opened to the public last week in downtown Miami and accommodates 3000 square-metres of galleries within a three-storey complex with a huge elevated veranda.

A car park is on show beneath the building, while a single roof shelters both indoor and outdoor spaces.

“Typologically you could say that this is a building built on stilts,” says the architect. “Layers end with a trellis-like roof and start with a platform which is also kind of a trellis, under which you can park your car and that also is open to the elements. Literally everything is visible, is part of the whole.”

The architect describes how galleries were designed to open out to the veranda so that “landscape would walk inside the building”.

“We wanted to do buildings that are transparent or permeable, so that inside/outside would not be a strict barrier,” he explains.

Exhibition galleries occupy the two lower floors of the museum and were organised to encourage a fluid transition between spaces.

“The special concept of the museum is this kind of sequence of spaces, which are more fluid,” says Herzog. “It’s a new kind of museum typology, which we believe was right to do here.”

The building also features an auditorium that doubles up as a connecting staircase.

“The auditorium staircase is an attempt to do more than just an auditorium – that would be a space that is closed and only used when there is a performance or conference – but to introduce it so that you have a grand stair leading people up to the main gallery floor,” says the architect.

He continues: “By means of curtains it can be subdivided, so it gives more opportunities to the curators and directors, and the people here.”

Bay windows puncture the walls of the first-floor galleries and contain benches that visitors can use to take a break from exhibitions.

“This is to give the windows more than just the role of being a hole in the facade,” adds Herzog. “This again is a transitional element between inside and outside, inviting people to rest, sit and warm up a little bit.”

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Museum “is a naked structure” appeared first on Dezeen.

Design Miami 2013: designer Simon Heijdens has created a series of hand-blown glass vessels that turn data from wind movement into projected patterns of light (+ slideshow + interview).

Heijdens’ Phare No.1-9 consists of nine suspended vessels that contain transparent liquid. A light source at the top of each vessel shines into the water and creates abstract patterns, which project onto the white walls and floor of the installation.

The project, commissioned by Champagne brand Perrier-Jouët and presented at Design Miami this week, is intended as a contemporary interpretation of the Art Nouveau movement.

Art Nouveau, which flourished from the 1890s to the First World War, is known for its florid lines but Heidjens said that its artists exploited the latest technological developments.

“They saw themselves as naturalists, making big lavish botanicals, as natural as possible,” he said. “But looking further underneath that skin, there is a really strong geometry and mathematics to their formal language and to the way the technology of their time was used in their work.”

Phare, which means lighthouse or beacon, takes data from outdoor sensors that monitor the wind and transforms it into a narrow beam of light that shines into the liquid within the vessels. When the light hits a photo-sensitive dye within the liquid, it produces delicate three-dimensional “drawings” in the vessels.

The dye gradually dissipates and becomes transparent again, changing the patterns that are projected around the room.

“It’s activated from above electronically and the dye is activated downwards through the volume of the water,” said Heijdens. “I find it interesting that you get a drawing between sculpture and graphic, because you can walk around it and see it from different angles. The dye is in flux and it dissolves in half a minute.”

Heijdens was reluctant to talk about the technology behind the piece, saying: “The conversation about technology is not one I really want to have because I think it’s not the interesting part of the project. I think the true value of people walking in here, without any baggage or any understanding, hindered by any kind of perception, is just the sudden wonder.”

Here’s an interview with Heijdens conducted at Design Miami yesterday:

Marcus Fairs: Tell us a little bit about the project.

Simon Heijdens: So there are nine glass containers that are filled with water in which I developed a technology which enables me to make a drawing in water; a 3D drawing. The round bottom of the glass containers filled with water gives a lens effect and projects the drawing into the space.

All of the pieces were commissioned by Perrier-Jouët. I was asked to look into their heritage of Art Nouveau, which is very strong. It wasn’t a movement that I’ve ever been particularly interested in but looking into Art Nouveau in a greater sense, and also how it’s set in its time, it’s kind of fascinating to see in the early 1900s there were massive things happening in industry, technology and the popularisation of the printed poster, photography, and the invention of cinema; basically the pillars of our concept in media.

I find it interesting in that case how technology is very strongly affecting what the artists and designers and architects of their time are doing. All the classic Art Nouveau posters, the specific type of colour area and vector lines are very defined by technology and I think that was the first connection I felt to my practice. My generation had the digital wave when I graduated, and suddenly there was this enormous amount of new materials and enormous, really sudden possibility to use the materials much more than 10 years before that.

I find it very interesting how that part of technology is affecting industry and I think that specifically for Art Nouveau, because looking at it objectively you see the very strong curve. They saw themselves as naturalists: big lavish botanicals, as natural as possible. But looking further underneath that skin, there is a really strong geometry and mathematics to their formal language and to the way the technology of their time was used in their work.

Marcus Fairs: How would you describe your work?

Simon Heijdens: My general practice is about countering the perpetual nature of architecture, the perpetual character of architecture that we live our lives in, increasingly in this perpetual manmade surrounding which is more and more designed to function day and night, with climate control and 24 hour lighting, also socially, designed to work with people across the world, the objects in space around us makes us more homogenous.

And also on a larger scale, how cities and high streets are designed more to look like each other and I suppose the general aim of my practice is to counter that and to use materials with a variable nature and a certain character and softness, to bring back the timelines of a certain space because when these spaces are soft enough to bury the imprints of their use, that gives you a much more sense of place.

Marcus Fairs: So tell me how it actually works. How do you draw in water with light?

Simon Heijdens: The dye inside the water has the ability to switch from being completely transparent to its reddish tint.

Marcus Fairs: So is it a photo-sensitive pigment?

Simon Heijdens: It’s activated from above electronically and the dye is activated downwards through the volume of the water. I suppose, cutting a long story short, I find it interesting that you get a drawing between sculpture and graphic, because you can walk around it and see it from different angles. The dye is in flux and it dissolves in half a minute.

Marcus Fairs: What triggers the dye to become that colour?

Simon Heijdens: I don’t think that’s a conversation that I’m interested in. I think it’s not the point, it’s not because it’s a secret but I think the true value of people walking in here, without any baggage or any understanding, hindered by any kind of perception, is just the sudden wonder. Like do you remember the first time you saw a Polaroid develop? I think the strongest thing I remember of that is the sheer magic and poetry of that. Therefore the conversation about technology is not one I really want to have because I think it’s not the interesting part of the project. The important thing with technology is what you do with it.

Marcus Fairs: But how does it work?

Simon Heijdens: You’ve seen how it works. I find it really important to not make that the basis of this story and the piece.

Marcus Fairs: I want to know how it works.

Simon Heijdens: I told you.

Marcus Fairs: You’re not going to tell me.

Simon Heijdens: We could have a three hour conversation about the science of wavelengths of light or we can speak about what you thought when you walked in there and what you felt like.

Marcus Fairs: Honestly, I want to know how it works. When I saw a Polaroid for the first time, I wanted to know how it worked. I think people will look at this and wonder how this works.

Simon Heijdens: I think in that nanosecond of seeing it and being really amazed and then starting to worry about how it works, even if it’s just half a second, I think that’s something to cherish, especially now because everything is explainable in life. Everything you walk up to you understand, you don’t really ask any question about it.

Marcus Fairs: I believe the opposite. If someone says to me something’s magical I’m like, bullshit, it’s not magical. How does it work?

Simon Heijdens: I’m not saying it’s magical, I’m interested in you seeing it or Mr A walking into it, without having read it or having a technological mindset from reading your article. I think its important to me that there is a carelessness about that.

Marcus Fairs: Okay. So it’s some kind of photo-sensitive dye and the light triggers that change?

Simon Heijdens: Yeah.

Marcus Fairs: Did you see that thing that Troika did in Kortrijk last year? They had this old barn or something and they had these lights shining up from the floor and the light curved in an arc. There was this brief moment of magic, when you went, f*ck, how did they make light bend like that?

Simon Heijdens: And did you ask that?

Marcus Fairs: There was a sign on the wall that told you. It explained how it was done, using Fresnel lenses to refract the light to create an illusion of curving light. The light didn’t really curve; that’s impossible. So there was the wonder of first seeing it and then there was the explanation to satisfy your curiosity.

Simon Heijdens: Right, I think there’s a structural difference, Troika are my best friends, but there’s a structural difference between what they aim to do with their practice and what I do. The way you are going to put this [interview] up is going to define someone’s expectations of the piece before seeing it.

Marcus Fairs: Yeah that’s my job, sorry. That’s what I do!

Simon Heijdens: Well the same for me. My job isn’t a scientist. I’m not like, hey guys, you’re going to see what I can do. I understand that you’re providing the shortcut.

Marcus Fairs: Yeah but it’s not a shortcut. This is bloody hard work! It’s not an easy interview but it all started a couple of days ago when I first saw it I asked how it worked and I was told that nobody knew. So I’ve got a bee in my bonnet. I want to know.

Simon Heijdens: That’s amazing though. Even if it’s just three days of just you with a bee in your bonnet, that’s an achievement on its own.

Marcus Fairs: Yeah, you got me interested.

PR person: Maybe it’s interesting to talk about the wind and the movement and how that triggers the drawings.

Marcus Fairs: Yeah, what triggers the drawings? Magic, right?

Simon Heijdens: A little bit. I don’t know if you know much about my work in general but like including fluctuating timelines from the exterior to reflect inside and to bring back a natural timeline. It’s also here but perhaps in a less apparent way in my lights in the project in Chicago that you published. That was the only other thing that you published of mine, Marcus.

Marcus Fairs: And this is going to be the last at this rate! Also, it’s sometimes very hard to publish this kind of work in a convincing way. The one in Chicago – the window thing – looked really good on screen. But often it requires video to get this kind of project across.

Simon Heijdens: You don’t think this looks really good?

Marcus Fairs: Yes. That’s why I’m here talking to you.

Simon Heijdens: Interesting though. The other project you published, you didn’t come and ask me about it…

Marcus Fairs: I didn’t write that story. But this is going to be the best interview of the week. So back to the project: what does it draw and why?

Simon Heijdens: The patterns of wind that are passing outside are defining the drawings that are moving from one container to the next. I’m kind of making not just individual elements but part of a larger space because this setting is not just a technology room. It’s about how it makes that step from existing on a millimetre scale and becomes projected towards the space as a whole through the lens.

Below is the press text about the project from Perrier-Jouët:

Phare No.1-9, the new light work from designer Simon Heijdens, commissioned by Perrier-Jouët House of Champagne, was today unveiled at Design Miami. Heijdens’ immersive piece creates a captivating experience that reveals the poetry of the natural world through an avant-garde narrative. Heijdens’ work blends art, craft, design and new techniques seamlessly, resulting in an exciting re-interpretation of what Art Nouveau means to the 21st Century.

Phare No. 1–9 is nine hand-blown glass vessels, part filled with transparent liquid, suspended in a pure white room. Light emanates from each ‘Phare’, referencing its namesake: a lighthouse. In a reflection of Perrier-Jouët’s own material essence the work explores water as a dimensional volume, and it becomes a translucent refracting medium for light. A constantly evolving story grows within the water and is illuminated to fully immerse the space in pattern that moves from one Phare to the next. The totally white environment thus becomes both a screen and a narrative that one can walk inside, allowing the experience of the piece from different perspectives.

With Phare No.1-9 Heijdens has found a completely new way of drawing and building up images. Just as Art Nouveau saw Jules Chéret introduce the printed poster, and Louis Lumière create moving pictures, Heijdens presents a new medium of expression that echoes the period’s temperament of aesthetic innovation. His work explores the concept of coincidence, to trace and reveal the hidden essence of the spaces and objects that surround us in everyday life. Phare No.1-9 delves to the core of Art Nouveau and its principles of a studio-based, crafted art-piece, and merges the organic with avant-garde technology. The installation breaks boundaries of how we experience the natural world, and opens up the static character of our structured surroundings.

“I am interested in how we relate to objects and the space around us,” says Heijdens, “I try to bring back a sense of nature and coincidence back into the homogeneity of the everyday. With Phare No. 1-9, I have worked with water for the first time, exploring its narrative qualities and variable character. It’s been a joy to interpret the brief from Perrier-Jouët, and I hope that with Phare No.1-9 I have captured a characteristic of water and light, revealing something that we couldn’t normally experience, in a totally new way.”

“We believe Phare No.1-9 by Simon Heijdens truly takes the Art Nouveau ethos into the 21st Century, and creates a remarkable experience unlike any other. The craftsmanship and vision of Simon, combined with his unique take on expressing the natural world, has resulted in an astounding work.” said Axelle de Buffévent, Style Director for Perrier-Jouët. “We are extremely proud to be part of Design Miami/ through this commission, and to have made a genuine contribution to the contemporary design world.”

This marks the second successive year that Perrier-Jouët has taken part in Design Miami/, both through commissioning original work, and as the exclusive champagne partner for the fair. The role as a patron for contemporary design began in 1902, when the champagne house worked with the significant French Art Nouveau artist Emile Gallé. He created the iconic anemone of its Belle Époque cuvée, still used today. Since then the house has commissioned many established and emerging designers as part of its continued artistic heritage.

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creates “3D drawings in water” appeared first on Dezeen.

A previously unrealised beach house designed by modernist architect Charlotte Perriand in 1934 has been constructed and furnished by French fashion house Louis Vuitton to coincide with this year’s Design Miami fair (+ slideshow).

Charlotte Perriand’s La Maison au Bord de l’Eau, or the house beside the water, has been built by Louis Vuitton using sketches and drawings almost eighty years after it was first conceived.

The project was initially conceived for a competition to design cheap holiday lodging, held by French architecture magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.

Perriand’s design won second prize and was later reworked for wealthy vacationers, but the original scheme was never built.

Now constructed in the beach-side garden at The Raleigh Hotel on Miami’s South Beach, the small house is raised on wooden cuboids above the sand and accessed by a ramp at the back.

Two wings fronted by sliding glass doors are connected by a semi-enclosed corridor at the rear, creating a U-shaped plan.

Bedrooms containing beds designed by Perriand are located on one side, along with the bathroom. The kitchen, dining and living areas are housed in the opposite wing.

Wood clads the walls and floor, and is used for the majority of the furniture.

A central deck is covered with a fabric canopy, which drains via a hole in the centre positioned above a plant pot.

Accents of blue used for rounded lighting covers and counter tops match the corrugated roof.

The project follows Louis Vuitton’s Icônes Spring Summer 2014 fashion collection that took its influences from Perriand.

Work by the modernist designer is currently on display as part of an exhibition about how women shaped twentieth-century design, on show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

At Design Miami last year, Louis Vuitton showed a collection of leather portable objects including pieces by designers Fernando and Humberto Campana.

Here’s some more information from Louis Vuitton:

La Maison au Bord de l’Eau, 1934

Design Miami satellite exhibition

Charlotte Perriand

Architect, designer, planner and photographer Charlotte Perriand remains an influential figure in the modern movement of the twentieth century.

With links to the avant-garde in France, Germany, Russia, Japan and Brazil, her work spans seven decades of the last century.

She left her mark on the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, always working at the very top of her profession and at the cutting edge of the new. She was the first woman to work as an architect, designer and planner, opening up all these opportunities to the many women who followed her.

She played a major role in the story of design, not only in France, but also in Japan by giving direction to that country’s industrial design output before the outbreak of war in the Pacific.

As a pioneer of interior architecture alongside Le Corbusier, and trailblazer for the modern movement in furniture, she created many design masterpieces now regarded as icons.

As a close friend of, and collaborator with, painter Fernand Léger, her work is marked by the concept she called a “synthesis of the arts” (synthèse des arts) and the determination to share progress with everyone through her chosen field of creativity: the home.

A great traveller throughout her life, her thinking and work were enhanced and expanded by her travels throughout Europe, Asia, India, the Pacific and Latin America.

La Maison au Bord de l’Eau

The House first designed a clothes collection, an ephemeral reflection of Perriand’s desires, and is now producing La Maison au Bord de l’Eau for the 2013 Miami art week. This never-before-released work by the architect will be on display in South Beach December 3-8, 2013. This legendary, yet never executed, project is now a reality.

La Maison au Bord de l’Eau, first conceived in 1934 for a design contest held by L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui magazine, was meant to introduce an economical form of holiday lodging for the mass market. This project won second prize, but was never built.

Charlotte Perriand later reworked the idea into several variations for wealthier vacationers. The fact that the project was never executed explains the lack of detailed drawings and the great variety of versions found in sketches.

Now, eight decades later, Charlotte Perriand’s studies prove quite contemporary in light of the advancements in wooden architecture. Though a certain degree of adaptation was necessary to translate the original drawings and notes into a tangible structure, the spirit of the designer was respected to the fullest.

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