Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: French botanist Patrick Blanc, the inventor of green walls, explains how he created the hanging gardens on the outside of Herzog & de Meuron‘s new Pérez Art Museum in our next movie from Miami.

The new Pérez Art Museum Miami by Herzog & de Meuron, which opened last month, features clusters of columns covered with plants suspended from the building’s large overhanging roof.

Blanc explains that the Swiss architects approached him to create these vertical gardens after they successfully worked together on the CaixaForum arts centre in Madrid, completed in 2008.

“We had already covered a wall totally with plants in Madrid,” says Blanc. “Here, for the museum, they asked me: ‘Do you think it’s possible to have the plants on columns instead?’ I said: ‘Yes, of course.'”

Unlike a green wall, which faces in one direction, Blanc had to use different types of plants on each side of the hanging columns.

“For the outside surface, facing the sea, [the plants] have to face full sun, they have to face strong winds, sometimes salt and sometimes hurricanes,” he says. “The side facing the museum is very dark, so [I used] shade-loving plants.”

Blanc claims the key to creating a successful vertical garden is the diversity of species used.

“I use many, many different species,” he explains. “Here, in Miami, I used 80 different species. Sometimes, I use up to 400. When you have so many species, it looks much more natural.”

Vertical gardens are more than just aesthetically pleasing, Blanc goes on to claim.

“Because the roots are growing on the surface, [rather than into the ground], all of the micro-organisms associated with the roots are totally in contact with the air, [which is important] for de-pollution,” he says, “Also, you have benefits of insulation.”

He continues: “And, of course, the target it to use water collected from the roof. With a horizontal garden you lose a lot of water through percolation in the soil. You only have useful water when you have a vertical garden.”

Blanc believes that vertical gardens have become so popular because they provide an interesting and space-efficient way of introducing greenery into cities and claims he doesn’t mind that so many other people have taken on his idea.

“You use vertical space and usually it is empty space,” he says. “I think that is why they have been such a big success.” “Everybody in the world is doing vertical gardens. Of course, 20-25 years ago, I was the only one. But I am happy because with this idea I created a new vision of the interaction between human beings, the town and plants.”

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.

The post Patrick Blanc’s vertical gardens at
Pérez Art Museum create “living walls” appeared first on Dezeen.

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.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from Eindhoven, Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma show us their experiments with unusual materials including fish skin, cow bladders, animal blood and even lava.

Italian designers Farresin and Trimarchi, who met at Design Academy Eindhoven and set up Formafantasma in the small Dutch city after graduating, have become well-known for their interesting use of materials.

Past projects include objects made out of food, a range of natural plastic vessels and furniture covered with discarded animal skins.

The duo’s latest project involves melting down volcanic rock from Mount Etna in Sicily.

“We are conducting some really simple experiments by remelting lava,” Farresin tells us when we visited their studio during Dutch Design Week.

“We are working with basalt fibres, which is this really interesting material that we found. It is similar to glass fibre, but is entirely produced by the melting of lava. Because of the chemical components of lava, you can create fibres with it.”

Farresin shows us two applications of the material, a textile made from woven threads of basalt fibre as well as a ceramic-like material, which is made from layers of this textile heated in a kiln.

“We put it in a ceramic oven and control [the temperature] so that the basalt fibre does not melt completely and turns into a more structural material,” Farresin explains.

He then shows us fish skin samples from Formafantasma’s Craftica project for Fendi.

“What we like about these skins, which we got from a company in Iceland, is that they have been discarded by the food industry,” he says. “We are actually continuing the investigation of these materials and are [currently] designing a piece for a company using fish skins.”

The Craftica collection also included water containers made from animal bladders, which Trimarchi shows us next.

“These are from cows and, again, they come from the food industry,” he says. “Usually these are used in Italy to make cases for mortadella [an Italian sausage].”

Farresin adds: “We still find the material fascinating, so we thought to use them in lighting. We made a construction using the valve of a bike so that we can basically dry the piece and inflate it directly on the LED light source.”

Finally, Farresin and Trimarchi show us samples from their Botanica project, a series of vessels made from natural plastics, which was acquired by London’s V&A Museum this year.

The first is bois durci, a nineteenth-century plastic made from sawdust and animal blood. Then he shows us pieces of shellac, a natural polymer secreted by lac bugs, a small parasitic insect native to India and Thailand.

Trimarchi says that, since the Botanica project, they have been looking into better methods of producing the material as well as ways of using it.

“Something we are really trying to investigate is to make the production process of shellac more efficient,” he explains.

Farresin adds: “Nowadays it is just farmed by small communities in India and Thailand. We see a parallel between this and silk production, but the farming is really difficult.”

“We are interested in getting in touch with institutions in India to see if we can participate in improving the bug farming there.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post Eindhoven design studio Formafantasma
is “experimenting with lava” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our second movie from Eindhoven, Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Dave Hakkens explains his concept for a modular mobile phone made of detachable blocks, an idea that looks set to become a reality now he has teamed up with Motorola.

Phonebloks is a concept for a mobile phone made of swappable components that fit together like blocks of Lego.

“It is basically made to be upgraded and repaired,” explains Hakkens, who was speaking at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show during Dutch Design Week last week, before his collaboration with Motorola was revealed.

“Usually we throw [a mobile phone] away after a couple of years, but this one is made to last.”

He continues: “You throw away a lot of good components [when you throw away a phone], because usually it’s only one item that is broken. With this phone you can only throw away components that are actually broken, or need repairing or upgrading.”

“If it’s getting slow you only upgrade the speed component, if you need a better camera you only upgrade the camera component. In this way you can keep the good stuff and the bad stuff you upgrade.”

The video of the concept Hakkens posted on YouTube quickly went viral, attracting over 16 million views.

“I’m just one guy at the Design Academy, I can’t make this phone myself,” says Hakkens. “So I put this video online and in the first 24 hours I had one million views on YouTube. I got a lot of nice emails from companies and people who want to work on this.”

Hakkens also put the project on Thunderclap, a crowdspeaking site where supporters donate their social reach rather than money.

His Phonebloks Thunderclap campaign closed yesterday, having gained 979,280 supporters. On closing, an automatic message about Phonebloks was sent out to all of his supporters’ social media contacts, reaching over 380 million people.

The approach has been successful in getting the attention of major players in the mobile phone industry.

Yesterday he posted a new video on his Phonebloks website, announcing that he has teamed up with American communications giant Motorola, which has been working on its own modular mobile phone concept called Project Ara for the last year.

“The whole point was to generate a lot of buzz,” says Hakkens. “So companies see that there’s a huge market and they need to make a phone like this.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post “With Phonebloks you only throw away
components that are broken” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the penultimate stop on our Dezeen and MINI World tour is Eindhoven. In our first video report from the city, co-founder of Dutch Design Week Miriam van der Lubbe explains how the small industrial town has become one of the leading centres for design and technology in the world.

“Eindhoven is actually a very small city compared to the big capitals in Europe or the world,” says van der Lubbe. “It’s a group of about seven villages that grew together into Eindhoven.”

It is also not a very pretty one. “The centre of Eindhoven really got destroyed [during the Second World War],” Van der Lubbe explains. “They built it up in the fifties and it became a really ugly city. In Eindhoven, it can only get better.”

Despite its size, the city has been a site for technological innovation since the industrial revolution, thanks almost entirely to Dutch electronics giant Philips.

The company was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 and, although it moved its headquarters to Amsterdam in 1997, its blue logo still adorns many of the buildings in the city.

Once Philips moved out, many people were afraid Eindhoven would become a “non-area”, Van der Lubbe says. In fact, the creative industries were quick to take advantage of the large amounts of cheap space Philips left behind.

One example Van der Lubbe takes us to is Strijp, a former Philips industrial complex that is now one of the central areas of Dutch Design Week.

“Strijp is a major part of Eindhoven centre actually,” says Van der Lubbe. “The owner of Strijp bought these industrial buildings and gave them to the creative people.”

An abundance of designers ready to take up these former industrial spaces graduate each year from Design Academy Eindhoven, which has gained a reputation as one of the foremost design schools in the world.

Former students include Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders and Tord Boontje and many graduates, such as Piet Hein Eek plus Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farrasin of Formafantasma, choose to stay in the city.

Van der Lubbe, herself a Design Academy Eindhoven alumni, shares a studio in nearby Geldrop with fellow academy graduate Niels van Eijk.

“It grew out of Philips, because they saw that design was an important aspect of products,” she says of the school.

“It used to be that as soon as people graduated they left. But now they’re coming back because they see that there’s something going on here that’s interesting.”

There is still an emphasis on science and technology in Eindhoven. Van der Lubbe takes us to the High Tech Campus on the outskirts of the city, where many technology companies are based, as well as Eindhoven University of Technology.

Having design, industry, science and technology in such close proximity is the key to Eindhoven’s success, says Van der Lubbe.

“There is a huge opportunity for Eindhoven because it has all these aspects in it,” she says. “It has the academic world, it has science, it has the creative world, it definitely has industry.”

“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out and there is so much more that can actually happen here. I really believe that.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post “Eindhoven has design, it has science
and it has industry” appeared first on Dezeen.