Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: property developer Craig Robins discusses his role in transforming Miami’s South Beach from a rundown retirement village into a glamorous holiday destination in this movie filmed during Design Miami last year.

Craig Robins, CEO of property development company Dacra, was born in Miami and started acquiring properties in South Beach in the 1980s while still studying law at university.

“We had the largest collection of historical Art Deco structures in the same place in the world,” he says of South Beach. “It was very rundown: it had become a retirement village for an elderly population that was dying off and there was a crack epidemic. There were a lot of people that thought the buildings should be torn down.”

He continues: “There was a group of us that thought that, not only should they be preserved, but that they could really become this incredible legacy that Miami could offer to the world. So I began my career figuring out how to adaptively reuse these great historical structures.”

This was an unusual approach to property development in America at the time, Robins claims.

“[South Beach has] much more of a European feel,” he explains. “The structures are smaller, the neighbourhood is pedestrian-friendly, which in Miami is almost non-existent.”

Many of the Art Deco hotels along South Beach’s iconic Ocean Drive and the surrounding area were refurbished by Robins together with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell in the 1990s.

“Chris had sold Island and wanted to begin doing hotels,” Robins explains. “He and I did a lot of investing in the South Beach area together. From Chris I learned to produce creativity, because he was approaching real estate much more like a guy who made records, who worked with artists and ended up with a great creative product. That was the way we approached the buildings we were doing, and that’s still true for me today.”

Many of the buildings that Robins and Blackwell bought and renovated were quickly sold on again.

“Part of what we realised was that sometimes it was better for someone else to own a property so that the neighbourhood had this collaborative, competitive spirit where everybody was expressing themselves in their own way,” he says. “Gloria and Emilio Estefan bought the Cardozo from us very early on and did a beautiful job with it.”

He concludes: “It’s kind of the opposite to what Disney World does. The whole idea about Disney World is to give you a fantasy with something that’s fake. Our business model is to do something that’s real.”

We drove around South Beach 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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Deco buildings “should be torn down” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: graduate designer Martijn Van Strien explains that his range of coats made from single sheets of black tarpaulin are designed for an imagined future world where money and resources are in short supply.

Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear, which Van Strien exhibited at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show during Dutch Design Week last year, consists of five coats made out of cut sheets of folded tarpaulin.

“It’s a kind of trend forecast for a dystopian future that, when everything is not so great with the economic stuff that’s going on right now, we might be heading towards,” says Van Strien. “It will be cold; people will be unhappy; we’ll be living in buildings that are just grey blocks. These are coats that we could produce for people that don’t have a lot of money, when we don’t have a lot of materials, when a coat needs to last for a lifetime.”

Van Strien says he chose tarpaulin because it is cheap, resilient and simple to work with.

“[The coats] are all cut from a single piece of black tarpaulin,” he says. “You then have to weld the parts together with heat. In the front I’ve made closures with magnets and that’s pretty much it. This material is super easy to work with, you don’t need to finish it or anything and it will last forever.”

The coats were designed to provoke a reaction and make people think about where the world could be heading, Van Strien says.

“A lot of people feel a bit creeped out [by the coats] and that is the goal, that we think about how we’re handling our social malaise,” he explains. “I see myself as a fashion designer, so I’ve looked at this from a purely aesthetic point of view. But the thought behind it is something that I feel very strongly about. I never make a garment just because it’s pretty, it always has to tell a story.”

Despite being designed for a future that does not exist yet, Van Strien says he has been approached by a number of people interested in putting the coats into production.

“I was not planning on putting these coats into production when I first made them, it was just a statement,” he says. “But a couple of parties have come up and they asked me if I wanted to take them into production so now I’m considering it.”

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 Martijn Van Strien’s Dystopian Brutalist
Outerwear is “a kind of trend forecast” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Amsterdam designer Pieke Bergmans explains that she used a process similar to glass blowing to create the plastic lighting she exhibited during Dutch Design Week 2013 in Eindhoven.

Showcased amongst the pipes in a former pump house in Eindhoven, Bergmans exhibited two groups of objects as part of her VAPOR collection, which she created by heating and rapidly inflating PVC plastic.

Swaying, ethereal shapes were hung in the main room, which Bergmans made by blowing air into the plastic until it stretched into an extremely thin, translucent tube at one end.

“The material is solid and somehow it fades away almost into nothingness,” she explains. “It dissolves like a gas. It’s very thin plastic at the ends, but on the top it’s quite solid.”

A second installation in the basement of the pump house consisted of a series of twisted, rippled pipes.

“The shapes are really organic, they grow like a plant or an animal,” she says. “That is something I really love, because I don’t like to design being very precise. I actually prefer that shapes grow into their natural environments.”

She continues: “So this plastic is actually grown. The only thing I decide is to add more or less air into it, or maybe add a few colours, or maybe add more material.”

Bergmans explains that the pieces she exhibited at Dutch Design Week were the result of many different experiments.

“I’m very free and experimental and I try to understand the boundaries [of a production process],” she explains. “I will make things with lots of air and it will explode, maybe. After lots of experiments I know the limits; I know the edges. And actually, the edges are most of the time the nicest.”

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 Pieke Bergmans’ blown-plastic VAPOR
lighting “grows like a plant or animal” appeared first on Dezeen.

Movie: project director Paul Baker discusses Wilkinson Eyre‘s award-winning cooled conservatories at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore in this exclusive video produced by Dezeen. 

Gardens by the Bay is a large waterside park next to the Marina Reservoir in central Singapore. It features two huge glass houses designed by London architects Wilkinson Eyre, which won World Building of the Year at World Architecture Festival in 2012.

“The project was to develop two cooled conservatories to accommodate a really extraordinary collection of plants that would never be able to grow in Singapore without an artificial environment,” Baker explains.

One of the glass domes features a dry Mediterranean climate, while the other recreates the cold, moist environment of a cloud forest. Baker says that while they had to meet very strict requirements for the atmosphere inside the domes, there was very little brief for how they should look.

“The trick we explored was to get a really simple structure, a grid shell, as light as possible and stiffened by a series of ribs that stabilised the grid,” he explains. “That allowed us to have this totally clean internal view and externally it generated quite a strong form to both of the biomes.”

He continues: “One was pulled up to allow for a mountain to sit inside, the other was stretched out to allow for a flower field. The flower field being in the Mediterranean, the mountain being in the cloud forrest.”

A wooden canopy runs between the two freestanding domes. Baker explains that the design team wanted this to contrast with the steel and glass of the conservatories.

“The canopy is all about wood: it’s got a lot of colour in it; it’s got a lot of play in it,” he says. “It’s also deliberately quite dark so that the drama of entering the conservatories is amplified by the darker compressive space outside.”

Baker explains that the conservatories were designed to provide very different experiences.

“There is no set path,” he says of the flower dome. “It is your own adventure. It is all about you making your own route and understanding and exploring the building.”

In contrast, the cloud forest, which includes a 35-metre-high indoor waterfall, is “an entirely prescriptive route,” he says.

“As you enter, again you’re coming from a more compressed, darker environment and then you’re completely assaulted by the cold, the wet of the waterfall. You explore the base of the mountain and then take a lift to the top. That then allows you to do the descent in a really creative way.”

He continues: “We have a series of walkways that take you right out into the cloud forest with a whole range of different plants. At all the levels you get a different horticultural experience.”

Baker says that he takes the greatest satisfaction from seeing people enjoying the conservatories.

“This building has got a pretty strong educational remit,” he says. “It’s got nice messages [about protecting the environment], but it’s also an awful lot about fun.”

“The more travelled you are, the more complacent you get about those sorts of experiences. But being from Singapore, being very much in an urban society, I think the real drama of a strong – although artificial – environment is quite exciting.”

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Gardens by the Bay are “about having fun” appeared first on Dezeen.

This movie we filmed at Dezeen’s pop-up shop of the future at London department store Selfridges demonstrates how augmented reality technology could transform retail.

Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs introduces the shop we curated for Selfridges‘ Festival of Imagination, which includes a virtual retail experience for Dezeen Watch Store and a life-size walkaround digital model of Zaha Hadid’s superyacht – both created by technology company Inition.

“The Imagine Shop is an attempt to visualise the kind of products, services and shops we might have in the future,” says Fairs.

The space on the ground floor of the department store contains all wall of 3D-printed products and clothing by Janne Kyttanen of 3D Systems, and even features a giant printed ping-pong table.

“The most exciting thing here is that we’ve worked with Inition, which is a 3D visualisation company, to show how augmented reality could be used in stores of the future,” Fairs says.

Inition lead creative Alex Lambert then talks about the augmented-reality projects that his company and Dezeen worked on for this event.

“Inition and Dezeen collaborated on two pieces of augmented reality,” he says, “one for watches available at the Dezeen Watch Store and another for a £300 million superyacht designed by Zaha Hadid.”

Lambert talks through the technology for the yacht models, which works using a tablet camera that picks up the code from patterned markers then displays the 3D model on screen.

“This type of augmented reality relies on a tablet,” he explains. “You’ll see a live video feed coming through the camera and once you point it at the marker the 3D model will appear.”

Two versions of the yacht are included in the shop: a miniature version and a full-size model that glides across the tablet screen.

“We’ve actually created the yacht in full scale,” says Lambert. “It’s a sunny blue ocean with a full-scale yacht sailing past, just to give people an idea of the scale of the superyacht.”

Using the same technology, shoppers can try on designs from Dezeen Watch Store at a virtual watch shop. Shoppers simply attach a band around their wrist and hold it up to a camera, then the chosen watch manifests over the band.

“We take one of these bespoke trackers… turn to the camera, get the marker in view and boom! The watch appears,” Lambert describes.

Inition added texture and shadows to the virtual watches to make them look as realistic as possible. Different models and colourways appear instantaneously around the wrist on screen as they are selected.

“Dezeen are very forward thinking in employing this technology, especially for watches,” says Lambert. “In the future hopefully people will download the app, use a webcam or tablet and try on the watches at home before they purchase online.”

Elsewhere in the department store, Inition also worked with fashion designer Gareth Pugh to install a virtual reality booth on the first floor and an auditorium designed by Dutch architects OMA has been created in the basement.

The Festival of Imagination continues all this month at Selfridges on Oxford Street, central London.

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Dezeen’s Imagine Shop for Selfridges appeared first on Dezeen.