Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: architect Terrence Riley takes us on a tour of downtown Miami and says that redevelopment of the historic area has coincided with a new emphasis on outdoor living in the city.

Downtown is a small nineteenth-century area of Miami located to the north of Miami River and the west of Biscayne Bay. Formerly the economic hub of the city, the neighbourhood was largely abandoned in the nineteen-seventies.

“The developers, their clients and the tenants needed bigger spaces,” explains Riley, a partner at Keenen Riley Architects and former director of Miami Art Museum and curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “Eventually you saw empty stores, empty office buildings and it was really across the river, in the south, where all the development began.”

Miami Art Museum, which moved to a new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron in December, was originally based in the historic downtown district as part of a cultural complex designed by American architect Philip Johnson.

“This is a very familiar tactic,” Riley says. “Take a really lousy neighbourhood and what do you do? You put the cultural facilities there, because they’ll go anywhere those people.”

“Miami Art Museum, from its earliest days, was put into this situation of trying to be a catalyst for spurring development downtown.”

Riley claims that downtown Miami is now a very different place compared to when the museum first opened in the nineteen-eighties.

“What were empty lots are being redeveloped,” he says, pointing out the old post office, which has now been taken over by the American Institute of Architects.

The redevelopment and repopulation of downtown Miami has coincided with the emergence of a renewed interest in outdoor living in the city, Riley says.

“A lot of people in Miami lived this air-conditioned life 12 months a year,” he explains. “Now I think the attitude is changing. You see that reflected in all the outdoor cafes and things like bike riding.”

“The whole idea that you can live downtown now, shop downtown and have restaurants downtown is something completely new.”

Many of the buildings in downtown Miami feature long arcades to shelter people on the streets from the elements.

“Miami was [originally] laid out as a pedestrian city,” Riley explains. “Miami lost a lot of that common-sense architecture with air conditioning and underground garages where you go directly from your car into the building.”

However, he believes that architects are now using similar principles in the design of new buildings.

“You’ll notice on the Herzog & de Meuron museum these long, broad, overhanging eaves that provide protection all the way around the museum,” he says. “These recall some of the more thoughtful, intelligent things that they used to do in the traditional city.”

We drove around downtown 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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“laid out as a pedestrian city” appeared first on Dezeen.

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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designers” says Design Miami director appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our first movie from Miami, Jacques Herzog of Herzog & de Meuron claims the Swiss architecture studio is trying to create a “new vernacular for Miami” that eschews sealed, air-conditioned buildings in favour of more “transparent or permeable” structures.

“Very often, if you go to a place, you’re asked to do architecture that relates to that place, stylistically, or typologically or whatever,” says Herzog, who was speaking at the press preview of the new Pérez Art Museum in downtown Miami, which opened on Wednesday. “What would that be in Miami?”

“The most famous style or vernacular here is the art deco [buildings] on Ocean Drive, but this is relatively stupid architecture; it is just blind boxes, which have a certain decoration, like a cake or pastry, with air conditioning that makes a very strict difference between inside and outside.”

He continues: “This is very North American architecture that doesn’t relate to or exploit the amazing conditions that you find here: the amazing climate, the lush vegetation, the seaside, the sun. We wanted to do buildings deconstructing this, opening up these structures and making them transparent or permeable.”

Herzog gives the example of 1111 Lincoln Road, Herzog & de Meuron’s sculptural car park on South Beach, which was completed in 2010 and is open to the elements on all sides.

As well as providing parking spaces for 300 cars, the car park includes shops, bars and restaurants and hosts parties, weddings and other events throughout the year.

“It’s just a stupid garage,” he says. “But the new thing is that we made the building double height so it opens the possibility to have different floor heights and different rooms.”

“Parking cars [in this building] is an experience. We introduced shops and restaurants and little bars and other possibilities for people to hang out and use the entire building, not just to make a blind box for cars.”

Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern in London and Parrish Art Museum on Long Island are two other examples of galleries that “give right answers to different places”, Herzog says.

“I compare it to cooking,” he explains. “We try to use what is available in every season or in a certain region and not to try to have an ambition to do something exquisite in a place where it wouldn’t make sense, but to fully exploit whatever is there.”

The Pérez Art Museum features large, over-hanging eaves to provide shelter from the sun and rain of Miami’s tropical climate, while suspended columns covered in vertical gardens by botanist Patrick Blanc hang from the roof to emphasise the building’s relationship to its surroundings.

“I think this museum is an interesting attempt [to exploit the natural climate in Miami],” Herzog says. “Somehow it introduces a type of building that could become a new vernacular for Miami.”

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 more original music on Dezeen Music Project.

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stupid architecture” in Miami 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.

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is “experimenting with lava” appeared first on Dezeen.

Movie: in our next exclusive interview from Inside Festival, Per Anders Borgen of Ratio Architects explains how the design team used raw materials to “remove the institutional look” from the interior of a student facility at St. Olav’s Hospital in Trondheim, Norway.

The Knowledge Centre by Norwegian studios Ratio Architects and Nordic Office of Architecture is a medical student research, training and teaching facility at St. Olav’s Hospital in Trondheim. It won the health category at last month’s Inside Festival.

The outside of the building features a black and white glass facade, designed together with artist Anne Aanerud, which provides shade from the sun as well as decoration.

“Architecture and sunshading form the facade and the expression of the building,” Borgen explains. “That is connected to a very high demand on energy reduction.”

Inside, the architects chose to leave much of the building’s wood and concrete structure exposed.

“Because this is very much a university building, we tried to keep it a little bit rough,” Borgen says. “In hospitals you [usually] have all these clinical, sterile materials. We tried to avoid that.”

“We wanted to use natural wood and concrete. The construction is the interior and that’s part of our concept.”

Patient wards and visitor areas, as well as the student library and cafeteria, feature specially commissioned art works painted on the walls.

“We were trying to remove the institutional look,” Borgen explains. “I don’t think a hospital needs to look like a hospital. That is a convention you can challenge as an architect.”

“It’s very hard because you have all kinds of demands that force you to do something. But [the Knowledge Centre] is an attempt to make a good building with function and good form joined together. It’s not different from every other architectural concept or task in that sense.”

This movie was filmed at Inside Festival 2013, which took place at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore from 2 to 4 October. The next Inside Festival will take place at the same venue from 1 to 3 October 2014. Award entries are open February to June 2014.

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“not to look like a hospital” appeared first on Dezeen.