Hasta La Ideas

Movie: in this exclusive interview, Rem Koolhaas tells Dezeen why the colossal new De Rotterdam tower is the most visible OMA skyscraper yet. “Nobody will be able to avoid” seeing it, he says.

Located on the south bank of Rotterdam’s Maas river, De Rotterdam is a 150-metre structure where overlapping glazed towers accommodate apartments, offices and a hotel. It is only the fourth high-rise that OMA has completed, even though the firm has developed designs for dozens over the years.

“This is on a site where nobody will be able to avoid seeing the entire building,” says Koolhaas, comparing the project with the Rothschild Bank Headquarters in London and CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, both of which are located within a dense cityscape. “It has a superb location on the river that can be only approached on one bridge, so we could really predict how it will be perceived,” he said.

OMA originally looked at designing two buildings on separate plots. The architect explains that he wanted to avoid “planting needles” so instead came up with a concept for a single structure with large vertical openings that break up the overall mass.

“We made a building that consists of separate volumes that were slightly shifted vis-a-vis each other so that it was very adaptable,” says Koolhaas. “We could easily replace one part with another part and therefore accommodate different logics and arguments.”

“This shifting creates a large building, but a large building that is a very dynamic presence in the city, because it is very different from any angle. It can be a wall, it can be almost three separate buildings, it can be a single mass,” he adds.

The building officially completed yesterday. Tenants including the municipality of Rotterdam are expected to move in over the next year.

Images of De Rotterdam are courtesy of the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions.

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in the city,” says Rem Koolhaas appeared first on Dezeen.

Movie: Wong Mun Summ of WOHA explains how the Singapore studio tried to recreate geological forms in the architecture of PARKROYAL on Pickering, which won the Hotels category at last month’s Inside Festival. 

PARKROYAL on Pickering by WOHA is a 367-room hotel on the edge of Singapore’s Central Business District, which features large balconies and terraces covered in 15,000 square metres of tropical plants.

“We wanted to create a hotel in a garden,” explains Wong. “We have achieved more than 200% of the site area in green replacement. So the green areas in the building are actually larger than the site itself.”

The balconies are made from layered slabs of contoured concrete, which continue inside the hotel in the reception areas on the ground floor. Wong explains that they were arranged to suggest natural landscapes.

“All the inspiration comes from rock formations,” he says. “It’s a very organic feeling that you get from the building.”

He adds: “We wanted to mimic the idea of the sedimentary layer and that is actually quite obvious from the form of the various strata in the building. Each layer is grooved, so that it has more shadows and is more refined.”

The hotel rooms themselves are more simple in design, but Wong says that the layout of each one is designed in relation to the garden outside.

“We wanted create a very warm feeling that is extending from the gardens,” he says. “The hotel rooms are configured in such a way that all of the rooms look into the sky terraces. Not only do you get a city view, you get a garden view.”

The large windows in the bedrooms are broken up by an irregular pattern of timber mullions, which is replicated by the bespoke furniture and fittings inside the rooms.

“Because we were the architects [as well as the interior designers] we wanted to make sure there was a good transition from architecture to interiors,” says Wong. “So the idea was to transform [the windows] into framing structures for the cabinets, the shelves, and even the lamp fittings.”

Wong says that he believes the hotel can be enjoyed by both passers-by and guests.

“We succeeded in creating a building that the man in the street can relate to,” he claims. “Quite often high-rise buildings tend to be very abstract, almost lacking in details. In this case what we have tried to do is humanise the skyscraper.

“It’s not just the guests that benefit from it, but also people who walk around in the city.”

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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“inspired by rock formations” appeared first on Dezeen.

Movie: in this exclusive video interview from Inside Festival, Joakim Lyth of Wingårdhs explains how the Swedish architecture firm used brightly-coloured curved glass to draw customers inside its Emporia shopping centre.

Emporia, which won the Shopping Centres category at this year’s Inside Festival, is a shopping mall located to the south of the city of Malmö in Sweden.

It features two gaping entrances made out of brightly-coloured curved glass, one amber and one blue.

“Two main entrances lead people into the shopping centre,” says Lyth. “They are formed by a double-curved glass [structure]. They should drag people inside the shopping centre.”

The use of coloured glass continues throughout the building to help lead customers through the shopping centre’s figure-of-eight plan.

“The coloured glass goes through the whole of the building, different colours are used in different circulation hubs,” Lyth explains. “One of the problems with a shopping centre is that they’re usually quite hard to find your way around. So [using] strong colours, giving a strong atmosphere and identity to different hubs seemed like a reasonable idea.”

He adds: “The figure-of-eight is quite a common feature when it comes to shopping centres. The curved shape gives you a hint of what’s hiding behind the next corner.”

The building features residential and office units on the levels above the shopping centre, as well as a publicly accessible roof garden on the top.

“The municipality demanded that the greenery we took with the shopping centre should be given back,” Lyth says. “The roof has no commercial value, so it’s just a place where you can relax.”

The whole project took five years to complete. Lyth says a shopping centre the size of Emporia only became viable in Malmö when the Öresund Bridge, which connects Sweden to Denmark, opened in 2000.

“It made part of Malmö, where Emporia now is situated, closer to the international airport of Copenhagen than Copenhagen itself,” he says. “That was a tremendous shift in the region and made it possible for [the site where Emporia was built] to gain a lot of new value.”

Despite the large number of shopping centres in the area, Lyth believes Emporia stands out.

“The building is performing pretty well,” he says. “I think that people really like the atmosphere, the ambience. It’s something different than the normal shopping centre.”

Inside Festival 2013 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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“drag people inside” says architect appeared first on Dezeen.

Movie: show director Deborah Spencer and creative director Michael Sodeau take us through their highlights of designjunction 2013 in this movie Dezeen filmed during London Design Festival.

designjunction took place from 18 to 22 September 2013 in the industrial building of a former postal sorting office on New Oxford Street in London.

“We feel it breaks the mould of the traditional trade show,” says Spencer. “We’re in the heart of central London, in a derelict building that hasn’t been used for the last ten years. It’s a really interesting back-drop and it presents design in a much more interesting light.”

Spread over three floors, designjunction showcased a range of furniture and lighting products by both young designers and established brands from the UK and abroad.

In the movie we speak to exhibitors including London designer Paul Cocksedge, who was launching his Vamp gadget that plays music wirelessly through vintage speakers, Eero Koivisto of Swedish studio Claesson Koivisto Rune, who was presenting a new range of wicker lamps, as well as Patrzia Moroso of Italian furniture brand Moroso, which provided the furniture for the VIP lounge.

The show also featured pop-up shops, bars and restaurants, as well as live manufacturing on site.

“I wanted exhibitors and visitors to feel that they could spend a full day here,” explains Michael Sodeau, creative director of the show. “The idea was to create a rhythm within the building, so it’s almost like different districts.”

“On the ground floor we have the pop-up shops and street food. Then on the first floor we move up to more exhibitions, slightly more open spaces and then up onto the second floor where we have brands and a more exclusive restaurant and bar.”

Spencer says one of her personal highlights of this year’s show was the Flash Factories area on the ground floor, which featured live demonstrations of various manufacturing techniques, from 3D printing and CNC routing to the production of hand-made bicycle saddles by British manufacturer Brooks.

“We’ve got this really strong contrast between craft-making and future digital technology,” she says.

This year also featured a new lighting section on the first floor called lightjunction.

“We’ve brought over a whole host of international brands that haven’t shown in the UK for many, many years,” Spencer explains.

She adds: “On top of that we’ve got these really strong eateries. So you’ll see Jamie Oliver’s Barbecoa and there’s a Sodastream bar on the ground floor offering complimentary drinks.”

Spencer claims that it is the variety on offer that sets designjunction apart from other design shows.

“We’re more than just an exhibition,” she says. “We’re actually a production, we put on a proper show that caters for all areas of design.”

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traditional trade show” appeared first on Dezeen.

Movie: Indian architect Sandeep Khosla explains the importance of outdoor learning at DPS Kindergarten School in Bangalore, India, which won the education category at last month’s Inside Festival in Singapore.

DPS Kindergarten School by Khosla Associates is a prototype for a series of school buildings to be rolled out across southern India.

“The brief was to really create a typology that could be repeated and adapted to further schools in the region,” says Khosla. “We used exposed concrete as the starting point and we created a very modular system that can be expanded vertically as well as horizontally. So the inside of the classrooms are basically the stripped-down materials of the architecture.”

The 25 classrooms feature brightly-coloured walls made of corrugated metal sheets and perforated terracotta screens for ventilation.

“Colour is very much a part of the Indian consciousness,” Khosla explains. “We’ve used three colours, which wrap around these corrugated sheets that we used.”

He adds: “Corrugated sheets are easy to construct with and they reduce time in the construction.”

The perforated screens, called jali, keep the classrooms cool in the absence of any air-conditioning.

“We decided to do a climate-sensitive, sustainable school,” Khosla explains. “The breezes from south-west to north-east flow right through the classrooms and the hot air rises in the courtyard. So it’s a natural ventilation stack effect that we’ve created.”

The jali screens also have a decorative purpose, Khosla says.

“We used two modules of different patterns and we’ve created very nice floral patterns by combining them,” he says. “The light creates lovely patterns on the floor at different times of the day.”

As well as helping to keep the building cool, Kohsla says the central courtyard is also an important space for learning at the school.

“The courtyard is the soul of the school,” he explains. “In the gurukal system of education in ancient India the disciples would sit at the feet of their guru under the shade of the largest tree in the village.”

“In this school too you have a lot of outdoor learning happening in the courtyard, either on the steps of the corridors or around the frangipane trees. It’s all integrated into this central courtyard.”

Inside Festival 2013 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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DPS Kindergarten School” appeared first on Dezeen.