Hasta La Ideas

As an industrial designer, it’s gratifying to see something you worked on sitting on a store shelf or showroom floor. Conversely it’s depressing when a project you toiled over gets axed and never sees the light of day. But it is set designers who must experience the most mixed emotions of all: They will spend months creating props or environments that will definitely get made–but that will then be destroyed after filming, to make room in the studio for the next project.

One grand exception of this occurred not in Hollywood, but in Leavesden, England. Bear with us while we break this down:

The L.A.-based Thinkwell Group is an “experiential design firm” that designs, among other things, amusement parks. Towards the tail end of the filming of the Harry Potter series of movies, Warner Brothers tasked Thinkwell with creating a post-film-franchise attraction, to keep the money coming in after the series’ conclusion. Thinkwell headed out to Warner Brothers’ Leavesden Studios in the UK, where all of the Potter films were produced and where the sixth was then being shot, and made a startling discovery: The filmmakers had saved nearly everything. Props, sets, models, and elaborate constructions dating all the way back to the first film had been stored in a massive airplane hanger and spilled over into a further 200 shipping containers.

As one example, check out the sick “Snake Door” from movie #2, The Chamber of Secrets. I saw it years ago, and blithely dismissed it as CG, but it’s a working motorized prop:

Nutty, no? And while the video can give you the misimpression that the door is small, check out this photo showing the scale of it:

Another thing I’d seen in the movie and assumed was CG was the Hogwarts castle:

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William Root constructed and completed this Tiny House project after his freshman year at Pratt.

The thought of summer vacations evoke thoughts of flings, new friends and the occasional awkward family vacation. For me this is what I thought was the general consensus for myself and my peers’ summer vacations until I met William Root.

Hailing from Albaquerque, NM, Will Root is a fellow sophomore at Pratt Institute for Industrial Design. Will is one of the characters that can only be found in an art school, attractinb a veritable cult following on campus with his iconic structuralist book bag, which he designed and made several versions of the bag during foundation year. In one of our many all nighters together we inquired about each others lives and in turn this past summer.

For most students, the reality of the summer is working to pay off their debts. Will realized that working a minimum wage job would pay for a mere two weeks at Pratt. Not content to rely on tips, he opted to think big—big enough to cover an entire year at school. With an entrepreneurial mindset that only the school of hard knocks could teach, he set out to build (and sell) in his words “The best Tiny House ever made.”

In the time it usually takes to adjust to being back home, Will finalized his design for a Tiny House and set out on construction within the week. In a rented lot near the lumber yard, he set out creating the project that would consume his entire summer. Tiny Houses, all though not definitively defined, do tend to have some common characteristics, mainly that their proportions and size are constrained to the size of a trailer.

Still, one of Will’s goals was to make a no compromise Tiny House. Where many other designs made the house as small as possible, he made his as large as state laws would permit. Thus, he was able to incorporate a full-size kitchen, tiled bathroom, and a 9×13 sized deck. In total the house encompasses a mere 160 sq. ft, which is small even by NYC standards, where the legal minimum is 400 sq. ft.

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Z Step, the latest project by Amsterdam-based designer Michael Schoner, is an ingenious retail display system based on measures of 33cm (about 13 inches). Each powder coated sheet metal unit is comprised of different ‘steps,’ each measuring 33 cm. The units can be combined in a surprisingly large variety of ways, and because they’re magnetic they can be customized with hooks, knobs, pins, brackets (or anything stuck to a magnet) to hold and display books, clothing, food or literally any object. I love that it’s a minimal, unobtrusive design that allows the user to personalize it to fit their space and suit their taste.

Schoner just completed the manufacturing in March and so far I’ve only seen the unit in white, but hopefully he’ll come out with colored versions soon. Z step is currently on exhibition at Depot Basel until this Wednesday, July 11, 2012.

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Danish architectural practice 3XN launched their internal “Innovation Unit” called GXN in 2007 with the goal “to develop a building culture that positively affects the world in which we live both architecturally and environmentally” (the ‘G,’ of course, stands for ‘green’). Their latest project fits nicely with our March editorial theme of Food Design, the increasingly fertile intersection of the two creative pursuits: Copenhagen’s NOMA—which (if you don’t know by now) was voted the Best Restaurant in the World for the second year in a row—invited them to design the interior of the new NOMA Food Lab.

In fact, we had the opportunity to meet the brilliant René Redzepi, founder and executive chef of NOMA at the Design Indaba Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Of the collaboration with 3XN/GXN, he said, “We have been happy to work with GXN on the transformation of our former meeting rooms. The result is great and has contributed to not only the space, but also organizational life and inspiration.”

NOMA Lab’s interior fixtures (no connection to Noma Bar’s Wallpaper covers) presented a challenge from the outset: the facilities are housed in “a former warehouse on the national registry of protected buildings. The tight restrictions meant that GXN was required to design the interior without using so much as one single nail in the walls or flooring.” Thus, the design team had to literally work around the existing space:

The approach was to design four central multi-functional storage units; each composed from over five hundred uniquely formed wooden cubes. Curving playfully throughout the space, these units divide the 200m2 room into smaller areas accommodating the Food Lab, the herb garden, staff areas and office. Raw and simple, through colours and forms, it captures a unique Nordic aesthetic. True to the restaurant’s philosophy, the NOMA Lab is developed exclusively using Nordic materials.

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We were pretty excited when we first heard about U.K.’s McKay Flooring use of reclaimed whiskey barrels for bespoke flooring; now they’re back with veritable barrels of wall cladding. We’ll leave the charming ’cross-the-pond spelling intact:

The original philosophy was to extend the life of the beautiful oak barrels, that would other wise have ended up as landfill, and manufacture solid wood parquet flooring from the staves and lids. Having achieved this to much acclaim we were still left with plenty of usable prime oak from the many staves that were unsuitable for converting into the thin flat strip flooring. We have now introduced Whisky Barrel Cobbles to the Whisky Barrel Flooring range.

Taking inspiration from the gentle curve of the contours of a whisky barrel we noticed the likeness to traditional granite cobble sets that once paved the streets or our native Glasgow. By cutting the staves down to hand sized blocks and applying some finishing and staining we’ve replicated the cobble look for use indoors utilising the authentic the casks cast off by the Scottish Whisky Industry.

Glasgow’s Bruadar bar is among the first watering holes to boast a rustic oaky interior courtesy of McKay’s.

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