The Bloated Shelf by Damien Gernay comprises an ash wood frame and four shelves made from sheets of leather filled with expanded foam. One side of the leather is glued to a wooden board to create the flat surface.
“The idea originates from the image of a prominent belly, constrained by a belt,” said Gernay. “The leather inflates in a natural way, making each piece unique,” he added.
The unit stands at 175 centimetres tall and is 85 centimetres wide.
The shelf forms part of the designer’s range of furniture using leather and foam, which includes a stool with a black leather seat. Gernay said the collection intends to “create a dialogue between a rigid structure and a flexible skin.”
The Bloated Shelf and Bloated Stool are on display at the Cabinets of Curiosity exhibition at Mint shop, 2 North Terrace, Alexander Square, London, SW3 2BA until 30 September 2013.
London Design Festival 2013: new studio Brose~Fogale has launched a valet stand, dresser and set of mirrors, which were installed in an east London boutique last week (+ slideshow).
Brose~Fogale‘s Camerino Collection includes a valet stand that balances on a horizontal bar and props up against the wall.
Clothing can hang from poles that stick out from the central stem.
It also has two shelves for shoes or accessories in front and a circular mirror to one side near the top.
The dresser has legs at each end that match a circular copper-tinted mirror, which sits atop a third stand protruding through the surface of the table.
The mirror is also available in a hand-held version, shaped like a table tennis bat with a wooden handle, or as a tabletop model with a small tray at its base.
Separate trays for loose change and other small objects also feature in the range, as well as angled coat pegs with rounded ends.
All are available in natural wood or painted in bright colours.
Here’s some more information from the designers about the installation:
The Artist’s Dressing Room
Start London joins forces with up and coming design studio, Brose~Fogale to celebrate the London Design Festival 2013.
Brose~Fogale, a partnership between designers Matteo Fogale and Joscha Brose will take over Start’s store windows from 14 to 22 September, showcasing their new Camerino Collection and reinterpreting the idea of an artist’s dressing room with their modern, contemporary furniture.
The installation is titled “The Artist’s Dressing Room”, which translates to Camerino in Spanish and Italian. Kate Moss before a fashion show, Marilyn Monroe preparing for her next hollywood shoot – the name instantly evokes images of glamour and excitement. It is this special place, and the five minutes before the curtain gets lifted that are magical, full of concentration, excitement and glamour.
Brose~Fogale, through their inspiring and original display will be recreating this scene in the Start Womenswear boutique located at 42 – 44 Rivington Street, and allowing the public to catch a glimpse of this intimate and never before seen moment.
News:Arizona architect Nick Tsontakis has unveiled plans for a house that will straddle a mountain and be shaped like a manta ray (+ slideshow).
The $30-million two-storey building is designed by Nick Tsontakis to sit on top of Mummy Mountain in Arizona.
“The overall form of the home is reminiscent of a manta ray – even though this was not intentional – and from the air the structure looks like it’s swimming on top of the mountain,” Tsontakis told Dezeen. “I wanted to make the house design memorable and simple. It is organic, soft and liveable.”
Tsontakis told Dezeen that he came up with the concept to capture views of both the McDowell Mountains in Scottsdale to the north and of Camelback Mountain and the city lights in Downtown Phoenix to the south. “It meant that I would somehow have to infuse the house into the mountain,” he explained.
A number of local guidelines restricted the scale of the design, said the designer. “We were not to exceed the height of the top of the mountain in the centre of the home and we had to draw a 20 degree line from the [mountain’s] pinnacle in all directions, which the house could not penetrate,” he explained.
Once completed, the property will contain six bedrooms and eight bathrooms, and will boast views across Paradise Valley from a series of viewing decks.
A ten-car garage located on the upper level will be accessed via a sloping road. On the same level there will be an entry hall and a pair of two-bedroom guest wings.
Stairs and elevators will descend to the main ground level, which will accommodate a master wing on the north side and a large living area to the south.
“The two wings will be connected with a tunnel bored through the mountain from north to south, and on the east a 2000 square-foot entertainment hall would be carved out of the mountain,” added Tsontakis.
The property is currently listed by Russ Lyon Sotheby’s International Realty and is due for completion in 2015. Tsontakis told Dezeen that “the project is not under construction yet”, but that he is in conversations with “several interested parties.”
Complex wooden lattices provide a stage set for archery competitions and boxing matches at this pair of university buildings in Tokyo by Japanese studio FT Architects (+ slideshow).
Located on the campus of Tokyo’s Kogakuin University, the two structures are both dedicated to sporting activities and called for column-free spaces built from low-cost materials.
Katsuya Fukushima and Hiroko Tominaga of FT Architects used locally sourced timber for the construction of both buildings.
They said: “We have salvaged the purity of traditional Japanese timber composition, simply made up of horizontals and verticals, which has been somewhat disregarded ever since the advent of modernism in Japan.”
“Small timber sections, normally reserved for furniture making, were chosen for the archery hall, and timber members deemed defected because of insect damage, for the boxing club,” they added.
A simple bolt-and-nut assembly was used for both frameworks, but required meticulous accuracy to ensure that each grid is made up of only perpendicular elements.
Archery Hall and Boxing Club, Kogakuin University, Tokyo
Structure & Space – medium-span, column-free
The project consists of two buildings, an archery hall and a boxing club, standing a few hundred metres apart on the grounds of Kogakuin University in west Tokyo.
The formal rituals of Kyudo (Japanese archery) and the very physical nature of boxing may appear worlds apart. However, surprisingly, the two built facilities share a number of commonalities.
The University’s brief was for low-cost structures made of locally sourced timber to provide accessible and inspiring spaces for the students. By chance, both facilities called for a column-free space of 7.2m by 10.8m, a size that is comparable to a sacred hall in a traditional Japanese temple. In order to achieve this span, without columns and using low-cost methods of timber construction, it was necessary to come up with an innovative timber solution. We began the project by investigating a number of structural forms that would be appropriate for each sport.
Underlying Principles
Through collaborative exploration with timber experts, from researchers, manufacturers to suppliers, we derived at timber materials that are not commonly associated with structural or architectural usage. Small timber sections, normally reserved for furniture making, were chosen for the archery hall, and timber members deemed defected because of insect damage, for the boxing club.
We have salvaged the purity of traditional Japanese timber composition, simply made up of horizontals and verticals, which has been somewhat disregarded ever since the advent of modernism in Japan. Delicate lattice frame composed of slender ties beams and posts for the archery hall, and a bolder, stepped frame, was employed for the boxing club. Here, timber, a historical material, has been reanalysed and transformed into a new building material.
Contrast/Complement
The two structures have been constructed employing a simple, lo-tech method of bolt-and-nut assembly. However, due to the scale of the space and simplicity of construction, the execution had to be meticulous, in order to produce spaces that are out of the ordinary.
For each building, the main subject is the 7.2m x 10.8m space and the timber structure, merely its backdrop. The powerful presence of the timber structure emphasises the stark transparency of the void below. The whole is only achieved by the juxtaposition of these two contrasting and complementing qualities.
Departing from the same starting point, the two buildings have arrived at a shared architectural theme via two different structural and spatial solutions.
Completion: 2013 Location: Tokyo, Japan Principal use: archery hall (Japanese archery=Kyudo) and boxing club Total floor area: archery hall 106.00 sqm, boxing club 92.75 sqm Structure: wood Architect: FT Architects/Katsuya Fukushima, Hiroko Tominaga
Vietnamese studio H&P Architects has built a prototype bamboo house designed to withstand floods up to three metres above ground (+ slideshow).
H&P Architects used tightly-packed rows of bamboo cane to build the walls, floors and roof of the Blooming Bamboo Home, along with bamboo wattle, fibreboard and coconut leaves.
Elevated on stilts, the house is accessed using wooden ladders that lead to small decks around the perimeter. The area beneath can be used for keeping plants and animals, but would allow water to pass through in the event of a flood.
The walls fold outwards to ventilate the building, plus sections of the roof can be propped open or completely closed, depending on the weather.
Inside, living and sleeping areas occupy the main floor, and ladders lead up to attic spaces that can be used for study or prayer.
The vernacular structure can be assembled in as little as 25 days and adapted to suit varying local climates and sites.
It has been designed as a house, but could also be used as a school classroom, medical facility or community centre.
“The house can keep people warm in the most severe conditions and help them control activities in the future, also contributing to ecological development as well as economic stabilisation,” said the architects.
Suspended sections of bamboo can be filled with plants to create a vertical garden on the facade.
At night, interior lighting shines through the cracks in the walls to make the building glow from within.
In Vietnam, the natural phenomena are severe and various: storm, flood, sweeping floods, landslides, drought, etc. The damage every year, which is considerable compared to the world scale, takes away about 500 persons and 1.2%-GDP-equally assets and reduces the involved areas’ development.
One solution to houses and homes for millions of these people is the goal of this BB (Blooming Bamboo) home.
From the bamboo module of f8-f10cm & f4-f5cm diameter and 3.3m or 6.6 length, each house is simply assembled with bolting, binding, hanging, placing.
This pulled monolithic architecture is strong enough to suffer from phenomena like 1.5m-high flood. Currently, H&P Architects is experimenting the model to suffer 3m-high flood. The space is multifunctional such as House, Educational, Medical and Community Centre and can be spread if necessary.
Example of closed and open house
From the fixed frame using f8-f10cm bamboo, the house cover can be finished according to its local climate and regional materials (f4-f5cm small bamboo, bamboo wattle, fibreboard, coconut leaf) in order to create vernacular architecture.
Therefore, the house can warm people in the most severe conditions and help them control activities in the future, also remarkably contribute to ecological development as well as economic stabilisation.
Reclaimed ceramic tiles decorate the recesses of this long white pavilion, which stretches across a redesigned town square in Provence by French architecture studio Comac (+ slideshow).
Marseille-based Comac designed the pavilion as part of a town centre redevelopment in Gignac la Nerthe, which included a new plaza, a children’s playground, a garden and the renovation of an existing stone barn.
Hollow sections in the volume of the long pavilion offer four sheltered areas, each lined with the colourful tiles that were found on the site.
One is intersected by a canal and fountain, while two others contain benches and tiered seating that create small open-air theatres.
At night, the tiles are illuminated by lights set at the pavilion’s base.
“The main goal was to unify three deserted plots into a whole public square connected with the actual city centre,” said the architects. “The entire urban project is creating several intimate spaces and foster social gatherings and activities.”
The old stone barn was restored to “leave a historical trace in the middle of the city”, while regional trees and flowers were planted in the botanical garden that surround the canal.
An old Roman City from the 1st century, Gignac la Nerthe is a city from the Provence region, 20km from Marseille. In the late 1960s, the city developed alongside the first wave of North African immigration and in the 1980s with the people moving from some of Marseille’s roughest neighbourhoods. Nowadays, the city has been populated by low cost individual housing that didn’t leave any room for public space. The city centre’s new square and pavilion delivers a two-level proposal: first an urban evolution and then a social answer.
The main goal is to unify three deserted plots into a whole public square connected with the actual city centre, composed of the town hall main square, the church, an old barn, a village house, an old wash house and the boulevard Perrier.
First of all, the houses had to be demolished to create a direct connection with the town hall square and the deserted plots. The old barn was renovated to leave a historical trace in the middle of the city. By extending the axis created by the municipality’s building, an architectural element is set up on one hand to structure the public space and on the other hand to organise some function needed in such a space.
In the continuation of the actual town hall’s square, the entrance of the project is defined by the new pavilion and the renovated old barn.
The long building (70 meters) is creating a mineral square followed by a botanical garden, old Provencal plants and flowers are growing along the square. On the other side of the pavilion, a Provencal garden is defined by 9 trees and a water canal.
The pavilion is hosting activities and functions, beginning by the children area: a small theatre and a playground, the fountain, toilets, a covered space for party, open air lunches and at the end an open air theatre for projection, children shows or movies shows.
A modern Provencal approach: the ceramic coloured pattern comes from a piece of ceramic founds on the site, as a testimony to the region’s heritage.
The entire urban project is creating several intimate spaces and foster social gatherings and activities. It is a powerful tool to help the municipality realise its social policy goals towards the citizens of Gignac la Nerthe.
Location: Marseille – Gignac la Nerthe Program: Pavilion, main square, botanic garden, kids playground, intimate garden, open air theatre, technical room, old wash house Surface: 3000 square metres
Client: City of Gignac la Nerthe Budget: €750,000 End of construction: July 2013 Building period: 10 months
Architect: Comac Landscape architect: Paul Petel Engineer: SLH – Franck Penel Building firms: DM construction, Paysages mediterraneens Urban furniture: Cyria
London Design Festival 2013: designers Laetitia de Allegri and Eva Feldkamp have created a collection of furniture and products including a magazine holder that resembles a toast rack (+ slideshow).
Photograph by Richard Hanson for the Brompton Design District
Laetitia de Allegri and Eva Feldkamp showed a selection of products designed individually, alongside three designs created in collaboration that were inspired by sailing.
“I sailed for the first time two years ago and I love everything about it,” Laetitia de Allegri told Dezeen. “The closeness to nature, the design of the boats, the materials, techniques, everything is so simple and beautiful.”
A beech tray features a linear arrangement of wooden slats joined using the process of caulking that traditionally creates a non-slip seal on boat decking.
Door handles sand cast from aluminium or gunmetal reference the curving form of propeller blades.
The duo’s foldable stool can be hung on the wall to display the fabric that creates its seat when unfurled. The fabric is attached to a horizontal bar that holds it in tension when in use and weighs it down when hung up.
Laetitia de Allegri exhibited a range of side tables and stools with colourful bands of glazing based on the look of the frayed ends of rugs.
De Allegri also showed a magazine rack that supports magazines between three protruding vertical fins. The product is available in marble or colourful ceramic.
Eva Feldkamp showed a pair of ceramic carafes with forms that reference their contents. The taller, slimmer vessel is for water, while the rounder one is used for pouring milk.
Feldkamp’s other product is a tape cutter comprising aluminium sections and a circular blade that can be stacked to create a tool for accurately cutting rolls of tape into strips of a desired width.
Photograph by Richard Hanson for the Brompton Design District
Drawing on the technical expertise developed throughout their studio work, the duo Laetitia de Allegri and Eva Feldkamp launch their debut exhibition, Issue No. 1, in a tribute to feminine sensibility at London Design Festival this September. Against a landscape of colours, a selection of independent projects – side tables, magazine racks, carafe and a tape cutter – are showcased alongside three feature collaborations: a series of door handles, a foldable stool and a tray, each inspired by the mood and feel of sailing.
The inspiration underpinning the collection is the free spirit of sailing. Through our projects, we explore its associated shapes, materials and techniques alongside its relationship to nature.
Door handle
The door handles capture the sensitivity experienced in the repetitive touching of an everyday object. All three handle types are sand cast, as is each shape – some from aluminium, some from gunmetal. This project revisits the domestication of a product that is technical in its design, yet involves the senses in its use, embodying the perfect balance between function and tactility
Foldable stool
This stool’s function is twofold. In its closed position, it can be hung on the wall to create a framework for the fabric that gently drops down lengthwise. The weight of a stitched inner tube creates a slight tension to display the material. When unfolded, the tube centers the fabric in between two simple frames joined at an axis, forming the seat.
Sparks by Laetitia de Allegri
SparkS is a collection of playful, ceramic side tables and stools, based on colour experiments in glazings. They were intended to be placed next to a sofa or bed, but are equally at home on terraces or in gardens. The superimposed colours were inspired by the frayed ends of rugs bundled together on display, fusing together to create a coincidental new world of colour. Dimensions: 350 x 350 x 540mm (Tall round Table), 300 x 300 x 240mm (Small round Table)
Photograph by Flurin Bertschinger
Untitled Nº 01 by Laetitia de Allegri
Untitled Nº01, marble magazine rack, has been created for the exhibition No function – no Sense? for DEPOT BASEL in August 2012. Dimensions: 310 x 400 x 210mm
Untitled Nº 02 by Laetitia de Allegri
Untitled Nº02, ceramic magazine rack. Dimensions: 310 x 400 x 210mm
Carafe by Eva Feldkamp
Similar in form, these two carafes are distinguishable by the liquid each is made to hold. The fresher, slimmer carafe complements the flowing, refreshing and transparent quality of water, while the rounder, deeper bellied carafe evokes the rich, nourishing quality of milk. Dimensions: 255 x 75 x 75mm 230 x 80 x 80mm
Tape cutter by Eva Feldkamp
Personal tool to customise the width of tape, composed of turned aluminium layers and circular knife. When the layers of turned aluminium are stacked to a certain height the tape can be cut precisely into a specific width. Pressure controls the number of layers, and with that, the length of the cut piece. Dimensions: 65 x 55 x 55mm
News: Zaha Hadid’s extension to the Serpentine Gallery has opened today in London’s Kensington Gardens (+ slideshow).
Located just across the river from the main gallery building, the Serpentine Sackler Gallery occupies a 200-year-old former gunpowder store. Zaha Hadid Architects renovated the old brick building to create new gallery spaces, then added a curving cafe and events space that extends from one side.
The new tensile structure is built from a glass-fibre textile, forming a free-flowing white canopy that appears to grow organically from the original brickwork of the single-storey gallery building.
It stretches down to meet the ground at three points around the perimeter and is outlined by a frameless glass wall that curves around the inside.
Five tapered steel columns support the roof and frame oval skylights, while built-in furniture echoes the shapes of the structure.
“The extension has been designed to to complement the calm and solid classical building with a light, transparent, dynamic and distinctly contemporary space of the twenty-first century,” explain the architects. “The synthesis of old and new is thus a synthesis of contrasts.”
For the original building, the architects added a new roof that sits between the original facade and the outer enclosure walls, creating a pair of rectangular galleries in the old gunpowder stores and a perimeter exhibition space in the former courtyards.
A series of skylights allow the space to be naturally lit, but feature retractable blinds to darken it when necessary.
The Serpentine Sackler Gallery is Zaha Hadid’s first permanent structure in the UK and follows the studio’s Lilas installation at the gallery in 2007 and pavilion in 2000.
The gallery opens with an exhibition from Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas.
London Design Festival 2013:sound machines that transform and distort visitors’ voices feature in this interactive installation by Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki (+ slideshow + movie).
The Garden of Russolo at the Victoria and Albert museum comprises voice-activated devices that Yuri Suzuki calls White Noise Machines. Each processor is housed in a wooden box on four legs and has a horn on one side that receives sounds made by visitors and emits the transformed noises.
“If you speak or scream into one of the boxes, it captures your voice and translates it into various effects,” Suzuki told Dezeen.
Each box is fitted with a Raspberry Pi computer to process the sounds it receives and each machine is programmed to create a different effect.
One machine plays sounds back in reverse, another creates musical notes and another can speed up or slow down sounds when a handle on the side is turned.
Suzuki told Dezeen that he created the machines to allow people to appreciate the sounds that they can make. “You never realise or feel the sounds that you are creating and the sounds that you do create disappear almost immediately,” said Suzuki.
“I wanted to create a way for people to capture sound and a moment for them to realise how interesting it is,” he added.
Suzuki originally designed the White Noise Machines for the Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi, India, in 2009 where he was a resident artist.
The Garden of Russolo was on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum last week as part of the London Design Festival. “A museum gallery is a great location to present this idea as most museums tend to be quiet and people care more about the noise they create,” said Suzuki.
Here’s a film of visitors interacting with the machines in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Sackler Centre foyer:
Here’s another film of the sound machines in the V&A’s John Madejski Garden:
Suzuki told Dezeen that he named the installation after Italian Futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo. “He treated noise as music and created machines purely to create big noises,” Suzuki said.
Yuri Suzuki is an artist who explores the territory of sound and design by developing devices under the theme of sound-technology and music-human relationships. In our daily lives, we are unconsciously surrounded by environmental sound, but sound influences people’s minds to a great extent. Suzuki produced numerous works focusing on this “noise”.
One representative work is sound-taxi: a London black cab outfitted with a sound collector microphone and many speakers records the surrounding noise, converts it into music, and outputs it real time.
Additionally, he produced Child Chiller, which uses the visible effect of “white noise” to erase noise with some other noise. This uses the noise that resembles the sound in Mother’s womb and is said to relax and stop babies from crying.
Similarly, this time, V&A introduces the new work, “White Noise Machine”, that asks about “the sound-human relationship” using this “white noise”.
It is based on “silent city” project during his residence at Khoj Artist Association in New Delhi in 2010 to erase the town’s noise. He says New Delhi is the noisiest city that he ever visited and could not stand the noise, which normally he comfortably enjoys. So he used the noise erasing effect for TV static called white noise and made a device that produces the same amount of noise in order to make the noisy city silent.
Throughout his works, Suzuki’s problem consciousness always stays at “sound” and “physical law”. He conveys invisible “sound” and “mechanism of things moving” to viewers as a fun experience. Substance itself is at the same time an object that explains it. His concept is simple, clear and design is pop, that’s what makes it good. It is rare to find a designer who is so good at making an entrance to products’ humorous part. It is strange that while looking at his works the machines become loveable and almost human-like.
Italian plastic brand Kartell has released its first accessories collection of translucent bags with shoes to match (+ slideshow).
Grace K handbag
Better known as a furniture producer, Kartell has collaborated with designer Giorgiana Zappieri of fashion brand .normaluisa to create the range of plastic accessories.
Grace K handbags
Grace K drawstring handbags are made from translucent plastic with gold-coloured chain straps, named after actress Grace Kelly.
The bags come in black, coral, cream and gold, as well as a pair of two-toned variants including dove-grey and peach, plus bone and dove-grey.
Grace K handbags
Kartell’s first range of So K flat sandals with ankle straps is available in colours that match the handbags. Other shoes in the brand’s catalogue including ballerina pumps and platform shoes have been updated in new fluorescent tones.
Kartell is proud to announce its presence at Super with a stand dedicated to its collection of Kartell à la Mode accessories.
For Spring Summer 2014, Kartell is launching its first handbag, “Grace K”, designed in collaboration with .normaluisa designer, Giorgiana Zappieri. The timeless shapes of the so-called “drawstring bag” are given new life through the transparency of plastic combined with glittering gold-coloured chains for the strap. The name Grace K is obviously a tribute to the undisputed style icon Grace Kelly, bearing testimony to a relaxed elegance that’s never showy.
So K sandal
Grace K will be available in monochromatic versions in black, coral, cream and gold, and in two two-toned variants: dove-grey/peach and bone/dove-grey. These last two models sport contrasting shades on the top and bottom of the handbag, a duotone that is adorned with a coral-coloured drawstring on the first version and a black one on the second.
Glue Cinderella ballerina pumps
In addition to Grace K, we are also introducing So K, the catalogue’s first flat sandal to complete the already wide range of footwear. So K is available in four colours: black, gold, peach and coral. With a simple shape and minimalist design, So K adapts to lots of different occasions of use, adding a colourful and ironic, but always discrete touch to any look.
Lady platform shoes
These two new items for next summer join Kartell à la mode classics which have been given new colours to keep up with the latest trends: Glue Cinderella ballerinas will be available in two new two-tone versions: fuchsia/lime and petroleum/lime. And the soft Lady platform shoes with be highlighted with fluorescent tones, in the same colours as the Cinderella ballerinas, and with two new, even softer, models in black/smoky and dove-grey/peach.
Our regular models are also available alongside our very latest items: Glue Cinderella ballerinas by .normaluisa and Bow Wow by Moschino, Lady platform peep-toe sandals with plateau sole by .normaluisa and Super Bow by Moschino, as well as Sofia boots and Demi Sofia ankle boots, both designed by .normaluisa, and also available in Metal and Wild versions.
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