Hasta La Ideas

Want to get out of your apartment without going far? Why not set up camp right down the block? The designs this week prove that urban camping has never been easier—or stranger.

Walking Shelter photos by tin&ed

The Walking Shelter is part Inspector Gadget, part performance piece. Created by the Australia and Amsterdam–based design collective Sibling, the Shelter deploys from a slightly odd-looking pair of sneakers. From the netted back of each shoe, the wearer pulls out a single-person tent stored in two parts. When zipped together, it almost looks like the real thing, save for one key design feature: the covering relies on the wearer for support. So pulling up a tent also means assuming the (seated) position.

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Sometimes you want to enjoy the pleasures that come with sky and sun, but you don’t want to have to actually go outside to do it. This week’s group of designers turned our expectations outside in by inviting structures and materials usually slated for the outdoors into the indoors. The results range from droll to downright strange. But perhaps that just means we need to adjust our established outlook.

When the French designer Grégoire de Lafforest took on an 1,100-square-foot Paris loft renovation, he looked to nature for inspiration, placing a dried maritime pine tree adorned with plastic needles in the center of the space. Then he took the idea even further. Around the kitchen, de Lafforest erected a greenhouse constructed from a do-it-yourself kit. This house-within-a-house nicely divides up the space while leaving food preparation both enclosed and exposed.

Residing somewhere between gardening and composting, the installation Final Bloom by the Australian architect and designer Eugene Soler enlists the lopped-off tops of root vegetables as stars in an installation for the British Institute of Interior Design‘s 2013 conference. Saved from restaurants and friends’ kitchens, the veggie caps are placed in shallow pools of water filled by a series of bathroom fixtures (manufactured by the conference’s sponsors), where they sprout new growth. The series of containers and the vegetable off-cuts emerging from them look much more like indoor art than kitchen waste.

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You know summer is in full swing when even our bathtubs are stretching their legs and kicking back, hammock-style. That’s good for us. The more ways we can include that slouchy, forgiving form in our everyday lives, the more likely we are to experience the easy relaxation we associate with it. Here’s hoping.

Splinter Works, a design studio headquartered 30 miles south of London, has fused two furnishings—the hammock and the bathtub—into a serious relaxation tool. Constructed from aerospace-grade carbon fiber and foam, even the woven structure evokes the tree-suspended swing. Water fills Vessel from a freestanding tap, and a drain in the floor catches suds released by way of a plug at the tub’s lowest point. Like any good hammock, it’s strong enough to cradle two.

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Our nostalgia for paper manifests itself in more than just bespoke greeting cards and pocket-sized Moleskines. Papers of different thicknesses and colors can be cut and folded into forms that take on a strange intimacy, or even digitally recreated into characters from the craft store. Here’s what’s pertinent this week in pulp.

Just as beers and backyards are finally having their moment in the sun, the French design studio Zim & Zou crafts another seasonal staple: a full-sized barbeque grill made entirely of paper, complete with stacked skewers, drumsticks plump as hot air balloons and a geodesic bottle of Heinz to accompany it all. Although some of the images look like computer renderings, everything is handmade by the 25-year-old designers Lucie Thomas and Thibault Zimmermann, whose previous constructions include a paper Game Boy, a stop-motion greeting card for IBM and a lush leather-and-paper jungle for an Hermès window display.

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Heart of Architecture installation photos © Jon Meade

An embrace of the low res is popping up in more than just “deal with it” memes. In sculpture, architecture and interiors, designers are taking on projects square by square. The results are purposefully pixelated.

Giles Miller Studio required 2,433 pieces of curved stainless steel and etched brass to construct the large reflective disk currently on display in London for Clerkenwell Design Week. As the outdoor light changes, so do the lines of rectangles, which reveal new patterns at different times of day. The installation, called Heart of Architecture, is a brighter take on a project the studio built last year for the event—a similarly styled archway made up of 20,000 wooden hexagons.

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