Hasta La Ideas

Talk about taking an idea and running with it: D*Haus of London is a design studio that is singularly fixated on a geometric trick of reconstituing a square into a triangle in as few parts as possible—four, to be exact.

In 1903, an English mathematician called Henry Ernest Dudeney worked out how to turn a perfect square into a perfect equilateral triangle by dissecting the square in to four distinct shapes, these shapes can be rearranged into the triangle. This concept alone is fascinating but and the possibilities are endless when applying the formula to world of architecture and design.

Although the schematics for the Dudeney-inspired designs are something like Tangrams-meets-Jacob’s-Ladder, the natural extrapolations of the quadrilaterals—into 3D forms, each of which vaguely resembles Emilia Borgthorsdottir’s “Sebastopol”—makes for compelling articles of furniture. Director David Ben Grünberg, who co-founded the company with fellow architect/designer Daniel Woolfson, recently noted in an interview with Futurespace, “Everything we design has to work in a number of ways. Our designs become parametric in the sense that everything is related to the other.” The D*Light (get it?) comes in perspex and corian; the table comes in the latter, with over 100 custom color options.

But if the tabular extrapolation of Dudeney’s discovery is a straightforward interpretation of the geometric marvel, D*Haus has Fuller-esque ambitions for the concept. The D*Dynamic is billed as the world’s first dynamic house, which “can ‘metamorphosize’ and transform itself into eight configurations.”

Conceived for the harsh, climatic extremes from ‘Lapland to Cape Horn and Aleutians to Auckland,’ D*Dynamic can respond dynamically to its environment by controlled adaptation to seasonal, meteorological and astronomical conditions…

If this sounds remotely interesting to you, hit the jump to see the video…

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