Hasta La Ideas

Berlin architects Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke have been awarded this year’s Mies van der Rohe Award for Study Pavilion, a steel-framed university building in Germany.

Düsing and Hacke, who founded their eponymous studios in 2015 and 2016 respectively, are the youngest people to have ever received the biennial accolade, also known as the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture or EUmies Award.

The gridded Study Pavilion was created for the Technical University of Braunschweig as a campus building containing flexible spaces for studying and socialising.

It won the prize for “its ability to challenge the constraints and imagery of sustainability, creating a welcoming and playful environment for study, collaboration and community gathering through an uncompromising and carefully detailed structure,” according to the award announcement.

“It has taken a clear architectural idea, scrutinised it and pushed it to the limit,” the announcement continued. “More than being a building, it could be understood as a versatile system, merging technological inventions with a flexible and reusable principle.”

The Study Pavilion has a hybrid steel-wood structure organised in a three-by-three metre grid of columns and beams, wrapped with fully glazed facades.

Study spaces are spread across an open-plan ground floor and a mezzanine level, with sound-absorbing yellow curtains that can be drawn to create separated zones.

The university building was selected as the winner from a list of 362 nominated projects. Among the finalists were a school in Spain with zigzagging shapes animating the facade, a renovated 15th-century convent and a slaughterhouse that was transformed into an art gallery.

The Mies van der Rohe Award also announced Spanish studio SUMA Arquitectura as the winner of the Emerging Architecture prize for its design of the Gabriel García Márquez Library in Barcelona.

The library has a geometric form with chamfered edges and an interior organised around a triangular atrium.

“The library acts at the scale of the city, contributing to the transformation of the neighbourhood by opening up as a new exterior and interior public space,” said the award announcement.

“This wooden structure unfolds as a rich sequence of monumental and domestic spaces that welcome neighbours and citizens, providing them with comfortable atmospheres for learning, teamwork, and community engagement,” it continued.

“With meticulous attention to detail, the authors have thoroughly examined and pushed the library programme to its fullest potential.”

Founded in Barcelona in 1988, the biennial Mies van der Rohe Award seeks to recognise the best architecture projects in Europe.

This year’s jury wanted to emphasise “the significance of architecture that explores the potential to shift mindsets and policies, as well as the importance of fostering inclusivity,” according to the organisers.

Irish studio Grafton Architects was the recipient of the 2022 Mies van der Rohe Award for a university building named Town House. It was the last-ever UK-based project to win the award since the country is no longer eligible to enter after Brexit.

Past winners also include a 1960s social housing renovation in France, which received the prize in 2019, and the 2017 winner was a renovated apartment block in Amsterdam.

The photography is by Leonhard Clemens unless stated.

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Navigation and understanding of the environment is an everyday challenge for the visually impaired. This limitation hinders their independence and of course, cripples their mobility. Walking aids and certain technology-assisted solutions do provide necessary navigation details with obstacle detection, but a personal assistant that talks to them like their own is still missing.

With the advent of generative AI, a designer duo has taken the leverage to create an AI-powered wearable device called InSight that intends to grant visual independence to the blind or anyone else who can leverage the benefit. The product was conceived for the Samsung Re:Create Challenge, which is a global competition that requires participants to perceive and conceptualize products that would repurpose ‘Samsung devices or their materials’ and promote sustainability.

Designers: Merve Nur Sökmen, Ayberk Kole

The basic idea of InSight is to seamlessly integrate with the user’s lifestyle while making available to them an accessible and connective, audio navigation experience in real-time. Designed to integrate all the features of existing Samsung consumer electronics, and to be constructed from recycled Samsung devices and materials, InSight helps reduce electronic waste, while performing the underlying function of a personal navigation assistant for the visually impaired.

With an onboard battery and an intuitive touch control, the pint-sized InSight can run navigation commands on the go. With its interesting clip-on design, one can wear it on their clothes and receive real-time audio descriptions of the visual environment in real-time, so navigation is better and more inclusive. To add more substance to the assistant’s capabilities, the user can talk back to the device, which then with its built-in AI can help with the possible information. A likely use case for students and travelers.

By helping perceive the surroundings in real-time and relaying comprehensive information to the user with audio descriptions, InSight can have a drastic impact in many lives that are dependent on others for mobility as of now. To make the device really helpful – beyond the AI integration – designers have worked its aesthetics around Samsung’s design language. The InSight connects seamlessly with smartphone and headphones of the user and provides onboard touch controls for personalized settings. And when it begins to run out of power plug it into a USB-C cable and juice it for another outing of independence!

The post Samsung AI-powered wearable assistant helps visually impaired navigate better with real-time audio descriptions first appeared on Yanko Design.

The windmill sails of the Moulin Rouge, an iconic 135-year-old cabaret venue in Paris, collapsed to the ground in the early hours.

Just before 2am this morning, the four blades attached to a red-painted windmill on top of the Moulin Rouge venue fell off and landed bent in front of the building, according to newspaper The Guardian.

Blades atop Paris landmark Moulin Rouge windmill collapse overnight
https://t.co/8o98mZ6FRh pic.twitter.com/cTJa8BjM4h

— FRANCE 24 (@FRANCE24) April 25, 2024

The windmill sails of the Moulin Rouge have fallen off

The letters M, O and U from the front sign also appear to have fallen, according to photos of the building posted on X, formerly Twitter. Firefighters were called to the area and no one was injured.

It is not yet known why the sails fell off.

The Moulin Rouge later took to Instagram to say the venue would stay open and the Thursday evening show would go ahead as planned “to keep the Parisian party spirit alive”.

Located in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, the red windmill and its sails made from wood and metal have come to be a tourist destination in the city.

According to the Moulin Rouge’s Instagram post, windmill sails have been turning on the building for 135 years, since its opening.

The collapsed sails were reportedly rebuilt 20 years ago to make them lighter and were checked every two months.

Les joies d’aller bosser à 3h : se retrouver nez à nez avec l’hélice du moulin rouge tombée par terre pic.twitter.com/Xi9zI0TJHu

— Adélaïde Malavaud (@AMalavaud) April 25, 2024

The sails collapsed to the ground and bent

The cabaret venue, which is famously home to the French can-can dance, opened in 1889. It was destroyed in a fire in 1915 and didn’t reopen again until 10 years later.

Paris is expecting an increase in tourists this summer as it prepares to host the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

French studio Chatillon Architectes recently unveiled its progress on the renovation of the Grand Palais, which will host fencing and taekwondo events for the games, and winning athletes can expect to walk away with a piece of the Eiffel Tower in their medals.

The top photo is by Dietmar Rabich via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Windmill sails fall off Moulin Rouge cabaret in Paris appeared first on Dezeen.

Space may be infinite, but it has the same problem we do on Earth: Not enough housing. Builders of space habitats are constrained by shipping capacity. While rocket launches have become cheaper and more frequent, there are only so many building materials you can cram into the payload. “For example, the ISS took more than 40 flights,” writes Max Space, “and cost more than $100 billion to build. Max Space can provide the equivalent cubic volume of the ISS in space for $200 million—including launch—bringing the cost down by over a hundred-fold.”

Company founder Maxim de Jong, a pioneer of “soft system space architecture,” is the world’s premier expert on using expandable materials in space. (Two experimental expanding-material spacecraft of his design, Genesis I and Genesis II, have been orbiting the planet since 2006 and 2007.) Here’s how his latest design, the Max Space 20, would deploy:

Here are some shots of the full-scale ground prototype:

“Max Space expandables use an entirely unique design approach and philosophy. Our expandables incorporate ‘isotensoid’ architecture whereby every structural fiber element remains unencumbered and free to assume an ideal geometry for optimum load-bearing capability. The benefits of the Max Space design are enormous ranging from lowest possible mass and cost to unsurpassed predictability and unlimited scalability. Despite the conceptual simplicity of the Max Space design, the challenges of its practical implementation were overcome by the lifelong relentlessness of founder Maxim de Jong’s design acumen.”

As for weathering impacts from space debris, the company says their material is “safer and stronger than traditional hard modules. This is largely due to the architecture composed of a multi-layered system of fiber-based ballistic shielding of much greater resilience than aluminum and titanium.”

The Max Space 20 is so named because it provides 20 cubic meters (706 cubic feet) of interior space. That’s a far cry from the ISS’ habitable volume of 388 cubic meters (13,696 cubic feet), but the company can’t pass the battery of required testing hurdles all in one go; so the plan is to launch the 20 unit in 2026, followed in the next four years by the Max Space 100 and Max Space 1000, the latter of which will properly dwarf the ISS.

“More volume, less cost” is the company’s motto. Here’s their pitch:

Dezeen Showroom: Italian stone brand Antolini has updated its Cristallo Vitrum tableware collection, adding a material combination that evokes the look of glacial ice.

Titled Cristallo Vitrum “Wow”, the new variation features translucent natural quartz stone paired with satin gold-finished steel.

The play of cloudy and transparent sections and delicate amber veining gives the stone a mesmerising appearance, similar to large ice sheets, while the metal components create contrast.

The Cristallo Vitrum tableware collection includes a lamp, candleholders, trays, place markers, serving stands and a caviar and butter set.

Rounded, pebble-like shapes repeat throughout the collection, softening the feel of hard stone and metal, and subtly echoing the lopsided circle of Antolini’s logo.

Antolini describes the collection as “like small works of architecture” that demonstrate the “infinite versatility” of natural stone and the many effects that the manufacturer is able to create with it.

Product details:

Product: Cristallo Vitrum
Brand: Alessandro La Spada
Designer: Antolini
Contact: info@antolini.com

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