Hasta La Ideas

James Morgan a réalisé le clip du chanteur Nick Mulvey pour sa chanson « Meet Me There ». On y suit un africain sur les belles terres, le désert et reliefs du Yemen. Filmé avec une caméra Red Epic Dragon, le clip est à découvrir dans ses deux versions : l’officielle et le director’s cut.

Director’s Cut Version :

Official Version :

Helmed by Design Miami co-founder Ambra Medda, L’ArcoBaleno is an extraordinary online marketplace for the cultured design enthusiast. To provide further…

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Flowering vines will sprawl across the facades of these four tower blocks underway in Casablanca by French studio Maison Edouard François, creating a series of brightly coloured vertical gardens.

Located in the Les Hopitaux district of the North African city, the Gardens of Anfa project by Maison Edouard François comprises three mid-rise residential towers and a low-rise office office block. Set to complete by 2017, it will be the first development in Africa to feature vertical gardens this extensively.

Each floor of the three 16-storey residential towers will feature wrap-around balconies with screens made from an interwoven mesh. The balcony walls will be planted with jasmine or white bougainvillea, an ornamental vine native to South America.

As the plants become established they will grow throughout the mesh, creating a blanket effect on the exteriors of the buildings. The 12-storey office block meanwhile will be differentiated from the surrounding buildings by the multicoloured flowers adorning its facade.

The development encompasses a 50,000 square-metre site. Once complete, it will become a new mixed-use quarter that will also include public spaces, underground car parking and a series of low-rise residential blocks.

At the base of the towers, public spaces will include seating, cafes, water features and a thoroughfare for cars and buses. Washingtonia palm trees will create a dense thicket of foliage, shading pedestrians from the intense Moroccan sun.

Moving further away from the centre, trees and bushes of blue and white blossoms will be planted to separate the towers from the low-rise residential buildings that form the outer edge of the development.

These buildings will feature a series of balconies jutting out from the facade at random, and are also intended to incorporate vertical gardens. A row of purple blossom trees will form an outer perimeter, completing the development.

“These residential buildings break down the scale of the high-rise towers to give the park an inhabited character. This architecture of individual buildings demarcates the limits of the gardens,” added the spokesperson.

This isn’t the first time Maison Edouard François has combined high-rise buildings with plants. Tour Végétale de Nantes was a concept unveiled by the studio in 2011 that featured trees and shrubs growing in stainless steel tubes on each floor of a tower.

Here’s some information from the architects:

The Gardens of Anfa, Casablanca – Morocco

The Gardens of Anfa will be the landscaped heart of a new neighbourhood in Morocco.

A large, dense park conceals a series of four buildings with vegetal façades, creating mimetic games with the surrounding nature.

In the foreground, Washingtonias are planted as if in a dense forest. In the mid-ground, multi-colored flowers cover the topography. In the background, trees and bushes flourish with blue and white blossoms.

The architecture plays itself out in many colors. Towers with organic forms are implanted around the square. The towers with office spaces have façades that are planted with multicolored bougainvilleas. The towers with housing units appear white, planted with jasmine or white bougainvilleas.

Lower buildings surround the park and are set back from the adjacent roads. The façades of these small buildings are vertical gardens. These residential buildings break down the scale of the high-rise towers to give the park an inhabited character. This architecture of individual buildings demarcates the limits of the gardens.

Program : Mixed-use program consisting of three mid-rise residential towers (R+16), a low-rise office tower (R+12), surrounded by low rise residential blocks, convenient amenities for the residences open onto the central and linking public piazza and three underground parking lots distributing each lot that make up the master plan.

Client: Yasmine Signature Anfa Club
Team: Maison Edouard François, Groupe 3 Architectes (local construction architect)
Area: 50 000 M² Net Floor Area
Schedule competition: 2012
Construction permit: 2013
Delivery: 2017

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Gardens of Anfa by Maison Edouard François appeared first on Dezeen.

Design strategy collective Urban-Think Tank has designed and built a prototypical house as part of an initiative to improve housing conditions for slum dwellers in some of the 2700 informal settlements across South Africa (+ movie).

Urban-Think Tank, which was involved in the Golden Lion-winning research into the Torre David vertical slum in Caracas, has this time teamed up with ETH Zürich university to search for ways that architects can help improve the environment and security of these slums that house approximately 15 percent of the country’s entire population.

Working under the title Empower Shack, the team organised a design-and-build workshop in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town that is one of the largest in South Africa, and developed a design for a low-cost two-storey shack for local resident Phumezo Tsibanto and his family.

They then worked together to replace Tsibanto’s existing single-storey dwelling with the new two-storey structure, giving the family a new home with a watertight exterior and its own electricity.

The designers are now exploring different configurations of the prototype that will allow it to adapt to the needs of different residents, extending up to three storeys when necessary.

This in turn becomes part of a wider strategy for rationalising the layout of the entire community, known as blocking out. This involves creating access routes for emergency vehicles and providing basic services such as sanitation and water.

“Our work on the Empower Shack project is not the result of the usual architectural pursuit for a new housing typology,” said Urban-Think Tank co-founder Alfredo Brillembourg. “While we are absolutely trying to innovate upon the design and technology of low-cost housing, we’re more concerned with the general ‘system’ that surrounds housing in the context of informal South African settlements.”

He continued: “This includes the infrastructure that makes housing decent, such as power and sanitation, along with the urban configuration of homes. The Empower Shack project seeks to address these larger challenges, and in doing so, hopefully changes not just the built landscape of places like Khayelitsha, but also the social, political and economic structures that shape residents’ lives.”

Brillembourg and partner Hubert Klumpner are now showing their findings from the two-year research in an exhibition at the Eva Presenhuber Gallery in Zurich.

Here’s a project description from Urban-Think Tank:

Empower Shack

Can art and architecture lend a voice to segments of the population that go unheard? Empower Shack is a new exhibition presenting an ETH Zürich and Urban-Think Tank project on South Africa, supported by Swisspearl (Schweiz) AG. A collaboration between the Brillembourg & Klumpner Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, South African NGO Ikhayalami (‘My Home’), Transsolar, Brillembourg Ochoa Foundation, Meyer Burger, the BLOCK ETH ITA Research Group, and videocompany, the Empower Shack team was established as a response to conventional approaches in dealing with urban informality, which are unsustainable and painstakingly slow in meeting the immediate needs of the vast majority of South Africa’s urban poor.

With its roots in a research, design and build workshop aimed at developing an innovative, replicable, affordable and sustainable shack prototype for Cape Town’s Khayelitsha (the third largest township in South Africa), the exhibition uses film, photography, drawings, painting and large-scale architectural installations to explore the complexity of living conditions in informal settlements, and the social role of architects in helping to address the economic, ecological and security challenges faced by residents.

With a population of over 50 million and the continent’s largest economy, South Africa is often seen as a source of relative stability and prosperity in the region. Yet economic inequality remains high. Around 1.5 million households (approximately 7.5 million people) live in 2,700 informal settlements scattered across the country, which faces an overall shortage of 2.5 million houses.

While the government’s record on housing delivery is laudable, the scale of need means informal settlements will remain for the foreseeable future. In response, authorities have slowly begun shifting the focus to incremental upgrading, including committing in 2010 to improve the quality of life of 400,000 households in well located informal settlements by 2014 through improved access to basic services and land tenure.

Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, along with their research and design teams and collaborating partners are engaged in an ongoing project to develop and implement design innovations for rapid and incremental informal settlement upgrading.

The examples featured in the Empower Shack exhibition are intended to provide immediate strategies to alleviate a national crisis, while remaining embedded within community-driven processes around resource allocation.

With Empower Shack, Brillembourg and Klumpner reinforce their broader vision for practical, sustainable interventions in informal settlements around the world. They argue the future of urban development lies in collaboration among architects, artists, private enterprise, and the global population of slum-dwellers.

Brillembourg, Klumpner and their team frequently exhibit internationally in venues such as Kassel (2004), MoMA (2010) and the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture, where they were awarded the Golden Lion in 2012. Through artistic and didactic presentations, they issue a call to arms to their fellow architects to see in the informal settlements of the world a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in the service of a more equitable and sustainable future.

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prototype for South African slums appeared first on Dezeen.

Photo essay: French photographer Romain Veillon explored an abandoned town that is slowly being consumed by the Namib desert to create these images of once-opulent buildings filled with sand dunes.

The discovery of diamonds at the turn of the twentieth century prompted the establishment of Kolmanskop as a settlement for German miners, but it was abandoned just 50 years later when the diamond fields became exhausted and the value of the stones decreased. Now little more than a tourist destination, the ghost town is gradually disappearing under sand, so Romain Veillon paid a visit to document its remains.

The series is entitled Les Sables du Temps, which translates as The Sands of Time. Veillon hopes it will serve as both a memory of the perishing town and a reminder of the “strength of nature”.

Once rich and opulent, Kolmanskop is now a ghost town invaded by sand and lost in the middle of the Namib desert. But its history stays as short as it is surprising; founded after the discovery of diamonds by German settlers in 1908, Kolmanskop went through a real “diamond rush” and very fastly became the nerve centre of the area, due to its rich deposit of diamond. The legend says that even by night, you only had to go down to find diamonds in the sand, thanks to the moonlight.

Kolmanskop faced a striking prosperity that attracted many adventurers and other prospectors from across Africa, prosperity symbolised by the fact that Kolmanskop inhabitants used to get their clean water from 1000 kilometres away in Cape Town, or that they imported their champagne from Reims!

Kolmanskop emerged from the soil very quickly, as the new immigrants settled in the city. From a German inspiration, you could soon find there a hospital, a butcher shop, a bakery, an ice factory, a bowling alley, a casino, a school, a power plant and even a swimming pool. The hospital there received the first X-ray machine of the entire African continent, although the machine was mostly used to verify if miners had swallowed diamonds. At its zenith, Kolmanskop welcomed more than 1200 people and 700 families.

Unfortunately the drop of the diamond price after the First World War and the discovery of a bigger deposit south buried the last hope of Kolmanskop. Little by little the inhabitants quit the town, leaving behind them their houses and their belongings. By 1954, the city was entirely abandoned. Since then, it has slowly but surely become more and more covered by sand. Nowadays, Kolmanskop is only visited by the few tourists that venture into the isolated area.

With this set of photographs, I wanted to pay a tribute to this particular place and its past. For that, I have decided to underline the strength of nature that always takes back what is her’s, but also the ephemeral aspect of human constructions – symbolised here by the progress of sand and dunes through what remains of the city.

These silted doors are for me the symbol of an inevitable passing of time, reminding us that soon Kolmanskop will be no more and that we should enjoy it while it lasts. The light of the spot is also essential to me because it brings an atmosphere almost timeless and a strange sensation that is almost unreal.

You can lost in those dunes looking for the ghost of an ancient time, or trying to figure out what incredible stories must have taken place there.

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in photography by Romain Veillon appeared first on Dezeen.