This week’s job of the week on Dezeen Jobs is a position working with French designer Philippe Starck (pictured) as a senior architect. Visit the ad for full details or browse other architecture and design opportunities on Dezeen Jobs.
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at Philippe Starck appeared first on Dezeen.
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from Eindhoven, Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma show us their experiments with unusual materials including fish skin, cow bladders, animal blood and even lava.
Italian designers Farresin and Trimarchi, who met at Design Academy Eindhoven and set up Formafantasma in the small Dutch city after graduating, have become well-known for their interesting use of materials.
Past projects include objects made out of food, a range of natural plastic vessels and furniture covered with discarded animal skins.
The duo’s latest project involves melting down volcanic rock from Mount Etna in Sicily.
“We are conducting some really simple experiments by remelting lava,” Farresin tells us when we visited their studio during Dutch Design Week.
“We are working with basalt fibres, which is this really interesting material that we found. It is similar to glass fibre, but is entirely produced by the melting of lava. Because of the chemical components of lava, you can create fibres with it.”
Farresin shows us two applications of the material, a textile made from woven threads of basalt fibre as well as a ceramic-like material, which is made from layers of this textile heated in a kiln.
“We put it in a ceramic oven and control [the temperature] so that the basalt fibre does not melt completely and turns into a more structural material,” Farresin explains.
He then shows us fish skin samples from Formafantasma’s Craftica project for Fendi.
“What we like about these skins, which we got from a company in Iceland, is that they have been discarded by the food industry,” he says. “We are actually continuing the investigation of these materials and are [currently] designing a piece for a company using fish skins.”
The Craftica collection also included water containers made from animal bladders, which Trimarchi shows us next.
“These are from cows and, again, they come from the food industry,” he says. “Usually these are used in Italy to make cases for mortadella [an Italian sausage].”
Farresin adds: “We still find the material fascinating, so we thought to use them in lighting. We made a construction using the valve of a bike so that we can basically dry the piece and inflate it directly on the LED light source.”
Finally, Farresin and Trimarchi show us samples from their Botanica project, a series of vessels made from natural plastics, which was acquired by London’s V&A Museum this year.
The first is bois durci, a nineteenth-century plastic made from sawdust and animal blood. Then he shows us pieces of shellac, a natural polymer secreted by lac bugs, a small parasitic insect native to India and Thailand.
Trimarchi says that, since the Botanica project, they have been looking into better methods of producing the material as well as ways of using it.
“Something we are really trying to investigate is to make the production process of shellac more efficient,” he explains.
Farresin adds: “Nowadays it is just farmed by small communities in India and Thailand. We see a parallel between this and silk production, but the farming is really difficult.”
“We are interested in getting in touch with institutions in India to see if we can participate in improving the bug farming there.”
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.
You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.
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is “experimenting with lava” appeared first on Dezeen.
News: British architects Theis and Khan have been selected to design the new headquarters for the Royal Institute of British Architects at 76 Portland Place in London.
Located a couple of doors down from the RIBA‘s existing base at 66 Portland Place, the current Institute of Physics building will be completely renovated to create enough office space to bring all the architecture institute’s London staff under one roof.
Construction is scheduled to begin in March 2014 and expected to complete by the end of the year, freeing up space in the existing premises for new exhibition and events spaces that will include a gallery of architecture designed by London studio Carmody Groarke.
Patrick Theis and Soraya Khan saw off competition from five other shortlisted firms to win the project.
“We look forward to delivering a high quality sustainable design that both meets the RIBA’s aspirations for its new building and reflects the integrity of 66 Portland Place,” they said. “We were intrigued by the potential synergies between the two buildings and look forward to developing these further with the RIBA.”
The architects were selected following a panel interview with a group of RIBA members and will deliver the project alongside engineers Max Fordham and Price & Myers.
“The selection panel was greatly impressed by all the shortlisted teams’ initial thoughts, approach to the project and their experience and ability to deliver within a constrained timeframe,” said RIBA president Stephen Hodder.
“Theis and Khan gave an exceptionally considered approach and clearly demonstrated how they aim to meet our aspirations. We were particularly inspired by the team’s consideration of the relationship between our new premises and our main RIBA headquarters building, and how they had successfully delivered projects with such synergies in the past,” he added.
The RIBA has taken a 43-year lease on 76 Portland Place.
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new RIBA headquarters appeared first on Dezeen.
The entire facade of this house in the Japanese town of Ōiso by atelier HAKO architects is clad in fibre-reinforced cement boards and punctuated by a series of scattered windows (+ slideshow).
The grey boards are typically used as a standard roofing material in Japanese housing developments but were also applied by atelier HAKO architects to cover the exterior walls.
Designed for a family with two children on a site near the Sagami Bay coastline of the Pacific Ocean, the cement boards also perform a practical role as they are resistant to corrosion from the salty air.
An offset gable gives the roofline an asymmetrical appearance, which helps the building stand out among its more conventional neighbours.
“The house was placed on the north side of the site in order to protect the garden from seasonal wind from [the] north in winter,” said the architects, who incorporated small windows on the north facade and positioned larger windows on the south side of the building facing the garden.
The southern facade also incorporates large sliding windows that open onto a deck reminiscent of an “engawa”, a strip of wooden flooring found between the living space and external storm shutters of traditional Japanese houses.
“[The] internal area was designed with an emphasis on continuity with the garden,” explained the architects, who created an open plan living and dining area on the ground floor next to a kitchen with an aperture in the wall linking the two spaces.
A spiral staircase with a bottom tread that appears to hover above the ground connects the living room with a hallway on the upper floor where the bedrooms, bathroom and children’s play area are also located.
Photography is by Shinsuke Kera / Urban Arts, unless stated otherwise.
Here are some details about the project:
The site is located at the edge of dwelling area close to the sea that is facing the agricultural land spread to the north-east mountain side.
The house was placed on the north side of the site in order to protect the garden from seasonal wind from north in winter.
Internal area was designed with an emphasis on continuity with the garden. In the south elevation, wide window and shallow depth wood deck which is like japanese traditional ‘engawa’ were provided as connect elements of the internal area and the garden, whereas other elevation was designed defensive to outside.
Triangular roof was slightly rotated with respect to the axis of the outer wall, the elevations got asymmetric shapes that offer humorous feeling at glance.
Fiber-reinforced cement board to be used usually as roofing material of mass production house in Japan was used as the exterior wall finishing material resistant to salt damage, thus overall architecture got abstract appearance covered with the same material all.
Name: House in Ōiso
Architect: Yukinobu Nanashima + Tomomi Sano / atelier HAKO architects
Structural engineer: Shin’itsu Hiraoka / Hiraoka Structural Engineers
Completion: March 2010
Location: Ōiso, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan
Primary usage: private residence
Structure: wooden construction, two stories above ground
Site area: 155.31 m2
Building area: 44.86 m2
Total floor space: 89.72 m2
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material by atelier HAKO architects appeared first on Dezeen.
Architect Zaha Hadid has created a set of rings from lattices of gold filigree for Swiss jewellery brand Caspita.
Zaha Hadid‘s first collection of gold jewellery, designed for Caspita, was unveiled yesterday at the architect’s London Gallery.
The designs were inspired by natural cell structures and comprise a double layer of polygons that form a delicate mesh over the finger.
The front of the band is shaped into a claw-like asymmetric point while the other side is shorter.
Made in black, white, yellow and pink gold, some of the rings have diamonds set into sections of the lattice. Bracelets in a similar style also form part of the limited-edition collection, though no images are available yet.
“This feat of entwined geometries reveals its extraordinary sparkle thanks to the skill of the goldsmiths who expertly hand-polish these prodigiously meshed works,” said the team behind the designs.
After its stint at the Zaha Hadid Design Gallery, the jewellery will be shown as part of an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach from 2 to 8 December.
This isn’t the first time Hadid has designed jewellery: she also created a collection for crystal brand Swarovski in 2010.
Here’s the text sent to us by Zaha Hadid Architects:
Zaha Hadid for Caspita
Zaha Hadid offers Caspita her visionary talent by designing two exclusive pieces, a ring and a bracelet, which will be edited in a limited series and launched at the Zaha Hadid Design Gallery in London on 28 November, on show until 2 December during the Caspita pop-up store at the Gallery.
The collection will then move to Art Basel Miami to be showcased in the temporary installation “Colette art DRIVE-THRU at alchemist” from 2 to 8 December. Succumbing to the charm of Caspita, Zaha Hadid dwells for the first time upon goldsmith’s objects.
This unprecedented partnership is the first of Caspita’s project of astounding collaborations between jewellery, architecture, contemporary art and design. Inspired by cellular structures found in nature, these creations harmoniously intensify the brand’s aphorism “See the invisible”.
The unparalleled Swiss craftsmanship makes the creation of these two sibylline jewels possible, a profusion of lattice in filigree produced in black, white, yellow and pink gold set with diamonds or not.
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jewellery for Caspita appeared first on Dezeen.
The new Museum Luthers Sterbehaus by Stuttgart architects Von M is a grey-brick extension to the house where Martin Luther died – but it turns out the Christian reformer “actually died in another building around the corner” (+ slideshow + photos by Zooey Braun).
The “death house” museum extends a late-Gothic house in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the town of Eisleben, Germany, that centres around the life of Luther, a key protagonist in the reform of Christianity in the sixteenth century.
Until recently the house was believed to be the place of Luther’s death, so Von M was commissioned to restore the house to its sixteenth-century appearance as part of a larger project to convert the site into a museum dedicated to the life of the man and the history of the reformation.
“Today we know it isn’t the building where Martin Luther died; it was a mistake and he actually died in another building around the corner that doesn’t exist any more,” Von M’s Dennis Mueller told Dezeen.
“As it was the building for thinking of Martin Luther, it is still seen as the Luther Sterbehaus [Luther’s Death House],” he added. “We still see the old building as not only a space for exhibitions, but as one of the most important parts of the exhibition. It’s an exhibit itself.”
The two-storey extension is located behind the old house and is constructed from pale grey bricks that were cut using jets of water to create an uneven texture.
“The colour of the bricks was especially chosen for the project so that the facade chimes together with the materials of the old building,” said Mueller.
The main entrance can be found at the rear of the site, leading visitors through to exhibition galleries and events rooms with exposed concrete walls and ceilings.
A ramped corridor slopes down to meet the slightly lower level of the old house, which has been completely restored.
Photography is by Zooey Braun.
Here’s some extra information from Von M:
Museum Luthers Sterbehaus
The building which is one of the UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites was extensively renovated and extended by a new building into a museum complex showing a permanent exhibition as well as exhibitions presenting diverse and specific aspects and topics.
The basic principle for the restoration of the building were the historically documented reconstructions by Friedrich August Ritter in 1868 and Friedrich Wanderer in 1894.
The relocation of the main entrance and all other important functional rooms into the new building made it possible to largely preserve the existing basic structure of the old building.
Because of its clear cubature and structure, the new building that is connected to the existing one expresses itself in a self-conscious and contemporary speech, still it subordinates itself under the existing and its environment conditioned by the materiality of its facade as well as the differentiation of the single parts of the building in dimension and height.
Because of the mutual integration of the new and the existing building a significant and impressing round tour through the museum rooms has been developed – a tour that confronts the visitor with a diversity of aspects and themes of the permanent exhibition “Luthers letzter Weg”.
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by Von M built at wrong address appeared first on Dezeen.
San Francisco studio Fuseproject has created a concept for a wearable device to allow people in the developing world to test themselves for symptoms of chronic illnesses such as malaria without having to visit a doctor (+ slideshow).
Kernel of Life would allow users to test their own blood, saliva, urine or breath and transmit the results to doctors via a mobile phone.
Patients would communicate with doctors remotely via an app on the smartphone. “Kernel is our answer to the complications of treating chronic illnesses in the developing world, malaria in particular,” said Yves Behar of Fuseproject.
“When the nearest doctor is days away, both treatment and diagnosis can be accomplished through the cloud-based and embedded medical test that Kernel offers.”
Fuseproject developed the concept in response to a brief from Microsoft owner Bill Gates’ charity the Gates Foundation and Wired magazine, who invited four leading design firms to create prototypes for products that could help improve the lives of people in the developing world.
To use the device, users rotate the circular cover to reveal a micro-perforated pad, divided into four colour-coded quadrants to match the different types of biosamples that could be gathered.
“The four quadrant bio-sensing absorbent pad can test the blood, saliva, urine and breath,” said Behar. “Test results are transmitted via bluetooth to a mobile app allowing patients to be continuously monitored remotely via the cloud, with reminders such as medicine intake or doctor’s visits.”
A built-in sterilising pad would clean the sampling surface when the cover is closed. The device, which can be worn around the neck, also monitors the user’s temperature.
The sensor technology required to make the Kernel of Life is currently too expensive and not robust enough for its intended application, but Fuseproject predicts it could be perfected in five to ten years.
Other wellbeing products designed by Behar include a range of stylish pill containers and a wristband that tracks your movement and gives advice on how to live more healthily.
He also worked with the One Laptop Per Child Association to create affordable laptops and tablets for use in the developing world.
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“when the nearest doctor is days away” appeared first on Dezeen.
Our exclusive interview with Rem Koolhaas about his firm OMA’s giant De Rotterdam complex features in Dezeen Mail issue 180, which also includes the latest news, jobs, competitions and reader comments from Dezeen.
Read Dezeen Mail issue 180 | Subscribe to Dezeen Mail
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Opinion: Sam Jacob argues that as climate change pushes the reality of winter further from the idealised version that appears in Christmas decorations, they begin to represent “a hangover of a vanishing idea remade through other technologies.”
Picture the scene. Well, actually, it’s harder not to now that Christmas adverts have been “premiered” and are on the kind of constant rotation that bores into your mind’s eye like an augewurm. These scenes have been pre-pictured for you with the kind of luminous intensity that only million pound budgets and the most expensive of heartwarming celebrities provide. There are tables as big as airfields piled high with hams, cakes and turkeys, there are Disneyfied animals acting anthropomorphic sentiments, jumpers seen through Super 8 vision and snow falling over everything.
Out in the streets, council cherry pickers are draping trees in strings of lights, attaching stars to lamp posts and strapping pine trees to buildings. Shop windows have become landscapes of abstract wintriness: a silver birch forest has grown up in the window of Top Shop, there are drifts of cotton wool in Accessorize and glistering electric ice in La Senza.
Pubs spray a polystyrene porridge of fake snow into the corners of their windows: instant graffitied Dickensification. Strange fruits of platonic metallic spheres have sprouted on trees uprooted from their plantations.
There’s a flurry of white balls frozen above the grey morass of Oxford Street and giant frozen boughs arc across Regent Street, sparkling with electricity. Almost everywhere there are super-scaled outlines of snow crystals, laser cut from Day-Glo perspex or vinyled onto plate glass, shrinking us to microscopic size.
This trail of decoration is an alternate landscape, a continuous environment bleeding from our own decked-out-homes, through a city transformed with temporal forests and artificial constellations blinking above. It’s a 1:1 replica of a winter that never existed in all its synthetic, scenographic glory.
Piles of beautifully wrapped empty cardboard boxes are piled under corporate trees – a gesture of empty generosity as to fulfil our need to know that our contemporary Christmassy symbolism is entirely hollowed out.
All these decorative tools and devices have their roots in misty Pagan prehistory. The symbols and customs we use even now come from an ancient and superstitious relationship with nature. They were ritualistic acts ushering the sun back into ascent from the depths of the winter solstice, there to welcome the return of light and warmth. Evergreens, berries and fire were fertility rites concerned with renewal and rebirth. In even the most tawdry strings of tinsel are echoes of these long forgotten ancient magics. These symbols have been processed through thousands of years of culture so that their real roots are obscured, bent into countless other shapes by other belief systems, ideologies and practices.
Christmas decorations are the ultimate floating signifiers dangling off the boughs of harvested evergreens. Cut loose from their original meanings and myths, they are a semiological ding dong where bells, angels wings, holly and snow are packed together into a fabric as dense as Christmas cake, covering everything like wrapping paper. Denuded of their original meaning, decorations become a simple statement of fact: signs that denote winter, erected slap bang in the middle of real winter.
Our modern selves might feel entirely sophisticated, shed of superstition and primitive ritual. We might feel far removed from the pagan roots of this decorative urge, but perhaps there is something within us that drives our fervour for winter decorations, something driving us to these extraordinary ends – especially a society otherwise so cynical and resistant to forced entertainment and group sentiment.
It was science that assuaged our ancient pagan fear of a sunless never-ending Narnia, but it’s science, too, that raises contemporary fears for the future of our environment. As study after study shows, winter itself is threatened.
Climate change studies see the growing season extending as though it were an ink blot bleeding across the calendar. Winter season in the arctic is almost two weeks shorter than it was a few decades ago. Measuring the growth of plants reveals British spring occurring ten days earlier than the 1970s. This season creep is estimated to have been advancing spring by two to three days and delaying autumn by 0.3–1.6 days per decade over the past 30 to 80 years.
These are our modern fears for the environment, as deeply troubling as any ancient superstition, perhaps even more so given their foundation in fact. They have consequences for just the same things that the Pagans feared: a total disruption of the Earth’s ecosystem causing loss of the northern permafrost, rises in sea levels, decoupling of breeding and feeding patterns, disruption of migration and so much more that we have yet to fully appreciate.
Climate change means the apparent natural pattern of winter, the one depicted with such certainty by all of our Christmassy imagery is (if it ever was) an imaginary scene. Perhaps it’s more: a ritual that unconsciously reverses our old Pagan desire and makes a superstitious plea for winter to stay. Perhaps it’s even worse than this: maybe it’s winter as skeuomorphism, a hangover of a vanishing idea remade through other technologies. Perhaps a trip down Oxford Street’s commercially manufactured, abstracted visions of winter is nothing less than a salve to our latent environmental nightmares.
Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.
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as skeuomorphism” appeared first on Dezeen.
Movie: Rem Koolhaas explains how his preoccupations have shifted from urbanism and the city to preservation and the countryside in this second movie filmed by Dezeen at the launch of OMA’s new Rotterdam skyscraper. “It’s a cliche that everybody is living in the city,” the architect says.
The OMA founder believes that rapid urbanisation coupled with the increasing difficulty of building in heritage areas is creating a dichotomy for architects.
“We discovered that, unbeknown to us, a large part of the world’s service is under a particular regime of preservation and therefore cannot be changed,” he says. “That made us suddenly aware that the world is now divided into areas that change extremely quickly and areas that cannot change.”
With most architects increasingly concerned with urbanisation, Koolhaas explains why he sees the countryside as an opportunity for OMA.”It’s a cliche that everybody is living in the city,” he says. “Currently we are thinking about the countryside and what one could do in the countryside, and perhaps a new thinking about the countryside.”
Besides his architectural work with OMA, Koolhaas also heads a sister organisation called AMO, which conducts research and gathers intelligence that feeds into both his and his clients’ projects.
“We work as architects but also constantly try to explore where brand new issues arise or where new contradictions emerge, or where a particular way of thinking about a subject is no longer really kind of vital and needs revision,” he explains.
Koolhaas explored some of these ideas at the OMA/Progress exhibition, which took place at the Barbican Art Gallery in 2011. One wall of the exhibition featured a series of images depicting countryside scenes in various European countries, while a previously sealed entrance was opened up for the first time in the gallery’s history to highlight OMA’s interest in preservation.
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and preservation” says Rem Koolhaas appeared first on Dezeen.
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