Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Watch Store: a selection of men’s watches from the new military-inspired collection by Nixon are now available at Dezeen Watch Store.

The new collection includes The Corporal SS, a hardwearing, stainless steel timepiece with bold, military-inspired indices that are designed to be read at a glance. The large 48-millimetre case is finished with a raised bezel and a hardened mineral crystal lens.

Designed with everyday wear in mind, The Sentry SS has a solid stainless steel case with a screw-down case back and spring pin lugs. Other features include a day and date window, applied hour indices and printed second markers.

The final watch in our collection is The Qutaro, which has a distinctive brushed stainless steel checkerboard strap. The motif is repeated on the 36-millimetre square dial; the alternating textured finish adds depth to the timepiece. A stainless steel case, applied hour indices and a gasket crown complete the watch.

Each watch comes with removable links, allowing the strap to be adjusted to fit the wearer.

Nixon is a California-based lifestyle brand specialising in watches, accessories and audio products and was founded by Andy Laats and Chad DiNenna in 1997. The duo wanted to create durable watches that could be worn during active outdoor pursuits, including skating, skiing and surfing.

Shop the full Nixon collection.

You can buy all of our watches online, and you can also visit our watch shop in Stoke Newington, north London – contact us to book an appointment.

www.dezeenwatchstore.com

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range of men’s watches appeared first on Dezeen.

Lithuanian studio Inblum Architects has inserted a bar into the attic of an old house in Minsk, Belarus (+ slideshow).

The building was reconstructed following damages caused during World War II and now accommodates offices on two floors. Inblum Architects was commissioned to design a bar for the uppermost floor, under the roof.

The architects left brick walls exposed and used the same type of bricks to build a bar that runs along on side of the space.

A wooden framework fits around the bar and extends along the walls, doubling as shelving and a coat rack. It also creates an overhead canopy that resembles a series of rafters, which lowers the ceiling height on that side and makes the space feel more intimate.

“When we started designing this bar our goal was to create a space with its own unique atmosphere where old and new mix together in a perfect way,” architect Dmitrij Kudin told Dezeen.

Second-hand furniture surrounds the bar and was sourced from various places including an old school in Ireland and flea markets in Sweden.

“Imagine an old attic where you can find all sorts of old things that tell their own story; your secret hideaway from your childhood games,” Kudin said. “And now, when you are grown up you come back to it, clean up the space, use the furniture you have found and make a place for yourself and your friends where you can have a drink and chat about the old days.”

Brick-shaped pieces of mirror are attached to the wall behind the bar, as well as next to washbasins in the bathroom, while garlands of exposed lightbulbs have been strung around the wooden canopy.

The building is set into a hillside and visitors can access the bar directly from the street via a small wooden deck that offers views across the surrounding rooftops.

Photography is by Darius Petrulaitis.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Attic Bar – (Cherdak Bar)

This bar in the attic of a newly rebuilt house in Minsk Old Town stands out as an example of honest use of raw materials. The original brickwork is left bare, the bar counter is executed in the same brick.

Two main features organise the space. First, it is a multifunctional structure in pine boards, which spans across the entire space. It has a bar, a lamp, a shelf and a coat rack. Taken together, it highlights the space as an archetypal attic. Second, it is a soft seating structure occupying an otherwise unusable space found under a low ceiling.

The dividing elements “mirror” the sloped ceiling, so the space becomes complete. Smaller objects of the interior, new or old, have been carefully collected by architects from different sources.

The old-fashioned garland comes from USA, the bar stools are from brilliant German designers, old chairs come from a school in Ireland, a number of armchairs bought in Lithuania and renovated date back to the Soviet period, other objects come from Swedish flea markets.

Here the architects’ prime concern has been to create a certain atmosphere, no wonder the place has acquired a unique soul.

“Reminiscences of childhood, inspiration and throes of creation, the smell of an old wooden house, mirrors reflecting fragments of our life, the truth of a character and a material, a nostalgia for the gone incandescent light bulb, paying a due tribute to these days of our life” – this is what we thought of and felt while designing this bar.

Design by Inblum Architects, Vilnius, Lithuania
Team: Dmitrij Kudin, Laura Malcaite
Assistant: Janina Basova
Location: Minsk, Belarus
Year of design and construction: 2013

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Dutch firm UNStudio has completed a shopping centre in Wuhan, China, with over 42,000 shiny silver balls attached to its facade (+ slideshow).

UNStudio designed nine variations of the stainless steel spheres to cover the exterior of the Hanjie Wanda Square shopping centre, which are intended to recreate the effect of rippling water or silk. Each one contains a small LED light that further animates the facade after dark.

Three different entrances lead shoppers towards atriums at the north and south ends of the building. The first has an oval-shaped plan, while the second features a perfect circle.

“In Hanjie Wanda Square a circular motif is repeated in many different ways and patterns, both in the facade and throughout the interior,” explained UNStudio principal Ben van Berkel, whose previous projects include an airport in Georgia and a department store in South Korea.

“The patterns used are influenced by numerous cultural references, both traditional and contemporary. Patterns drive our aesthetic choices, whether they be personal or shared, and in Hanjie Wanda Square act as a background to the world of desire encapsulated in the contemporary shopping plaza,” he said.

A monochrome colour scheme is predominant throughout most of the interior and incorporates perforated screens, glazed balustrades and polished floors.

The southern atrium continues this theme, with shades of grey picked up across surfaces, but the larger northern atrium offers a few golden and bronze tones.

Van Berkel said: “Reflection, light and pattern are used throughout the Hanjie Wanda Square to create an almost fantastical world. New microcosms and experiences are created for the shopper, similar perhaps to the world of theatre, whereby the retail complex becomes almost a stage or a place of performance and offers a variety of different impressions and experiences to the visitor.”

There are four main levels to the shopping centre, organised around a looping plan that accommodates shops, restaurants and cinemas.

Large skylights stretch across the roof to allow daylight to enter the building.

Photography is by Edmon Leong.

Here’s a project description from UNStudio:

Ben van Berkel / UNStudio’s Hanjie Wanda Square in Wuhan completed

Hanjie Wanda Square is a new luxury shopping plaza located in the Wuhan Central Culture Centre, one of the most important areas of Wuhan City in China.

Following competitions in 2011 with design entries from national and international architects, UNStudio’s overall design was selected as the winning entry for the facade and interior of the Hanjie Wanda Square. The shopping plaza houses international brand stores, world-class boutiques, catering outlets and cinemas.

In UNStudio’s design the concept of luxury is incorporated through the craftsmanship of noble, yet simple materials and combines both contemporary and traditional design elements in one concept.

Synergy of flows

For the design of the Hanjie Wanda Square attention and visitor flows are guided from the main routes towards the facades and entrances of the building. From the three main entrances visitor flows are thereafter guided to two interior atria.

The concept of ‘synergy of flows’ is key to all of the design components; the fluid articulation of the building envelope, the programming of the dynamic facade lighting and the interior pattern language which guides customers from the central atria to the upper levels and throughout the building via linking corridors.

Facade design

The facade design reflects the handcrafted combination of two materials: polished stainless steel and patterned glass. These two materials are crafted into nine differently trimmed, but standardised spheres. Their specific positions in relation to each other recreate the effect of movement and reflection in water, or the sensuous folds of silk fabric.

The architectural lighting is integrated into the building envelope’s 42,333 spheres. Within each sphere LED-fixtures emit light onto the laminated glass to generate glowing circular spots. Simultaneously a second set of LED’s at the rear side of the spheres create a diffuse illumination on the back panels. Various possibilities to combine and control the lighting allow diverse effects and programming of lighting sequences related to the use and activation of the Hanjie Wanda Square.

Interior concept

The interior concept is developed around the north and south atria, creating two different, yet integrated atmospheres. The atria become the centre of the dynamic duality of the two Hanjie Wanda Square identities: Contemporary and Traditional. Variations in geometry, materials and details define these differing characters.

With two main entrances, the north atrium is recognised as a main venue hall, and the south atrium as a more intimate venue hall. The north atrium is characterised by warm golden and bronze materials reflecting a cultural, traditional identity.

In the south atrium silver and grey nuances with reflective textures reflect the city identity and its urban rhythm. Both atria are crowned by skylights with a funnel structure which connects the roof and the ground floor. The funnel structures are each clad with 2600 glass panels and are digitally printed with an intricate pattern. In addition, each funnel integrally houses a pair of panorama lifts.

Client: Wuhan Wanda East Lake Real State Co. Ltd
Location: ShaHu Ave, Wu Chang Qu, Wuhan, China
Facade: 30.500 sqm
Interior: 22.630 sqm
Programme: Luxury shopping mall
Contribution UNStudio: Facade and interior design
Status: Realised

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Designer Ross Lovegrove will present a series of 3D-printed 18 carat gold rings at Design Miami next week.

Lovegrove has created six rings, each of which will be produced in an edition of ten. The series, called Foliates, will be presented by the Louisa Guinness Gallery at Design Miami.

“These rings and this collection appear is as if the very last virgin leaves of a tree or plant have unfurled from one’s hand so that there is a relationship between the finger and the leaf, the gold appearing from the delicate void that I find so feminine and sensual and unattended,” said Lovegrove.

The flat rounded forms that flow from the bands are indented with digitally created patterns designed to mimic those found in nature. Lovegrove experimented with processes such as direct metal laser sintering and combining 3D-printing in wax with lost-wax casting to achieve these intricate surface details.

Half of the designs in the range have a single leaf-shaped element, while the others each include a symmetrical pair.

“They sit lightly, exploring the dynamics of space and the digital realm, converging organic design with the nature of naturalness that underlines my life’s commitment to sourcing the trinity that can exist so succinctly when technology, materials and form converge in the advanced times in which we live,” Lovegrove continued.

A few days ago we featured 3D monograms for necklace pendants that are printed in silver and stainless steel.

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News: the images in most kitchen, bathroom and bedroom catalogues are computer-generated but “no-one has realised”, according to a leading CGI artist (+ slideshow).

“Many furniture manufactures are using this medium to put together their catalogues and such,” said Richard Benson, creative director at digital imagery studio Pikcells. “The technology can now make these wonderfully realistic images as good as photography, and in some cases better.”

He added: “Most kitchen, bedroom and bathroom companies now use CGI to create their marketing material and no one has realised.”

Last summer flat-pack furniture giant Ikea announced it was starting to use digital images in its catalogues and online galleries, predicting that up to a quarter of all its images would eschew traditional photography by this year.

But Benson said that things have moved faster than even Ikea predicted. “It’s not just Ikea,” he said. “We design a lot of the [digitally created] spaces ourselves for some of the world’s biggest homeware brands.”

Benson said the rapid advances in digital image-making were leading to the mass closure of photography studios that specialised in interior and product shoots for brands. “It’s quite a big deal as lots of photography studios have been uprooted,” he said. “Over the past five years, there’s been a few studios that have really come to the end of their time doing room sets and have seen CGI coming through and packed up shop and called it a day really.”

Other photography studios have embraced CGI and turned themselves into digital studios. He added: “We’ve been brought in to produce what the photographer was doing anyway. The end if the same but the means is different.”

He explained that rendered images offer clients greater speed and flexibility than photographs, plus lower costs. “With photography, you’re always going to be restricted by what you can build and what materials you can use and what furniture you can get a hold of, whereas with CGI there are massive 3D libraries now where you can buy really high quality digital models and textures and drop them straight into your images.”

Computer renderings also allow sets to be re-used and adapted easily, Benson said. “In photography, people build massive sets and then they just throw it all in the bin afterwards, whereas we can reuse the sets over and over again. They’re just stored in the computers so we can pull them out and make quick changes and reissue images.”

Car brands have been using computer-generated imagery for advertisements for years, he added: “A lot of the adverts you see on TV [involve] CGI cars,” he said.

Magazines try to avoid publishing CGI images, Benson said, but they often published them unknowingly. “We’ve had loads of our stuff in magazines,” he said, including a recent interior that Pikcells developed from scratch for wood and laminate brand Kronospan. “A kitchen from the Fresh project was featured in Grand Designs in the future kitchen section and I don’t think they knew it was CGI.”

Leading architectural visualiser Peter Guthrie spoke to us last month about how architectural renderings are now “indistinguishable from photos,” and Benson says that producing renderings for catalogues requires even higher photo-realistic qualities. “In the work we produce, the images have to be really photo-real as they are sitting alongside existing photos in many catalogues,” he explained. “Architecural visualisation doesn’t generally have this issue. The expectation is lower as most people realise it’s CG, because what they are looking at is not built yet.”

An example of this is a Swiss studio that created a computer model of an unbuilt Zurich theatre designed by Jørn Utzon in 1964, to show that the building “could be built now”.

Today, most furniture brands use CGI instead of photography for the room sets in their catalogues, Benson said. “I would say 80 percent of the furniture manufacturers out there are using CGI for kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, living rooms, etcetera. It’s sort of happened in the last five or six years. It came at the right time, when the software was good enough and when the hardware was affordable enough to process the power needed to render these images.”

Ikea led the way with digital images of its kitchens, which are relatively easy to generate, given that they feature hard, flat surfaces with predictable reflections. However, Ikea has still not mastered the art of creating realistic bedroom images, Benson said, due to the complexity of computer-modelling bedlinen and soft furnishings.

Even that is changing, with software and processing power now able to create convincing fabrics. “Soft furnishings and fabrics [are] becoming extremely realistic to the point where we’ve started to use CG bedding and cushions and things,” Benson said.

The only items that studios like Pikcells still struggle to render are flora and fauna. “To create flowers for each image would take a long time as opposed to going down to the florist and photographing stuff. As soon as the software is ready to use in that department, I don’t think there would be anything else that you would be missing.”

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