Milan 2014: design duo Formafantasma is presenting a collection of engraved drinking glasses that form new patterns when stacked together, at an exhibition curated by Rossana Orlandi in Milan
Commissioned by the MAK Museum in Vienna and produced by Austrian brand J.& L. Lobmeyr, the Alphabet collection of glasses and a carafe by Formafantasma are engraved with twelve different patterns.
The etchings reference motifs found in both J.& L. Lobmeyr’s archive and at the Geymüllerschlössel castle, in which the museum is housed.
Placed upside-down on the table one inside another, any two engraved patterns will combine to form a new pattern.
Delicate gold lines on each glass suggest the correct alignment. The bigger glass protects the smaller one like a crystal dome used to cover a still life composition.
“The design highlights the pleasure of diversity within a set of objects while revisiting the rules of table setting,” said Formafantasma.
The pieces were originally created for a site-specific installation called The Stranger Within for the Dining Room of Geymüllerschlössel.
They will be shown at the Rossana Orlandi-curated Bagatti Valsecchi exhibition, Via Gesù 5, in Milan from 8 to 13 April.
Milan 2014: Venetian designer Luca Nichetto has reimagined a traditional Tyrolean chair for his latest collaboration with Casamania, debuting in Milan this week.
Luca Nichetto‘s La-Dina is a contemporary reinterpretation of traditional wooden chairs from the Dolomite mountain range in west Austria and north-east Italy.
Its name is a pun on Ladin – Ladina in Italian – the language spoken by the people who once built their settlements in the region.
Luca Nichetto has simplified the form, using rounded lines and including a small upside-down triangular hole that punctures the back rest.
The legs are fixed into the solid wood of the seat, which in turn is secured to the backrest using a clamping wedge.
La-Dina is made from ash wood and is available in a range of colours.
The design marks Casamania‘s 30th anniversary and the 10th anniversary of its collaboration with Nichetto.
A concrete tunnel slices through the base of this Tokyo house by Japanese architect Makiko Tsukada, creating a round hole in the facade that reveals the underside of a staircase (+ slideshow).
Makiko Tsukada designed Tunnel House for a site facing a T-junction, so her concept was to produce a form that appears as a continuation of the road. The result is a curving container that cuts through the entire ground floor.
“Our design intention is to provide a visual extension of the street on the site so that it creates a virtual crossroads,” said Tsukada.
The rest of the house is planned around the tunnel, creating a series of unusual features that include a floating steel floor, a dining table beneath a staircase, a triple-height courtyard and a bedroom without a ceiling.
The architect categorises these spaces as uchi, which means “in the tunnel”, and soto, which means “out of the tunnel”.
“One of the visitors’ comments was that ‘tunnel-uchi’ and ‘tunnel-soto’ betray one’s sense of space, as one feels like being outside while actually being inside the house,” she explained.
A glazed wall exposes the full outline of the tunnel from the house’s entrance. Inside, the structure is revealed to be wrapping around a pair of lidless boxes that contain the main bedroom and bathroom.
“From the bedroom box, one can see the view of the entire ‘tunnel-uchi’ space as if seeing an exterior view from a rooftop,” said Tsukada.
Two double-height spaces behind the curving concrete accommodate a small study and a toilet. Glass doors lead out from spaces into the simple courtyard, which is sandwiched in between.
A staircase leads up onto the top of the tunnel, which doubles as a mezzanine walkway. Residents can then access a guest bedroom and dining room, located on the suspended steel floor that provides the uppermost storey.
The dining table sits over the stairwell and has a mirrored underside that creates upside-down reflections.
Photography is by Shinkenchiku-sha.
Read on for a project description from Makiko Tsukada:
Tunnel House
The site is at the end of a T-junction. Our design intention is to provide a visual extension of the street on the site so that it creates a virtual cross road. The interior space and the exterior space are connected by carving out a part of the volume along the extended axis of the street. The tunnel-like configuration is intended to activate both “uchi” (in the tunnel) and “soto” (out of the tunnel) spaces.
The open side of the quarter cylinder is enclosed by glass. The “tunnel-uchi” comprises two small boxes containing a bedroom and a bathroom respectively. The bedroom is enclosed by screen-like partitions and its ceiling is open. From the bedroom box, one can see the view of the entire “tunnel-uchi” space from there as if seeing an exterior view from a rooftop.
The opening at the side of the tunnel is connected to the “tunnel-soto” space. “Tunnel-soto” space is an interior space where the light that is cascading down along the tunnel surface from the oblong top light and the light coming down from the courtyard intersect each other three-dimensionally.
When going up the stairs, one can see the entire “tunnel-soto” space. From the gap of the floating steel floor, one can see the reflected image of “tunnel-soto” space on the mirrored surface on the rear side of the tabletop on the second floor. The floating steel floor and the super-thin 6mm thick table give the space a surreal atmosphere of floating and expansion, while creating a sharp contrast with the immense volume of the tunnel.
One of the visitors’ comments was that “tunnel-uchi” space and “tunnel-soto” spaces betray one’s sense of space, as one feels like being outside while actually being inside the house. By experiencing repeated reversals of the interior and the exterior spaces (betrayed feelings), one probably can feel a sense of expansion and openness in this tunnel house.
Location: Suginami-ku, Tokyo Structure: Reinforced Concrete and Steel Principal Use: Residence, Office Site Area: 82.39m2 Total Floor Area: 87.17m2 (43.65m2/1F, 43.52m2/2F) Structural Engineer: Taizen Nieda and Taizo Komatsu
Milan 2014: Dutch designer Hella Jongerius is launching her first range of rugs as the newly appointed design director for Dutch firm Danskina (+ movie).
Duotone rug by Hella Jongerius
Showing at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, the collection includes six designs, four of which are by Jongerius. Her designs are called Bold, Cork&Felt, Duotone and Multitone.
Duotone swatches by Hella Jongerius
“A rug is a two-dimensional product,” Jongerius said. “There is no construction needed, just an expression of yarn and colour. A Danskina rug has clear colour concepts, the colour and texture on the floor is very important in giving a space a certain atmosphere.”
Multitone rug by Hella Jongerius
Each design is created using a different mix of techniques, materials and colours. According to senior designer at Danskina, Edith van Berkel, Duotone took the longest to design. “We worked on this fabric for a longer time. We thought it was interesting to make a nice balance of colours. It was made with a flat woven carpet warp in one colour and weft in the other so that the design appears in squares.”
Multitone rug by Hella Jongerius
In contrast, the hand woven Bold design is created by using just one piece of wool yarn that is dyed in two different colours. This makes the two block colours in the rug appear to grip one another.
Bold rug by Hella Jongerius
The Cork&Felt design is the only unwoven design, instead made of assembled strips of cork and felt. The strips appear randomly in the design making each rug unique.
Bold swatch by Hella Jongerius
The Multitone rug started out as a colour blanket to see how colours mixed and was not supposed to be in the collection at all. “We thought the colours worked so well that it deserved a place in our collection,” said van Berkel.
Lucky swatch by Karin An Rijlaarsdam
The other pieces in the collection are two hand-knotted designs by Dutch designer Karin An Rijlaarsdam.
East swatch by Karin An Rijlaarsdam
The rugs will be on show in Pavilion 16, stand D20 at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan until 13 April.
News:Herzog & de Meuron has won a competition to design a hospital in a Danish forest, with plans for a building shaped like a four-leaf clover (+ slideshow).
Located north of Copenhagen in Hillerød, the New North Zealand Hospital will be Herzog & de Meuron‘s first project in Scandinavia and will be completed in collaboration with local firm Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects.
The building is conceived as a low-rise pavilion-like structure that never exceeds four storeys in height. A total of 24 medical departments will be housed inside and a large garden will be located on the roof.
Herzog & de Meuron says the structure will demonstrate that architectural ambition and functionality can be combined within a hospital.
“The choice of the jury is a seminal sign to architects and the entire health-care sector: low, flat hospital buildings can be better integrated in the city or the countryside than the high-rises structures that were often realised in the last decades,” said the studio.
“The hospital organically reaches out into the wide landscape. Simultaneously its soft, flowing form binds the many components of the hospital. It is a low building that fosters exchange between staff and patients, and it has a human scale despite its very large size.”
The building is scheduled to open in 2020, but could also facilitate an expansion in 2050.
“Herzog & de Meuron have designed a patient-centred hospital – a beautiful, healing and functional building that supports our patients’ recovery in the best possible way,” said hospital director Bente Ourø Rørth. “The hospital’s great strength is its highly successful and fundamental fusion of form and function.”
Architect Anupama Kundoo discusses the power of craft and working with traditional stone masons, in the second of our series of movies from BE OPEN’s Made In… India Samskara exhibition in New Delhi.
Architect Anupama Kundoo, who designed the exhibition
For architect Anupama Kundoo, being surrounded by work made using hand-crafted techniques is a reminder that there is an alternative to the “standardised industrial products”, people have become used to.
“We are all different, we are all unique, and it’s very strange that we have to be adjusting ourselves continually to standard products.” she says. “We have just accepted and surrendered ourselves to this future: it doesn’t have to be like that.”
The granite slabs rise up from the floor to create plinths to support the exhibits
She describes her installation as an undulating landscape, made from three principle elements: ferrocement slabs, pools of water and modular slabs of hand-levelled granite. This landscape hosts the homeware, lighting, clothes and furniture on display.
The granite slabs were hand-levelled in Tamil Nadu
Kundoo teamed up with stone-cutters from Tamil Nadu in the south of India to produce the slabs that dip and rise throughout the space. These long granite strips make up both the floor of the space and the surfaces for displaying the exhibits.
Detail of the granite slabs, here supporting a terracotta speaker
“These heavy slabs flow through the space like ribbons,” says Kundoo. “They frame the space and the undulations come out [of] the function: to raise the slab to the level required to display a particular object.”
Exhibits raised on plinths above one of the pools in the exhibition
“The actual elements are modular. The pieces rest on a sand bed and they can be reassembled in a wide range of ways and it can all be directly reused,” she says.
View of the entrance to the exhibition, showing the granite floor in the foreground, the ferrocement to the rear of the image
It took the masons six week to level the granite used in the exhibition, through a painstaking process of hand-levelling, a technique normally used to make stones for grinding masala paste, says Kundoo.
The exhibition contained two pools of water
Seeing the exhibition design, with these familiar techniques used in unexpected ways, had a dramatic effect on the craftsmen, said Kundoo.
“They’ve been making stone slabs for generations. But when they see [them], in this kind of composition, they realise that that they can make anything.” she says.
Three pieces by designer Gunjan Gupta on a ferrocement plinth
Kundoo works between Spain and India. In 2012 she exhibited her Wall House project at the Venice Architecture Biennale. This project also used the skills of Indian craftsmen — she brought a team to Italy to construct a full-size replica of a house inside the Arsenale.
Samskara, which ran from 10 to 28 February at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, launched BE OPEN’s Made In… programme, a two-year-long project focussing on the future of craft in design.
The music featured in the movie is a track called Bonjour by Kartick & Gotam on Indian record label EarthSync.
Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with MVRDV to give readers the chance to win a pink Twin House cushion from the studio’s Vertical Village furniture collection, which launched in Milan this week.
The Twin House cushion is one of 26 colourful foam “houses” that have just been put into production by Dutch architecture studio MVRDV and Belgian furniture label Sixinch.
The cushions were originally designed for the centrepiece of an exhibition in Hamburg about the studio’s Vertical Village research – which examined alternative solutions for apartment blocks in East Asia – but were used as seating by visitors and staff.
The Twin House cushion
“The flexible, durable foam elements became an instant crowd pleaser,” said MVRDV in a statement.
MVRDV decided to develop a furniture collection from these foam elements and chose to make 26 objects in the shape of houses proposed for the Vertical Village.
“The objects are not furniture in the traditional sense, they are more experimental and appeal by being surprising: how does one use a soft house in a living room?” said MVRDV.
The Twin House cushion is shaped like a semi-detached house, with the space in-between the roofs becoming the seat or a cradle for a baby.
The centrepiece of the Vertical Village exhibition in Hamburg
Other pieces in the collection include The Barn, The Factory, The Depot, The Cloud, The T and The Terrace House.
The cushions are made from foam rubber with a PU coating and come in a range of colours. The winner of this competition will receive a pink Twin House model, as pictured.
The Vertical Village furniture is currently on display as a sculpture at Interni‘s event Feeding Ideas for the City at Università degli Studi in Milan.
Due to shipping limitations, this competition is only open to readers in the EEC countries however the cushions are available to buy on the Vertical Village website.
Competition closes 7 May 2014. One winner will be selected at random and notified by email. The winner’s name will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page.
Here’s some information from MVRDV:
What started as a radical urban vision for the densification of the East Asian Metropolis has now turned into an iconic series of furniture, bringing vision and innovation to your home. The pieces are available in a wide variety of shapes and colours – allowing you to tailor your own personal Vertical Village. The product is flexible, waterproof, seamless, hygienic and comes in a range of striking and sophisticated colours. The objects are made of foam rubber with a PU coating, which is 100% recyclable and safe according to DIN EN71-3 standards for Children’s toys.
After the Vertical Village exhibition in Hamburg, a 4 metre tall installation made of 80 of these foam elements returned to the MVRDV offices, it was spontaneously used by the staff and visitors as furniture becoming part of office life. In daily changing settings it is used as seats, waiting lounge, playground, pedestal for models and even for the odd deadline powernap. And so a furniture collection was born as a by-product of urban research. The 26 objects are in the shape of houses proposed for the Vertical Village and one can sit, lounge, work and play. The coated foam is resilient and can withstand office life, family life and even outdoor use.
The centrepiece was made from 80 foam elements
And why not put some unexpected architecture in an interior? A semi-detached house, a volume with a gap or a cloud shape? The objects are not furniture in the traditional sense, they are more experimental and appeal by being surprising: How does one use a soft house in a living room?
Under the title ‘The Vertical Village – Individual, Informal, Intense’ the research project explored the rapid urban transformation of East Asia, the qualities of urban villages, and the potential to develop much denser, vertical settlements as a radical alternative to the identical block-like architecture of standardised units and their consequences for city life. The research was exhibited in Taipei, Seoul, Sao Paulo and Hamburg, usually accompanied by a large sculpture of a possible Vertical Village. After metal and plastic shapes in Seoul and Taipei in Hamburg the foam was the best solution for the 4 meter tall sculpture, leading to this furniture application.
The foam objects are in the shape of houses proposed for the Vertical Village
The furniture is available from April 7th online at www.vertical-village.com. The sculpture will be displayed at Interni’s Feeding New Ideas for the City, at Università degli Studi in Milan, in collaboration with Viabizzuno lighting.
Austrian firm Coop Himmelb(l)au has completed a major new concert venue and music school in the Danish city of Aalborg, which claims to be “one of the quietest spaces for symphonic music in Europe” (+ slideshow).
Located on the edge of the Limfjord – the body of water that bounds the city – the House of Music was designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au as a cultural hub that accommodates both a 1300-seat performance venue and a music college.
The architect worked closely with an acoustic consultant to develop a curvaceous auditorium that will offer exemplary acoustics. This is encased within a U-shaped volume that contains the classrooms and rehearsal areas of the school.
“The idea behind the building can already be read from the outer shape. The school embraces the concert hall,” said Coop Himmelb(l)au principal Wolf D. Prix.
Externally, the building’s facade is a composition of boxy volumes, undulating roof canopies, circular windows and latticed walls of glazing.
According to Prix the design is intended to represent the unity between music and architecture: “Music is the art of striking a chord in people directly. Like the body of musical instruments this architecture serves as a resonance body for the creativity in the House of Music.”
Visitors enter through a five-storey-high atrium with a concrete staircase winding up through its centre. This provides access to different levels of the auditorium, but also leads to an observation area facing out over the fjord.
Windows within the interior offer glimpsed views into the auditorium from the surrounding spaces. There are also three smaller performance spaces located underneath the foyer.
Water-filled pipes run through the concrete floor slab to provide heating in winter and help keep the building cool in summer. This will be controlled as part of an intelligent building management system.
The House of Music opened with a thirteen-day extravaganza of concerts, performances, film and fireworks.
Scroll down for the project description from Coop Himmelb(l)au:
House of Music as a creative centre for Aalborg
After four years of construction, the “House of Music” in Aalborg, Denmark was ceremoniously opened on March 29, 2014 by the Danish Queen Margrethe II.
This cultural centre was designed by the Viennese architectural studio Coop Himmelb(l)au as a combined school and concert hall: its open structure promotes the exchange between the audience and artists, and the students and teachers.
U-shaped rehearsal and training rooms are arranged around the core of the ensemble, a concert hall for about 1,300 visitors. A generous foyer connects these spaces and opens out with a multi-storey window area onto an adjacent cultural space and a fjord. Under the foyer, three more rooms of various sizes complement the space: the intimate hall, the rhythmic hall, and the classic hall. Through multiple observation windows, students and visitors can look into the concert hall from the foyer and the practice rooms and experience the musical events, including concerts and rehearsals.
The concert hall
The flowing shapes and curves of the auditorium inside stand in contrast to the strict, cubic outer shape. The seats in the orchestra and curved balconies are arranged in such a way that offers the best possible acoustics and views of the stage. The highly complex acoustic concept was developed in collaboration with Tateo Nakajima at Arup. The design of the amorphous plaster structures on the walls and the height-adjustable ceiling suspensions, based on the exact calculations of the specialist in acoustics, ensures for the optimal listening experience. The concert hall will be one of the quietest spaces for symphonic music in Europe, with a noise-level reduction of NR10 (GK10). Thanks to its architectural and acoustic quality, the concert hall is already well-booked: there will be concerts featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with violin soloist Arabella Steinbacher and the Danish National Radio Orchestra with soprano Mojca Erdmann in April.
The foyer serves as a meeting place for students, artists, teachers, and visitors. Five stories high with stairs, observation balconies, and large windows with views of the fjord, it is a lively, dynamic space that can be used for a wide variety of activities.
Instead of fans, the foyer uses the natural thermal buoyancy in the large vertical space for ventilation. Water-filled hypocaust pipes in the concrete floor slab are used for cooling in summer and heating in winter. The concrete walls around the concert hall act as an additional storage capacity for thermal energy. The fjord is also used for cost-free cooling.
The piping and air vents are equipped with highly efficient rotating heat exchangers. Very efficient ventilation systems with low air velocities are attached under the seats in the concert hall. Air is extracted through a ceiling grid above the lighting system so that any heat produced does not cause a rise in the temperature in the room.
The building is equipped with a building management program that controls the equipment in the building and ensures that no system is active when there is no need for it. In this way, energy consumption is minimised.
Planning: Coop Himmelb(l)au, Wolf D. Prix & Partner ZT GmbH Design Principal/ CEO: Wolf D. Prix Project Partner: Michael Volk Design Architect: Luzie Giencke Project Architect: Marcelo Bernardi, Pete Rose Design Architect Interior: Eva Wolf
News: the proliferation of computer renderings and prototypes on sites like Dezeen is making real products “look extremely boring,” according to Dutch designer Marcel Wanders.
Furniture brands are struggling to make their products appear interesting in comparison to online fantasies, said Wanders in an exclusive interview with Dezeen.
“You are so able to present every crazy idea as if it is reality, the whole universe of communication is so strong,” said Wanders. “But now it’s difficult for a company to be anywhere interesting in a world that is so dominated by prototypes and great and bright ideas.”
“The Dezeens of this world are extremely inspirational, but have no realistic dimension any more,” he added.
Wanders was speaking to Dezeen in Milan at the launch of the latest collection by Moooi, the furniture and lighting brand he co-founded in 2001 with Casper Vissers.
Moooi has grown rapidly by recruiting a roster of international designers to create unusual products that sit alongside new work by Wanders, who was one of a generation of Dutch creatives nurtured by conceptual design company Droog.
“It’s funny that in the 1990s Droog was doing all this wonderful work,” Wanders said. “It was interesting that we kind of invented something which I call today ‘virtual design’. We started making prototypes as if they were real, we communicated them in Milano as if you could buy them. That was at the same time a kind of communication being invented as a mass medium.”
Today, designers are able to get international attention for products that are not ready for market and in many cases don’t even exist as prototypes, Wanders said.
“Now I think it is so big, this virtual design, the prototypes are so important in the world of design and the alternative ideas are so important,” he said.
“Now you go on Dezeen and you go through the pages and you find a company like Cassina and oh my God, I mean it’s not even their fault, how could they be interesting between all these bright and virtual ideas which nobody is ever going to do? How could a chair or a lamp be interesting?”
“All that is realistic starts to look extremely boring in the world of all this inspirational stuff. It’s a really interesting problem that we’re going to face. It’s a bit difficult to be in such an exciting world because they to start to feel really boring.”
Milan 2014:a series of talks will launch this afternoon in Nike’s Aero-static dome at Palazzo Clerici, forming part of the FOMO algorithmic publishing project organised by Joseph Grima with Dezeen.
Three afternoons of talks called On The Fly will kick off today with Clemens Weisshaar, Atelier Bow Wow, Folder, Linda Fregni and Bart Hess discussing the theme of weightlessness in design.
The talks will take place at Palazzo Clerici inside a dome created by Arthur Huang, founder of MINIWIZ, which uses Nike’s Flyknit technology to create a temporary events space.
They are free to attend and each afternoon the speakers will tackle a different theme related to design practice, presenting a minimum of two images to accompany their talk.
During the talks a real-time publishing algorithm – developed by Joseph Grima’s design research group Space Caviar and called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) – will automatically create written articles from live speech and social media streams using the #OnTheFlyMilan hashtag.
The FOMObile in action at Palazzo Clerici in Milan
These will be collated in a PDF that will then be printed and saddle-stitched on the spot from the FOMObile – a roving publishing press with its own built-in power generator and solar-powered wi-fi hotspot. The resulting publication will be distributed for free in Milan and made available on the Dezeen website.
The On The Fly talks will be FOMO’s first test in a real-world environment. Anyone, anywhere will be able to take part by using the #OnTheFlyMilan hashtag on social media on Wednesday 9, Thursday 10, and Friday 11 April between 5.00 and 7.30pm CET.
Today’s event will be moderated by Joseph Grima, founder of Space Caviar and the former editor of Domus.
Talks on Thursday will be hosted by Gianluigi Ricuperati and will include Ianthe Roach, Pier Nucleo and Italo Rota, who will all discuss the theme “seamlessness”. On Friday, Marco Velardi will host Formafantasma, Martino Gamper and Anna Meroni talking about sustainability in design.
Scroll down for the full schedule for On The Fly:
9 April, Weightlessness with Joseph Grima
17:00 Clemens Weisshaar 17:30 Yoshi Tsukamoto, Atelier Bow Wow 18:00 Folder: Marco and Elisa 18:30 Linda Fregni 19:00 Bart Hess
Weightlessness will explore how external masses and strains, or lack thereof, shape the thinking and production of design. How does the experience of our environments impact on the design process? What does this mean for the final product? With a shifting landscape of outside forces, what does this mean for practice? What would freedom, or weightlessness, from this mean for our work and for us?
Seamlessness will ask whether consistency is good for design. Is a process, or product, designed without interruption a good thing? Is a perfectly consistent object or idea something positive? What can the messy convergence or merging of technologies, processes or people add to a project? How do these transitions and interfaces of design change or challenge us for the better?
The Nike Aero-static dome
11 April, Sustainability with Marco Velardi
17:00 Formafantasma 17:30 Brent Dzekciorius 18:00 Anna Meroni 18:30 Martino Gamper 19:00 Arthur Huang
Sustainability will take the practice of contemporary practitioners and explore the social, political, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainability. What is the impact of designing sustainably? How do we sustain interdependence between process, products and disciplines? These conversations will attempt to understand the life cycle of design, and the flows of work systems.
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