Iris van Herpen‘s collection was shown during Paris Fashion Week in January and included two outfits made using additive manufacturing.
She collaborated with MIT researcher Neri Oxman and 3D printing company Stratasys to create a textured cape and skirt. An intricate dress made by selective laser sintering (main image) was designed with Austrian architect Julia Koerner and printed by Belgian company Materialise.
The Voltage collection also included outfits that looked like they were covered in white anemones and one piece built up from faceted mirrored triangles.
The jury commented: “With Voltage, Van Herpen gives the world a view into the future of fashion. It is impressive to see how she, at such a young age, succeeds in giving so much body to her work, without any loss of experiment and challenge. With her designs she shows better than anybody else what is going on in the Netherlands at the moment.”
Also at the awards, graphic designer Femke Herregraven took home the MINI Young Designer Award. The judges called her a “subtle and intelligent social activist who is not afraid of complexity and proceeds in a thorough and restrained manner”.
Japanese studio Tato Architects references the ad-hoc extensions of neighbouring buildings with the steel, concrete and wooden volumes that make up this house in Osaka, Japan (+ slideshow).
Located on the hillside of Mount Ikoma, House in Ishikiri is a three-storey family home and was designed by Tato Architects as a composition of three separate blocks.
From the rear, the house comprises a glazed ground-floor storey with a gabled upper floor floating above, while the street facade reveals an extra storey and garage tucked underneath.
“We observed favourably the mosaic pattern of old and rebuilt houses telling each history of over 80 years,” said architect Yo Shimada, explaining how he approached the design as a collection of connected elements.
“We proceeded with the design by making the places step by step, searching for an appropriate way of building the house that adapts to surrounding environments,” he added.
A steel-plated box forms part of the lower ground floor, and contains a storage space and small toilet. A steel framework extends across it, creating space for the adjacent garage.
A split-level living and dining room occupies a double-height space on the middle floor and features sliding doors that open the space out to a wooden roof terrace.
A children’s bedroom is also situated on this floor. Positioned on top of the steel box, it comes with a row of windows around its base.
A staircase cantilevered from the dining room’s concrete wall leads up to a master bedroom and balcony on the top floor.
The kitchen is positioned at the opposite end of the house, overlooking a rear garden. A guest room above can be accessed by climbing a wooden ladder that extends up through a hole in the ceiling.
Dark concrete walls and a black house form volume above it, a translucent lean-to roof, a white high flat roof and a silver box under it. Those totally different and inconsistent materials and colours are combined to form this house.
The site is in a residential area developed around 1930, sloping to the west on a hillside of Mt. Ikoma, which overlooks the urban area of Osaka Plain. We observed favourably the mosaic pattern of old and rebuilt houses telling each history of over eighty years.
It was not easy to find out the way for making the house coordinated to the surroundings as the site is 3.5m up from the road so that the house would look larger than the actual size. We proceeded with the design by making places step by step searching an appropriate way of building the house that adapt to surrounding environments.
First, we made concrete walls with rough texture by using formwork made by small split lauan to match with old masonry walls and concrete-block walls in surrounding environments, and covered those with a black house form structure following the roof form of houses in the neighbourhood. After that, living space is made in the way as renovating interior space. The space for facilities to support the daily life such as a kitchen and a bathroom is made in between the concrete walls and the cliff-retaining wall behind the house, covered with a translucent lean-to roof and wooden windows and doors.
On the road side, a thin, modern flat-roof, which represents a new life style and cars covers the box made of steel plates commonly used for temporary enclosure at construction sites in Japan, pretending the atmosphere of ongoing construction sites.
These resulted in making places that are related to both ‘before’ and ‘after’. Living places are provided in space where different time-axes meet as ‘concrete walls’ and ‘a black house-type,’ ‘concrete walls’ and ‘a retaining wall,’ and ‘a white flat-roof’ and ‘boxes of steel plates.’
Rethinking the whole residential are from the way that this house exists would suggests us to rediscover potentials and richness of all elements and space among those with different histories in the area.
Project name: House in Ishikiri Location of site: Osaka, Japan Site area: 233.32m2 Building area: 61.37m2 Total floor area: 99.38m2 Type of Construction: Steel Program: house Project by: Tato Architects Principal designer:Yo Shimada Design period: March 2010 – April 2012 Construction period: July 2012 – January 2013
Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Dave Hakkens’ concept for a mobile phone made of detachable blocks has gone viral, attracting over 16 million views on YouTube and garnering almost a million supporters online (+ movie + interview).
“I put the video online and in the first 24 hours I had like one million views on YouTube,” Hakkens told Dezeen. “I got a lot of responses to it.”
Phonebloks is a concept for a phone made of swappable components that fit together like Lego, with each component containing a different function. This means that components can be replaced or upgraded without having to throw away the phone.
“Usually a phone is integrated into one solid block and if one part gets broken you have to throw away the entire phone,” said Hakkens. “But this has different components, so if your battery is broken you can replace the the battery or if you need a better camera you only upgrade the camera component. So you don’t throw away the entire phone; you keep the good stuff.”
Last month Hakkens uploaded a video explaining the concept to YouTube, where it went viral and has now been watched over 16 million times.
He then put the idea on “crowdspeaking” site Thunderclap, where instead of donating money, supporters donate their social reach. He now has over 900,000 supporters on the site, and when the campaign closes on 29 October a message about Phonebloks will automatically be sent to each supporters’ social media contacts, giving Hakkens a total audience of over 360 million people.
Hakkens said: “That’s the whole point of this idea; to generate lots of buzz so companies see there’s a huge market and realise they really need to make a phone like this.”
The Phonebloks concept features electronic blocks that snap onto a base board, which links all the components. Two small screws lock everything together. Users can choose components from their favourite brands or make their own modules.
“You can customise your phone, replacing the storage block with a larger battery if you store everything in the cloud, or replace advanced components you don’t need with basic blocks like a bigger speaker,” says the video explaining the concept.
Hakkens hopes Phonebloks will lead to fewer phones being thrown away, thereby reducing waste. “Electronic devices are not designed to last,” the video says. “This makes electronic waste one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world and our phone is one of the biggest causes.”
Here’s the interview conducted at Design Academy Eindhoven today:
Marcus Fairs: What is Phonebloks?
Dave Hakkens: Phonebloks is a phone made to upgrade and repair; it’s a phone worth keeping. Usually we throw it away after a couple of years. But this one is made to last.
Marcus Fairs: How is it made to last?
Dave Hakkens: Usually a phone is integrated into one solid block, and if one part gets broken you have to throw away the entire phone. But this has different components, so if for instance only your battery is broken you can replace the the battery, or if it’s slow after a couple of years you can change just the speed component. If you need a better camera you only upgrade the camera component. So in this way you don’t throw away the entire phone; you keep the good stuff.
Marcus Fairs: Tell us how it went viral.
Dave Hakkens: The idea with this whole project is I’m just one guy at the Design Academy; I can’t make this phone by myself. I can go to a lot of companies and pitch, ask them if they’d like to make my phone, but I thought I’d do it the other way around; so I gathered a lot of people who told companies they really wanted this phone. So I put this video online and in the first 24 hours I had like one million views on YouTube. I also gathered supporters so currently I have 900,000 supporters, and they all just wanted this phone. So now I have all this attention and I get a lot of nice emails from companies who want to work on this.
Marcus Fairs: How did you spread the message?
Dave Hakkens: You have this site called Thunderclap. On Thunderclap instead of crowdfunding you crowdspeak people; people don’t donate money but instead they donate their friends and family. You say you’re interested in a project and want to support it, so you donate your friends – their Facebook followers and Twitter followers – and on the 29 October automatically a message is sent out by those people saying “We want phone blocks”. That spreads to all their friends and families. So currently I have like 900,000 supporters but on 29 October we will reach 300 million people. So that’s the whole point of this idea; to generate lots of buzz so companies see there’s a huge market and realise they really need to make a phone like this.
Marcus Fairs: What is the next step?
Dave Hakkens: My idea succeeded from day one; I got a lot of responses to it. I’ve got a lot of people interested in developing it: engineers, technicians and companies. So right now I’m thinking what would be a logical next step. Crowdsource it on the internet? Work together with a company? That’s what I’m thinking about now; how to realise the phone the best way.
Dutch designer Aldo Bakker has curated an exhibition at Gallery Libby Sellers in London that presents his products alongside complimentary pieces from the gallery’s inventory.
Pose by Aldo Bakker
Gallery Libby Sellers invited Aldo Bakker to select works from its collection that share materials or details with his own and present these as a way “to create interesting conversations, connections and juxtapositions between the two.”
“Both Max and Peter work in the moment, their works comes to existence by doing,” Bakker told Dezeen. “In my case, the moment is dissolved in the whole, and you do not see many traces of the process of making.”
Wooden Vase by Peter Marigold
Materials that recur often in Bakker’s work, including metal, wood, glass and ceramic, are also prevalent in the works that he chose for the show.
“Contrary to a solo exhibition, a group show offers more entrances to the different works, and most likely enables the viewer to see the objects more clearly and precisely because of the oppositions,” Bakker explains. “I hope that the differences between the works will help visitors understand them better.”
Spaces in Between is at Gallery Libby Sellers until 14 December 2013.
Here’s are some more details from the gallery:
Spaces in Between 15 October – 14 December 2013
Gallery Libby Sellers is pleased to present Spaces In Between – a group show curated by the award-winning designer Aldo Bakker.
Craftica by Formafantasma
Contemplation and communication are at the heart of Bakker’s practice; his works in wood, metal, glass and ceramic are rigorously considered and purposely provoke reaction from the end user. By way of highlighting this, and to initiate a dialogue with the gallery, Bakker was invited to select objects from both the gallery’s existing works and his own extensive repertoire in order to create interesting conversations, connections and juxtapositions between the two.
Having had free access to the gallery’s entire inventory, Bakker’s choices confirm his position as an arbiter of materials, detail and form. His final selection comprises works by Formafantasma, Max Lamb, Julia Lohmann, Peter Marigold, Jonathan Muecke and Lex Pott – and each will be presented as counterpoints with specific designs from Bakker’s own works. While Bakker will introduce these interchanges between objects, it will be left to the visitor to bring their own interpretations and translations to the conversations.
Particles by Aldo Bakker
Bakker (b.1971) views his designs as the work of a ‘vormgever’, which in Dutch literally means ‘giver of form’. As he says, “both in my language and in my form, I choose to approach ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality’ very precisely and I allow my designs to acquire physical shape only when I deem them to be ‘autonomous entities’”. His work can be found in international public collections, including Vitra (Germany), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam), the Zuiderzee Museum (Enkhuizen) and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (New York). He has collaborated with clients including Thomas Eyck, Izé, Sèvres, Nodus and Wallpaper*. Bakker was the recipient of the 2012 Z33 Architecture Competition Award, and has also won Wallpaper* Design Awards for ‘Best Stool’ and ‘Best Use of Material’ (2011). He lives and works in Amsterdam and is a tutor at the Design Academy Eindhoven.
Six limited-edition vases were created by Milan designers Studiopepe for a window installation in central London based on the work of postmodern designer Ettore Sottass (+ slideshow).
The vases with asymmetric handles were specially customised in a range of hand-painted graphic patterns and bright monotone colours.
So Sottsass featured a number of works by contemporary designers that referenced forms and patterns used in Ettore Sottsass’ work during the mid twentieth century.
Darkroom is a design accessories shop curated by Rhonda Drakeford and Lulu Roper-Caldbeck.
Here is more information from Darkroom:
This is Sottsass with a twist, so expect a sculptural array of hand-painted laminate-style patterns, colour palettes that clash cute with crazy, and juxtaposed materials that push the boundaries between furniture and fashion, plus jewellery that double as objets d’art, and textiles, cushions, stationery and bags.
Visionary and contrary, throughout his life Sottsass worked across many disciplines, and his influence can be found everywhere from high fashion to office furniture in the second half of the 20th century.
From the iconic Valentine typewriter for Olivetti, to the subversively kitschy furniture of the Memphis group, Sottsass enlivened the functionality of ordinary objects, while pushing the boundaries of current tastes and creating new paradigms for future design.
For our So Sottsass season, Darkroom will be drawing on the designer’s bright and playful palette from his time with the legendary Memphis Group, and we’ll also be finding inspiration from the rough-edged modernism of his early ceramics.
Elevation Workshop was one of thirteen practices invited to create an installation using bamboo steel, a laminated and treated material that is formed using bamboo and produced in China.
Designed and assembled by the practice, the structure is formed from vertical members that stand at angles to zig-zagging horizontal planes. Visitors interacted with the piece by sitting or lying on the benches, or by walking through a hinged upright element that opens like a door.
All the installations were exhibited at the 751 D-Park, a former industrial facility in northeast Beijing.
Product news: New York designer Karim Rashid has created a faceted glass bottle and visual identity for American vodka brand Anestasia.
Karim Rashid referenced the angular strokes of the letters V and K in the word vodka when designing the asymmetric form of the Anestasia bottle, which he first began work on in 2012.
Karim Rashid’s sketches for the bottle
“The bottle’s faceted form grew out of the gustatory feelings for the vodka – but also I actually played with the letters of vodka,” Rashid told Dezeen. “The V’s and K’s made for great faceted forms.”
Concept visualisation of the bottle
Rashid was also responsible for the typography and logo for the product.
Concept visualisations showing the bottle at different angles
Danish architecture studio BIG has completed an underground maritime museum that loops around an old dry dock in Helsingør, Denmark (+ slideshow).
Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj
Rather than filling the empty dock, BIG chose to repurpose it as a public courtyard at the centre of the new museum, then added a series of bridges that cut into the 60-year-old walls.
Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj
Located in the surrounds of Kronborg Castle, which dates back to the fifteenth century, the Danish Maritime Museum forms part of the Kulturhavn Kronborg initiative – an effort to bring cultural attractions to Helsingør’s harbour.
Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj
The museum’s underground galleries present the story of Denmark’s maritime history up to the present day, contained within a two-storey rectangular structure that encases the dry dock.
Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj
“By wrapping the old dock with the museum program we simultaneously preserve the heritage structure, while transforming it to a courtyard bringing daylight and air in to the heart of the submerged museum,” said Bjarke Ingels, the founding partner of BIG.
Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj
The architect also emphasises that the presence of the dock allows the museum to be visible, without impacting on views towards the adjacent castle.
Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj
“Out of respect for Hamlet’s Castle we needed to remain completely invisible and underground, but to be able to attract visitors we needed a strong public presence,” he said. “Leaving the dock as an urban abyss provides the museum with an interior facade facing the void and at the same time offers the citizens of Helsingør a new public space sunken eight metres below the level of the sea.”
Photograph by Luca Santiago Mora
A trio of double-level bridges span the dock. The first run directly across, forming an extension of the harbour promenade, while the second and third lead visitors gradually down to the museum’s entrance.
Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj
An auditorium is contained inside one, while the others form extensions of the galleries, which were put together by exhibition designers Kossmann.Dejong.
Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj
KiBiSi, the design studio co-run by Ingels, created a collection of street furniture to line the edge of the site, arranged as dots and dashes to resemble Morse code.
BIG with Kossmann.dejong+Rambøll+Freddy Madsen+KiBiSi have completed the Danish National Maritime Museum in Helsingør. By marrying the crucial historic elements with an innovative concept of galleries and way-finding, BIG’s renovation scheme reflects Denmark’s historical and contemporary role as one of the world’s leading maritime nations.
Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj
The new Danish National Maritime Museum is located in Helsingør, just 50 km (30 mi.) north of Copenhagen and 10 km (6.5 mi.) from the world famous Louisiana Museum for Modern Art.
Photograph by Luca Santiago Mora
The new 6,000 m² (65,000 ft²) museum finds itself in a unique historical context adjacent to one of Denmark’s most important buildings, Kronborg Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage site – known from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is the last addition to Kulturhavn Kronborg, a joint effort involving the renovation of the Castle and two new buildings – offering a variety of culture experiences to residents and visitors to Helsingør.
Photograph by Luca Santiago Mora
Leaving the 60 year old dock walls untouched, the galleries are placed below ground and arranged in a continuous loop around the dry dock walls – making the dock the centrepiece of the exhibition – an open, outdoor area where visitors experience the scale of ship building.
Photograph by Rasmus Hjortshøj
A series of three double-level bridges span the dry dock, serving both as an urban connection, as well as providing visitors with short-cuts to different sections of the museum. The harbour bridge closes off the dock while serving as harbour promenade; the museum’s auditorium serves as a bridge connecting the adjacent Culture Yard with the Kronborg Castle; and the sloping zig-zag bridge navigates visitors to the main entrance. This bridge unites the old and new as the visitors descend into the museum space overlooking the majestic surroundings above and below ground. The long and noble history of the Danish Maritime unfolds in a continuous motion within and around the dock, 7 metres (23 ft.) below the ground. All floors – connecting exhibition spaces with the auditorium, classroom, offices, café and the dock floor within the museum – slope gently creating exciting and sculptural spaces.
Photograph by Luca Santiago Mora
Bjarke Ingels: “By wrapping the old dock with the museum program we simultaneously preserve the heritage structure while transforming it to a courtyard bringing daylight and air in to the heart of the submerged museum. Turning the dock inside out resolved a big dilemma; out of respect for Hamlet’s Castle we needed to remain completely invisible and underground – but to be able to attract visitors we needed a strong public presence. Leaving the dock as an urban abyss provides the museum with an interior façade facing the void and at the same time offers the citizens of Helsingør a new public space sunken 8 m (16 ft.) below the level of the sea.”
Photograph by Luca Santiago Mora
KiBiSi has designed the above ground bench system. The granite elements are inspired by ship bollards and designed as a constructive barrier that prevents cars from driving over the edge. The system is a soft shaped bench for social hangout and based on Morse code – dots and dashes writing a hidden message for visitors to crack.
Photograph by Luca Santiago Mora
The exhibition was designed by the Dutch exhibition design office Kossmann.dejong. The metaphor that underpins the multimedia exhibition is that of a journey, which starts with an imagining of the universal yearning to discover far away shores and experience adventures at sea. Denmark’s maritime history, up to the current role of the shipping industry globally, is told via a topical approach, including notions such as harbour, navigation, war and trade. The exhibition has been made accessible for a broad audience through the intertwining of many different perspectives on the shipping industry.
Photograph by Luca Santiago Mora
David Zahle, Partner-in-Charge: “For 5 years we have been working on transforming the old concrete dock into a modern museum, which required an archaeologist care and spacecraft designer’s technical skills. The old lady is both fragile and tough; the new bridges are light and elegant. Building a museum below sea level has taken construction techniques never used in Denmark before. The old concrete dock with its 1.5 m thick walls and 2.5 m thick floor has been cut open and reassembled as a modern and precise museum facility. The steel bridges were produced in giant sections on a Chinese steel wharf and transported to Denmark on the biggest ship that has ever docked in Helsingør. The steel sections weigh up to 100 tons a piece and are lifted on site by the two largest mobile cranes in northern Europe. I am truly proud of the work our team has carried out on this project and of the final result.”
Photograph by Luca Santiago Mora
On Saturday October 5, Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II, cut the ribbon to mark the grand opening. The new Danish National Maritime Museum is open to the public for outdoor activities, exhibitions and events, making the museum a cultural hub in the region throughout the year.
Opinion: the internet is about to disrupt education and kill the lecture, which brings together “bored lecturers with hungover students”. But, asks Dan Hill, would design students be better off learning in the “gloriously generative cyberpunk favelas” of current institutions?
“‘Because,’ said Morris Zapp, reluctantly following, ‘information is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people. Ergo, it’s no longer necessary to hoard your information in one building, or keep your top scholars corralled in one campus. There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years, though very few people have woken up to the fact: jet travel, direct-dialling telephones and the Xerox machine.'” (From “Small World”, by David Lodge, 1984)
So says Morris Zapp, the errant American academic in David Lodge’s novel “Small World”, the meat in the sandwich of Lodge’s campus trilogy. Written three decades ago, “Small World” revels in the campus politics, sexual politics and, well, plain old politics of the time. But in this tirade from the reliably forthright Zapp (think Walter Matthau) we hear a kind of pre-echo of an increasingly vocal meme about educational tech.
We might need a bit more perspective – apologies, Morris – in order to understand what might be going on in design and architecture education, and by extension design and architecture, over the next few years.
For Morris Zapp we can now read Sebastian Thrun. Unlike Zapp, Thrun is real; via Stanford and Google X (the lab that created Google Glass and their self-driving cars) Thrun now runs Udacity, one of several start-ups looking to “radically disrupt” education. (Radical disruption is the obligatory starting point these days.)
These start-ups develop and host MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. In simple terms, they are putting videos of lectures online, within a flexible course structure, adorned with a few loose-fitting social media tropes to enable student discussion and automated in-lecture prompts and quizzes. People sign up to take courses at their own pace, more or less, over the internet.
But those simple terms don’t suggest the impact that MOOCs could have on traditional higher education, including design education. Udacity is joined by Coursera (also ex-Stanford), Khan Academy, edX (MIT/Harvard) and many others. They claim millions of users; already more than attend traditional universities in the USA, in fact. (Coursera alone has over four million enrolled on courses.) Bill Gates has called Khan Academy the future of education. Thrun believes that within 50 years there will only be 10 institutions in the world providing higher education (he hopes including Udacity).
(Ah these names. “Coursera.” “Udacity.” They sound like recently-privatised former state assets. I next expect a slew of social media oriented services, with monickers like Smugly and Learnr, Swotly and Examinr, Cramly and Testr.)
Yet what MOOCs essentially do is replace the lowest of the low-hanging-fruits of education – the common or garden lecture. It represents what we call the “jug and mug” approach to learning: the lecturer is the jug, pouring their knowledge into the mug, aka the student. In fact, we know that most lectures bring together bored lecturers with hungover students. (Or indeed vice versa.) You don’t need to watch a Ken Robinson lecture – although you should – to know that this is not what education should be about.
Yet so many education systems are still oriented around the lecture. It is the foundation of timetables, and the lecture theatre still represents the foundations of most contemporary college buildings, spatially. One is probably being constructed right now, somewhere in the world, as you read this.
And that’s a waste, as MOOCs may do lectures much better. This is the component of higher education that the internet will easily swallow. MOOCs are the mp3 of education: the easiest thing to distribute, will be. Just as the mp3 has indeed disrupted the music industry, but not really music, so the MOOCs will remove much of the lecture, but possibly not broader education.
Design helps us understand this. Perhaps there is a reason that the curricula of these services does not feature much design so far. Perhaps predictably, there is a lot of code, and a lot of traditional humanities and science, but little design.
Udacity will shortly start its first ever design course: “The Design Of Everyday Things“, led by Don Norman, the ex-Apple legend, and Coursera’s few design-related courses tend to be at the more analytical end of the scale. In the UK, the Open University, which has been doing this sort of thing since Morris Zapp was just achieving tenure, has a new venture called FutureLearn. It has made some smart acquisitions in terms of team and university partners, but again, there is little or no design there so far.
So, could MOOCs have a role to play here? Is design education just late to this new game? Or does design education simply not fit the MOOC model?
Stefano Mirti’s “Design 101” course, for Iversity via Accademia di Belle Arti in Catania, indicates some of the promise for design education in this medium. Irresistibly Italian in presentation, Design 101 is based around regularly providing challenging briefs of things to make, with Mirti supplying context and inspiration.
And yet despite attempts to fold in collaboration and sharing, it will tend to a solitary pursuit of those exercises. At least currently. The whole point of MOOCs – one of their core values – is that they are *not* social and collaborative. Their dematerialised and dislocated state means they fit into your schedule, but in doing so, it cannot – by definition – bring you together with people at the same time and in the same space.
Design and architecture education however is, I believe, more than ever about collaboration, on working through holistic projects together, face to face, in transdisciplinary teams, learning through doing on real projects with real clients. While digital tools can support this, affording some new patterns of activity, the pull back to the physical, embodied and genuinely social is profound, particularly as systems and outcomes become more complex, more entwined, more hybridised. Schools and research centres like Strelka, CIID, Sandberg Instituut or the work we’re doing at Fabrica, are exploring exactly this, as post-institutional learning environments.
It’s difficult to see how MOOCs will really shift that aspect of design education.
The great graphic designer and typographer Erik Spiekermann once said: “You can teach yourself everything there is to be learned by observing, asking, taking things apart and putting them back together again. Teachers can help with that process as long as they stay credible. The only way to achieve that is to keep on learning themselves.”
MOOCs will not force teachers to keep learning; rather, they may encourage lecturers to constantly refine their delivery, their execution, to obsessively watch their pay-per-view ‘lecture stats’ just as most animators now lie awake at night dreaming of a Vimeo Staff Pick.
Yet if MOOCs enable us to select the very best of “jug and mug” mode education, it means only a few have to do it, after all. We could collate a “watch-list” of classic lectures – Philip Johnson on Le Corbusier, Richard Sennett on the city, Paola Antonelli on Italian design – and distribute that. There are thousands of possibilities, as TED, in its own yawningly banal way, has illustrated so far.
Much of the theory of design might be conveyed via MOOCs, and then reinforced in practice. MOOCs might free up teachers – and space – for crits, tutorials, studios and the other high value physical exchanges that cannot be distributed so easily.
Morris Zapp: “‘It’s huge, heavy, monolithic. It weighs about a billion tons. You can feel the weight of those buildings, pressing down the earth. Look at the Library – built like a huge warehouse. The whole place says, ‘We have learning stored here; if you want it, you’ve got to come inside and get it.’ Well, that doesn’t apply any more.” (Lodge, 1984)
That may be so, but the thing is, Morris, that space is important for other reasons. Design education in particular needs space to explore, to pin up and tear down, to drill holes in, to knock about.
I recently visited RMIT’s new Design Hub building in Melbourne, designed by Sean Godsell Architects, and came away impressed and dismayed in equal measure. It’s a beautiful jewel-box that is, at this early stage, not working. Over-designed and over-finished as it is, it will do little to encourage the interdisciplinary research work it supposed to afford. It too needs knocking about a bit.
For me, the ideal design education space – showing my prejudices, here – looks more like the wonderfully messy SCI-Arc in Los Angeles or Royal College of Art in London. The RCA, especially in Tony Dunne’s Design Interactions space, can sometimes feel like some kind of gloriously generative cyberpunk favela.
How will MOOCs fit alongside this? Or put it another way, what do you think the student bar at Coursera is like?
The huge opportunity behind non-certified, transdisciplinary learning is that it can be tuned to the 21st century’s needs, rather than the last century’s. Collaborative project-based learning ought to be intrinsically holistic in nature, with tangible outcomes. This is how design is practiced, and this is how design ought to be practiced in the context of learning. Putting lectures online is really just putting 20th century education on the internet, and there must be more to 21st century education than that.
Morris Zapp: “As long as you have access to a telephone, a Xerox machine, and a conference grant fund, you’re OK, you’re plugged into the only university that really matters – the global campus.” (Lodge, 1984)
Sidetracked by skirt and semiotics, Morris Zapp was too lazy to ask the big questions, even as he stumbled into the “global campus”. But MOOCs do give us that opportunity to ask those big questions. The fact that design education is so far largely untouched by MOOCs et al does not mean it won’t be. The internet transforms almost everything; there is no reason it won’t reorient design education. The question is how.
Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. He is an adjunct professor in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty at University of Technology, Sydney, and his blog City of Sound covers the intersection between cities, design, culture and technology.
This gas compressor station in southern Denmark by Scandinavian firm C.F. Møller comprises Corten steel-clad boxes atop a pair of artificial hills (+ slideshow).
Corten steel panels create a textured surface around the upper walls of the structures, and were chosen because they are easy to maintain and fit in well with the natural surroundings.
“The plating is juxtaposed to create a varied and vibrant pattern of light and shadow,” said architect Julian Weyer. “The combination of materials aims to make the buildings appear rugged and elegant at the same time.”
The bases of both buildings are tucked down into the centre of two artificial hills, which are covered with grass.
The new technical plant is the first of its kind in Denmark, suppling gas to pipelines as far away as Germany and Sweden.
The interior of the plant is divided up into a linear sequence of rooms, accommodating storage areas, fire-extinguishing spaces, workshops, and boiler rooms. Additional buildings on-site accommodate an emergency generator in case of power failure.
Photography is by Julian Weyer.
Here’s a description from the architects:
Gas Kompressor Station, Egtved
Natural gas plant consisting of compressor station and service buildings.
A technical site is normally swaddled in greenery to prevent it from becoming an eyesore in the natural environment. The new Energinet.dk compressor station at Egtved is Denmark’s first installation of its kind, and here the opposite is true.
C.F. Møller has designed the plant, consisting of four compressor units and service buildings, as an architectural feature in the open landscape. The form of the buildings was also specially chosen in order to achieve optimum safety conditions at the plant.
The new technical plant, supplying the central intersection of the gas pipelines connection north-south from Germany and east-west to Sweden, has a landscape-like expression emerging from the landscape as a grassy embankment.
The remainder of the building appears almost to hover over the mound and is clad with rust-coloured Corten steel plating. The plating is juxtaposed to create a varied and vibrant pattern of light and shadow. The combination of materials aims to make the buildings appear rugged and elegant at the same time.
The grass and iron-clad plant houses service buildings, including an emergency generator and storage rooms, and beyond the buildings lies the compression plant itself atop an open plane. The buildings are designed to provide visual, aural and safety screening from the compression units.
“We began by asking ourselves a question: Can we push the boundaries for how we see a technical plant? Can we create a gas plant in dialogue with the landscape and yet focus on the energy supply infrastructure, on which we all depend?” says Julian Weyer, architect and partner.
The simple and striking design of the service buildings and substation also provides the opportunity for great flexibility in relation to the functional adaptation of the design in the coming phases.
Background
Natural gas supplies from the North Sea are dwindling. To ensure a regular and safe energy supply in the future, Denmark has to be able to receive gas from continental Europe.
Concept diagram
Energinet.dk has therefore constructed 94 kilometres of “gas motorway” from Egtved to Germany. This extension of the fossil gas system may well be a decisive step on the road to a green energy system, which is projected by 2050 to use only renewable energy.
Concept diagram
Client: Energinet.dk Address: Egtved, Denmark Engineering: Niras A/S Architect: C. F. Møller Architects Landscape: C. F. Møller Architects Size: 4.600 m² new-built and 20.000 m2 compressor station Year: 2010-2013
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