Hasta La Ideas

Architecture firm dRMM has combined fifteen staircases to create an Escher-style installation outside Tate Modern, ahead of the London Design Festival beginning tomorrow (+ slideshow).

“Stairs are always the most interesting things about architecture, they’re places where people meet,” dRMM co-founder Alex de Rijke told Dezeen at this morning’s opening presentation.

The interlocking wooden staircases are configured to create a maze of walkways and a viewpoints towards the city’s skyline across the Thames.

“It’s up to you what you want to look at, it gets you up high so you can see out over the river to St Paul’s,” de Rijke told us.

Visitors can climb up, down, over and under the structure, with some stairs leading from one to another and others to dead ends.

Steps and balustrades are made from cross-laminated timber panels of tulipwood taken from offcuts usually used for skirting boards.

The vertical panels used to form hand rails overlap to look like treads turned on their side, adding to the optical illusion.

Initially proposed to sit next to St Paul’s Cathedral, the installation was relocated to the lawn in front of Tate Modern – an art gallery housed in a former power station on the south bank of the river.

“St Paul’s was an interesting site but it was very constricted, the project was difficult to realise there whereas this space is much more open,” de Rijke. “This seemed like the best possible place to put it.”

The Endless Stair was created in collaboration with the American Hardwood Export Council and engineering firm Arup.

Taking place from 14 to 22 September, the London Design Festival will also feature a giant chandelier installed at the V&A museum. See our map of all the best exhibitions, talks and parties here.

Photos are copyright Dezeen.

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Canadian lighting brand Bocci has installed a giant chandelier of colourful glass spheres in the main hall of the V&A museum for the London Design Festival, which kicks off on Saturday (+ slideshow).

Bocci has suspended 280 of its 28 series of hand-blown glass lights on spindly copper wires to create a chandelier designed by Omer Arbel.

“To finally build a piece in a very tall space, and at the V&A no less, really excites us,” said Arbel. “We’ve envisioned the most ambitious iteration of our 28 to date.”

The chandelier descends 30 metres from the ceiling of the first floor gallery and through a hole in the floor to emerge into the museum’s main atrium.

Glass lights are scattered down the column of copper wires that falls straight at the top of the piece, then splays outward haphazardly in the foyer.

During last year’s London Design Festival, the V&A museum hosted one installation that visualised data streams from all over the city and another where drops of coloured ink fell from the top of a stone staircase into a glass tank six storeys below.

Bocci’s 28 lights have also been used to create chandeliers for Spazio Rosanna Orlandi in Milan and a small cafe in Vancouver.

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More information from Bocci below:

Bocci 28.280

A surreal light installation by Bocci created as part of the London Design Festival exhibits at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

During this year’s London Design Festival eleventh edition, the Canadian design brand Bocci will present a lighting installation at the festival’s hub venue, the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Entitled 28.280 and designed by Omer Arbel, the installation is a massive vertically punctuated light installation located at the main atrium of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The installation, featuring Bocci’s celebrated 28, will descend through the large existing void cutting through the entire length of the V&A building, with an astonishing height of more than 30 meters. The intent of the installation is twofold; On the one hand, it is a pure celebration of the monumental open height of the building, which uses light to crystallise a powerful phenomenological experience for the viewer. On the other hand, it is the most ambitious exploration to date of a novel glass blowing technique.

28 is an exploration of a fabrication process – part of Arbel’s and Bocci’s quest for specificity. Instead of designing form itself, here the intent was to design a system that haphazardly yields form, almost as a byproduct. 28 pendants result from a complex glass blowing technique whereby air pressure is introduced into and then removed from a glass matrix which is intermittently heated and then rapidly cooled. The result is a distorted spherical shape with a composed collection of inner shapes, one of which is made of opaque milk glass and houses a light source.

280 of these discreet 28 units will be hung within a 30 metre vertical drop, suspended by a novel, perhaps awkward and heavy copper suspension system, that promises to have as much presence or more than the glass it supports. The installation continues Omer’s personal research into the process of making, and documents Arbel’s remarkable journey as an articulator of form.

“We have always dreamed of mounting a light installation in a very very tall space… In the world of ideas, a tall space is the most appropriate environment for our pieces (abstractly speaking, I could say the ONLY environment for our pieces). Hence, to have the opportunity to finally build a piece in a very tall space, and at the V&A no less, really excites us on both a personal and professional level. We’ve envisioned the most ambitious iteration of our 28 to date.” – Omer Arbel

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Tomato vines suspended over conference tables and broccoli fields in the reception are part of working life at this Japan office by Kono Designs (+ slideshow).

New York firm Kono Designs created the urban farm in 2010, in a nine-storey office building in Tokyo to allow employees to grow and harvest their own food at work. Dezeen spoke with company principal Yoshimi Kono this week to hear more about the project.

“Workers in nearby buildings can be seen pointing out and talking about new flowers and plants and even the seasons – all in the middle of a busy intersection in Tokyo’s metropolitan area,” Kono told Dezeen. “The change in the way local people think and what they talk about was always one of the long-term goals of the project.”

The creation of the new headquarters for Japanese recruitment firm Pasona consisted of refurbishing a 50 year old building to include office areas, an auditorium, cafeterias, a rooftop garden and urban farming facilities. Inside the 19,974 square metre office building there are 3995 square metres dedicated to green space that house over 200 species of plants, fruits, vegetables and rice.

Kono told Dezeen that all of the food is harvested, prepared and served on-site in the cafeterias – making Pasona’s Urban Farm the largest farm-to-table office scheme in Japan.

Pasona employees are encourage to maintain and harvest the crops and are supported by a team of agricultural specialists.

“My client has a larger vision to help create new farmers in urban areas of Japan and a renewed interest in that lifestyle,” Kono told Dezeen.

“One way to encourage this is to not just tell urban communities about farms and plants, but to actively engage with them through both a visual intervention in their busy lifestyle and educational programs focusing on farming methods and practices that are common in Japan,” he added.

The building has a double-skin green facade where flowers and orange trees are planted on small balconies. From the outside, the office block appears to be draped in green foliage.

“The design focus was not on the imposed standards of green, where energy offsets and strict efficiency rates rule,” said Kono. “But rather on an idea of a green building that can change the way people think about their daily lives and even their own personal career choice and life path.”

Inside the offices, tomato vines are suspended above conference tables, lemon and passion fruit trees are used as partitions for meeting spaces, salad leaves are grown inside seminar rooms and bean sprouts are grown under benches.

Plants hang in bags surrounding meeting desks and there are vines growing within vertical cages and wooden plant boxes around the building.

Ducts, pipes and vertical shafts were rerouted to the perimeter of the building to allow for maximum height ceilings and a climate control system is used to monitor humidity, temperature and air flow in the building to ensure it is safe for the employees and suitable for the farm.

“It is important not to just think about how we can use our natural resources better from a distance, but to actively engage with nature and create new groups of people who have a deep interest and respect for the world they live in,” said Kono.

“It is important to note that this is not a passive building with plants on the walls, this is an actively growing building, with plantings used for educational workshops where Pasona employees and outside community members can come in and learn farming practices.”

Yoshimi Kono studied architecture in Tokyo and was a chief designer with Shigeru Uchida at Studio 80 in Tokyo and later became partner at Vignelli Associates in New York. He founded Kono Designs in 2000.

Plants growing on the outside and inside of buildings have been popular on Dezeen recently. Other features include the news that botanist Patrick Blanc has unveiled his latest green wall during Paris Design Week yesterday and we reported on Blanc’s collaboration with French architect Jean Nouvel to create the world’s tallest living wall in Sydney.

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Photographs are courtesy of Kono Designs.

Here’s a project description:

Pasona Urban Farm

Located in down-town Tokyo, Pasona HQ is a nine story high, 215,000 square foot corporate office building for a Japanese recruitment company, Pasona Group. Instead of building a new structure from ground up, an existing 50 years old building was renovated, keeping its building envelope and superstructure.

The project consists of a double-skin green facade, offices, an auditorium, cafeterias, a rooftop garden and most notably, urban farming facilities integrated within the building. The green space totals over 43,000 square feet with 200 species including fruits, vegetables and rice that are harvested, prepared and served at the cafeterias within the building. It is the largest and most direct farm-to-table of its kind ever realised inside an office building in Japan.

The double-skin green facade features seasonal flowers and orange trees planted within the 3′ deep balconies. Partially relying on natural exterior climate, these plants create a living green wall and a dynamic identity to the public. This was a significant loss to the net rentable area for a commercial office. However, Pasona believed in the benefits of urban farm and green space to engage the public and to provide better workspace for their employees.

The balconies also help shade and insulate the interiors while providing fresh air with operable windows, a practical feature not only rare for a mid rise commercial building but also helps reduce heating and cooling loads of the building during moderate climate. The entire facade is then wrapped with deep grid of fins, creating further depth, volume and orders to the organic green wall.

Within the interior, the deep beams and large columns of the existing structure are arranged in a tight interval causing low interior ceiling of 7′-6″. With building services passing below, some area was even lower at 6′-8″. Instead, all ducts, pipes and their vertical shafts were re-routed to the perimeter, allowing maximum height with exposed ceilings between the beams.

Lightings are then installed, hidden on the bottom vertical edge of the beams, turning the spaces between the beams into a large light cove without further lowering the ceiling. This lighting method, used throughout the workspace from second floor to 9th floor, achieved 30% less energy than the conventional ceiling mounted method.

Besides creating a better work environment, Pasona also understands that in Japan opportunities for job placement into farming are very limited because of the steady decline of farming within the country. Instead, Pasona focuses on educating and cultivating next generation of farmers by offering public seminars, lectures and internship programs.

The programs empower students with case studies, management skills and financial advices to promote both traditional and urban farming as lucrative professions and business opportunities. This was one of the main reason for Pasona to create urban farm within their headquarters in downtown Tokyo, aiming to reverse the declining trend in the number of farmers and to ensure sustainable future food production.

Currently, Japan produces less than one-third of their grain locally and imports over 50 million tons of food annually, which on average is transported over 9,000 miles, the highest in the world. As the crops harvested in Pasona HQ are served within the building cafeterias, it highlights ‘zero food mileage’ concept of a more sustainable food distribution system that reduces energy and transportation cost.

Japan’s reliance on imported food is due to its limited arable land. Merely 12% of its land is suitable for cultivation. Farmland in Pasona HQ is highly efficient urban arable land, stacked as a vertical farm with modern farming technology to maximise crop yields.

Despite the increased energy required in the upkeep of the plants, the project believes in the long term benefits and sustainability in recruiting new urban farmers to practice alternative food distribution and production by creating more urban farmland and reducing food mileage in Japan.

Using both hydroponic and soil based farming, in Pasona HQ, crops and office workers share a common space. For example, tomato vines are suspended above conference tables, lemon and passion fruit trees are used as partitions for meeting spaces, salad leaves are grown inside seminar rooms and bean sprouts are grown under benches.

The main lobby also features a rice paddy and a broccoli field. These crops are equipped with metal halide, HEFL, fluorescent and LED lamps and an automatic irrigation system. An intelligent climate control system monitors humidity, temperature and breeze to balance human comfort during office hours and optimise crop growth during after hours. This maximises crop yield and annual harvests.

Besides future sustainability of farmers, Pasona HQ’s urban farm is beyond visual and aesthetic improvement. It exposes city workers to growing crops and interaction with farmland on a daily basis and provides improvement in mental health, productivity and relaxation in the workplace. Studies show that most people in urbanised societies spend over 80% of their time indoors. Plants are also known to improve the air quality we breathe by carbon sequestration and removing volatile organic compound. A sampling on the air at Pasona HQ have shown reduction of carbon dioxide where plants are abundant. Such improvement on the air quality can increase productivity at work by 12%, improves common symptoms of discomfort and ailments at work by 23%, reduce absenteeism and staff turnover cost.

Employees of Pasona HQ are asked to participate in the maintenance and harvesting of crops with the help of agricultural specialists. Such activity encourages social interaction among employees leading to better teamwork on the job. It also provides them with a sense of responsibility and accomplishment in growing and maintaining the crops that are ultimately prepared and served to their fellow co-workers at the building’s cafeterias.

Pasona Urban Farm is a unique workplace environment that promotes higher work efficiency, social interaction, future sustainability and engages the wider community of Tokyo by showcasing the benefits and technology of urban agriculture.

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Opinion: in the first of his monthly columns for Dezeen, V&A senior curator Kieran Long argues that today’s obsession with authorship and celebrity “leads to serious imbalances in the way we see design in the world” and calls for an overhaul of the way design is curated in the twenty-first century.

Long, who was an architecture journalist before being appointed to curate design, architecture and digital at the V&A last year, points out that museums like the V&A focus on handmade, one-off objects at the expense of the mass-produced, anonymous objects that predominate in the real world. “The museum is more or less silent on the era of extraordinary Chinese manufacturing we are living through,” he says.

Below he sets out “95 Theses” for contemporary curation, including provocative statements such as “Ugly and sinister objects demand the museum’s attention just as much as beautiful and beneficial ones do” and “Museum curators have as much in common with investigative journalists as they do with university academics”.

Every morning, on the way to my office, I pass a sign that reads: “Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” At the Victoria & Albert Museum, the building is always telling you to do something. The didactic, Victorian and Edwardian decoration asks you to pay attention to nature, to design and manufacture, to the provenance of objects, even where your food comes from. But this particular sign is deeply serious in its upper-case, gilded typeface. It can be seen only by V&A staff, and most often by the people who empty the bins in the service road at the back of the museum.

As a motivational slogan, it’s espresso-strength, but it also betrays an emphasis at the V&A on the handmade, the artisanal and the one-off that design institutions, the media and designers themselves share. An object that an artist’s or craftsperson’s hand has touched has far more chance of making it into the V&A’s collection than something mass-produced or anonymous.

In our China gallery, for very good institutional reasons, there are no contemporary, mass-produced objects. The twenty-first century is represented by artisanal glass and works of conceptual furniture design: the museum is more or less silent on the era of extraordinary Chinese manufacturing we are living through. Dezeen has a similar emphasis: while the site is catholic in its tastes, the anonymous, the mass-produced and the semi-designed are suppressed in favour of the work of a fairly coherent group of designers.

There are all sorts of pretty reasonable explanations for this. The most banal is, of course, that star designers are click bait: celebrity matters, especially in the media. On the other hand, some might argue that designers’ work is simply better than the anonymous manufactured stuff that surrounds us. It’s easier to love the milled aluminium monocoque of Jonathan Ive’s Macbook than the awkward black plastic housing of a traffic light.

The emphasis on the authored leads to serious imbalances in the way we see design in the world. In future months, I will use this column to try to broaden the conversation about what design is, to try to move beyond a myopic interest in what designers and architects do, toward understanding what their work tells us about the world we live in. The others writing here (Sam, Alexandra, Justin and Dan) are all much better at this than me: I’m looking forward to reading their work.

But to begin, I want to share with you some thinking I’ve been doing about what a museum is for in the twenty-first century. Below are “95 Theses” about how museums might think about contemporary practice, offered in a spirit of generosity and for debate.

I have written these in collaboration with colleagues at the museum: Glenn Adamson, the head of research (who leaves the V&A soon to join MAD in New York as director) was instrumental, but Martin Roth, the director of the V&A, Christopher Wilk, head of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion and Corinna Gardner, curator of product design have all collaborated. The statements below do not represent the view of the museum, perhaps they even question the idea that the museum can have a singular, coherent viewpoint. We disagree among ourselves about many of them: all the more reason to put them out in the world.

The format of the 95 Theses is a gentle joke: the V&A’s relatively new, German director does not foresee a Lutheran Reformation at the V&A. But we felt that just as Martin Luther’s Theses were addressed at indulgences within an institution at a crisis point in its public role, so it was time for some clear statements that question our own received wisdom.

I hope the Dezeen audience will forgive this rather lofty start. In future columns, I want to write about what design tells us about how we live together in the world. I will type each column with all my might: about 70 words per minute.

Curating for the Contemporary: 95 Theses

The Public Realm

» A museum is a privileged part of the public realm.

» Among the museum’s most important roles is that of an agora – a space for the public to encounter itself.Museums should strive to maintain openness.

» Museums should accommodate difference.

» Museums should provide a setting for democratic encounter.

» Museums should constantly monitor the behaviours they allow and disallow.

» The museum must engage with the popular and the mass-produced: the material culture of every social class and situation.

» The public should be able to find objects from their own lives in the museum, and learn about how these things came to be.

» Museum viewership at its best is an active process, in which notions of truth are consciously tested and remade.

» Museums should encourage critical response and involvement by their visitors.

Historic Collections

» Our historic collections are only as important as we choose to make them.

» Interpretation flows around and through a museum’s collection, but the objects will outlast our interpretation.

» Every gallery in every museum necessarily reflects the contemporary world, through selection, interpretation, and display.

» It is difficult to judge which things the future will value, so our choices must be based on an object’s compelling relevance to today.

» This conception of relevance includes both the past’s value within the present, and present views of what was valued in the past.

» Geographically-orientated displays should reflect the current reality of the regions they represent.

Expertise

» A museum’s staff is a topography of different views and opinions.

» Our public voice should reflect this multifarious nature.

» The museum should develop institutional modesty.

» We should strive to be aware of what we don’t know, and constantly invite experts in to help us.

» Often those experts will be drawn from the general public.

» When visitors have more knowledge than curators, this should be welcomed.

» Nevertheless, the expertise of curators is real. Museums should not yield our traditional role as repositories of knowledge and judgment.

» Museums must make a special space for the public’s authority.

» A museum object is an incontrovertible fact in the world. It is interpretation that is necessarily unstable.

» We should actively mount challenges to our own curatorial expertise.

Democracy

» A museum is a civic institution.

» Museums should be instruments of social justice.

» This means behaving democratically.

» We are a long way from achieving democracy in museums.

» Museum collections are extensive archives of unstated prejudice – beset with sexist, racist, and class-based distortions.

» Museums must work to redress this legacy, employing techniques proposed within feminism and post colonialism.

» Staff should advocate for democracy within their institutions.

» The museum can have meaningful contributions to political processes, and should seek out these opportunities.

» Twenty-first century practice is increasingly ‘flat’ in character.

» We take seriously the postmodern critique that sought to dismantle hierarchies of fine art over craft, high culture over low.

» This means that no domain of creativity is inherently superior to any other.

» Painting and sculpture have no more cultural value than knitting, cooking, and bicycle repair.

» The vernacular and the academic are equally valuable.

» Museums will need to reshape themselves if they are to reflect this reality.

The Global Museum

» Given the opportunities provided by technology, more museums than ever are in a position to reach a global audience.

» There is a danger that this wide-ranging influence will reproduce existing power asymmetries.

» Museums with a global reach must consider deeply the terms on which this universality was established – such as colonialism and imperialism.

» If they can be truthful about these historical realities, museums can be invaluable tools of cultural diplomacy.

» Every instance of cultural diplomacy should be mutual.

» Museums should not be in the business of unilaterally exporting anything (treasures from the collection, local cultural assumptions, models of expertise, etc.).

» In matters of repatriation and other controversial issues of patrimony, are museums sufficiently objective to be the final arbiters?

Kieran Long is Senior Curator of Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the forthcoming series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.

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as much as beneficial ones” appeared first on Dezeen.

Designer Tom Dixon launches a flexible new chair for the contract market during the London Design Festival next week. It’s made of glass-reinforced nylon and has a faceted back resembling bunny ears.

The one-piece seat and back of Y Chair is made of nylon strengthened with overlapping glass fibres, giving it strength and flexibility. The chair comes in black and white versions with the option of sled, swivel or wooden bases.

Dixon will launch the chair at The Dock in London next week during the London Design Festival, which runs from 14-22 September. See our online World Design Guide map of the London Design Festival 2013 for more details about this and over events across the city.

Here’s some info from Dixon:

Y Chair – A new silhouette. Super Ergonomic. Hyper-flexible, and Ultra-robust

Our recent adventures in hotel, restaurants, bar and office design got us looking for a chair to withstand heavy use, constant knocks and the daily abuse of the professional world. But we also wanted a recognisable silhouette, an ergonomic shape and a modern attitude.

Not too much to ask we thought. But after much fruitless searching we decided it was time to make our own.

Two years of complex engineering, significant tooling investment and intense shape-making later we think we may have got it.

The Y Chair’s expressive form is injection moulded in glass-reinforced nylon which is extremely fatigue resistant – absorbing shock and load through its flexibility. Tested to contract level it will withstand the most demanding environments.

The shape of the Y chair is prompted by ergonomics – with lumbar support, space for the spine and a generous brace for the shoulder blades. All adding to its instantly recognisable silhouette.

Product Information:

Available in two shell colour options; Black and White. Also available with upholstered felt seat and back pads. Three base options: Sled, Swivel and Wood.

Sled: Black or White Powder Coat base; Stackable up to 8 high; 100% recyclable; Suitable for outdoors.

Swivel: Sand Blasted Die Cast Aluminium base; Clear lacquered and Black Powder Coat options.

Wood: Oak base; clear lacquer or black stain; Copper cross brace.

Further information:

Most chairs seen in the contract market are made from Polypropylene but Glass Reinforced Nylon has short overlapping strands of glass fibre in the plastic which provides a much higher degree of strength.

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Tom Dixon appeared first on Dezeen.