Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: with four cities down and four to go, we’re halfway through our Dezeen and MINI World Tour. Before our next stop at London Design Festival in September, here are some movie highlights from our trips to Cape Town, Milan, New York and Berlin.

We kicked off our Dezeen and MINI World Tour at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, where we talked to leading figures in the design world who were speaking at the conference, as well as Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo.

Naidoo reflected on what Africa’s burgeoning economy means for design on the continent (above), before taking us on a tour of the upcoming district of Woodstock, a former industrial suburb where many of Cape Town’s designers have moved in recent years.

Architect David Adjaye told us why he believes there is a great opportunity for architects in Africa (above), Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde talked about the clothes he is designing that become transparent when you lie and Ben Terrett, head of design at the UK’s Government Digital Service, explained the ideas behind the design for the new gov.uk website, which later went on to be named Design of the Year 2013.

Read our round-up of this year’s Design Indaba conference »
Watch all our movies from Cape Town »

In April we headed to Milan for the design world’s biggest and most important design fair.

Italian architect Fabio Novembre welcomed us to the city (above) and then took us to some of his favourite areas, including a converted farm near the city centre and the San Siro football stadium.

Designers including Tom Dixon and Marcel Wanders discussed the continued importance of Milan to the design world, despite Italy’s political and economic difficulties, as well as the growing phenomenon of other companies using the event to copy their products (below).

We interviewed a host of top designers including Ron Arad and Naoto Fukasawa about their latest products and spoke to leading design journalists at our dedicated Dezeen and MINI World Tour Studio.

Joseph Grima, former editor of Domus magazine, reflected on the difficult period the city is currently going through, design journalist Kieran Long compared Italy’s current generation of designers to the great masters and Johanna Agerman Ross, editor-in-chief of Disegno magazine, discussed the renewed focus on commerce at this year’s fair.

Watch all our movies from Milan »

Next up was New York for the USA’s leading design week, which this year relaunched itself as NYCxDesign.

Willy Wong, chief creative officer for the city’s marketing and tourism agency, told us how the city is hoping the new festival will help boost its design sector (above).

New York designer Stephen Burks gave us a tour of the west side of town, where he lives and works, before taking us to see the High Line and the new buildings by major international architects including Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano that are springing up next to it (above).

In addition, design journalist Monica Khemsurov took us to all the key exhibitions around the Noho Design District.

Watch all our movies from New York »

The German capital was our most recent destination. We checked out DMY International Design Festival Berlin, where graduates and young brands from over 30 countries presented work in the hangars of the former Tempelhof airport.

DMY Berlin founder Joerg Suermann gave us a tour of this year’s show (above) as well as taking us to some of his favourite spots in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood where he lives.

Watch all our movies from Berlin »

About Dezeen and MINI World Tour:

Dezeen and MINI are travelling the world together this year, visiting eight cities to discover the most exciting new talents, the hottest trends and the most important themes in architecture and design in 2013.

Our Dezeen and MINI World Tour will take in a selection of the best international fairs, conferences and festivals, where we’ll be conducting interviews, making videos and reporting on the most interesting developments.

For the second half of the tour we’ll be heading to London for the London Design Festival from 14-22 September, Singapore for the World Architecture Festival and the INSIDE festival from 2-4 October, Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week from 19-27 October and then Miami for Design Miami at the end of the year from 4-8 December.

www.dezeen.com/miniworldtour

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pit stop appeared first on Dezeen.

This week’s Dezeen Mail newsletter includes a Vietnamese house with patterned screen walls (pictured) and a fake mountain villa atop a Chinese tower, plus the latest news, jobs, competitions and reader comments from Dezeen.

Read Dezeen Mail issue 165 | Subscribe to Dezeen Mail

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This house in Kanazawa by Japanese architect Takuro Yamamoto is punctuated by a series of interconnecting voids, including a terrace with a shallow reflecting pool (+ slideshow).

The client asked Takuro Yamamoto Architects for a simple building with several outdoor spaces, so the Tokyo-based firm inserted holes into the monolithic structure to create a courtyard and covered parking space on the ground floor, as well as the first floor terrace.

“The connection of voids – we call it Cave – is the theme of this house,” explain the architects, adding that the different voids “serve multiple purposes in order to make up for the space limitations.”

The house’s exterior appears as a plain white volume, with one surface interrupted by an aperture that creates the parking space and a covered entrance passage to protect the owners from the winter snowfall.

This void continues around a corner, where it becomes a secluded courtyard visible from the open plan kitchen and living space through full-height windows.

Views of the “cave” change throughout the day depending on the angle of the sun, and the architects added the shallow pool on the terrace “because we thought water is inseparable from white caves.”

The interconnected outdoor spaces also provide a route for snow to be cleared if it starts to build up in winter.

Takuro Yamamoto Architects previously designed a house in Kashiwa, Japan, around an angled central courtyard that divides the surrounding space into smaller rooms.

Other Japanese houses on Dezeen include one with a facade that looks like a picture frame surrounding a courtyard garden and another simple white cube that resembles a block of tofu. See more Japanese houses »

Cave-like structures have appeared before on Dezeen, including a bathroom showroom by Zaha Hadid and a faceted church hall in Austria. See more caves »

Photography is by Ken’ichi Suzuki.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

White Cave House

White Cave House is a massive lump engraved by a series of voids interconnected in the shape of a kinked tube. The connection of voids – we call it Cave – is the theme of this house.

Internal rooms are designed to enjoy the minimum views of Cave characterized by its whiteness. At the same time, this concept is also the practical solution to realize a courtyard house in Kanazawa city known for heavy snow in Japan.

The client’s original request was a white minimally-designed house with many external spaces, such as a large snow-proof approach to the entrance, a roofed garage for multiple cars, a terrace facing to the sky, and a courtyard.

Though a roofed entrance and a garage are desirable for snowy place, it takes so many floor areas away from the internal rooms for the family, while the space and the budget is limited. In addition, courtyard style itself is not suitable to the snowy country because courtyards would be easily buried under snow.

To solve the problems, we proposed to connect these external spaces to one another with a large single tube, or Cave, and have each part serve multiple purposes in order to make up for the space limitations.

We designed Cave unstraight because it prevents passengers outside from seeing through, though it is not closed. By this arrangement, Cave takes a new turn for each part letting in the sunshine while protecting privacy of the courtyard, the terrace, and the internal rooms.

The family inside can enjoy the view of Cave changing its contrast throughout a day under the sunshine. Cave also serves as a route to remove snow from the external spaces in winter, otherwise you would be at a loss with a lot of snow in the enclosed courtyard.

In order to make Cave deserve its name more, we wondered if we could add the reflection of water to the house because we thought water is inseparable from white caves.

We eventually figured out that the terrace was an appropriate site to place it. The terrace covered by white waterproof FRP holds a thin layer of water like a white basin.

On the terrace reflecting the skyview without obstacles, you may feel that Cave has brought you to another world far from the daily life.

Credits: Takuro Yamamoto Architects
Location: Kanazawa
Use: independent residence
Site area : 493.88m2
Building area : 132.68m2
Total floor area: 172.33m2
Completion: June 2013
Design period: February 2011-September 2012
Construction period: October 2012-June 2013
Structure: Wood
Client: a married couple + a child
Architect: Takuro Yamamoto
Structure design: Yamada Noriaki Structural Design Office
Construction: Ninomiya-Kensetsu

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Takuro Yamamoto Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

German firm Archequipe has renovated a townhouse in Cologne’s Deutz district with a gabled facade that steps back and forth to respect the boundaries of a neighbouring residence.

Haus KLR was designed in the 1980s by architect Jutta Klare as a home for herself and her husband. Originally the five-storey building had housed an apartment for the couple’s in-laws on its second floor, but this space has now been converted into an architecture studio for Archequipe.

Thirty years ahead of its completion, the architects have given the building a facelift, re-plastering the staggered white walls that comprise the south, east and north elevations.

These offsets help to maximise the building footprint on each floor while respecting a guideline that required various setbacks on different storeys.

“The valid building law requested three metres distance between ground floor and the eastbound property line while the second floor required 4.5 metres distance to the same boundary,” explained the architects.

There’s also a south-facing oriel window that reinterprets the local 1930s vernacular.

Archequipe’s renovation included repainting the frames surrounding all the building’s windows, which are either square or made from combinations of square panels.

Stone floors were restored throughout both the studio and house, which includes a large dining room that opens out to the garden. Bathrooms were also overhauled on each floor.

Other houses we’ve featured from Germany include a renovated 1970s house in Offenbach and a gabled residence in the town of Metzingen. See more German houses on Dezeen »

Photography is by Roland Unterbusch.

Here’s some more information from Archequipe:

House KLR

The House KLR was built 1982 in Cologne as a townhouse with two units. In these days it was one of the first realised buildings of the architect who designed it for her husband and herself. A rentable in-law apartment with a separate staircase was supposed to support the young couple financially.

The district Deutz, where House KLR is located, was traditionally regarded as a secondary part of Cologne, whose centre resides on the opposite side of the river Rhine. In the last decade the once neglected district Deutz evolved into a popular address within Cologne’s inner city.

Most parts of the neighbourhood were erected in the 1930s with 3-4 story residential buildings while the narrow building site of House KLR was used as a fruit and vegetable garden until the 1980s. The simple and practical post-war architecture, nowadays most common in German cities, dominates the area today.

One challenge regarding the design was to follow building laws while producing sufficient living space on the small plot. The valid building law requested 3.0 metres distance between ground floor and the eastbound property line while the second floor required 4.5 metres distance to the same boundary. In reaction to these demands a sculptural structure originated that seems to jump back and forth playfully multiple times.

The diversely leaping cubes led to additional useful surfaces which made the construction of a sufficiently spacious roof terrace for the in-law apartment possible. The two remaining facades – one facing the street the other the garden – were designed in the style of the sculptural structure of the east façade, thereby, preserving the element of the oriel present in the surrounding buildings. Besides the motif of the oriel the small window formats and the plastered facade as typical elements of the neighbouring housing were included into the design.

The main apartment reaches over the three lower levels, the entrance to the amount of the middle level. The kitchen and dining area are set in the lowest level, so that the garden can be used as an additional dining area during the summer. The garden is also regarded as a recreational area, as for his unique position – below street level and shielded by the enclosing wall – it gains the character of a lonesome oasis in the midst of the city. The bedrooms of the main apartment are located on the first floor and are connected with the two other floors through stairs within the apartment.

The in-law apartment is also structured as a maisonette, and reaches from the second floor till the attic. Today it accommodates the Cologne architecture office of archequipe.

In 2012, exactly 30 years after building House KLR, extensive renovation work was performed. All facades were newly-plastered. Roof sheetings and window benches were renewed, the windows painted in a corresponding color. Inside, the stone cottage floors were refurbished, and walls plastered smoothly. Bathrooms on all levels were completely renovated.

Architects: archequipe, Freie Architekten
Location: Cologne, Germany
Team: Jutta Klare, Bartosz Czempiel, Sebastian Filla

Area: 300 sqm
Year: 1982/2012

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by Archequipe appeared first on Dezeen.

Mesh sections in the walls and floor of this Corten steel bridge in Norway provide views of the Suldalslågen river rushing beneath it (+ slideshow).

Norwegian firm Rintala Eggertsson Architects designed the bridge to connect the town of Sand with a woodland area that is a popular recreation spot with local residents.

Inhabitants of the town were invited to vet early proposals for the bridge during a workshop with Rintala Eggertsson Architects and Czech architect Ivan Kroupa.

“The idea behind the chosen proposal was to establish a horizontal reference line in the landscape, to emphasise the undulant and organic shapes in the bedrock,” say the architects.

Walls with diagonal bracing are clad in sheets of Corten steel and panels of stainless steel mesh, which allow users to look out at the landscape and cause the bridge to glow from within at night when the internal lighting is switched on.

The enclosed steel volume amplifies the sound of the cascading water, which can also be seen through a steel grate in the floor.

A small concrete pavilion on the south side of the river can be used as a picnic site or resting place.

Other bridges we’ve published recently include Thomas Heatherwick’s design for a garden spanning the River Thames in London and a twisting concrete form crossing a river in the Austrian Alps – see more stories about bridges.

Rintala Eggertsson Architects is constructing a giant treehouse in a Swedish forest for Treehotel and previously designed a 19 square-metre dwelling in Oslo that it describes as “a kind of urban cave”. See more architecture by Rintala Eggertsson Architects »

Photography is by Dag Jenssen.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

The bridge is located just north of the town Sand in the municipality of Suldal on the west coast of Norway. It is the result of extensive design process which started in 2008 after a design workshop together with Czech architect Ivan Kroupa where the inhabitants of Sand were given the opportunity to make a referendum over some of our initial ideas.

The bridge connects the town to a vast wooden landscape which is used for recreation by the inhabitants of Sand. This new connection makes the area more accessible for the general public and allows people of all generations to use the area.

The idea behind the chosen proposal was to establish a horizontal reference line in the landscape, to emphasize the undulant and organic shapes in the bedrock. The bridge consists of two steel lattice beams in corten steel on each side of the walkway, with a system of vertical and diagonal members.

The walls are clad with sheets of stainless steel stretch-metal and corten steel. On the south side of the river, after crossing the bridge from Sand, a small pavilion in concrete was made to accommodate for small picnics and pit-stops for passers-by.

An important issue from the very start of the design process was to capture the power of the river running underneath the bridge. This was developed into an enclosed acoustic space above the middle of the river with a view through a steel grate directly down to the river, which gives the visitor a direct connection with this untamed natural element.

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