Five wooden cabins fan out around a site on Tokyo Bay to form this capsule accommodation by Japanese office Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects.
Located on the east coast of the bay in Kyonan, the hostel was designed by Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects as five rectilinear wooden buildings with grey-painted exteriors and exposed timber interiors.
Three of the buildings accommodate guest facilities, including bathrooms, communal kitchen and dining areas, plus large Japanese-style rooms with tatami mats across the floor.
Compact bedrooms occupy the other two buildings and are stacked up on two storeys to make room for 12 in each block.
“All the rooms have a view of the Tokyo Bay, each one becoming a space like a ship’s cabin,” says Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects.
Each of the eleven-metre-long containers has a timber frame and follows the same dimensions as a shipping container. “The client requested guest units that had the possibility of future relocation or addition,” explain the architects.
A car park is positioned behind the buildings, but could provide space for three extra buildings in the future.
This private training center has 2 capsule-hotel and 3 tatami-style buildings. They are positioned with various angles of axis and all the rooms have a view of the Tokyo Bay, each one becoming a space like a ship’s cabin.
The client requested guest units that had the possibility of future relocation or addition. While clearing these requirements and in order to ensure the necessary dimension for the bedroom spaces with economy, we utilised a wooden structural frame on a standard freight-truck of adequate dimensions.
Location: Kyonan, Chiba, Japan Principal use: hostel Category: newly built Structure: steel, 1 storey Completion date: 2012
Site area: 1,013.22 sqm Building area: 149.85 sqm Total floor area: 149.85 sqm Structural engineer: ASA General contractor: Ajiro Koumuten
Steel rings were moulded around a wooden chandelier before it was burnt away, leaving this latest piece in a collection of disintegrated furniture by Amsterdam-based Studio Markunpoika.
Studio Markunpoika founder Tuomas Markunpoika formed a web of rings around the original wood piece then set it alight to leave a fuzzy memory of the original object. “The hardest part was to find a suitable light source, and to fix wiring so itcontoured the inside shape and didn’t interfere with the see-through aesthetics,” Markunpoika told Dezeen.
The twelve-piece collection, which includes a cabinet (above) and chair (below), was nominated in the furniture category for Designs of the Year 2013. “When working on the other pieces of the collection I couldn’t help noticing how exquisitely the multilayered exoskeleton was interacting with light and movement,” said Markunpoika. “The chandelier seemedlike a good next step.”
Spanish architecture studio Sol89 has converted a former slaughterhouse in the historic town of Medina-Sidonia into a school for training chefs (+ slideshow).
Constructed in the nineteenth century, the building previously featured a series of outdoor paddocks and a large courtyard, used for storing livestock before the slaughtering process. As part of the renovation, Sol89 has extended the building into these spaces to create kitchens and classrooms.
Like most of the town’s architecture, white-painted walls surrounded the perimeter of the slaughterhouse site and now enclose both the new and old sections of the building.
The original pitched roof is clad with traditional clay tiles, but the architects used modern flat ceramics to give a vibrant red to the asymmetric gables that make up the roof of the extension.
“If we observe Medina-Sidonia from a distance, it seems to be a unique ceramic creation moulded by the topography of Medina,” explain architects María González and Juanjo López de la Cruz. “The Professional Cooking School uses this idea of the moulded ceramic plane to draw its geometry. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place.”
The original arched doorway remains as the entrance to the school and leads in via the old structure. Inside, the architects have replaced the original flooring with exposed concrete that skirts around a set of historic columns in the main hall.
The kitchens are lined with tiles on the floors and walls. High level windows help to bring light in from above, while small glass courtyards are positioned at intervals to provide areas for students to grow vegetables and herbs.
Medina is a historic town in the hills in Cadiz. Its houses are known for their whitewashed walls and their ceramic roofs. The project involves adapting an ancient slaughterhouse, built in the XIX century, into a Professional Cooking School.
The ancient slaughterhouse was composed of a small construction around a courtyard and a high white wall that limits the plot. If you are going to act in the historic city you must adapting, taking shelter, settling in its empty spaces. The density of the architecture of the ancient slaughterhouse, where brick walls, stones and Phoenician columns coexist, contrasts with the empty space inside the plot, limited by the wall. The project proposes catching this space through a new ceramic roof that limits the new construction and consolidates the original building.
If we observe Medina Sidonia from a distance, it seems to be a unique ceramic creation molded by the topography of Medina. The Professional Cooking School uses this idea of the molded ceramic plane to draw its geometry. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place, ceramic roofs and whitewashed walls. Some little courtyards are inserted, working as ventilation shaft, and are cultivated with different culinary plants which are used by the students to cook.
At the original building, ancient floors were replaced by slabs of concrete with wooden formwork that recognise traditional building forms, walls are covered with white and rough lime mortar which seeks material memory of its industrial past, and the existing Phoenician columns, displaced from the disappeared Temple of Hercules, have been consolidated. All of those materials, even the time, built this place.
Context sketch
Architects: María González y Juanjo López de la Cruz. Sol89 Team: George Smudge (architecture student), Jerónimo Arrebola (quantity surveyor), Alejandro Cabanas (structure), Insur JG (building services), Novoarididian SA y Rhodas SL (contractors)
London firm Tony Fretton has sandwiched two rows of brick houses between a pair of canals in the town of Den Helder in the Netherlands (+ slideshow).
Tony Fretton Architects collaborated with Dutch firm Geurst en Schulze Architecten to design 16 houses for the Molenplein site, as part of a wider masterplan by West 8 that centres around the redevelopment of the town’s former navy base.
Three-storey houses stretch along the front of the site, facing out across the dockyard, while a row of smaller two-storey residences run along behind and are separated by private gardens.
Drawing inspiration from canal houses of the early twentieth century, the houses feature a mixture of linear and gabled profiles, and present both exposed and painted brickwork facades.
Bright yellow doors and ornamental marble panels mark the entrances to each house, plus the windows come with chunky wooden frames.
Each of the 16 houses has one of four standard layouts. There are few internal partitions and finishes, as the architects wanted to give residents the opportunity to design their own interiors.
Read on for more information from Tony Fretton Architects:
Houses in Molenplein, Den Helder, the Netherlands
Tony Fretton Architects has completed a new development of houses in the Dutch town of Den Helder.
Commissioned by Dutch developer Proper-Stok the development comprises 2 and 3 storey houses designed by Tony Fretton Architects and Dutch practice Geurst en Schulze Architecten configured within a masterplan designed by West 8.
Molenplein occupies a long site between two canals, the Helderskanaal and Werfkanaal, where it looks out onto Den Helder’s former Napoleonic naval yard. The development is part of a regeneration strategy by the municipality to attract middle-income people to the area following the relocation of the Dutch navy base. The Napoleonic dockyard has also been redeveloped, providing places for business and culture.
West 8’s masterplan for Molenplein preserves the character, scale and diversity of the city fabric along each canal; the plan comprises large three-storey houses facing the dockyard and compact two-storey houses to the rear, with private gardens in between, and intersperses designs by Tony Fretton Architects with those of Geurst en Schulze Architecten.
Houses designed by Tony Fretton Architects are distinguished by a simple profile and generously proportioned windows and entrance doors. The designs are abstracted versions of typical canal front and back houses and aim to reproduce the generosity of scale and abstraction seen in Dutch architecture from the Golden Age and early Dutch modernism. Materials comprise wooden window frames in facades of white painted brick or rose coloured brick with white pointing. A measure of ornament is given through the use of discreet panels of Belgian marble at eye level. In contrast the Geurst en Schulze houses have finely elaborated detail and provide punctuation in the terrace.
Inspired by the openness and energy that the practice observed in an earlier development they designed – De Prinsendam in Overhoeks, Amsterdam – where owners radically personalised their interiors, the houses are presented with unplanned interiors and carefully positioned service risers, fenestration and staircases that support a wide range of possible internal configurations.
Location: Den Helder, The Netherlands Client: Proper-Stok Gross external area: 2,300 sq m approx Internal area: 3,200 sq m approx
Architects: Tony Fretton Architects Design team: Tony Fretton, James McKinney, David Owen, Chris Snow, Chris Neve Project Associate: David Owen Project Architect: Chris Snow Executive Architects: Geurst en Schulze Architecten Masterplan & landscaping: West 8 Structural Engineers: Ingenieursbureau Dijkhuis bv Services Engineers: Wolf Dikken adviseurs Main Contractor: Tuin Den Helder bv
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie recorded at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan last month, MINI head of design Anders Warming discusses the design of the new MINI Paceman and design journalist and curator Kieran Long gives us his thoughts on how the current generation of designers compares to the great masters.
Anders Warming
Warming explains that the idea behind the design of the MINI Paceman was to combine the signature styling of the classic MINI with new features such as four-wheel drive and horizontal tail lights. “When you look at [the car] you feel and you see MINI, but you realise there is so much new to it,” he says.
MINI Paceman
He also stresses that a lot of the design of the car was done by hand. “People say cars are just [designed] by computers today,” he says. “A car is really done by hand. It’s designed with sketches, we choose the lines that we like and we also spend a [lot of] time forming the shapes in clay and then from that make the tooling.”
The guest in our Dezeen and MINI World Tour Studio is Kieran Long, senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the V&A museum in London. He believes the work of the current generation of designers lacks the boldness of the post-modern design Italy became famous for in the 1970s and 1980s.
“I sense a sort of tentative nature in the design that you see – even [work by] the younger designers, students and so on,” he says. “There’s not much boldness either in formal or colour terms, but also philosophical and ideas terms.
Kieran Long
“It really struck me visiting the exhibition at the Triennale on Italian design, what a big contrast that is from the grand era of Italian design. You see the boldness of those forms and remind yourself of what Italian design was known for and you see now a sort of pastel-y sort of invisible feeling to design.”
Haze chair by Wonmin Park
Despite this, Long says there are detectable trends that young designers are exploring. “We’ve had this fixing, repairing, ad hocism thing now for a couple of years,” he says. “This year it’s really identifiable that young designers work is occupied by new materials, often sustainable materials, new organic materials in the kind of Formafantasma mould. If somebody would just capture that and make a manifesto about it, it would seem like a real movement.
Salmon stool by Formafantasma
“I think the big problem is that they have no grasp of design history,” he continues. “They have no idea of where they sit in relation to anything. It’s my observation that most of those designers wish they were taught a formal didactic history of design alongside the freedom that the art school education gives them.”
More generally, Long believes that design needs to be less introspective to remain relevant. “I think we’ve overrated what designers do as the thing that’s interesting about design,” he says. “What’s really interesting is the problem solved, or the relationship made, or the fashion trend started or ended – those cultural currents that design contributes to.
“I think they could learn something from architecture in that sense; when you’re an architect, when you write about architecture, you can also write about the city, and the city is everything in it. Design needs to find a category like that. They need to relax and say: ‘what I do is not the interesting thing about design, it’s what happens after it leaves my office.'”
Dutch graphics studio Experimental Jetset has redesigned the logo for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York as a slender W that changes shape to respond to its setting (+ movie).
Experimental Jetset developed the graphic identity around the concept of a “responsive W” that forms both a symbol of the Whitney and a framework for accompanying text and images.
“We came up with the idea of the zig-zag line, with the zig-zag being a metaphor for a non-simplistic, more complicated (and thus more interesting) history of art,” say the designers.
“We think the line also represents a pulse, a beat – the heartbeat of New York, of the USA. It shows the Whitney as an institute that is breathing (in and out), an institute that is open and closed at the same time.”
The designers specified Neue Haas Grotesk – a redrawn version of a 1950s Swiss typeface – for any text positioned alongside the logo, while any images can be positioned underneath.
“We began to explore the possibilities of the W as a frame to put work in, or a stage to place work on,” they explain. “The lines [of the W] can be seen as borders, arrows, connections [or] columns.”
The new graphic identity replaces the Whitney’s thirteen-year-old logo, designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, and marks a period of change that will see the museum relocate to a new building by architect Renzo Piano, set to open in 2015.
As the Whitney approaches the opening of its new building in 2015, museum staff are taking stock of all aspects of programming and operations. While much of this work is happening behind the scenes, one very visible aspect of this focus is the Whitney’s graphic identity. While the museum has changed considerably in the thirteen years since it introduced the word mark designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, even more extensive institutional changes will come with the move downtown.
Two years ago, Museum staff began a thoughtful internal dialogue regarding the Whitney’s graphic identity and selected the design studio Experimental Jetset to develop an approach which embraces the spirit of the Museum while serving as a visual ambassador for our new building. The result is a distinctive and inventive graphic system that literally responds to art — a fundamental attribute of the Whitney since its founding in 1930. This dynamic identity, which the designers refer to as the “responsive ‘W'” also illustrates the Museum’s ever-changing nature. In the upcoming years it will provide an important point of continuity for members, visitors, and the public during the transition to the new space.
Forward-thinking designers are using 3D printing to blow architecture wide open, as Dezeen’s editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs reports in this extract from Print Shift, our one-off publication dedicated to the developing technology.
The race to build the first 3D-printed house has begun. Teams of architects in London and Amsterdam are competing to produce the first habitable printed structure, using technology that could transform the way buildings are made. Though they all have the same objective, the teams are investigating very different materials and fabrication methods.
All these approaches are completely untried at this scale. And there’s a certain amount of scepticism regarding the viability of scaling up a technology that, until now, has only been used to make relatively small objects – objects that do not demand the structural or environmental performance of a house. But architects working in this area are convinced it won’t be long before additive manufacturing transforms their discipline.
“When we started our research, we were dealing in science fiction,” says Gilles Retsin of Softkill Design. “Everyone on the architecture scene was saying, ‘It’s only going to be possible in 50 or 60 years.’ But when we were sitting at the table in front of one of these 3D-printing companies, these guys were like, ‘Yeah, no problem – let’s start up the research, let’s push it.’ So it’s not actually that far off any more.”
Neri Oxman, architect and founder of the Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab, argues that digital fabrication is ushering in a third era of construction technology. “Prior to the industrial revolution, hand-production methods were abundant,” she says. “Craft defined everything. The craftsman had an almost phenomenological knowledge of materials and intuited how to vary their properties according to their structural and environmental characteristics.”
But the coming of the industrial revolution saw the triumph of the machine over the hand. “The machine was used to standardise everything. And the things we built – our products, our buildings – were defined by these industrial standards.”
Now, however, digital technologies such as additive manufacturing allow craft and industry to merge. “Craft meets the machine in rapid fabrication,” says Oxman. “We can generate craft with the help of technology.”
The question is, which technologies are best suited to architecture? The results of the above architectural experiments will go some way towards answering that.
Landscape House based on Möbius strip by Universe Architecture
Universe Architecture is collaborating on its Landscape House with Italian robotics engineer Enrico Dini, inventor of an extremely large-format 3D printer that uses sand and a chemical binding agent to create a stone-like material. Dini’s machine, called D-Shape, is the largest 3D printer in the world. Located in a warehouse near Pisa, it looks like a stage-lighting rig and works like a laser-sintering machine, but with sand instead of nylon powder, and chemicals instead of a laser.
A moving horizontal gantry first deposits a 5mm substrate layer of sand mixed with magnesium oxide, then, via a row of nozzles, squirts chlorine onto the areas of sand that are to become solid. This resulting chemical reaction creates synthetic sandstone.
The gantry is then raised, another layer of sand is added and the process is repeated. When the D-Shape has completed its printing, the surplus sand is carefully removed to reveal the solid object underneath.
D-Shape prints at a rate of 5cm per hour over a 30-square-metre area, to a depth of up to two metres. Working flat-out, it can produce 30 cubic metres of building structure per week. Dini is a pioneer in the field and the only person to have already printed prototype structures at an architectural scale. In 2009 he worked with architect Andrea Morgante to print a three-metre-high pavilion resembling a giant egg with large holes in its surface. Fabricated in sections and then assembled, it was intended as a scale model of a 10-metre structure that was never built; nonetheless, it can stake a claim to being the first-ever printed architectural structure.
Egg-shaped structure printed by Enrico Dini
Dini worked with designer Marco Ferreri in 2010 to create the first dwelling to be printed in one piece. The resulting “house” – a one-room structure resembling a mountain hut – was printed for an exhibition at the Triennale in Milan. The crude building had a doorway and two square windows; its interior featured a work surface, sink and platform bed.
“It’s a very historical piece,” says Dini. “It was the first attempt to print a building.” Unfortunately, the brittle synthetic stone cracked during transportation, leading Dini to decide that fabricating buildings by section was a more viable use for his technology.
Printing buildings in one go will be possible in the future, says Dini, “but probably not with my technology.” Instead, he now sees a role for D-Shape in printing building elements like large façade panels, large diameter columns and double-curvature components.
Machines such as D-Shape could eventually be adapted to work on the move, Dini adds, allowing them to print on an urban scale. “We might print not only buildings, but entire urban sections,” he says.
For Universe Architecture’s Landscape House, Dini has devised a system that will see two D-Shape printers working side by side inside temporary structures close to the site. The D-Shapes will print a kit of parts that will be assembled to form the looping structure. Each part will be hollow; the superstructure will be filled with fibre-reinforced concrete to give it structural integrity.
“Before our Landscape House design, you could easily use the printer to print vertical columns,” says Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Universe Architecture, “but it was not possible to print something that has a horizontal connection, like a beam. By putting reinforced concrete within a hollow structure, you can have a vertical load on top of a horizontal structure. And that opens the door for all types of designs. It was Enrico Dini’s idea.”
Because of the fragility of the individual parts, they’ll have to be printed with support structures to prevent them from breaking while they’re manoeuvred into position; these will be removed after the concrete filling has been poured in. The entire process will take up to a year and cost around €5 million. Universe Architecture doesn’t yet have a client willing to put up that kind of money.
Some purists argue that this convoluted process is not “true” 3D-printing. “We actually don’t consider that a 3D-printed building,” says Softkill Design’s Gilles Retsin, “because they’re 3D-printing formwork, then pouring concrete into the form. So it’s not that the actual building is 3D-printed.”
For its Protohouse 2.0, Softkill Design plans to print the entire building using industrial laser-sintering machines normally used to make prototypes for the automobile industry.
“The existing research always focuses on transporting a 3D printer to the site because they’re using sand or concrete,” says Retsin. “We’re deliberately working in a factory and using laser-sintered bioplastic [plastics derived from biomass rather than hydrocarbons].”
ProtoHouse by Softkill Design
The design itself also bucks convention: instead of columns and floorplates, it has a fibrous structure akin to the trabecular composition of bone. Unlike sand-based structures, which require thick sections to maintain structural integrity, Retsin says these fibres can be as thin as 0.7mm.
This opens up all sorts of new aesthetic possibilities. Traditional steel or concrete structures have a high level of redundancy – material that doesn’t need to be there, but which is too difficult or expensive to remove. But 3D printing allows material to be placed only where it is required. “We created an algorithm that mimics bone growth, so that we’re depositing material only where it’s necessary and most structurally efficient,” says Softkill Design’s Aaron Silver. “It’s not a purely structural object; we’ve also tried to ‘design’ with it, to create our own forms.”
The single-storey house has a porous exoskeleton rather than a solid envelope. Weatherproofing would be applied inside, lining the cave-like living spaces. Voids would be glazed in the traditional manner.
The building will have a footprint of around 8 by 5 metres and will be laser-sintered in a factory, in pieces. These pieces, each up to 2.5 metres, will be transported by van to the site (although, like Universe Architecture, Softkill Design doesn’t have a specific site or client yet) and joined simply by pushing together the fibrous strands “like Velcro”. Softkill Design believes the pieces could all be printed in three weeks and assembled on site in a single day.
“The big difference between 3D printing and manufacturing on site is that you’re almost entirely skipping the fabrication part,” says Retsin. There are huge potential time, labour and transportation savings to be made, compared to traditional construction methods – however, the cost of 3D-printed materials is still far higher than regular bricks and blocks.
Canal house by DUS Architects
“The price of 3D printing is still a big problem for large volumes,” says Retsin. “You pay for the amount of material used rather than the volume. So we’ve developed a method that can generate a large volume with extremely thin and porous structures. It’s only now with 3D printing that you can achieve a strong, fibrous structure using less material than a normal structure. That makes it cheaper.”
For its canal house project, DUS Architects is using lower technology: a scaled-up Ultimaker desktop machine that it calls the KamerMaker (“room maker”) that can print components up to 3.5 metres high. Working initially in polypropylene, the architects hope to experiment with recycled plastics and bioplastics further into the build.
The project is not about exploring new architectural possibilities but rather generating discussion about the future of design and construction. Starting on site this summer, DUS intends to figure out the construction methodology as it goes along and hold workshops and open days in the structure as it is built. “3D printing is not going to replace brick and concrete buildings. I think it’s more going to be the case that we’ll start printing brick and concrete,” says architect Hedwig Heinsman of DUS. “This is something to kick-start a debate about where architects will be in the future.”
Over in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Mediated Matter group at MIT is researching a head-spinning array of innovative design and construction processes that integrate, as their website states, “computational form-finding strategies with biologically inspired fabrication”. Many of these involve looking at ways of developing 3D-printing technologies for architectural applications.
“The 3D-printing technology has been developing at a very rapid pace,” says Mediated Matter founder Neri Oxman, “but there are still many limitations,” such as the range of materials you can use, the maximum size you can print at and the speed of the process.
Oxman and her team are researching ways of getting around such drawbacks, for example experimenting with printers that can produce “functionally graded” materials that exhibit a range of different properties.
Existing 3D printers are only able to produce homogeneous materials that have the same properties throughout. But graded materials would be useful for printing architectural elements – such as beams or façades that mimic bone, which is hard on the outside but spongy on the inside. Or for printing human skin, which has differently sized pores on different parts of the body, allowing it to act as a filter on the face and a protective barrier on the back.
Oxman has developed a process to assign different materials or properties to individual voxels (volumetric pixels) produced on existing printers, creating simple graded materials. But gradients are hard to produce with the current generation of 3D printers, which rely on armatures or gantries that can only move on three axes – back and forward, side to side, and up and down – and which must lay down material in layers, one atop the other. They also require complex support structures to be printed at the same time to prevent the printed objects collapsing under their own weight.
“In traditional 3D printing, the gantry size poses an obvious limitation for the designer who wishes to print in larger scales and achieve structural and material complexity,” explains Oxman. She and her team are investigating ways of printing with additional axes of movement, by replacing the gantry with a six-axis robotic arm. “Once we place a 3D-printing head on a robotic arm, we free up these limitations almost instantly,” she says. This is because it allows “free-form” printing at a larger scale and without the need for support structures.
Electron microscope image of the surface of a silk moth cocoon. Image by Dr. James C. Weaver, Wyss Institute, Harvard University
Oxman and her team have been looking to the natural world for inspiration, studying the way in which silkworms build their cocoons. Silkworms “print” their pupal casings by moving their heads in a figure-of-eight pattern, depositing silk fibre and sericin matrix around themselves as they go. They’re able to vary the gradient of the printed material, making the cocoon soft on the inside and hard on the outside. As well as the silk fibre – which can be up to a kilometre in length – the pupae also excretes sericin, a sticky gum that bonds the fibres together to form the cocoon. Essentially, the silkworm is acting as a multi-axis 3D multi-material printer.
“We attached tiny magnets to a silkworm’s head,” says Oxman, “and we motion-tracked its movement as it built its cocoon. We then translated the data to a 3D printer connected to a robotic arm, which would allow us to examine the biological structure in a larger scale.”
Oxman’s team will perform its first large-scale experiment using this research in April, when it aims to print a pavilion-like structure, measuring 3.6 by 3.6 metres, using a robot programmed to act like a silkworm.
Robotic arms can be used to print in traditional materials, such as plastic, concrete or composites, or employed to weave or knit three-dimensional fibre structures. Researchers are also exploring how the high-performance fibres excreted by silkworms and spiders could be produced artificially, and Oxman’s team will print the pavilion’s structure using natural silk.
In the future, buildings may be constructed by swarms of tiny robots that use a combination of printing and weaving techniques, Oxman says. “I would argue that 3D printing is more than anything an approach for organising material,” she says, using the terms “4D printing”, “swarm construction” and “CNC weaving” to describe the future of architectural technology. “Today’s material limitations can be overcome by printing with responsive materials,” she says. “Gantry limitations can be overcome by printing with multiple interactive robot-printers. And process limitations can be overcome by moving from layering to weaving in 3D space, using a robotic arm.”
According to this vision, the construction site of the future will owe more to tiny creatures like silkworms than to ever-larger 3D printers of the type we use today. “Transcending the scale limitation by using larger gantries can only offer so much,” says Oxman. “But if we consider swarm construction, we are truly pushing building technology into the 21st century.”
Japanese designer Kei Harada has created two chairs made completely out of rubber.
Harada based the project on a Surrealist image by American portrait photographer Philippe Halsman called Dali Atomicus, which illustrates a silhouetted chair crashing towards a chaotic scene that includes flying cats, a bucket of water and the artist Salvador Dali suspended in mid-air.
The designer told Dezeen, “If I could change one thing about the photograph, I would transform the chair into a rubber one; by doing so, I could add a little ease to the photograph because a rubber chair would inflict less damage to the floor, walls, and the chair itself.”
The elastic material provides a more malleable chair, so the back and legs bend in response to the sitter’s posture.
There are two seats in the Chair for Dali series: one chair has a square back rest and is made of rubber with 70% hardness whilst the other has a rounded back and is made of rubber with 90% hardness, making the leg bracing unnecessary.
Giles Miller’s London design studio has positioned a target of reflective pixels in front of a medieval gate for this year’s Clerkenwell Design Week, which kicks off in London today (+ slideshow).
Giles Miller Studio designed a single, curved pixel element and collaborated with metal manufacturers Tecan to create 2433 stainless steel and etched brass pieces for its exterior.
The metal pixels are arranged at angles over the curved surface, forming patterns that change according to light conditions.
“We wanted to celebrate Clerkenwell as an architectural hub,” Giles Miller told Dezeen, “the target shape stamps the district on the map.”
A bullseye of brass panels sits in the centre of the glimmering structure, placed in front of a stone gate that was once part of St John’s monastery. “St John’s Gate is very iconic,” said Miller. “We enjoyed the contrast of what we do against the old brick.”
Dezeen Watch Store also has a pop-up shop in the Farmiloe Building at Clerkenwell Design Week, where we are presenting a selection of our latest and best-selling watches – more details here.
Giles Miller Studio sent us the following information:
Giles Miller Studio and Tecan present The Heart of Architecture, Clerkenwell 2013
Critically acclaimed Giles Miller Studio is delighted to team up with British precision metal fabricators Tecan, in presenting ‘The Heart of Architecture’. This innovative installation has been constructed at the iconic Saint Johns Gate as a part of this year’s Clerkenwell Design Week.
London’s Clerkenwell boasts the highest number of architects per square mile in Europe. The ‘Heart of Architecture’ consists of a giant sculptural target built to stamp Clerkenwell and its inhabitants on the world stage, and to represent this thriving area as the creative core of the British Architectural and Interior design world.
Giles Miller Studio has created this unique installation alongside Tecan, a precision metal manufacturer based in Dorset, who’se intricate and specialist manufacturing process has generated the latest in the studio’s range of reflective surface systems.
Featuring Giles Miller’s signature technique of manipulating light and shadow to show intriguing imagery, the installation has been formed from thousands of systematically hand laid stainless steel and brass ‘pixels’. By angling the specifically designed elongated pixels at opposing angles the surface of the installation will become an observation of light and shade, reflecting and bouncing light patterns in a celebration of its historic yet creatively progressive surroundings.
News: Barcelona officials are outraged over plans to construct a 300-metre “space hotel” – complete with a zero-gravity spa and vertical wind tunnel – on an artificial island off the coast of the city.
Aimed at guests who “wish they could travel to distant galaxies”, the €1.5 billion hotel designed by Spanish architect Erik Morvan would offer over 2,000 hotel suites and residences alongside a 24-hour “space mall” and a marina filled with parks, pools and beaches. Windows would feature transparent glass displays of the galaxy, which guests could turn on and off at the touch of the button.
US developer Mobilona submitted a request for planning permission to Barcelona City Hall last week, but city mayor Xavier Trias has already voiced objections. “We have no intention of turning Barcelona into a spectacle,” he told Catalan news channel 3/24.
Describing the plans as “not in keeping” with his vision of the city, Trias commented: “We have no need or desire to take on projects of this nature. We are a city of culture, knowledge, of creativity, and of innovation, and our project [to develop the city] will follow a different path.”
A representative from the Barcelona planning department also told the Telegraph newspaper: “This seems more suitable for somewhere like Dubai. Any plan to advance Barcelona must be in keeping with the present model of the city.”
Mobilona’s CEO Jerome Bottari is confident that the space hotel concept will be popular and has already unveiled plans for similar projects in Hong Kong and Los Angeles. “Mobilona creates the perfect blend of design and technology to simulate any place on earth, or in the universe,” he said. “Immersive displays inside Mobilona Space Hotel on Barcelona Island will provide guests with stunning views of some of the most remote galaxies in our universe.”
If plans go ahead, the building will become the tallest hotel in Europe.
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