Hasta La Ideas

Italian designer Eugenia Morpurgo has set up a high-street micro factory, which uses digital manufacturing to produce her range of customisable shoes that wearers can assemble and repair themselves.

Called Don’t Run – Beta, the project is a collaboration between Eugenia Morpurgo and British-Spanish designer Juan Montero to create a production line for leather shoes, so the buyer can customise their new footwear and see it being produced in-store on a laser cutter and 3D printer.

Morpurgo first launched her canvas repairable shoes – that can be repaired easily because they’re joined with reversible, mechanical fastenings rather then the usual stitches or glue – in 2011.

Now she has followed up with a new range of colourful sandals, lace-ups and boots using the same system, but with leather uppers designed by Sophia Guggenberger, Anastasija Mase and Eliška Kuchtová.

Customers first choose the style of shoe they want and the pattern is adjusted to their size on-screen. They then choose the foam from which the sole and insole will be cut, colour of filament for the 3D-printed connectors and a piece of leather for the uppers. They watch the machines at work and are then taught how to assemble the shoes.

To make the shoe, the leather uppers and rubber soles are laser-cut with a series of connecting holes. The 3D printer then produces a series of connections that are used to attach each piece of material through the holes.

Next, the uppers are folded over the sole and either tied with laces or attached with more connectors, depending on the design.

“Taking a step away from the established status quo and the relentless pursuit of quantity and profit, Don’t Run – Beta offers a possible alternative to mass production through small scale, on-demand digital manufacturing,” said Morpurgo. “It is an experimental system focused on illustrating the possibility of a transparent, open and collaborative production line for shoe making and design.”

She explained that this pilot production process is an example of how designers can use digital technologies to make their own products.

“The decentralisation of large-scale production and distribution makes it possible to offer greater control to both designers and consumers,” Morpurgo added. “What we have are high streets with micro factories set up to deliver personal and transparent products only in the presence of real demand.”

It is also a cheaper way of producing shoes on a small scale. Traditionally, shoe producers need two sole moulds for each shoe, but this is expensive and the reason companies produce a large number of shoes to cover the cost.

As Don’t Run – Beta replaces the physical moulds with digital data, the designers are able to use unlimited digital libraries of soles, sizes and styles. This not only eliminates the need for storage space but also reduces the cost by up to 75 percent.

The leather is sourced from local sellers in an attempt to re-use off cuts and waste material, so the pieces are cheaper but also unique.

The price of each pair is dependant on the weight, since this is a direct reflection of the material used and time taken to cut and produce the shoe.

The production line was trialled at the end of last year as part of a month-long residency at an art space called These Things Take Time in Ghent, Belgium.

It was set up in collaboration with TimeLab Ghent who provided all the technical support and machinery.

Don’t Run – Beta was also made in collaboration with Olivia de Gouveia for graphic communication and Francesco Zorzi for illustrations.

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Layers of sand that resemble a mountainous landscape will gradually move and change shape for the duration of this installation by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo for skincare brand Aesop‘s New York pop-up shop.

The installation at The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn was created by Escobedo to reflect its temporal setting and the idea of natural ornamentation espoused by Modernist architectural theorist Adolf Loos.

“Inspired by this principle, this installation for Aesop reflects the passing of time in the way of an inverse sedimentation,” explained Escobedo in a statement displayed alongside the work.

A simple wooden structure, which also references the minimal aesthetic favoured by Modernist architects, supports and frames the glass panels containing black and white sand. The sand has been poured into gaps between the glass sheets, creating striated patterns that look like the peaks and valleys of a mountain range.

The sand will gradually sift through and out the bottom of the glass panel, causing the patterns to evolve over the five month period of the pop-up shop’s residency.

“Installed in springtime in New York, it also recalls melting snow, Les Eaux de Mars, a change of season, optimism and expectation,” Escobedo explained.

Aesops’s products surround the space containing the artwork, which also features a freestanding vintage sink that echoes the raw, industrial backdrop of the gallery space.

Aesop is renowned for its unique shops created by leading architects and designers, including one in Kyoto with light fitting taken from squid fishing boats and another in New York with a ceiling covered in copies of The Paris Review.

Photography is by Rafael Gamo.

Here’s some more information from Aesop:

Aesop pop-up at The Invisible Dog

Aesop is honoured to partner with The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn to present a temporary installation designed by architect Frida Escobedo. Launched on March 13, the innovative retail space will operate until the end of July.

While its main business is skin, hair and body care, Aesop has long nurtured a passionate interest in all forms of creative expression, and is well known for collaborations with individual practitioners and organizations alike. The endeavor sees the brand join with a New York exemplar of community-focused cultural engagement and one of the foremost proponents of Latin American Modernism.

The installation’s centerpiece is a timber-framed glass enclosure containing meticulously segmented layers of sand that will shift over the next five months. Escobedo speaks of this feature having dual interpretations. In a materiality and form, it reference Modernism’s shift away from ornamentation. And in keeping with one of Escoebdo’s central concerns, it reflects temporality of its setting. The design is also influenced by Aesop’s distinctive aesthetic, which the architect sees as aligned with the Japanese principle of shibusa or ‘sophisticated austerity’.

Aesop selected the location because of its deep ties with the neighborhood and by the creative space and support network it provides for artists. The Invisible Dog manages to combine residency studios for artists, venues for exhibits and performances, and community engagement. Established in 2009 and nestled between Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Boreum Hill, this interdisciplinary space is an exemplar of self-sustained, community-focused cultural engagement; and an acclaimed hub for experimentation and collaboration among artists.

Aesop was founded in Melbourne in 1987 and today offers its superlative formulations in signature stores and counters around the world and online. As the company evolves, meticulously considered design remains paramount to the creative of each space.

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Opinion: Patrik Schumacher’s viral-friendly outburst against political correctness in architecture this week illustrated a dark symmetry between the TED talk and the rant, says Mimi Zeiger.

This week Patrik Schumacher took to Facebook to decry the state of architecture as both a discipline and a discourse. Quickly filling his timeline, he scolded “critics and critical architects” for their agnosia, or form blindness.

“This [visual condition] is involved in the critic’s inability to grasp the significance of parametricism,” he wrote, aghast at the lack of appreciation of a high period of organic form derived from computational inputs. An hour later he continued his imperatives, writing “STOP political correctness in architecture. But also: STOP confusing architecture and art. Architects are in charge of the FORM of the built environment, not its content.”

Although the contents of Schumacher’s Facebook wall almost immediately went viral, it should go without saying that his personal comments posted on his own social media profile were not exactly new insight into the worldview of Zaha Hadid‘s first in command.

I caught him covering this ground at the Politics of Parametricism conference organised by CalArts‘ MA Aesthetics & Politics program back in November, where from the back of the auditorium he took up the mic and launched into an extended commentary (some might say mansplain) directed at panelists Laura Kurgan, Peggy Deamer, and Teddy Cruz. In her earlier talk, Deamer had critiqued the neoliberal ideology behind parametricism, and suggested that the fixation on computation “leaves behind the actual worker at almost every level: architect, fabricator, engineer, constructor.”

One can only guess that this latest round of remarks from Schumacher were triggered belatedly by the tongue-lashing the firm received over the design of the Al Wakrah stadium for the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar and Hadid’s disavowal of architectural responsibly for migrant worker deaths. (Although Hadid’s remarks were trounced for their glibness, her shrugging off of responsibility onto the Qatari government underscores the relatively tiny amount of agency the architect, even the most powerful ones, shoulders in these conditions.)

Schumacher’s commentary, which continued all day, ending in a summary document and the reposting of related news items, coincided with day two of TED 2014. My Twitter feed documented the both in real time and with parallel emphasis as if they were conjoined twins. As I watched the missives go by, the paired events allowed for a reflection on the current media models filling our bandwidths: the TED Talk and the Rant. The two are uncanny in their dark symmetry. They are fuelled by access, personality, and true belief and leave little room for complexity, failure, or doubt.

TED Talks also recently faced criticism for their packaged, twenty-minute doses of future-forward cool, with a side of heartwarming humanism. “”Buildings don’t just reflect our society; they shape our societies.” @marchitizer #TED2014,” tweeted John Cary, the quote, an aphoristic snippet of Marc Kushner’s TED presentation, a spry ying to Schumacher’s yang.

Architecture has always had its share of provocative statements. Walter Gropius in the Bauhaus Manifesto (1919) suggested, not unlike Kushner’s optimistic TED Talk, that the built synthesis of art and architecture will “one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.” While in 1980, Coop Himmelb(l)au took the opposite approach, concluding the practice’s manifesto with the decisive phrase: “Architecture must blaze.” (And, indeed, Schumacher presented his own Parametricist Manifesto in 2008.)

But the rant is something quite different from the manifesto. The rant is a privilege. Ranting is a spectator sport, which means it is predicated on the status of the ranter. You need to know someone is looking in order to publicly tantrum. To wit, when Wolf Prix needed to air a grievance regarding 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, he issued a press release entitled “The Banal.”

As perversely delectable as it is to watch star architects froth and whine as if in an episode of Real Housewives, the spectacle is just as calculated.

“There has never been a feedback loop for architecture until now, and that changes everything,” read a tweet, quoting Kushner’s TED Talk. A bit of a headscratcher, the decontextualised phrase makes more sense when applied to architectural discourse online.

The TED Talk and the Rant are two poles in a closed loop system. A TED talk may say all the right things and a rant may say all the wrong things, but in this digital environment, neither takes risks.

Schumacher’s Facebook posts, then, despite their volubility and tenuous grasp on the rules of punctuation and capitalisation, do pose an important point, although not one he may want to claim. There is a desperate need for more architects (and critics) to argue a position and to engage in more debate, not simply preach or provoke. And, despite arguing the contrary, his comments underscore the fact that architecture is indeed political.

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based journalist and critic. She covers art, architecture, urbanism and design for a number of publications includingThe New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature. She is currently adjunct faculty in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center. Zeiger also is editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.

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in order to publicly tantrum” appeared first on Dezeen.

Bamboo poles were used to clad the facade and surrounding walls of this house in the Philippines by Swiss-Filipino studio Atelier Sacha Cotture (+ slideshow).

The family home in the city of Parañaque is located in a residential neighbourhood and was designed by the Philippines office of Atelier Sacha Cotture. It wraps a central courtyard to restrict views of the interior from adjacent properties.

“The courtyard solution has been chosen for its qualities of efficiency and privacy,” said the architects. “This typology was widely used during the Spanish colonial era here in the Philippines.”

The street-facing facade presents a uniform surface of vertical bamboo poles that incorporates doors to the garage and the house’s main entrance.

Explaining the choice of bamboo, the architects said: “It is a low cost and sustainable material that grows intensively locally. This material has been historically used in the country for the fabrication of handicrafts, native architecture and utilitarian objects.”

The material was treated to protect it from mould and pests, before being stained and varnished to enrich its natural tone and increase its resilience.

The bamboo-covered doorway leads from the street into a dark corridor clad in a type of local granite called Araal, which is also used to cover chunky supporting columns at the ground floor level of the house.

The corridor is illuminated by a shimmering chandelier suspended from the ceiling and opens onto an uncovered courtyard with a lawn at its centre.

A wood-decked pathway crosses a narrow pond to lead into a foyer. It continues through to the main living spaces, which feature sliding glass doors framed in locally grown mahogany.

These ground floor areas, including the dining room, living room and kitchen, overlook the courtyard and the pond that runs along its back edge.

An outdoor dining area is sheltered beneath a walkway that connects the study on the first floor with a garden on the garage roof.

The first floor can be reached by a staircase made from wooden treads that cantilever from the wall of the living room. A family room and two bedrooms are also contained on the first floor, with another staircase featuring a vertical bamboo screen ascending to the top storey.

The master bedroom on the top floor has a wall made from a mosaic of coconut bark tiles and sliding doors which lead onto a terrace that wraps around the corner and houses a separate salon.

Photography is by Luca Tettoni.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

House in Parañaque

Location

The house is located in the residential subdivision of Better Living in Paranaque City, Metro Manila. The area features a low density neighbourhood of houses and low rise buildings.

Program

The program is a 465sqm family house on a 360sqm lot. The entrance foyer, garage and service area face the access road while dining, living room and kitchen overlook the private courtyard. The first floor hosts a family room and a private quarter with two bedrooms along with a guest-office room with access to a roof garden. The master bedroom occupies the second floor with its own salon, changing room and bathroom.

Planning

The house has 250sqm of landscaped courtyard, accessible roof garden and terrace.The courtyard solution has been chosen for its qualities of efficiency and privacy. This typology has been widely used during Spanish colonial era here in the Philippines.

Materials

Bamboo is the chosen material for this project. It is a low cost and sustainable material that grows intensively locally. This material has been historically used in the country for the fabrication of handicrafts, native architecture and utilitarian objects.The bamboo poles are treated against moulds and pests then stained and varnished. They are protected by ledges that also prevent the direct sunlight from penetrating into the house, while on the top floor the layers of bamboos are doubled.

The courtyard is bordered by a pond running all its length with a vertical water feature facing the living and dining room. Small shells and crushed Adobe stone are incrusted into the render. At night, the wall lighted up from the pond.

The base of the main house and the entrance foyer is clad with Araal, local granite. All windows, cabinets and beds have been designed and fabricated with Mahogany wood, also available locally.

Stones for the bathrooms and living room come from the nearby island of Romblon. There is also a wall featured made of coconut bark in the master bedroom. Capiz is used for most of the lamps.

Energy

Electricity is partially provided by solar panels placed on the top roof.

Completion date: June 2011
Land area: 360sqm
Project area: 465sqm
Client: Private
Address: 95 Luxembourg St., Better Living subd. Paranaque City, Philippines
Styling and furnishing: Milo Naval

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News: don’t let fear mongers prevent the development of technologies that make the human body perform better and last longer, says a leading bio-ethicist.

A “conservative, dystopian version of the future” is holding back the development of cyborg technology and the genetic modification of humans, said Andy Miah, chair of ethics and emerging technologies and director of the Creative Futures Institute at the University of the West of Scotland.

Speaking at the Bye Bye Homo Sapiens symposium, hosted by Central Saint Martins department of Materials Futures, Miah compared the evolution of bio-tech to modern medicine where interventions like pacemakers have become an accepted norm.

“We need to think of our bodies as works in progress: as things which can benefit from bio-technological modification,” he said.

“I would argue that our commitment to longevity in life commits us inevitably to human enhancement.”

Miah cited laser eye surgery as an example of a technology that was initially mistrusted but is now widely used to improve patient’s eyesight.

Similarly, resistance to growing body parts from stem cells or using nanotechnology to introduce disease-fighting cells into the body needs to be overcome, said Miah.

Acceptance of bio-technology techniques will accelerate, he said, once people become accustomed to seeing how they can be used to improve patient’s lives by design.

Discussions around human enhancement quickly become fraught and contentious, because “at the heart is the debate about what kind of life is worth living”, he said.

“The concern is that there is a loss of self that we encounter by embracing the technology… Either through behaviours or through biological transgressions, people perceive a compromise of identity. The concern is that if we do this, we somehow lose some part of our humanity.”

He pointed to the world of sports where doping scandals are rife, but athletes are already using technology to enhance their performance through their equipment and clothing. Improving the human body – or even opening the door to possibilities like cryogenic suspension  – is the next step.

Miah has previously been involved in a UK government select committee on human enhancement technologies in sport.

His current undertakings include a major collaborative project on the ethics and politics of biomedical developments for human enhancement led by the Universities of Madrid and Granada.

“There’s a tendency to characterise people interested in these forms of human enhancement as being somehow radical others: that they are transgressing the norms of humanity, that they are challenging the human species by advocating that we ought to move beyond it,” said Miah.

“It’s a red herring to believe that these desires to reinforce ourselves or to extend the upper limits of our capacities [are somehow transgressive]: whether that’s the length of our life or the length of our limbs”.

“Our concerns about biological transgressions are something that we will relegate to history in due course.”

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as works in progress” appeared first on Dezeen.