Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen promotion: Design Indaba has announced its line-up for the international conference, exhibition of African design, film festival and music programmes taking place in Cape Town from 26 February.

South African festival Design Indaba celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year, coinciding with Cape Town’s status as World Design Capital 2014.

Speakers including British designer Thomas Heatherwick, IDEO design director Tom Hulme and Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa are scheduled to talk at the Design Indaba conference from 26 to 28 February.

This year’s exhibition will feature projects by emerging designers from South Africa and other countries on the continent, taking place from 28 February to 2 March.

Ten feature-length documentary films will be shown at two locations for the FilmFest: a drive-in movie theatre and an outdoor cinema set up at the Castle of Good Hope, set against the backdrop of Table Mountain.

Design Indaba Music Circuit will offer live performances in a range of genres at ten of the city’s top venues.

For further details about the festival, a full list of events and speakers plus to register to attend, visit the Design Indaba website. See Dezeen’s coverage of Design Indaba 2013 here.

More information from the organisers follows:

Get Ready For Design Indaba 2014

A leading international design Conference, an Expo featuring the best in African creativity, a FilmFest and a Music Circuit – what more could you ask for? Welcome to Design Indaba 2014!

Design Indaba celebrates its 20th anniversary of championing design. In the past five years alone, Design Indaba has contributed over 1.3 billion rand to the South African GDP – the single biggest economic impetus to the design industry in the country. We believe that the design industry is one to be reckoned with, can change the world around us for the better and contribute to local and global economies; the success of Design Indaba is evidence of this.

This is also a big year on local calendars as Cape Town marks its status as 2014 World Design Capital. To celebrate properly we have lined up an unprecedented programme of events for 2014. Continuing our proud legacy of curating an exceptional line-up of inspiring creative events, this year’s Design Indaba festival will consist of:

Design Indaba Conference 2014
26-28 February

More than 40 of the world’s leading design minds take to the Design Indaba Conference stage this year in what will be the most sensorial experience in the event’s history. Audiences can look forward to multidisciplinary presentations that defy the traditional “talkshop” format from designer superstars such as British architect Thomas Heatherwick, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister and award-winning local author Lauren Beukes.

Our diverse group of speakers comprise sound designers, architects, curators and ad maestros with a panoply of perspectives from over 20 different countries. This year more local design fundis join in the fun as we expand our audience to Simulcast venues in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Port Elizabeth and Potchesfstroom.

For more information, go to designindaba.com/conference

Design Indaba Expo 2014
28 February – 2 March (Buyers/media preview: 27 February)

Design Indaba Expo, which has grown to become the biggest curated design event in the Southern Hemisphere, will for the first time look north of South Africa’s borders to include work by creatives from other African countries. A centrepiece exhibition, Africa Is Now, a Design Indaba project, will introduce visitors to the latest developments in architecture, fashion, social and industrial design, and technological innovation sweeping the continent. Expect emerging, established and unexpected talent from countries such as Morocco, Malawi, Uganda and Angola.

The Expo is a major event on the local design calendar, attracting local and international trade members sourcing the best of South African design as well as thousands of visitors stocking up on the latest inspiring products.

Once again, Design Indaba Expo will ignite debate about what constitutes beauty through the Most Beautiful Object in South Africa competition. This year, we’ve invited 12 editors and cultural commentators including ‘it-girl’ Bonang Matheba, Marie Claire editor Aspasia Karras and Mail & Guardian editor Chris Roper, to nominate an object they consider to be SA’s most beautiful. The public will be called on to vote for their favourite object through pre-event coverage in the Sunday Times and at the stand on the Expo floor.

The Emerging Creatives, our hugely popular talent incubation platform, goes a step further this year with a pilot mentorship programme sponsored by the Department of Arts and Culture, that paired eight up-and-coming designers from previously disadvantaged backgrounds with an expert in the design field to help them refine a product to showcase at the Expo.

For more information, go to designindaba.com/expo

Design Indaba FilmFest 2014
21 February – 2 March

Design Indaba FilmFest presents ten documentary feature films, never before seen on South African soil, in an unforgettable al fresco setting. From intimately told, quirky narratives to bold conversation-starters, they showcase the genius and passion that drives creativity in endeavours such as urban planning, old-school sign painting, skateboarding and photography.

The festival takes place over ten nights at two different venues that capture both the heritage and picturesque beauty of Cape Town. Maiden’s Cove in Clifton will host three films, screened in an old-school drive-in style setting. Viewers will enjoy cinematic brilliance with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Twelve Apostles on the other. Cape Town’s oldest surviving building, the Castle of Good Hope, hosts the remaining seven films outdoors, with the audience picnicking against the backdrop of Table Mountain.

For more information, go to designindaba.com/film

Design Indaba Music Circuit 2014
26 – 27 February

Design Indaba once again hosts a series of world-class music events in Cape Town to celebrate music as an art form and a medium to spread the message of creative thinking. The Design Indaba Music Circuit is unmatched in its approach and execution, allowing the people of Cape Town and visitors to Design Indaba to explore the city’s soundscapes in a variety of unique and authentic settings.

Ten of the best venues Cape Town has to offer showcase a progressive blend of South African and African musos in genres such as electronica, jazz and hip-hop blends, afro-house, new age kwaito, folk and soul.

For more information, go to designindaba.com/music

To ensure you have the most up-to-the-minute information on Design Indaba 2014 and ticket sales, follow Design Indaba on Twitter or Facebook.

Download our free app for the full Design Indaba 2014 festival experience.

www.designindaba.com

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Following our earlier story about a tea house in Prague, here’s another cafe with vaulted ceilings by Hungarian studio Spora Architects, in a two-hundred-year-old former palace in Budapest (+ slideshow).

Spora Architects designed Embassy Espresso as an artisanal coffee shop in the basement of a former nobleman’s city palace, and architect Ádám Hatvani told Dezeen the space is suspected to have been originally used as a stable.

“We know that in this kind of palace from time to time the ground floor was the place for the guard, the servants, horses and carriages,” Hatvani said. “We found some holes in the walls that are probably the places of the barrier beams, usually between the horses and the stable.”

Located in the financial district of downtown Pest, the cafe’s existing doors and window shutters open the space out to the street.

Inside, the architects uncovered the original vaulted brick ceilings and exposed walls built from a mixture of brick and stone.

Pipes run along the upper parts of the walls and extend outwards to form splayed lighting installations, as well as to support hanging pendant lights and simple bulbs.

“There are four different types of lights installed; in the pipes are cables for the lamps so there are no visible cables or installation elements in the cafe,” Hatvani explained.

Wooden benches are positioned around the edges of the cafe. The serving counter is made from wood and is fronted by black steel barstools and chairs.

The floor is covered with natural black slate tiles.

Photography is by Danyi Balázs.

Here’s a project description from Spora Architects:

Espresso Embassy

Take a 80 square meter ground floor flat in the downtown of Budapest, and transform it into an artisanal coffee shop, for one of the world’s best baristas. The building is an urban palace, with beautiful classicist detail, structures of that period, today a residential house.

This was before the artisanal coffee revolution of quality, simplicity, inviting interiors. This is the background in which Espresso Embassy was spawned. After cleaning up the structures, hidden beauties were uncovered. Bohemian spherical brick vaults, stone-brick mixed walls. It turns out the space might have been a stable, this is where the mysterious little gaps in the wall could have come from: holding the walls between two horses, or the timber for the loft on which hay was stored. All this in great condition.

Almost finished. What was needed to add, was a simple black stone floor, furniture made of oak and steel, unique lighting from water pipes. Everything is from what it seems. Material thickness, bricks, stone, oak, raw steel, slate, and the white and black rendering on some parts. Everything else is the work of hospitality.

It is as if we were in a two hundred year old inn, where there is wifi, filtered water for the guests through a tap made of copper and a bowl of concrete, high quality espresso machine, überboiler, milk patterns on cappuccinos, quests with laptops and tablets, breakfast-goers, cultural nomads, urban coffee lovers, intellectuals, businesspeople, bankers, university goers, Hungarians and foreigners: it’s the city.

Architectural design: Dékány Tibor, Hatvani Ádám _sporaarchitects
Year: 2012
Location: Espresso Embassy, Arany János u. Budapest, V., Hungary
Lighting: sporaarchitects, Tarcali Dávid, Jánosi András _lumoconcept
Concrete wash basin : VPI betonmanufaktúra

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by Spora Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

This radical redesign of a door by Austrian artist Klemens Torggler uses a folding and pivoting system to collapse and roll to one side.

Instead of a single panel attached to a frame by two hinges, Torggler‘s Evolution Door folds into four triangular sections that collapse in on themselves and turn round before straightening back up into a rectangle.

Two halves of the door are attached by pivots at the bottom and top of the frame and a hinge in the middle.

By gently pulling at the joint that connects the two middle panels together, the door folds and slides across the entrance.

“The special construction makes it possible to move the door sideways without the use of tracks,” explained Torggler. “This technical trick opens up new applications for the door.”

Torggler calls the system Drehplattentür, which translates as the “flip panel door”. The artist, based in Vienna, has been working on the concept for a number of years with a series of distinct iterations.

His earliest designs used two metal rods to connect two square panels that would separate then converge in one motion. He developed a second technique that used a cut-out epitrochoid curve with a wheel track that allowed the two panels to move more fluidly than his previous design. The triangular design is his latest.

Torggler has experimented with glass, wood and metal, as well as creating larger double doors and screens to separate entire rooms.

Currently the Evolution Door is a prototype, however a selection of his earlier versions have been made available through website Artelier Contemporary.

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by Klemens Torggler appeared first on Dezeen.

Faceted concrete staircases connect a string of social spaces inside this SOM-designed campus building for The New School in New York, visible outside the building through huge diagonal windows (+ slideshow).

The University Center was designed by architecture firm SOM to provide 35,000 square-metres of teaching facilities and student housing for The New School, allowing the university to pull its activities away from sites around the city and consolidate them onto its Greenwich Village campus.

Conceived as “a campus within a building”, the 16-storey building contains student housing in its nine upper floors, while the seven lower levels accommodate multi-purpose classrooms, design studios, laboratories, an 800-seat auditorium and the main university library.

Social areas, dubbed “sky quads”, are interspersed throughout the building to provide areas where can staff and students can interact, whether relaxing between classes or working on group projects.

Broad staircases create leisurely routes between these spaces. Clad with glass-fibre-reinforced concrete panels, these structures alternate between straight and diagonal trajectories, and some integrate seating areas.

“The University Center transforms the traditional university environment,” said SOM design partner Roger Duffy. “Rather than compartmentalising living and learning spaces, we strategically stacked these functions to create a vertical campus that supports the kind of interdisciplinary learning that has defined The New School since its founding.”

Exterior walls are clad with hand-finished brass shingles, intended to fit in with both the cast-iron facades of the Ladies’ Mile Historic District to the north and the brownstones of the Greenwich Village Historic District to the south and west. These panels also provide solar shading for windows during the daytime.

In addition to the staircases that stretch through the building, SOM added fire-safe staircases that students can use to move quickly between floors. The architects also installed skip-stop elevators that miss out floors during peak hours to speed up movement.

Three dining areas are located on different floors. Other features include bike storage rooms and showers for students and residents, which the university hopes will encourage cycling.

The student housing floors provide accommodation for approximately 600 students and can be accessed via a dedicated entrance on Fifth Avenue. Residents have access to a series of communal facilities in the basement, including a gym, a common room, study areas, art studios, a mailroom and a laundry room.

Photography is by James Ewing.

Here’s a project description from SOM:

University Centre, The New School

For nearly a century, The New School has been at the forefront of progressive education, with design and social research driving approaches to studying the issues of our time, from democracy and urbanisation, to technology, sustainability, and globalization. Over the past 15 years, The New School has built on this legacy to grow into a major degree-granting university, with nearly 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students. But, in recent years, as the school outgrew its longtime home in New York’s Greenwich Village and found its real estate holdings spread across the city, from the Financial District to the Upper West Side, this pedagogical model proved challenging to maintain without the physical plant to support it. The University Center both supports and furthers this model through its innovative design and responds to the school’s increasing demand for state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary spaces.

The University Center adds 375,000 square feet of academic and student space to The New School’s Greenwich Village campus. The 16-storey centre houses design studios, laboratories, interdisciplinary classrooms, the main university library, a nine-floor student residence, an 800-seat auditorium, a café, and flexible academic and social spaces for student activity.

Conceived as a campus within a building, the University Center transforms the traditional university environment. Rather than compartmentalise learning, living, dining, and socialising spaces, these functions are situated in a vertical configuration, creating strategic adjacencies and heightening the university’s commitment to interdisciplinary learning. Connections between classrooms, studios, library, cafés, auditorium, and student residences take the form of stacked staircases and “sky quads” that facilitate the chance encounters vital to the cultivation of discussion and debate at The New School.

This innovative interior organisation isexpressed in the exterior of the building. Tightly woven, purpose-built spaces clad in hand-finished brass shingles contrast with the open connective tissue of the stairs and quads visible through a glazed skin. The exterior mediates between the cast-iron facades of the Ladies’ Mile Historic District to the north and the brownstones of the Greenwich Village Historic District to the south and west. Located at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, the University Center broadcasts the experimental nature of the school’s new home, creating a dialogue between the campus community, the local neighbourhood, and the city.

A New Kind of Urban Campus

With its 230,000-square-foot, seven-storey campus centre (located in the building’s base) and 130,000-square-foot residential tower, the University Center reimagines the organising elements of a traditional campus, from quads to classrooms and living quarters. Vertical, horizontal, and diagonal campus pathways work together to facilitate movement through the building, while increasing opportunities for interaction among students and faculty from across the university. Academic spaces are flexible and easily adaptable, and can be renovated or reconfigured with no impact on power, data, or lighting to meet changing needs.

Raw finishes and an exposed mechanical system further ensure flexibility in the academic spaces. To bring light into the 30,000-square-foot academic floor plates, clerestory windows line both walls of the main corridor. Horizontal windows and light shelves naturally illuminate classroom ceilings, reducing lighting loads.

Pathways to Discussion and Debate

The University Center’s system of double stairways plays a critical role in the life of the building; it works in conjunction with skip-stop elevators to move large numbers of students vertically through the building. Stacked one above the other, the fire stair is designed for quick circulation, while the broader, open “communicating stair” allows for travel between floors at a more leisurely pace. With faceted walls clad in glass-fibre-reinforced concrete panels, the high-use stairways are a place for chance meetings between students and faculty, and encourage social interaction and interdisciplinary exchange.

Circulation paths that weave vertically, horizontally and diagonally through the building lead into and activate sky quads – interactive spaces that also orient users due to their adjacency to stairways and corridors. Like the “local” and “express” stairs that link them, the sky quads are intended to perform as social spaces, promoting formal and informal encounters between students and faculty, as well as supporting academic and leisure activities. These interactive spaces include student lounge areas, student resource centres with adjacent meeting rooms, study areas, cafés, and pin up spaces for design studios.

To avoid crowded conditions and delays during class-change times in this vertical campus, peak elevator demand is mitigated through the combination of the intuitive system of stairways and a skip-stop elevator system. During peak times, the elevators stop at floors one, four, and six, and stairs are utilised to access the intermediate floors, while at off-peak times, the elevators stop at all floors.

A Commitment to Sustainability and Energy Efficiency

Designed to meet LEED Gold certification from the US Green Building Council, the University Center sets the New York City standard for green technology and building practices with super-efficient LED lights, occupancy sensors, a 265-kilowatt cogeneration plant, and sustainably sourced materials.

Envisioned as a model of energy efficiency, carbon reduction, and sustainability, the building anticipates 31 percent energy savings over a code-compliant school. Both passive and high-tech solutions increase energy efficiency. The envelope of the building is limited to 35 percent glass, which decreases solar heat gain while optimising interior daylighting. The shingled cladding shades the windows up to 20 percent during daylight hours. An ice-storage system, located in the second basement, uses electricity from the power grid during off-peak times to freeze water in a series of chambers; the ice melts during the day, reducing consumption during peak times. Heat recovery wheels recover heat from exhaust air and help heat supply air, saving energy. A green roof, funded in part by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, mitigates the heat-island effect, as well as storm-water runoff, capturing water for both gray-and black-water treatment facilities in the building. Waterless urinals contribute to potable-water conservation. Composting is employed with an in-vessel composter in the cafeteria.

The building serves as a living element of the curriculum, providing on-site training to the next generation of green leaders to students in environmental studies, sustainability management, and urban design. Design elements that demonstrate architectural, structural, mechanical and green building strategies are visible through signage and working exhibits. Back-of-the-house systems have been transformed into instructional spaces for New School students and facilities staff, as well as for professional organisations and unions, who are expected to use the building for hands-on training.

Active Design Features

A central stair is the principle design feature in the University Center – a focal point both inside and outside the building. These stairs are intended as the principal means of circulation through the building for the physically able. Through the use of clerestory windows in hallways and on the façade, the University Center provides for daylighting along paths of travel, and the design is organised to encourage walking between destinations, as well as spaces for social interaction. The building provides bike storage rooms and showers to encourage cycling, walking, and running between home and school. The building was recognised by Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a model of the successful implementation of the “active design” strategies that are part of New York City’s anti-obesity and health initiatives.

Student Resources

A co-ed residential tower for more than 600 students occupies floors 8-16 of the University Center. An amenity space on the lower level is accessible only by residents and consists of a large common room, art studios, an exercise facility with gym equipment, soundproof music practice rooms, a study hall, bicycle storage area, mailroom, and laundry room. The University Center has three dining areas: a 280-seat cafeteria on the second floor, an 80-seat library café on the seventh floor, and a 60-seat event café on the lower level off the entrance lobby and auditorium.

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for The New School in New York appeared first on Dezeen.

French auto brand Renault has designed a concept car that launches its own drone from a hatch in the roof (+ slideshow).

The Renault Kwid Concept, unveiled at the Delhi Auto Show, is the first car to come with its very own unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which could help the driver scout ahead for traffic, take aerial photos of the surrounding landscape and detect obstacles in the road.

The device, referred to as a Flying Companion, is stored in a rotating rear portion of the Kwid’s roof when not in use. When activated, the panel slides open and the quadrocopter – named after the device’s four motors – can be operated in one of two modes.

In automatic mode, the drone flies along a pre-programmed flying sequence using in-built GPS. In manual mode, the UAV is controlled via a tablet built into the dashboard of the car.

“Customers in new markets are much younger,” explained Serge Mouangue, brand manager and innovative cooperative laboratory manager for Renault. “Their expectations are different and customers are basically gamers. They tend to take a closer interest in technology and want to enjoy themselves.”

The Kwid resembles an off-road buggy thanks to the oversized wings, mud guards and wheel arches. However, designers at Renault have suggested the car will come in two-wheel drive instead of four – meaning it’s more likely to be for city dwellers than rural ones.

The Kwid will come with a 1.2-litre turbocharged engine with a dual-clutch transmission, allowing the owner to drive in automatic or manual mode. Renault has suggested that it could also come with an electric motor. The interior features two-tone white seats with a yellow-trimmed dash. The chairs are wrapped in a web of white elastic polymer to give the impression the passengers are sat in a bird’s nest, according to designers on the project.

The driver is sat in the centre of a row of three, allowing the same model to be used in both left-hand, and right-hand drive markets.

In the rear, passengers can adjust the air-conditioning via a panel on the back of the driver’s seat, which also features ventilation ducts built in.

While just a concept for now, Renault has said the Kwid will go on sale within two years, with particular focus on the Indian market. “Young customers in India are often trend setters, looking forward to pushing the envelope when it comes to technology and enjoyable drives,” explained Gilles Normand, chairman of Renault’s Asia-Pacific Region.

“The Kwid Concept, with its Flying Companion, meets this forward-looking spirit with both its dynamic styling and hyper connectivity,” he added.

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equipped with traffic-spotting drone appeared first on Dezeen.