Hasta La Ideas

An inflatable pavilion that looks like a soap bubble, by architects Plastique Fantastique, has been popping up around Copenhagen this month (+ slideshow).

Aeropolis is a transparent blow-up structure, designed by Berlin temporary architecture firm Plastique Fantastique, that can be inflated in any location and used as an enclosed event space.

The structure is made from a fire-proof PVC and when inflated industrial ventilators are used to retain the air pressure required to keep the bubble’s shape. Visitors enter the bubble through a zipped door on the side.

The Aeropolis pavilion has been used as an event hub for the Metropolis Festival 2013 in Copenhagen and has been erected in 13 locations, including a green park, under a bridge and inside a church.

Events held inside the bubble have included a light installation, dance performance, a star-gazing evening and a music concert.

Plastique Fantastique director Marco Canevacci told Dezeen the firm is looking to install the pop-up bubble at Remake Festival in Berlin.

Watch Aeropolis in use inside a church:

Here’s another movie, that features a yoga class taking place inside the bubble:

Our other stories that feature blow-up design include the entrance to last year’s Design Miami fair that was covered by inflatable sausages, a twisted tubular inflatable pavilion installed in east London and news that a giant inflatable rubber duck with be exhibited during Beijing Design Week 2013.

See more inflatable architecture and design »
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Aeropolis by Plastique Fantastique

The Aeropolis community centre breathes new life into the city, and make the invisible visible.

The architecture of the 100 m2 pneumatic installation allows maximal mobility and will be installed in 13 different locations during the Metropolis Festival in August 2013. On its tour of the various Copenhagen districts, it will be a base for urban activities with all kinds of changing themes – all curated together with staff from the local community centres.

The scenography changes with the specific environment: there’s meditation and yoga by the lake, it opens up towards the sky above us in a cemetery, it invites us to a soundless discotheque at one of the noisiest intersections in the city, it provides performance at Islands Brygge, martial arts at Superkilen and Karom competitions in Versterbro, it blows up inside a church and shows a future cultural centre in Valby.

About Plastique Fantastique

Plastique Fantastique is a collective for temporary architecture that samples the performative possibilities of urban environments.

Established in Berlin in 1999, Plastique Fantastique has been influenced by the unique circumstances that made the city a laboratory for temporary spaces.

Plastique Fantastique’s synthetic structures affect surrounding spaces like a soap bubble does: similar to a foreign body, it occupies and mutates urban space. Their interventions change the way we perceive and interact in urban environments. By mixing different landscape types, an osmotic passage between private and public space is generating new hybrid environments.

Regardless the way people view a bubble, walk around its exterior or move inside it, the pneumatic structure is a medium to experience the same physical setting in a temporary extraordinary situation. A Plastique Fantastique installation has the ability to remove a subject from its surrounding context and transfer them into a new spatial realm.

Plastique Fantastique creates light and fluid structures that can lie on the street, lean against a wall, infiltrate under a bridge, squeeze into a courtyard, float on a lake and invade an apartment to generate an “urban premiere”.

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Plastique Fantastique appeared first on Dezeen.

British designer Tom Dixon discusses how the digitalisation of manufacturing processes is enabling young designers to take production into their own hands in this movie Dezeen filmed at MOST in Milan.

Set against a backdrop of planes, trains and submarines, Dixon has hosted his MOST show at the Museum of Science and Technology during Milan design week for the last two years.

“What you’ll see around the museum is people just getting on and producing their own things,” Dixon says of this year’s exhibition.

“Last year we used a big punch press with a German company called Trumpf to make something here in the museum,” Dixon says. “The net result of that are some big lamps that we’re now going to be making in New York for a client and the one that we’re showing here was made in London.”

Called Punch Ball, the lamps can be customised and ordered via Tom Dixon Bespoke and are produced to order locally.

“We’re deconstructing the manufacturing process,” Dixon claims. “I think for a long time people thought all goods were going to be produced a long way away in low-cost labour countries and shipped in huge quantities to the rich west, but that whole equation has completely changed.”

Dixon says that now smaller companies are also able to produce their own products due to advances in digital fabrication technologies.

“The product world has been quite slow to be part of the digital revolution, but obviously people are getting more and more able to bypass the normal structures for producing and selling their work,” he says.

“I think a couple of years back, people would have been waiting for a big producer to spot their prototypes and put them into production. People have given up hope of that happening, but of course with the new technologies you’re able to produce the stuff yourself digitally, do the logistics through various structures and then get direct to the global consumer.”

Dixon cites online retailer Fab.com, which had a stand at this year’s MOST, as an example of how designers today are able to sell their products all over the world, without having to rely on the infrastructure of a large manufacturer or distributer.

“People are being approached by [Fab.com] to sell their things online to an audience of something like 13 million internationally, which means that a young, untested designer can suddenly have access to this vast marketplace,” he says.

“Designers from all over the world are making all over the world and selling all over the world, which is a significant move from what Milan used to be.”

See all our Milan 2013 coverage »
Watch our Dezeen and MINI World Tour video reports from Milan »

The post “Young designers have given up waiting to be
spotted by a big producer” – Tom Dixon appeared first on Dezeen.

Le studio de retouche photographique Bespoke Pixel existe depuis 2009. Ayant pu travailler pour GQ, Vogue ou encore The New Republic, les équipes de cette structure propose des clichés de mode d’une grande beauté avec beaucoup de talent. A découvrir en images dans la suite.

La marque de bière tchèque Velkopopovický Kozel s’offre une édition limitée créée par le designer ukrainien Yurko Gutsulyak, qui fait un focus particulier sur la tradition et son savoir faire séculaire avec un effet pyrogravé. Une récompense est même offerte à quiconque décrypte le message caché au sein du design.

Le designer néo-zélandais Ryan Romanes a imaginé ce « Urban Survival Pack ». Avec un design simple et très réussi, cet ensemble d’objets contient tous les éléments nécessaires pour faire pousser des plantes et survivre dans un environnement urbain. A découvrir en images dans la suite de l’article.