Hasta La Ideas

Milan 2014: Milan designer Alberto Biagetti has created a furniture collection inspired by his home city that incorporates materials salvaged from its aristocratic palazzos.

The Bonjour Milàn collection developed by Biagetti’s studio, Atelier Biagetti, comprises a cabinet, a lamp, a large table and groups of side tables made from materials including discarded tiles.

“All of our pieces are hand made in Milan and each material has been selected to represent an historical era, a sort of sedimentation of materials,” the designer told Dezeen.

“This idea made us think that maybe in the future people will search for plastic in the ground as one of the most precious materials, as happens today with many materials that become more precious and rare over time.”

Hexagonal tiles taken from typical Milanese residences act as surfaces for side tables that feature bases made from rectangular brass profiles.

The structure of each table creates a seemingly delicate contrast to the weighty tiles, which are positioned at different heights.

“When I found these parts of a wonderful old floor with this incredible patina I thought that was a treasure and the perfect starting point,” explained Biagetti.

A mixture of discarded materials including copper, brass, plastic laminate and wood are applied to the glass surfaces of the table and cabinet and arranged in patterns that resemble sectional views of stratified rock or earth.

The patterns spread across the glass top of the table and continue onto the upper portion of the supporting trestles, while the top and bottom of the glass cabinet are covered in opaque materials that conceal its contents.

The Parabola lamp features an adjustable brass base supporting a parabolic dish that is inspired by the shape of the huge antennae used for space research.

A small reflector at the centre of the dish directs light onto the domed surface, which projects an even light into the room.

Each of the pieces in the collection is unique due to the irregular combination of available materials and the use of handmade production processes.

The collection was launched at a preview event in Paris last week ahead of a presentation at Atelier Biagetti’s Milan showroom from 8-13 April.

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to make furniture by Atelier Biagetti appeared first on Dezeen.

Feature: as Facebook buys virtual reality headset maker Oculus and Sony reveals its own VR device, Dezeen explores what the resurgence of this old school technology means for designers.

Oculus VR was already big before Facebook bought the virtual reality headset maker for $2 billion. A resurrection of dead technology from the 1990s, Oculus Rift had previously been branded as a gaming device, but with Facebook’s acquisition VR’s progression into the digital world in general has been accelerated.

“Oculus has the potential to be the most social platform ever,” said Mark Zuckerberg in a call to Facebook’s investors, while his announcement post painted a picture of the world donning headsets to watch tennis, study in classrooms and consult with doctors.

Facebook sees Oculus Rift as a chance to profoundly transform communication, and to the gaming industry it’s a generational leap in electronic entertainment. But there’s more to virtual reality. It’s as much a creative tool for designers and architects, as it is a new medium for designers to explore, and a close and personal way of experiencing the creations of others.

And good god it’s difficult to explain why to anyone who hasn’t tried modern virtual reality devices. Rewinding to the Game Developers Conference, held in San Francisco just last week, Sony neatly illustrated this fact in its reveal of its own prototype virtual reality gaming headset, Project Morpheus.

Sony’s president of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida, called the peculiarly powerful effect of being sensorily immersed in virtual reality “presence”, acknowledging just how hard it is to relate its effect of “being there”. Seeing it formatted in double vision on YouTube doesn’t cut it at all.

Outwardly you look dorky, with a bulky headset strapped to your head, swinging it around to see things that aren’t really there. But inwardly the experience is remarkable, your virtual gaze mapped exactly and immediately to your real one. The ability to crane around obstacles, lean close to study objects or track an enemy starfighter as it loops over your cockpit is enveloping. And it clearly has further application than games.

At its Morpheus announcement, Sony saw it complementing Google’s ongoing 3D interiors mapping project Indoor Maps, which allows you to sample hotels and shops before you visit. Indeed, Oculus Rift has already been used for a sort of viral tourism from its earliest demos, taking users on a visit to Tuscany, Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment, and the EUseum, a virtual gallery that presents high resolution paintings to study.

It therefore isn’t much of a leap to seeing it being used as an architectural visualisation tool, something that both architects and technologists have actually been exploring since virtual reality’s advent. Importing from CAD into 3D game engines like Unity is relatively easy, allowing companies like Arch Virtual to spring up to offer walkthroughs of prospective projects along with environments for military training, medical simulations and advertising.

Instead of the all too familiar glossy render, with virtual reality you get to examine the details: the weight of a wall, the expanse of a void, the shifting sightline as you freely move across an aperture. Clients can experience their commission before they sign instead of just pore over abstract plans.

There are applications in product design, too. Ford uses virtual reality to sample new car designs, allowing the chance to inspect an interior from the perspective of the driver or passengers. Ford argues that it allows the company to assess designs far earlier in the process than before, from material finishes to colour schemes, in different light conditions and environments.

As well as sampling designed objects and spaces, virtual reality also has an application in creating them, whether in CAD or ZBrush, breaking beyond the perceptive confines of 2D displays. As an idea of how easy the new generation of virtual reality software and hardware makes manipulation of objects in 3D space, there’s MakeVR. It uses wireless motion controllers similar to those popularised by Nintendo for its Wii console to make interaction seamless. Shorn of the complex menus found in a lot of design software, virtual reality helps to democratise 3D design – in terms of skills and knowledge if not financially. Spool the 3D models out to a 3D printer and production is further pressed into the hands of the many.

On the other hand, it’s possible to use 3D sensors like Microsoft’s Kinect to map fully textured environments or objects for use in virtual reality. Through a confluence of breaking technologies, 3D as a medium for creatives to work in has become a reality.

There are many hurdles ahead. A major one is that virtual reality in its current iteration is insular, highjacking your senses and removing you from the real world. Whether you’re in a living room or a studio, you don’t get to share glances with those around you. Moreover, wearing a headset for extended periods is less than comfortable and has a tendency to make people fall over. Aside from its weight (which isn’t exactly heavy but it’s an unaccustomed bulk), nausea and dizziness can result from a lag between head movement and seeing the result, how quickly the screen refreshes and the speed at which things are moving in the virtual space.

But still, Facebook’s just bet $2 billion on virtual reality, a discarded tech from the mid 1990s, finally making a comeback. We’ve experienced enough Hollywood visualisations of a computer-vision based future, and increasingly the confines of the 2D – and even 3D – TV screen are becoming suffocating, failing to express the richness of the virtual things and places that creatives are making. Virtual reality might be yesterday’s future, but that isn’t making it feel any less fresh.

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to change the world of design appeared first on Dezeen.

German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic has created a series of futuristic scenarios as part of the largest solo exhibition of his work at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany (+ movie).

Grcic worked closely with curators at the Vitra Design Museum to create a series of installations that depict environments for future living based on his personal vision of design’s role in modern society.

“We consider Konstantin Grcic to be one of the most influential designers of our time – his approach and his aesthetic is probably the most advanced and radical,” Vitra Design Museum director Mateo Kries told Dezeen.

“He is at the peak of his career, but still he has never staged an exhibition that conveys the visual world, the themes and the narratives that inspire him. These were some of the reasons why we decided to work with him on a large solo exhibition,” Kries added.

The installations include a fictional home interior, design studio and urban environment featuring several of Grcis’s iconic designs, such as the Mayday lamp for Flos and Chair One for Magis.

The first of the installations, called Life Space, resembles a typical home featuring everyday objects including some of Grcic’s own designs, which are arranged on a raised platform.

The Work Space section presents some of Grcic’s products and prototypes on a long table in front of a wall clad in artificial rock that create the feel of a futuristic subterranean workshop.

A projection on the opposite wall displays scenes from a typical work day at Grcic’s Munich studio, including CAD models being manipulated, a 3D printer in action, and everyday objects or prototypes being inspected.

The third area, called Public Space, features a huge panoramic collage depicting aspects of contemporary urban and rural society alongside imagined futuristic architecture.

A chain-link fence separating the image from the rest of the space is intended to create the feeling of a safe environment in which visitors are encouraged to interact with examples of Grcic’s furniture.

The final section, Object Space, features a museum-style vitrine displaying a range of Grcic’s products alongside inspirational objects he has collected over the years.

In a video interview with the exhibition’s curators, Grcic spoke about the changes he has witnessed in the design industry throughout his career, including evolving attitudes towards mass production.

“Industry, meaning standardisation churning out many of the same products for everyone, is an old concept,” the designer suggested. “The beauty is that industry now produces diversity, variety and is able to customise a project but still on an industrial scale.”

He added that his own products are not always immediately accessible but that he believes design’s role is to produce challenging and divisive objects.

“I sometimes hear that it takes time for my products to be understood or liked,” he claimed. “I think it’s quite good or necessary for products to challenge an opinion because we don’t want to live in a bubble where everything is beautiful or comfortable. The power of an object that makes you think is something that I want to explore.”

Konstantin Grcic – Panorama is on show at the Vitra Design Museum until 14 September 2014. It was co-produced by the Z33 House for contemporary art in Hasselt, Belgium, where it will be presented early next year.

Photography is by Mark Niedermann, courtesy of the Vitra Design Museum.

Here’s some more information from the Vitra Design Museum:

Konstantin Grcic – Panorama
22.03.2014 – 14.09.2014
Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein

Konstantin Grcic is one of the most influential designers of our time. Serious and functional, unwieldy and occasionally disconcerting, his works combine an indus- trial aesthetic with experimental, artistic elements. Many of Grcic’s creations, such as Chair One (2004) or the Mayday lamp (1999), are widely acclaimed as design classics. With »Konstantin Grcic – Panorama«, the Vitra Design Museum is now presenting the largest solo exhibition on Grcic and his work to date.

Specifically for this exhibition, Grcic has developed several large-scale installations rendering his personal visions for life in the future: a home interior, a design studio and an urban environment. These spaces stage fictional scenarios confronting the viewer with the designer’s inspirations, chal- lenges and questions, as well as placing Grcic’s works in a greater social context. The highlight of these presentations is a 30-metre long panorama that depicts an architectural landscape of the future.

A fourth area of the exhibition takes a focused look at Grcic’s daily work. This section presents many of his finished objects, but also prototypes, drawings and background information along with artefacts that have inspired Grcic – from an old teapot and an early Apple computer to works by Marcel Duchamp, Gerrit Rietveld and Enzo Mari. In the shift of perspectives between larger and smaller scales, the exhibition demonstrates how design is more than mere problem solving for Grcic, but a highly complex process that integrates coincidences, ruptures, chance discoveries and a profound engagement with the visual culture of our time.

Konstantin Grcic (b. 1965) was initially influenced by the minimalist designs of Jasper Morrison under whom he began his career in the late 1980s. Soon he developed his own distinctive stylistic idiom and has become a driving force of formal and technical innovation within the international design scene. Today, Grcic works for many leading design companies, including Authentics, Flos, Magis, Vitra, ClassiCon, Plank, Krups and Muji. With his widely published designs, he often develops surprising solutions that avoid cliché and derive their radical aesthetic from Grcic’s intensive investigations of materials, technologies and production processes.

With Panorama, Grcic enters new territory. Never before has he so fundamentally reflected on his own work and so thoroughly disclosed his own understanding of design in general. The exhibition is based on an extensive analysis of current technological shifts, innovations and upheavals in contemporary design. It was developed over three years of close collaboration between Grcic, the Vitra Design Museum and Z33 –House for contemporary art in Hasselt, Belgium. The result is a striking presentation of narrative and visual intensity, situated on the cusp between present and future, reality and fiction.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 320-page catalogue that comprises a catalogue raisonné of Grcic’s work as well as essays by such authors as s Richard Sennett, Peter Sloterdijk, Paola Antonelli, Mario Carpo and others. In conjunction with the exhibition, Vitra Design Museum will organize a
wide-ranging event programme.

Konstantin Grcic – Panorama is an exhibition of the Vitra Design Museum and Z33 – House for contemporary art, Hasselt (Belgium). W.I.R.E. – Web for Interdisciplinary Research & Expertise at ETH Zurich was a major scientific collaborator. The exhibition will be shown at Z33 from 01.02. to 24.05.2015. Further exhibition venues will be announced in due course.

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at Vitra Design Museum solo show appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2014: Dutch designer Richard Hutten will launch a multicoloured chair made from 545 stacked layers of Kvadrat’s fabric in Milan next month.

Based on an earlier version of the designer’s aluminium Cloud chair, Hutten has created the Layers Cloud Chair based on the same shape, a cluster of spheres.

The Layers Cloud chair uses 840 metres squared of Kvadrat‘s Divina fabric and references the layered rock pigments found in the Painted Desert, Arizona. “I wanted the design to be about the textile,” said Hutten. “Rather than using the material as a cover, I created an object with the material.”

Each layer of the chair is a different colour, of which nearly 100 were used. The pieces of fabric were drawn separately, cut with a CNC machine and manually assembled one by one.

“With the Layers Cloud Chair Richard has created a fairly baroque furniture piece offering a fulminant display of fireworks in colour.” said Hans Maier-Aachen, curator of Kvadrat’s exhibition for Milan 2014.

The chair will be shown in Milan as part of Kvadrat’s Divina exhibition from 9-13 April during the Salone del Mobile.

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to launch in Milan appeared first on Dezeen.

Each piece in the Folk candle holder range is different but shares the same characteristics, creating a family of objects which work together or individually (+ slideshow).

The inspiration for the collection of holders came from the idea that humans all share the same basic characteristics, but have different body shapes.

“People all share the same basic characters, but it is the details and proportions that set them apart,” Simon Legald told Dezeen.

“Each candle holder has its own expression but share the same DNA,” he said. “It was important for the different pieces to be able to function by themselves as well as together with the other family members.”

The collection consists of a tray, candlestick tray, two different styles of candlestick, a candle holder and a tea light holder. The smaller objects fit perfectly into the trays to create a variety of use and display options.

Each piece comes in two different colours from a palette that includes a pale blue, burgundy, three shades of grey and a bright yellow.

“The colours were chosen to provide a classic feel, said Legald. “These colours make the series easy to combine and create one’s own style and feeling.”

Legald began working for Normann Copenhagen as an intern two and a half years ago while studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and has since become the company’s senior house designer.

“I have learned more about design the last year than have the past six years,” said Legald. “Co-founder and CEO Jan Normann Andersen is a mentor for me, he knows so much about design and production, and helps me become better at what I do.”

Here’s some information from the designer:

Normann Copenhagen presents the Folk range of candle holders

Danish designer Simon Legald has designed a range of timeless candle holders for Normann Copenhagen made to be combined in many ways. The range consists of four different candle holders and a tray with a simple, minimalistic feel. The silhouettes, which are neither round nor square, give the Folk range their character and own unique expression.

Simon Legald’s design is, among other things, characterised by his carefully thought out attention to detail. He has worked on the shapes, sizes and edges of Folk, so that the small candle holders fit perfectly into the trays. The asymmetric positioning of the sticks on the base is a discreet detail that makes the design more dynamic to look at.

Simon Legald explains: “I wanted to create a little family of cohesive products. Each candle holder should have its own expression but share the same DNA. It was important for the different pieces to be able to function by themselves as well as together with the other candle holders in the set.”

The Folk range consists of five different pieces, each in two different colours. The colours in this series range from three classic shades of grey to light blue, burgundy and yellow. The colours have been chosen to make the range interesting and make it easy to combine the candle holders according to one’s taste and decor.

Colours: Light grey, grey, dark grey, light blue, burgundy, yellow
Material: Zinc
Dimensions:
Tray: H: 1 cm x L: 21,7 cm x D: 9,8 cm, 17,5 GBP
Candlestick Tray: H: 16,5 cm x L: 18,8 cm x D: 9,8 cm
Candlestick: H: 12,6 cm x L: 10,5 cm x D: 9,3 cm
Candle Holder: H: 3 cm x L: 10,5 cm x D: 9,3 cm
Tealight Candle Holder: H: 2,6 cm x L: 10,5 cm x D: 9,3 cm, 12 GBP

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Simon Legald for Normann Copenhagen appeared first on Dezeen.