Hasta La Ideas

The Internet allows us to share information more freely than ever before. But along with that come two somewhat disturbing trends we’ve recently picked up on.

The first is that people are increasingly posting things linklessly. In other words, someone will assemble a Tumblr wall of photos of awesome things, but there is no link back to where those things came from, what they are or who made them. Merely showing a photo of a beautiful chair is apparently enough for the poster, with no opportunities to further your understanding of it. But I want to know who designed the chair and where I can learn more about it.

The second involves the rash of “How It’s Made” videos that seems to increase every week. While we love seeing these, and feel funny complaining about something some shooter has obviously toiled to produce and has provided for free worldwide viewing, it bugs us that these videos increasingly lack any narrative that explains the processes we’re seeing and therefore doesn’t really deepen our comprehension of the subject. Given a choice between no-explanations-given videos and no videos at all, obviously we’d always choose the former (and would post them rather than you not seeing them at all), but we can’t help but feel there’s a real opportunity for learning here that is only being half-addressed.

As a good example of this, take a gander at this Encylopaedia Brittanica Films short from 1947 showing how books were made. We posted about it last year commenting on how many people the process involved. (Footage starts at 0:25.)

Now look at this short, currently making the blog rounds, commissioned by the UK’s Daily Telegraph showing how handmade books are produced today:

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Slideshow: the modular fenestration of this school building in western Switzerland was inspired by shapes from 1980s computer game Tetris.

Designed by Swiss architects ipas, the four-storey block is an extension to an existing secondary school and a glass bridge connects it to the main building at second-floor level.

Concrete steps lead up to the first-floor entrance and can also be used as bleachers when sports activities take place in the adjacent playground.

Differently coloured walls and floors inside the school differentiate between classrooms, the gym, bathrooms and the entrance foyer.

Dezeen visited Switzerland at the end of last year for an architectural tour of Basel and Zurich – listen to our podcast from the trip here.

Photography is by Thomas Jantscher.

The text below is from ipas:

Tetris

The building is located near the forest and its large windows fully open the school on its wooded surroundings. Imagine our children, perched in the wild beauty of foliage, about to sprout from vertigo that comes from the rise of knowledge ….

A place outside any, between heaven and earth, where reigns only the relentless beauty of a diaphanous light colored green, the sweet sound of singing of leaves blowing in the wind, a spellbinding atmosphere by its serenity in harmony with all the idea that there is a place of learning.

Imagine a school which draws its plastic aesthetics of the forest. A beauty who plays a musical symphony to the rhythm of chance and repetition, to capture, play, live emotions that nature gives us.

The building unfolds quietly because dialogue with nature, respect for the latter, out of modesty, its footprint is minimal: as a result of deforestation is reduced, the search also.

The repeating pattern used for the definition of the openings of facade has its roots in the plant environment that characterizes the place. Zoom on the macroscopic foliage delivers us a pixelization constituting the frame in which the openings take place.

The famous arcade game Tetris animates the facades and makes light of the serious idea of a school to give it a more playful.

A door-to-north false facade welcomes the entry of the new school which is in turn connected to the existing complex through a large entry step outside that can serve as bleachers for outdoor sporting activities. A glass bridge, geometry broken, connects the two schools.

The program follows a hierarchical organization clear down the access and sport, the top areas of learning, this spatial arrangement is enhanced by the multiple external environments and their lights.

The circulation spaces are generous because we must accommodate students, create meeting places and provide surfaces for new teaching methods.

The colors also draws its source in the nearby forest by restoring a concrete-colored brown, evoking the tree trunks. Inside, the chromatic variations borrow light of the four seasons, autumn orange for the lower level, the winter-brown at the entrance, spring green on the first floor and was green-blue in the second floor.

The bathrooms are blue, penetrates to the wood walls and ceiling of the gyms where the soil reflects the blue sky.

The building uses the principle of large spans, two concrete walls 40 inches thick and encompassing two levels of classes materialize an arc of 32 meters in length through which the gym is divisible released any intermediate support.

In terms of sustainability, maintenance, materials which constitute the outer shell provide durability that resists the vicissitudes of time: an inert material such as concrete, and a compact roof completely resistant to ambient humidity generated by the near the forest

Architectes: ipas architectes sa

Competition: 1st prize

Planning: 2004, 2005-2007

Owner: Commune de Genolier

Team: Michel Egger, Eric Ott, Salvatore Chillari, Delphine Jeanneret-Gris, Gilles Batista, Michael Desaules

In collaboration with: Daniel Schlaepfer, Lausanne, artiste

Dezeen Wire: a report by Manhattan think tank Center for an Urban Future has found that design schools are catalysts for entrepreneurship and economic growth in New York City. 

The report claims that more than twice as many students graduate in design or architecture in New York that in any other city in the country, enrolments at New York universities are growing faster than any other American city and that a higher proportion of graduates from New York design and architecture schools go on to set up their own businesses.

Download the full report here.

Click above for larger image

Here are some more details from Center for an Urban Future:

Report finds that NYC design schools are catalysts for entrepreneurship & economic growth

Design schools may be the real engines of New York City’s innovation economy, according to a new report published today by the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan based think tank.

The report reveals that New York City graduates more than twice as many students in design and architecture as any other city in the country and finds that the city’s leading design schools—including Parsons The New School for Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts (SVA)—have become critical catalysts for innovation, entrepreneurship and economic growth.

While there has been much attention in recent months on the potential impact of a new applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island, the Center’s study shows that the city’s design universities are already playing a pivotal role in producing local start-ups. The report reveals that an astounding 129 of the 386 members (or one third) of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, a national association with members around the country, attended one of three New York City design schools: FIT, Parsons or Pratt. In addition, according to national data, nearly 20 percent of all Pratt, Parsons and SVA graduates went on to start their own businesses—a much larger percentage than design schools elsewhere.

Graduates of NYC’s design schools founded many of New York’s most visible and influential design firms, including Studio Daniel Liebeskind, Diller Scofidio Renfro, SHoP Architects, Smart Design, Ralph Applebaum Associates, Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan International.

The report, titled “Designing New York’s Future,” finds that no other city matches New York’s education infrastructure in design and architecture. In 2010, New York City graduated 4,278 students in design and architecture, while the city with the second most, Los Angeles, graduated less than half as many (1,769). New York has four design schools in the country’s top ten by the number of degrees awarded every year: the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) (#1), Parsons The New School for Design (#4), the Pratt Institute (#7) and the School of Visual Arts (SVA) (#10). New York City also has two architecture schools in the top ten by the number of degrees awarded: Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) (#5) and Pratt (#8).

In addition, enrollment at New York’s design universities has been growing at a faster rate than other universities in the city: Between 2001 and 2010, full time student enrollment at the city’s 10 largest design and architecture schools increased by 34 percent, going from 18,002 students at the beginning of the decade to 24,065 students ten years later. During the same period, student enrollment at all institutions of higher education in New York City grew 27 percent between 2001 and 2010. The enrollment increases at New York’s design schools also outpaced the rate of growth for other major design schools in the U.S. The largest design schools in the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD), a national consortium that includes the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, grew by 28 percent between 2001 and 2010.

The report shows that New York’s leading design and architectural firms rely on graduates from these schools. According to the report, 50 percent of the designers at the Rockwell Group, a prominent design and architecture firm, are graduates of NYC design schools. At Gensler, a major design and architecture firm with more than 400 employees in NYC, an estimated 30 percent of the designers are from NYC design schools. At Nanette Lepore, the fashion house, the number is 29 percent.

While the report highlights the important role of New York’s design schools, it also shines a spotlight on areas at the schools that need improvement. For instance, the majority of the professional designers interviewed for the report said that the city’s design schools did not provide ample opportunities for them to develop business or entrepreneurial skills.

The report concludes that design universities are poised to play an even more central role in New York’s economic future given that designers are having a growing influence on everything from smart phones to the delivery of health care services. But it also faults city officials for largely overlooking design universities in their innovation economy initiatives.

The Center for an Urban Future is an independent think tank based in Manhattan that focuses on critical issues facing New York City’s future, with a focus on economic and workforce development. This study is the latest in a long line of Center for an Urban Future reports focusing on opportunities for New York City to grow and diversify its economy.

Light permeates this civic hall designed by Magén Arquitectos in southern Spain through blocks of alabaster in the facade.

The building is constructed from translucent alabaster and opaque limestone that were extracted from native quarries.

The harsh geometry contrasts with the warmer, softer bamboo finish that can be found in the more significant internal spaces where the delegates gather.

White stone walls allude to the sobriety and plainness of traditional Iberian vernacular as well as referencing material groups from local quarries.

Three bands organise the spaces: the first and second hold the access, lobby, management and adminstration spaces while the third band holds less public spaces such as the auditorium and classrooms.

Photography is by Pedro Pegenaute

Here are some more details from Magen Arquitectos:

The Bajo Martin County is formed by nine historic populations in Teruel, located in the basin of the River Martin. Alabaster, which is extracted from quarries in the area, is one of its main resources, dedicated to both the export and cultural promotion, through routes, meeting craft and art activities, organized annually by the Center for Integrated Development of Alabaster.

The site is located on the outskirts of Hijar, capital of the county, along the national highway N-232 and the old abandoned silo. It was a dysfunctional urban environment, including existing industrial buildings, and the front of residential townhouses, just across the road.

The absence of urban qualities in the environment legitimizes a certain autonomous condition of the building, rising from the land to form a unified solution, clear and compact. Therefore, the necessary link of building and place, reinforced by its institutional character, not articulated from urban relationships with the immediate environment, but from references to geographical landscape, history and culture, present in their external configuration. The group of carved volumes on local materials -stone and alabaster, alludes, in an abstract and geometric way, to stone groups that occur in quarries in the area. The stone surfaces, opaque or translucent, exhibit materials and expressive features of alabaster in relation to the day or night lighting.

The ordered group volumes in the outside, compact, heavy and massive, is poured inside. The space pierces and perforates the solid volume, producing a dynamic system of voids, connected visually and spatially, diagonally, linking the three floors and articulating the circulation spaces, access and meeting. The continuity with the outside material and the presence of natural light into the interior through various gaps, strengthen the condition of the interior space as empty excavated, drawn from the section as a fundamental tool of the project.

The functional organization of the project is divided into three bands constructed parallel to the path. The first is the plenary hall access and, second, the lobby and areas of management and administration, and third, to the auditorium and classrooms. The distribution of plants distinguishes between the more public areas at ground and first floors, and more related to internal management and work in the second. In contrast to the stone walls inside the bamboo wood finish in the most significant spaces such as the plenary hall, underscores its public, institutional and representative.

I’m not sure if it already sounds anachronistic to talk about ‘shop class,’ but I have vague memories of a wacky middle school Metals teacher and an altogether incongruous Printing elective at my high school. The equipment was invariably second- (or third-, fourth-, nth-)hand, long-patina’d with wheezy nostalgia—this was New England, after all—and the dubious tutelage at the calloused hands of gruff semi-retired tradesmen relegated this sort of education squarely in the past.

Which is precisely why a new project by a team of Stanford d.school students is so interesting: they’re looking to introduce new generations of young minds—future designers and otherwise—to a new generation of young technologies. In short, “Sparklab is a big red truck filled with cutting-edge maker tools that goes from school to school, bringing the joy of building back to kids.”

The Kickstarter project is the culmination of a yearlong thesis project for an enthusiastic crew of 20-something makers with the savoir-faire to realize the potential of 21st century fabrication tools not just for making things but for education as well. If the idea of a mobile shop class isn’t appealing enough as it is, they have the blessing of IDEO Founder (and d.school prof) David Kelley.

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