Le studio de design Bonsoir Paris a imaginé pour le Bright Young Things concept store situé à Londres au sein de la chaîne de grands magasins Selfridges. Avec des utilisations originales et très réussies de modules gonflables, ces structures éphémères sont à découvrir en images dans la suite.
American studio Qastic has created an inflatable pavilion with a floating roof held down by fabric veils (+ slideshow).
Called Floatastic, the structure was designed by Connecticut firm Qastic for a wedding ceremony. They intended to create a temporary shelter without imposing any loads on the ground.
A giant horizontal white balloon is filled with helium. As it rises upwards, a series of fixed fabric veils keep the inflatable overhead and appear to dangle like jellyfish tentacles. “Buoyancy is achieved through the efficient harnessing of a noble gas,” said Qastic.
The designers said that the floating pavillion is the result of research into buoyancy and structures that are made by reversing the position of the load.
“Since the surrounding environment and microclimate fluctuate in every 24-hour cycle, our studies found that the floating pavilion will experience many buoyant conditions which are unique but steady,” said the firm.
Here’s a film featuring the structure floating in the wind:
We’ve featured other stories about inflatable structures recently, including a pop-up pavilion that looks like a soap bubble and a twisted tubular inflatable pavilion installed in east London.
See more inflatable architecture and design »
See more pavilion design »
Photographs are by Net Martin Studio.
Here’s more from Qastic Lab:
Floatastic
Balance Through Buoyancy is a research base pavilion called “Floatastic” by QASTIC Lab, which was designed and built for a private client to serve as a temporary shade pavilion for a wedding ceremony in Edgerton Park, in New Haven Connecticut – an Olmsted planned landscape.
This deployable structure aims to create a floated shelter which avoids imposing any loads to the ground, which traditional structures require. Instead it proposes a well-fabricated balloon, which is filled with Helium to raise the imposed loads of fabric veils and any possible dynamic environmental loads toward the sky.
Buoyancy is achieved through the efficient harnessing of a noble gas. The idea of ‘flesh’ is explored through the pavilions possible functions and effects, by which an abstracted mass can impose on fabric surfaces in both relaxation and tension.
It is within this dialogue of the helium container and the loads that we can test possible architectural and spatial effects, with articulation between Balloon edges and fabric veils exploring the possibilities in which the complex surface veils are relaxed or in tension in double curvature configurations.
Making use of the method of reversing load bearing systems, the form of the pavilion is defined by geometrically precise formwork that is then fabricated with randomly varying edges both for the horizontal balloon and the PVC pipes on the ground to allow for varied functions at different heights, climates and locations.
Since the surrounding environment and microclimate fluctuate in every 24 hours cycle, our studies found that the floating pavilion will experience many buoyant conditions which are unique however steady.
Metaphorically, Floatastic envisioned to be a surrealistic and breathtaking imitation of the Jellyfish that appear alive and tries to swim against the external forces in the water. However, rather than being in the water, Floatastic questions its audiences to unconsciously know if they are floating in the sea or on the ground.
Architects: QASTIC Lab
Location: Edgerton Park, New Haven, Connecticut. USA
Constructor: QASTIC Lab
Client: Jahangir Mohamadzadeh
Designer & Team Leader: Mahdi Alibakhshian
Design and fabrication Team: Ali Sadeghian, Reza Zia, Ahmad Jamei, Carlos Bugatti, Delara Zarrinabadi, Lili Saliani
Design & Fabrication Consultant: Nathaniel Hadley, Mohamad Reza Mojahedi
Conceptual & Visualization Consultant: Gregory Hurcomb
Exhibition Period: July 2013
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by Qastic appeared first on Dezeen.
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 »
See more pavilion design »
Here’s more information:
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.
German designer Philipp Beisheim has designed a stool and side table that you inflate with a hand pump like a rubber dinghy (+ movie).
The side table features a wooden top supported by an inflatable base, while the stool has a blow-up seat resting on wooden legs.
You can watch Beisheim pumping up the side table in the movie at the top of this post.
The blow-up parts of the products are made from a durable synthetic rubber called Hypalon, commonly used to make inflatable boats.
Beisheim took the side table to last month’s Blickfang designworkshop, where he told Dezeen: “It blows up in seconds. The material is a silicon-based fabric, which is actually used in the industrial area. It has a really strong structure, which makes the table a functional object.”
Watch our movie about this year’s Blickfang designworkshop »
“Making inflatable furniture allows the user to interact with the object in a different way by blowing it up,” Beisheim said. “My inflatable furniture would be useful outdoors, camping, for temporary events or people with a small balcony without much space.”
Earlier this month we featured more inflatable chairs by Chinese designers Ray Jiao and Yi Wang, which mould to the shape the sitter.
See all our stories about inflatable design and architecture »
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Philipp Beisheim appeared first on Dezeen.
News: the organisers of Beijing Design Week plan to emphasise problems with copyright in China by exhibiting an original version of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s giant Rubber Duck, which was duplicated around the country when it recently appeared in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour.
At a press conference announcing that Florentijn Hofman‘s ten-metre-high inflatable duck will appear at Beijing Design Week 2013, the event’s organising committee highlighted the proliferation of unsolicited copies that emerged in several Chinese cities including Tianjin and Wuhan last month, as well as unauthorised T-shirts and merchandise.
“We want to use the Rubber Duck case to drive an awareness programme raising the sensibility towards intellectual property rights around China,” said Wang Jun, a senior consultant to Beijing Design Week’s IP Protection Office.
Beijing Design Week will instead work with Hofman to produce and license official associated products and promises to take legal action against lookalikes.
“The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn’t discriminate people and doesn’t have a political connotation,” says a statement on Hofman’s website.
A 16.5 metre tall version of the sculpture was shown in Hong Kong from 2 May until 9 June, attracting a reported 8,000,000 people to the area.
Hofman’s duck has appeared in over a dozen cities since it was first exhibited in 2007, including Sao Paulo, Sydney and Amsterdam. Its installation at Beijing Design Week, which takes place from 26 September to 3 October, will be its second in China.
Copying in design is a hot topic at the moment, with Thomas Heatherwick recently being accused of copying the design for the Olympic cauldron from a New York agency, which has since said it never accused Heatherwick of plagiarism.
This issue is particularly prevalent in China, where a Zaha Hadid development in Beijing has been pirated by a Chinese developer in Chongqing. Earlier this year, Dutch design collective Droog made a series of products copied from traditional Chinese objects.
See all our stories about copying in design »
Top image is by YY Yeung.
The post Beijing Design Week confronts copying
in China with giant rubber duck appeared first on Dezeen.
Dezeen archive: this week we’ve delved into our archive to find all the best blow-up buildings, products and installations. See more inflatables in architecture and design »
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inflatables appeared first on Dezeen.
An inflatable pavilion covered with a clear tensile membrane has been installed in east London by Paris architects Atelier Zündel Cristea (+ slideshow).
A continuous white tube twists and undulates to create a three-armed form that visitors can walk or sit underneath and climb on top of.
“The design of the structure is a simple topological deformation of a torus and the shape was mathematically generated,” the architects told us.
The clear plastic sheet stretched over the top and attached with zips forms a springy surface, which can be reached by clambering up one of the sections that touch the ground.
An anodised aluminium platform with the same plan as the inflated structure forms the base, anchored to the ground at six points around the edge.
Atelier Zündel Cristea‘s design won first prize in a summer pavilion competition organised by ArchTriumph.
It is located in Museum Gardens in the east London area of Bethnal Green, next to the Museum of Childhood, and will be in place until 16 June.
Over in west London, this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion by Sou Foujimoto was unveiled earlier this week. See the first photos of the structure here, additional images here and watch our interview with Fujimoto here.
Our other stories that feature blow-up design include the entrance to last year’s Design Miami fair that was covered by inflatable sausages and a balloon shaped like a naked fat man pressed up against a gallery window.
See more inflatable architecture and design »
See more pavilion design »
Photography is by Sergio Grazia.
The architects sent us the following information:
Enhancing the experience of the city does not always require projects of significant cost and time, but can often come about as the result of modest, temporary interventions and events, in key places, at chosen times.
Our office is dedicated to the conception of interventions likely to appeal to city residents, transforming the way in which they view the places around them and the practices possible in their cities.
Human beings carry within them nostalgia of a primordial happiness from ancient times. The notion of a return to these origins of happiness is often associated with Nature.
Our intention is to encourage inhabitants to participate in fun, uncommon events taking place within the urban landscape: an inflatable bridge equipped with giant trampolines rises above the Seine, a pavilion erected in a London park, a museum traversed by a roller coaster.
These projects offer, in the heart of the city, new forms of Elysian Fields, given over not to the Champs-Élysées of shopping and strictly urban activities, but rather to fundamental human practices, which liberate strong emotions calling on all our senses.
The site of this competition is the Museum Gardens, Cambridge Heath Road in Bethnal Green, London. It lies within the Tower Hamlets and Hackney boroughs. The gardens are on the English Heritage Register for Historic Parks and Gardens. It is approximately 1.05 hectares in size and is surrounded by: Cambridge Heath Road, Museum Passage, V&A Museum of Childhood, St John’s Church and Victoria Park Square. The site’s main use is as a recreational garden for living, working and visiting communities. Given it’s prominence within the community it serves, it is clear to us that it is important that the most is made of the site through our pavilion.
Our project responds to the desire to create a temporary transportable pavilion for the summer of 2013 in such a public space, with a need for inclusion, socializing, relaxation, discussion, reflection, escape, view and enjoyment of a high quality space.
It will provide an inspirational space where visiting architects, designers, families and the general public can stand and sit whilst admiring, embracing diversity and engaging with each other in discussions about design, the importance and benefits of peace and co-existence, or even novel stories they have to tell in a peaceful setting.
The Museum Gardens, and nature in general are the perfect settings to promote the idea of peace, to encourage the sharing of joyful stories and provoking discussions about architecture and design.
We propose a Pavilion which is visually and aesthetically engaging. We think it is capable of providing an ideal contemporary space which offers a sense of tranquility, beauty and an exceptional aesthetic value to the very heart of the Museum Gardens.
Peace is one of the highest possible human ideals. It is a state of equilibrium; it means NO WAR, but also harmony, silence, pureness, kindness, happiness, appeasement, calm, reconciliation, serendipity, tranquility…
To express all of these ideas, we have created a perfect and symmetrical sculpture, obtained by a precise geometrical manipulation. The beauty of the shape lies in its perfect symmetry and fluidity; we feel there is no need to explain it a great deal as it is a pavilion that speaks to everyone. It allows visitors looking at the volume for a split second to get a sense of the pavilion and its layout with minimum effort.
The symmetrical geometry of the pavilion blurs our notions of inside and outside, however the simple act of motion through the exterior and interior spaces of the pavilion bringing an understanding to the visitor.
The Pavilion is 4 meters in height and 20 square metres in area. Designed entirely with lightweight materials – 77.96m² of PVC membrane and 20m3 of air – our project is a self-supporting structure; it is easily scalable to inhabit larger dimensions of other sites.
The post Peace Pavilion by
Atelier Zündel Cristea appeared first on Dezeen.
French designers Mathieu Bassée and Christophe Dubois designed display stands with inflatable shapes floating above them for an exhibition at Paris art centre Le Laboratoir earlier this month. (more…)
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