The talented Alex da Corte (who was born in New Jersey and lived Caracas, Venezuela for some of his childhood) says that his stunning new show “Delirium I” is an adaptation of “A Season in Hell”—a poem…
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Milan 2014: dripping water from ice-encased tropical plants and quietly rotating feather-patterned fans featured in this climate-themed exhibition by Italian research centre Fabrica (+ slideshow).
Industrial, graphic and interactive designers at Fabrica created a series of sensory installations that aimed “to give a visual and experiential form to temperature” for air conditioning brand Daikin, in Milan last week.
Thirty-six exhibits were installed within a laboratory-like setting entitled Hot & Cold.
Following research into the effects of temperature, the designers curated a series of kinetic, material and sound-based works led by the project’s creative director Sam Baron.
“In this project we conceived design as a practice that must communicate through form and function, a design that sets out from an object, and reaches towards sound, graphics and interactivity,” said Baron.
Works on display included Migration, which comprised five motorised exhibits with hand-illustrated feathers. These represented the migration patterns of birds, characterised by height, distance and flock sizes during flight, said the project team.
“We loved the idea of birds migrating from one climate to another, as an expression of cold to hot and vice versa,” design team member Dean Brown told Dezeen.
The Solar exhibit used NASA’s interpretations of what planets sound like. In the centre of the exhibition, the team hung a mechanical model of Venus and Neptune, the hottest and coldest planets, orbiting the sun.
A sculpture called Air was made from suspended borosilicate glass letters, a material which is typically used in laboratories and resists extremely high temperatures.
“We discovered that you can burn the glass on the inside,” said Brown. “These oil lanterns are slowing charring the inside of the glass and by the end of the exhibition, the letters will become totally black.”
A series of tropical plants entitled Flora were encased in ice, which gradually melted away and collected in a glass vessel to reveal the plant.
Smaller objects were displayed on white metal stands with perforated tops, while larger exhibits were protected by low metal barriers designed to evoke a museum environment. “We took these references like these fences and plinths and framing objects the way you might do in a natural history museum,” said Brown.
The exhibition took place at the Garage Milano show during the city’s design week, which concluded on Sunday.
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for sensory installation in Milan appeared first on Dezeen.
Milan 2014: Space Caviar’s algorithmic publishing project will be travelling to Venice for the architecture biennale, with the final issues from Milan design week now available to download – including contributions from Formafantasma and Martino Gamper (+ slideshow + download).
Joseph Grima‘s design research collaborative Space Caviar created a new realtime publishing algorithm, called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), which combines text produced using voice recognition technology with text and images posted on social platforms like Instagram and Twitter.
The software debuted in Milan last week with a series of talks called On the Fly providing the core content for the resulting publications, which were printed instantly from a travelling publishing unit known as the FOMObile and based on an Open Structures modular system designed by Thomas Lommee.
Participants in the talks, which took place in Nike‘s Aero-static dome at Palazzo Clerici, included Martino Gamper, Clemens Weisshaar, Atelier Bow Wow, Bart Hess and Formafantasma. Members of the public from all over the world were also invited to take part by using the #OnTheFlyMilan hashtag on social media networks.
“The idea behind FOMO is to explore the potential of event metadata as source material for a performative publishing process, but the print component is important – the whole thing made a lot more sense when we bound it all together into a single volume at the end on the FOMO sewing machine,” said Grima.
The FOMObile will be in residence in Venice in early September and may also make an appearance during the opening weekend in early June.
“From a Dadaist perspective I think the Milan experiment went very well – almost everything about it was unexpected, such as how moments of intensity and moments of inactivity are revealed in the blanks and overlaps,” said Grima.
“What we’d like to do next is explore the other end of the spectrum, perhaps creating something that is indistinguishable from a conventional publication, for example working with the social media and physical interactions between people on a weekday in one of the piazzas of Genoa,” he said.
The project was inspired by a comment from futurist and writer Bruce Sterling, who said that “events were the new magazines”. Sterling was among the visitors to the project during Milan design week.
Download issues nine to 12 of FOMO from Milan:
» Formafantasma – download here
» Brent Dzekciorius – download here
» Anna Meroni – download here
» Martino Gamper and Arthur Huang – download here
Download issues four to eight of FOMO here.
Download issues one to three of FOMO here.
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prepares to visit Venice appeared first on Dezeen.
Milan 2014: British designer Max Lamb developed a multicoloured engineered marble for Dzek, which was used to build furniture that appears to merge with walls of the same material for an installation in Milan.
Max Lamb was approached by London design brand Dzek to re-examine the production of man-made stone surfaces and came up with a material called Marmoreal that combines coloured marble with a polyester binder to create a durable stone for architectural applications.
“We invited Max to examine agglomerate stones such as terrazzo and question how he would design and use one consistent with his practice known for its quixotic craftsmanship, disciplined logic, and a measured exuberance deeply rooted in materiality,” said Dzek founder Brent Dzekciorius.
Rather than the small chips of stone embedded in typical terrazzo, Lamb chose to celebrate the natural surface detail of marble by including large chunks in the mix for his manmade material.
Marmoreal means “real marble” in Italian and is used to describe materials or objects that resemble marble. The four types of marble used in Lamb’s stone come from the quarries around Verona in northern Italy, which are famous for processing marble.
Green Verde Alpi, ochre-yellow Giallo Mori, and red Rosso Verona variants were selected to contrast with a background of white Bianco Verona marble.
Combining these stones with a small amount of polyester resin results in a multicoloured material that is stronger and less porous than natural marble.
“Composed of four historically significant Veronese marbles, Marmoreal is a material exploration that celebrates the individual qualities of these stones while acknowledging that the sum of its parts makes for something far more compelling,” explained Dzekciorius.
The material can be used to produce tiles or components for furniture, like the six pieces developed by Lamb to showcase the product’s capabilities.
These include a chair, bookcase, low coffee table, side table, shelf and a dining table or desk, all produced from simple geometric blocks of the engineered marble.
At its installation during last week’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Dzek presented the furniture in a space lined with tiles of Marmoreal that made it hard to distinguish the furniture from the walls.
Dzek focuses on collaborating with architects, designers and artists to develop architectural materials that can be used as the basis for product collections. The Marmoreal project is the first to be completed by the company.
Photography is by Delfino Sisto Legnani.
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camouflaged furniture installation appeared first on Dezeen.
Working with skilled local craftspeople is both a duty and an opportunity for Indian designers, says Prateek Jain of lighting design company Klove, in the third and final movie from BE OPEN’s Made In… India Samskara exhibition in New Delhi.
“It’s the biggest job of a designer to make sure that they work with handicrafts people,” says Prateek Jain, co-founder of Klove. “Whether it’s a fashion designer who works with an embroiderer or whether it’s us working with wood carvers or stone cutters.”
Both sides benefit when designers work with traditional craft producers, says Jain, and can help bring craftsmen’s work to new markets. “It’s very important to apply a more contemporary design aesthetic to these handicraft [skills]” he says.
Jain’s chosen medium is glass, thanks to an encounter he had with craftsmen in Ambala, a town in northern India. When he saw local glass-blowers creating intricate glassware for laboratories, he knew he had spotted an opportunity.
“We saw that they were doing these beautiful, flawless bowls of silica glass,” he says. “The blowers had been making beakers, flasks and test tubes for generations. We realised that [we could use] this skill set to explore home decor.”
Together with his partner Gautam Seth he took these techniques used for creating lab-ware into unexpected contexts: creating luxury lighting installations for an international client base.
Klove now creates large, ornate custom-made lighting installations working in a palette of blown glass, brass, steel and copper.
Klove was participating in the Made In… India Samskara exhibition. Curated by Fashion Design Council of India president Sunil Sethi and creative think tank BE OPEN, the show celebrates collaborations between contemporary Indian designers and skilled Indian craftsmen.
For the show Klove used blown glass and beaten metal to create a large lighting installation in the shape of a peacock, India’s national bird.
“We knew that [the curators] wanted to represent India in a modern way. Instantly the idea of a peacock came into our head because it’s the national bird,” says Jain. “We wanted to represent the peacock in a contemporary manner but at the same time have a strong Indian aesthetic to it”.
The feathers that make up the peacock’s fanned tail are represented by 48 slender glass stems, similar in form to elongated laboratory flasks.
“The great part about being in this country is that you have great access to a great resource of talent. You have craftsmen who have been doing this work for many centuries” says Jain.
Samskara, which ran from 10 to 28 February at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, launched BE OPEN’s Made In… programme, a two-year-long project focussing on the future of craft in design.
The music featured in the movie is a track called Bonjour by Kartick & Gotam on Indian record label EarthSync.
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skills alive, says designer Prateek Jain appeared first on Dezeen.
Milan 2014: Nao Tamura drew on experiences from the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami to create an installation of suspended mobiles, intended to evoke a sense of fragility and harmony with nature.
Japanese designer Nao Tamura told Dezeen that her sculptural work was influenced by the earthquake that struck Japan in 2011.
“We lost a lot of people and I thought life is so fragile, people are so fragile,” said Tamura. “But also because of the tragedy, we learned to accept the nature and live in harmony with it.”
“I wanted to make something very fragile and very delicate, but everything is keeping the balance,” Tamura explained. “It creates this kind of sculptural piece and it’s about light, the piece, the shadow, the air and yourself. When you interact with the piece it creates this motion and the whole thing changes.”
Unique discs of acrylic resin with a coloured coating were fixed to a framework of thin rods representing the interconnected systems existing in nature.
Thin wires attached to the rods and held in tension by transparent plastic discs gave the piece structure and enabled the carefully balanced branches to pivot.
The movement of people in the space caused the delicate structures to move gently, causing a corresponding movement in the overlapping shadows cast on the ground.
“Through this piece, I wanted people to think about what we have now; the air, the sun and the nature and keeping good harmony with the nature and to realise that no matter how small your action is, you will have an effect that is larger than yourself,” Tamura added.
Tamura developed the concept for the Interconnection installation in response to a brief from Lexus that asked designers to explore the theme Amazing in Motion.
Tamura’s multidisciplinary studio has previously worked with designers and brands including Artek, Issey Miyake, Nike and Wonderglass on projects that frequently incorporate motifs and influences from nature.
Interconnection was presented by Lexus during Milan’s design week alongside works developed around the same theme by Italian designer Fabio Novembre and MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group.
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Interconnection by Nao Tamura appeared first on Dezeen.
Over the last few years Mies van der Rohe‘s Barcelona Pavilion has been loaded with junk, and had its pools filled with coffee and milk. Now photographer Jordi Bernadó has taken the doors out and mounted them onto the facade.
Spanish photographer Jordi Bernadó is the latest in a series of artists to be invited to make his mark on the iconic structure, which was first completed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1929, dismantled in 1930, then reconstructed in the 1980s.
Responding to Mies’ original desire for the pavilion to be photographed before its doors were installed, Bernadó’s temporary intervention, named Second Reconstruction, involved removing the two glazed entrances and positioning them in front of one of the building’s travertine walls.
In this way, Bernadó says he has “restored the image” of the building. “The pavilion once again becomes, temporarily, what Mies imagined,” said the photographer.
“The doors ask the question. The building without doors is the answer,” he added.
The Barcelona Pavilion was reconstructed in the 1980s, using only black and white photographs as reference. Since then a number of architects, designers and artists have been invited to create a site-specific installation inside.
Last year Spanish architect Andrés Jaque filled the structure with items found in the basement, while Japanese duo SANAA installed a spiral of acrylic screens in 2009 and in 2008 Chinese artist Ai Weiwei replaced the water of the pools with milk and coffee.
Here’s a description of this year’s project from Jordi Bernadó:
The Pavilion. Second Reconstruction. An artistic project by Jordi Bernadó
Mies referred to the Pavilion as a “pavilion of representation”. An ephemeral building whose maximum value was to represent an idea.
The aspect of the pavilion that has endured is therefore an evocation, not an object. A conceptual, not a material, act. A generator of thought, not a generator of physical space.
Consequently, what remains of the Pavilion is the idea and its images. And Mies ordered the Pavilion to be photographed without doors. In Mies’s thought and view, the Pavilion had no doors.
In fact, the Pavilion existed in all its plenitude only when the doors were removed. The moment of the gaze is the only real moment.
The photographer proposes, through a minimal gesture, to restore the image of the pavilion by removing the doors. The pavilion without doors at last. At its side, doors without a building. The pavilion reconstructed at last. And the doors out of their setting, by themselves generating the question posed by the intervention. The doors ask the question. The building without doors is the answer.
Photographing is not only fabrication of images (and therefore objectual). It is above all a gaze (and therefore intellectual). The photographer gazes. And gazes, presumably and ironically, as Mies did. And curiously enough, it is thanks only to the gaze that the pavilion once again becomes, temporarily, what Mies imagined. In this way, the time factor is transformed also into a fundamental aspect of the project.
Concept, immortality, time, estrangement. Ideas with which Mies worked and which constitute the essence of the Pavilion. And which the project reclaims also. As Ms Hock said, ‘gazing is inventing’.
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Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion appeared first on Dezeen.
Milan 2014: trees appear to float within this forest-like installation by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, at Cassina‘s stand at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan this week (+ slideshow).
Sou Fujimoto‘s Floating Forest suspends trees contained in mirrored cubes throughout Cassina‘s space at the furniture fair, exploring the architect’s interest in the contrast of nature and architecture within the Italian brand’s Milan exhibition space.
“I feel that Italian design is very powerful because of their history and because of their visions for the future,” Fujimoto told Dezeen. “They have both, not only traditions, and can still maintain the identity and quality of Italian design.”
Each hanging container is suspended from metal wires and covered with mirrors on the outside to reflect the trees and give the appearance of effortlessly hovering throughout the exhibition.
The furniture is arranged as individual rooms on a gridded floor plan.
“Some of the trees are floating at different heights to create articulations from space to space,” Fujimoto explained. “The installation creates the excitement of walking around as the scene is gradually opening up to you.”
The installation comprises a mixture of hanging trees as well as freestanding trees, arranged purposely to allow maximum floor space for visitors to pass through the showroom. “The trees are similar to the typical Japanese tree Momiji, as the shape is beautiful and the leaves are very delicate,” said the architect.
The piece will be installed at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Hall 20 Stand D1/E6, until Sunday.
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Cassina’s Milan display space appeared first on Dezeen.
Sougwen Chung has always had an affinity for computers and digital technology. The artist had her first website at the age of ten—”an oddly personal site,” she recalls….
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Milan 2014: Danish brand Hay is hosting an exhibition of products in the style of a pop-up mini market in Milan this week (+ slideshow).
The exhibition includes products from the company’s Wrong for Hay collaboration with British designer Sebastian Wrong. The hundreds of Hay products on show range from furniture to textiles, glassware, stationary and lighting.
The mini market allows visitors to browse and purchase from the two aisles of wall-to-wall accessories.
Products from Sebastian Wrong include his Slope Chair, which has a moulded polyurethane foam seat and a solid ash or oak legs. The seat comes in black, grey or green and the legs come in natural ash, black stained ash or oiled oak.
“The Hay Mini Market was created as part of our Milan exhibition so that visitors would have access to Hay and Wrong for Hay’s collection of small accessories,” Wrong told Dezeen.
“It’s been enormously successful, partly because, as is Hay’s ethos, everything is reasonably priced so everybody can buy a nice product to carry away with them.”
Other products include printed and embroidered cushions by Nathalie Du Pasquier, patterned Smiley Quilts by fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm and Lup Wall candles by Shane Schneck.
The exhibition is on show in the Via Ciovassino 3A for the Salone del Mobile in Milan from 8 – 13 April.
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