Hasta La Ideas

Milan 2014: a series of talks will launch this afternoon in Nike’s Aero-static dome at Palazzo Clerici, forming part of the FOMO algorithmic publishing project organised by Joseph Grima with Dezeen.

Three afternoons of talks called On The Fly will kick off today with Clemens Weisshaar, Atelier Bow Wow, Folder, Linda Fregni and Bart Hess discussing the theme of weightlessness in design.

The talks will take place at Palazzo Clerici inside a dome created by Arthur Huang, founder of MINIWIZ, which uses Nike’s Flyknit technology to create a temporary events space.

They are free to attend and each afternoon the speakers will tackle a different theme related to design practice, presenting a minimum of two images to accompany their talk.

During the talks a real-time publishing algorithm – developed by Joseph Grima’s design research group Space Caviar and called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) – will automatically create written articles from live speech and social media streams using the #OnTheFlyMilan hashtag.

These will be collated in a PDF that will then be printed and saddle-stitched on the spot from the FOMObile – a roving publishing press with its own built-in power generator and solar-powered wi-fi hotspot. The resulting publication will be distributed for free in Milan and made available on the Dezeen website.

The On The Fly talks will be FOMO’s first test in a real-world environment. Anyone, anywhere will be able to take part by using the #OnTheFlyMilan hashtag on social media on Wednesday 9, Thursday 10, and Friday 11 April between 5.00 and 7.30pm CET.

Today’s event will be moderated by Joseph Grima, founder of Space Caviar and the former editor of Domus.

Talks on Thursday will be hosted by Gianluigi Ricuperati and will include Ianthe Roach, Pier Nucleo and Italo Rota, who will all discuss the theme “seamlessness”. On Friday, Marco Velardi will host Formafantasma, Martino Gamper and Anna Meroni talking about sustainability in design.

Scroll down for the full schedule for On The Fly:

9 April, Weightlessness with Joseph Grima

17:00 Clemens Weisshaar
17:30 Yoshi Tsukamoto, Atelier Bow Wow
18:00 Folder: Marco and Elisa
18:30 Linda Fregni
19:00 Bart Hess

Weightlessness will explore how external masses and strains, or lack thereof, shape the thinking and production of design. How does the experience of our environments impact on the design process? What does this mean for the final product? With a shifting landscape of outside forces, what does this mean for practice? What would freedom, or weightlessness, from this mean for our work and for us?

10 April, Seamlessness with Gianluigi Ricuperati

17:00 Olimpia Zagnoli
17:30 Italo Rota
18:00 Pier Nucleo
18:30 Marco Raino
19:00 Ianthe Roach

Seamlessness will ask whether consistency is good for design. Is a process, or product, designed without interruption a good thing? Is a perfectly consistent object or idea something positive? What can the messy convergence or merging of technologies, processes or people add to a project? How do these transitions and interfaces of design change or challenge us for the better?

11 April, Sustainability with Marco Velardi

17:00 Formafantasma
17:30 Brent Dzekciorius
18:00 Anna Meroni
18:30 Martino Gamper
19:00 Arthur Huang

Sustainability will take the practice of contemporary practitioners and explore the social, political, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainability. What is the impact of designing sustainably? How do we sustain interdependence between process, products and disciplines? These conversations will attempt to understand the life cycle of design, and the flows of work systems.

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speakers announced for Milan FOMO talks appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2014: brushed steel frames surround monochrome shirts at this installation that Japanese studio Nendo has created for fashion brand COS, unveiled in Milan today (+ movie).

The COS x Nendo installation comprises a series of white shirts, which are displayed on stands and hung from the ceiling at different heights throughout the space.

Geometric brushed-steel frames in a variety of heights and widths surround the clothes, and the parts of the shirts that sit inside them are dyed with different shades of grey.

“I feel that Nendo and Cos have a lot in common with how we see things, simplicity, purity and focusing on the small details,” said Nendo founder Oki Sato. “When you look at a white shirt from COS it explains so much, so I decided to let the shirt do the talking.”

At the front of the space are five metal frames that incrementally increase in size. These surround a series of shirts, which gradually change colour from white to dark grey according to the scale of the surrounding stand.

“The white shirt is the cornerstone of our design philosophy; we love to reinvent them every season and so we were really excited that Nendo picked the shirt as a centrepiece for the installation, as it is such an important part of our collection,” said Martin Andersson, head of menswear design at COS.

The installation is on show from 8 to 13 April at Via delle Erbe 2, in the Brera district of Milan, above Nendo’s solo exhibition that features the studio’s furniture patterned with brush strokes and chairs with wood grain patterns printed onto natural timber. Visitors are invited to browse and purchase pieces by COS and Nendo at the exhibition.

Photography is by Daici Ano.

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for COS installation in Milan appeared first on Dezeen.

Illuminated glass droplets full of bubbles appear to fall from the ceiling in this installation by Japanese studio Torafu Architects (+ slideshow).

The Water Balloon installation at the Konica Minolta Plaza Gallery in Tokyo was created by Torafu Architects for the Eco & Art Award 2014 exhibition.

The designers worked with a glass artist to form a series hand-blown bulbs from recycled material.

Each fluorescent lamp is a different shape and patterned with bubbles created during the blowing process.

“The bubbles inside each unique shape help produce a distinctive ethereal light,” said the designers.

Suspended from wires at various heights around the small room, the 36 “water balloons” pulsate with light in the dark space.

“We strived to create a space where [visitors] can catch a glimmer of a new natural environment,” the designers added.

Photography is by Masaki Ogawa.

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of light for Tokyo installation appeared first on Dezeen.

Berlin studio J. Mayer H. has returned to Volkswagen’s Autostadt visitor centre, at the German car brand’s factory in Wolfsburg, to create a landscape of three-dimensional structures for children to interact with (+ slideshow).

J. Mayer H. was first commissioned by Volkswagen to build an exhibition space focussing on sustainability. Four years after completing it, the architects returned to create a space targeted specifically at children in the Autostadt‘s reception.

Named MobiVersum, the installation was conceived as a “playful learning landscape” of solid wood sculptures that present challenges to different motor skills. Children of all ages can clamber over or climb inside each of the shapes.

“Depending on their individual level of development, children can interact freely with the installation on various levels on their own or with their siblings or parents,” said the architects in a statement.

The designers liken the curving branch-like forms to tree roots and trunks, intended to create a dialogue with the leafy green tones of the Level Green exhibition on the floor above.

“The shape of the imaginative, playful structures of solid wood are reminiscent of roots and tree trunks under the luscious branches of Level Green,” they said.

The team worked with Osnabrück University professor Renate Zimmer to curate the exhibition, making sure it provides children with a broad introduction to all facets of sustainability.

Photography is by Uwe Walter.

Here’s the project description from the architects:

MobiVersum

In 2013, J. Mayer H. designed MobiVersum as a new interaction surface for young visitors to Autostadt Wolfsburg, integrated as part of the overall context of Autostadt “People, Cars, and What Moves Them”.

A playful learning landscape was developed for a wide range of experiences in dialog with the exhibition Level Green shown on the floor above. MobiVersum provides an active introduction to the subject of sustainability in all its facets for children of all ages: from the issue of mobility, joint learning and understanding, to courses in cooking. In collaboration with Renate Zimmer (professor, Institut für Sport- und Bewegungswissenschaft at Universiät Osnabrück) a large movement sculpture was created that is unique in terms of its design and the challenges it presents to children’s motor skills. Depending on their individual level of development, children can interact freely with the installation on various levels on their own or with their siblings or parents, engaging with the challenges presented by the sculpture for their motor skills.

The shape of the imaginative, playful structures of solid wood are reminiscent of roots and tree trunks under the luscious branches of Level Green. The sculptures, which can be used and entered, structure diversified spatial zones with different thematic emphases and inspire the children’s curiosity to discover and explore. Children as tomorrow’s consumers can thus learn early on the importance of a responsible approach to the world’s resources, for they represent our ecological/economical and social future.

Against the backdrop of the growing relevance of individual responsibility for sustainably approach to global resources, an exhibition on sustainability was already installed at Autostadt Wolfsburg in 2007. The exhibition and experiential surface Level Green, also designed by J. Mayer H., explains the focus on sustainability interactively to the visitors of the Autostadt. Art + Com, Berlin designed and implemented the content of the interactive media used especially for this purpose.

The metaphor of the expansive network with many branches was developed from the familiar PET symbol, one of the first prominent symbols of an increased awareness in environmental protection. By translating the two dimensional graphic to a three-dimensional structure and altering it step by step, the result was a complex structure that makes the essentially abstract quality of the subject graspable on a spatial level.

Together, MobiVersum and Level Green form a synthesis for all generations to explore knowledge in depth, to enjoy their own experiences, and to learn playfully.

Client: Autostadt GmbH, Wolfsburg
Site: Volkswagen GroupForum, Ground Floor, Autostadt, Wolfsburg
Total floor area: approx. 1600 sqm
Architect: J. MAYER H. Architects, Berlin
Project team: Juergen Mayer H., Christoph Emenlauer, Marta Ramírez Iglesias, Simon Kassner, Jesko Malcolm Johnsson-Zahn, Alexandra Virlan, Gal Gaon

Architect on site: Jablonka Sieber Architekten, Berlin
Structural engineering steel construction: SFB Saradschow Fischedick, Berlin
Structural engineering wood construction: SJB.Kempter.Fitze AG, CH-Eschenbach
Building services: Brandi IGH, Salzgitter
Light engineers: Lichttransfer, Berlin
General contractor: Lindner Objektdesign GmbH
Contractor wood construction: Hess Timber

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huge shapes for children to clamber over appeared first on Dezeen.

Models were suspended in vacuums between plastic sheeting during Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen‘s Autumn Winter 2014 show at Paris Fashion Week.

Iris van Herpen and Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf created the installation in which models were held in midair between sheets of plastic.

“Models float in the air, embryonic, seemingly weightless and in a meditative suspended animation,” said Van Herpen.

Tubes extracted most of the air from the sheets to suck them tightly around the models, who posed in foetal or crouched positions wearing shimmering dresses.

The plastic sheets were hung in a line along the centre of the catwalk used to present Van Herpen’s ready to wear collection, titled Biopiracy.

The collection included 3D-printed garments created in collaboration with Austrian architect Julia Koerner, who previously helped design a dress for Van Herpen’s Voltage collection presented last year.

Van Herpen also worked with Dutch shoe brand United Nude to design crescent-shaped boots that were worn with the garments. Her show took place on Tuesday as part of Paris Fashion Week.

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Herpen’s Paris Fashion Week show appeared first on Dezeen.