Hasta La Ideas

Interieur 2012: American architect and designer Greg Lynn has created a prototype for a motorised compact-living cocoon that rotates to provide space for relaxing, sleeping and bathing (+ movie).

Lynn presented a 1:5 carbon fibre scale model of the concept, which is inspired by a space station and is called RV Prototype (RV = Room Vehicle), at the Interieur 2012 design biennale in Kortrijk, Belgium, last week.

“The 1:5 scale model in Kortrijk is always moving, but the idea is that three basic surfaces would be the orientations and everything in between would be momentary,” Lynn told Dezeen. “For example, zero degrees is living, 90 degrees is kitchen and bath and 180 degrees is sleeping and relaxing.”

Lynn was partly inspired by the sedate and lazy lifestyle offered by luxury recliner chairs, where entertainment and refreshment is always within arm’s reach, but he also wanted to create a stimulating and active environment for the user.

Above: photograph is by Wouter Van Vaerenbergh

The user of the RV Prototype would need to clamber around inside the cocoon in order to access all its functions as it rotates into different positions.

Above: photograph is by Wouter Van Vaerenbergh

A scaled-up version of the prototype would utilise its entire interior surface to provide 60 square metres of floor space, much like in a space station.

The prototype was presented as part of the Future Primitives programme at the Interieur design biennale – see all our stories about Interieur. London design studio Troika also contributed to Future Primitives with an installation that used fresnel lenses to refract beams of light into illusory arches.

Above: animation is by Greg Lynn Studio

Other projects involving Lynn we’ve featured on Dezeen include his Golden Lion-winning furniture made from recycled children’s toys and a project by some of his students to design a conceptual boat factory.

See all stories from Interieur 2012 »

Photographs are by Dezeen except where stated. Images and sketches are by Greg Lynn.

Here’s some more information from the designer:

RV (Room Vehicle) Prototype
Where the surface meets the machine

Because of contemporary digital communication, entertainment and the intelligent control of machines, the world expects more from the physical environment today. Mobility and high performance must be calibrated with reduction in footprint and efficiency. The bespoke comfort of a one-of-a-kind specified automobile is merging with the living room couch and television where everyplace aspires to be a first class flat bed seat with colour temperature and intensity controlled lighting, internet access and entertainment on-demand.

In order to move, robotic motion from industry is brought to motion types germane to reclining furniture. However, in the case of the mechanical or robotic reclining lounge chair, by placing all of the leisure functions at arms’ reach from a stationary seat the activities of living and the occupant’s musculature tend to contract to a stationary point. Despite the action and dynamism of the minivan lifestyle replete with sport, design and professionalism, most equate the recliner with sedentary consumption.

The RV Prototype brings intelligent movement and compact comfort to the living space as an alternative to over-inflated ‘McMansions’ by reducing footprint and material while also bringing the enthusiasm and activity of theme park, a hamster ball, an exercise machine, a natural landscape or sporting equipment to the human living sphere.

The living space does not move around you to make you comfortable, but instead you are rolled and must climb, tumble, traverse and spelunk across the ergonomic surface like a mountain goat, a Pilates disciple, a Parkour Tracuer or wannabe Spiderman. Instead of a baronial interior of luxury materials, in order to be movable, the materials and construction methods of the RV Prototype replace masonry and steel with lightweight, high strength cloth bonded to either a wood or cork core. To be affordable and responsible the 60m2 living space is distributed across the surface of the interior rather than just across the floor; thereby reducing the literal and energy footprint.

Intelligent Environments
Because of contemporary digital communication, entertainment and the intelligent control of machines, the world expects more from the physical environment today. Adaptation, intelligence, personalisation, bespoke manufacture, home delivery via fulfillment centers, targeted marketing, on-demand entertainment, personalised fast food ordered from secret menus, are the modes of desire and fulfillment that move us through the world. Myriad forms of intelligence have penetrated screens, print, transportation, appliances and even furniture as we are immersed in an environment that knows who we are, what we want and can therefore respond to our needs and desires at their formation.

Comfort with Motion
In the 1940s two typologies emerged promising comfort, freedom and dynamic motion: the recreation vehicle and the Barcalounger or La-Z-Boy mechanical recliner. Today’s recliners include PowerLiftTM, PowerReclineTM and PowerShiatsuTM, offering massages, heating and cooling, home entertainment control integration, food and beverage coolers, as well as recline, glide, rotate, lift and rocking motion. The motion of hospital beds is now available for the home in the Craftmatic. The RV Prototype brings the intelligence, comfort and freedom of motion of these furniture typologies to the entire living environment.

Reduced Footprint
By living on the walls, floor and ceiling, the volume and material of the living environment is reduced and used in a more high performance manner. Through rotation, the 60m2 living environment is thought as a wrap-around surface rather than as a platform. Like in a NASA capsule or a space station the ergonomic surfaces are not limited to the floor. The ability to rotate the living environment in response to the weather, daylight and temperature also optimizes environmental quality.

The post RV Prototype (RV = Room Vehicle)
by Greg Lynn appeared first on Dezeen.

Visitors to this installation in northern Denmark by German artist Thilo Frank are invited to walk through a contorted loop of timber while listening to the sounds of their voices and footsteps played back to them (+ slideshow).

A circle of concrete paving creates a continuous walkway, while 200 wooden frames with incrementally different dimensions provide the twisted structure surrounding it.

Microphones are hidden within the wooden beams and record the sounds made by everyone that steps inside.

These sounds are continuously remixed by a computer and played back through tiny speakers to create a distorted echo.

“The work acts as an archive of sounds and at the same time the visitors’ perception of space and presence is amplified,” explained Frank.

Light enters the structure though the gaps between frames, creating stripes of light and shade on the interior surfaces.

“Depending on the daylight the shadow play creates alternating patterns,” said the artist. “From further distance the sculpture flickers in a moiré effect.”

Similar structures we’ve featured include a latticed timber hut on stilts and a wooden pavilion with a hollow belly.

See more installations on Dezeen »

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Thilo Frank appeared first on Dezeen.

The Spaceship Heart installation, centered at Madrid’s Semana de la Arquietectura, consists of a whopping 400 modular cardboard building blocks, each with eight faces that represent a program in hypothetically mixed-use structure. Aside from looking like a rocket ready for blastoff, the structure also reminds of the symbolic heart shape, and serves simply as a place for viewers to gather and build a sense of community through conversation. Jump to check out the making of the modules!

Designer: Collective Paper Aesthetics

–
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(Heart Art was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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1. I HEART this DESIGN
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Visitors to the Adhocracy show at the Istanbul Design Biennial are confronted with a plotter taking the text of the Open Source Architecture Manifesto from a Wikipedia page and writing it onto a wall. (+ slideshow)

Created by Walter Nicolino and Carlo Ratti of Carlo Ratti Associati, the plotter updates the text as the Wikipedia page changes.

The project began last year when Joseph Grima, editor of Domus magazine and curator of the Adhocracy show, asked Ratti to write a manifesto for open-source architecture.

“I said yeah sure, but let’s do it in an open-source way,” Ratti told Dezeen. “So we set up a page on Wikipedia.”

Ratti, who is director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, invited contributors including Nicholas Negroponte, John Habraken, Paola Antonelli and Hans Ulrich Obrist to contribute to the page to create an evolving document that was published in Domus in June 2011.

“It’s funny because the editors of Wikipedia kept erasing it until it was published in Domus, and then it became kind of ‘legal’,” says Ratti. “So now it is a page on Wikipedia and people keep on adding to it, changing it and so on. It keeps on evolving.”

In Istanbul the suspended plotter writes the manifesto on a large whiteboard mounted on the wall on the staircase at the Adhocracy exhibition, crossing out and overwriting passages as they are edited on Wikipedia and starting afresh as soon as the text is completed.

The plotter is based on similar principles to Hektor, a wall-mounted plotter that paints with a spray can. “There was a prototype of a similar plotter called Hektor – there’s a couple of them online  that were doing things on a piece of paper,” says Ratti. “But here the idea was to do it on an architectural scale, on a big wall.”

See our interview with Joseph Grima about the Adhocracy exhibition and read more about open design on Dezeen.

Here’s some text from Carlo Ratti Associati:

Open Source Architecture Manifesto

2012 / Istanbul TURKEY

When Domus approached Carlo Ratti to write an op-ed on the theme of opensource architecture he responded with an unusual suggestion: why not write it collaboratively, as an open-source document? Within a few hours a page was started on Wikipedia, and an invitation sent to an initial network of contributors. The outcome of this collaborative effort is presented in an article published in Domus in June 2011. The article is a capture of the text as of 11 May 2011, but the Wikipedia page remains online as an open canvas — a 21st century “manifesto” of sorts, which by definition is in permanent evolution.

A year after the article’s publication, in the summer of 2012, the idea of recapturing the text in its current state of mutation was born. However, it was not to be envisaged as a new publication, but rather a piece of the exhibition, Adhocracy, curated by Joseph Grima for the first Istanbul Design Biennal. The studio carlorattiassociati envisioned a canvas on which a free flowing pen writes, erases and constantly rewrites the different versions of the Wikipedia page, indicating corrections, deletions and development of the manifesto in its continuous state of change.

A vertical plotter on a large whiteboard welcomes visitors to the exhibition; its contents are generated in real-time from a script that constantly compares the various versions of the Wikipedia page. Starting each time from one of the numerous updates written online, the pen retraces its steps to incorporate all the users’ contributions. Once it reaches the end, it begins once again, relentlessly in pursuit of the latest version of our open source manifesto, OsArc.

For more information, and to read the article published in Domus (June 2011) visit: senseable.mit.edu/osarc

For details of the exhibition Adhocracy, part of the Istanbul Design Biennal running until December 2012 visit: istanbuldesignbiennial.iksv.org/adhocracy

Team: Carlo Ratti, Walter Nicolino, Pietro Leoni (project leader), Antonio Atripaldi, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Enrico Gueli, Franco Magni

Special thanks to Officine Arduino / FabLab Torino

The post Open Source Architecture Manifesto
by Carlo Ratti Associati appeared first on Dezeen.

Beijing Design Week: designer Arthur Huang used Nike shoe material to create a colourful web in a rusting gas tower during Beijing Design Week (+ slideshow).

Designed for running shoes, the Flyknit fabric is made from precisely engineered yarns and Nike have commissioned a series of designers around the world to showcase the material in an installation for the Nike Flyknit Collective.

This installation, named The Feather, was created by stretching thin strings of the lightweight fabric from various points around the tower in a pattern that looked like a drawing made by a Spirograph toy.

A circular pavilion made from recycled plastic bricks sat on the ground in the centre of the tower and contained a single pair of shoes suspended in the air.

Splayed metal rods folded over the pavilion walls, providing the framework for a two-layered canopy of tightly woven fabric.

Springs under the pavilion floor were connected to the metal rods so the strings moved up and down when people walked around inside.

The gas tower is located in the 751 art district in the north-east of Beijing, a former industrial zone that is now home to many galleries and studios.

Watch a movie of Nike’s global creative director talking about the knitted Flyknit Racer running shoes here.

See all our stories about Beijing Design Week »

See all our stories about Nike »

Here is some more information from Nike:

Arthur Huang’s “Feather Pavilion”

Taipai-based engineer, architect, entrepreneur and pioneer in sustainable thinking, Arthur Huang, sees the world differently. His interpretation of FlyKnit’s key tenets — performance, lightness, formfitting, and sustainability — created through his MINIWIZ company, is both metaphorical and literal, resulting in the Feather Pavilion.

This spectacular space is a platform for showcasing every value of FlyKnit in an interactive, innovative way, that lets multiple concepts take flight though inspiration from nature’s own mechanical masterpiece — the feather.

Itself encapsulating the four FlyKnit principles, the feather is reflected conceptually throughout as well as physically though the shape of the pavilion roof, resulting in a personalized journey for visitors that, like FlyKnit and the Nike philosophy, is part of something much bigger — portable and capable of being the centerpiece of a stadium or larger exhibition space.

After seeing FlyWire innovations, guests enter a second half where the concept surrounds them for a 360 degree understanding of the technology where they can revel in Huang and Miniwiz’s vision.

Performance is represented through every element of Huang’s work – just by walking into the pavilion, stepping onto the platform creates a sensory action elsewhere in the structure.

Kinetic energy changes the look and the actual architectural form of this building, The ceiling moves like a feather, sounds are emitted and light and video is transmitted both internally and externally throughout the walls and floors, resulting in a sense of technical and musical harmony.

Lightness imbues every element of the Feather Pavilion experience – beyond being visually themed on the very essence of lightweight, the lightweight feel and transparency of the recycled TPU POLLI-Brick construction twinned with the shifting ceiling makes it utterly immersive. Formfitting is embodied in the precision engineered, industrial and tailored spirit of this project.

An intricate pulley system mirrors the motion of a loom, similar to the looms that create FlyKnit, while the building adjusting in line withthe form of its occupants, taking the form of a feather in the wind, transforms pure physics into an expansion of Nike’s breakthrough.

Sustainability is more than just a buzzword. It’s a testament to MINIWIZ’s work in the field that the sustainable nature of this entire structure, with the POLLIBrick compression walls, might go unnoticed.

This is the art of turning trash, something of no perceived value, something seen as primitive, into something awe inspiring. Made entirely from recycled TPU, each POLLI-Brick interlocks to create a resilient structure. To add further 100% organic reinforcement, recycled rice husks continue this design’s merger of tradition and the future of creativity.

Made with specifications from Nike’s R&D lab after a visit to Nike WHQ in Beaverton, a yarn runs through the pavilion in a Volt Green colour that matches the smaller scale version, turning into rugged caribiner cables that tie, with the threads becoming rope. This is function and beauty on a scale never before seen. And at the end of its own journey, the Feather Pavilion is capable of being recycled to create the next visionary MINIWIZ structure.

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Arthur Huang appeared first on Dezeen.