Hasta La Ideas

Designer Gerry Judah has created this white knotted sculpture of a race track for car brand Lotus at Goodwood Festival of Speed, which took place in West Sussex last weekend.

The structure features six historic Lotus Formula 1 cars secured onto 150 metres of winding road.

The hollow, 60-tonne sculpture is made from sheets of steel that have been joined at the edges to create triangular sections, which are self-supporting and require no internal frame.

This construction technique was used in tribute to Lotus founder and designer Colin Chapman (1928-1982) who introduced the monocoque chassis to automobile racing, enabling the chassis and body of a car to be made in one piece.

Judah creates an enormous car sculpture for the festival every year and you can see his previous ones here.

Photographs are by David Barbour.

Here’s some information about the project:

Lotus Sculpture, Goodwood Festival of Speed 2012

It is 2012 and every year a different car company sponsors a centrepiece sculpture for the Goodwood Festival of Speed. This is the sixteenth in a row that Gerry Judah has designed and produced, and this year it is bigger, more daring and beautiful, and more spectacular than ever before.

The sponsor this year is Lotus Cars. The sculpture itself is six historic Lotus Formula 1 cars driving on a winding road that has been tied into the shape of a half-hitch, or trefoil, knot. The road length is 150 metres, and the whole installation weighs 60 tonnes. There are six classic Formula 1 cars: the Lotus 32B (Jim Clark 1965), Lotus 49B (Graham Hill 1968), Lotus 72E (Emerson Fittipaldi 1973), Lotus 79 (Mario Andretti 1978), Lotus 99T (Ayrton Senna 1987) and the latest Lotus F1 Team challenger.

The sculpture is a triangular section, each of the three sides is what we call a continuously variable curve developable surface. This means that we start with flat sheet metal curves that can be rolled up and joined into three dimensional luxurious shapes. The result is a lightweight, extremely strong and rigid thin-shell structure, with no internal framework or core. Inside it is all empty space and what you see is the structure itself. The sculpture is 98% empty space. In automobile terms this would be a monocoque body, a tribute to the legendary designer and Lotus founder Colin Chapman’s introduction of monocoque chassis construction to automobile racing.

What we have here is a technique for building freeform shapes. In the future we expect that lots of structures will be built like this, from bridges and large span buildings, to roller coasters, but before that we will be building some even more spectacular sculptures.

Client: Lotus Cars
Design and production: Gerry Judah
Engineering: Capita Symonds
Fabrication & installation: Littlehampton Welding
Photography: David Barbour

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by Gerry Judah appeared first on Dezeen.

Artist Esther Stocker has built a disjointed grid of black blocks across the floor, walls and ceiling of Z33 – House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt, Belgium.

The arrangement of the blocks suggests a grid that’s only half visible, leaving the viewer to mentally piece together the remaining elements.

‘Based on a Grid’ is part of Z33′s current exhibition ‘Mind the System, Find the Gap’, in which more than 30 international artists offer their interpretation on the idea of gaps in the system.

The exhibition continues until 30 September 2012.

See more stories about installations »

Here’s some more about the exhibition:

‘Based on a Grid’ , commission 2012 – Esther Stocker In ‘Based on a Grid’ (2012),

Esther Stocker creates a spatial system from a series of black painted wooden blocks in the entrance hall of the Z33 exhibition building. The visitor is drawn into the installation, as it were, and is challenged by the system, the grid that is there but not immediately visible. For Stocker, the system is implied as much by its gaps as it is by its contours. But do we want to look for the system or are we happy to lose ourselves in the chaos of scattered elements drifting apart? A decision which according to Jan Verwoert, contributing editor at Frieze Magazine and freelance author, depends on the position one takes or is willing to take with regards to ordering structures. He therefore concludes: “Using abstraction as a medium, [Esther Stocker] formulates a critical position with respect to the authority of ordering structures.”

‘Mind the System, Find the Gap’ is this year’s summer exhibition at Z33 – House for Contemporary Art. More than 30 international artists seek out the gaps in the system.

Our society is governed by all sorts of systems and structures that organise and steer life. No system, however, whether political, judicial, economical, socio-cultural or spatial, can comprise life in its entirety. Every system has gaps, leaks and ambiguities.

The artists in the exhibition Mind the System, Find the Gap seek out these gaps. They set forth from this intermediate position to unveil, circumvent or criticise ruling systems and structures.

‘Mind the System, Find the Gap’ does not proffer an overly simplified critique on the notion of systems and structuring principles, but aims to seek out its complexity.

For the past few years, strong thematic exhibitions on societal issues have been Z33’s trademark. It is Z33’s ambition to challenge the visitor to look at the day-to-day reality with a different set of eyes, as do the artists in ‘Mind the System, Find the Gap’.

June 3 – September 30 2012
Z33 – House for Contemporary Art
Zuivelmarkt 33
3500 Hasselt
Belgium

Interactive designers rAndom International have created a lighting installation that can map and replicate human movement.

Located at the MADE exhibition space in Berlin, the project was presented as part of a dance performance coordinated by choreographer Wayne McGregor and composer Max Richter.

As two dancers moved around the perimeter of the installation, 3D cameras recorded the shapes made by their bodies and replayed them on a brass grid of over 10,000 LED lights.

The image created by the lights always resembles a single figure, no matter how many people approach it at once, but it can combine the movements of more than one body.

All information recorded by the device passes through a computer, so it can also be played back with a time delay or saved to replay later.

rAndom International designed a similar movement-sensitive lighting installation after being announced as one of the winners of the 2010 W Hotels Designers of the Future awards and have also created a set of motorised mirrors that turn to face their observer.

Film is shot and edited by Matthias Maericks, MADE.

Here’s some more information from rAndom International:

Future Self, 2012

“Future Self“ is a new performative light installation by rAndom International, presented for the first time in unique collaboration with Wayne McGregor and Max Richter and made possible by MADE.

Making its premier through performance over Berlin Gallery Weekend, “Future Self” was extensively explored in a new piece choreographed by Wayne McGregor and scored by Max Richter in relation to the light installation.

Two dancers intensely communicated, with each other and with their own reflections, through light as well as through the body. Throughout the performance, music, artwork and the human form were unified into one immediate and emotional experience.

“Future Self“ studies human movement; what it can reveal about identity and the relationship we have with our self image.

The installation mirrors our movement in light, creating a three dimensional, ‘living’ sculpture from the composite gestures of those who surround it.

Selected members of the audience are bound together, in the moment, as an illuminated presence –another version of themselves.

Aluminium, custom electronics, 3D cameras, LEDs, brass rods
1200 x 1500 x 3450 mm

MADE space, Berlin

Dancers: Fukiko Takase, Alexander Whitley
Rehearsal Director: Catarina Carvalho
Choreography: Wayne McGregor
Score: Max Richter

A data-driven display from Ryoji Ikeda explores the interior of an automobile

Derived from the data set of the latest Honda Civic model, the new sonic and visual installation by the Paris-based Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, “data.anatomy [civic]” was unveiled last week at the stunning post-industrial venue Kraftwerk Berlin.

Ikeda considers mathematicians to be artists, and specializes in work based on science and numbers—in this case he manipulates DNA data and astronomy to compose electronic sounds and a series of black-and-white dots and flurried lines.

Contacted last year by Honda to create something based on the CAD information of the re-designed five-door Civic, Ikeda started from the solid object to convert the material into intangible sounds and images of seemingly transparent waves in the air. With his art Ryoji aims to capture an unperceived dimension and succeeds once again in this particular project.

Honda chose an interesting approach in funding a concept they had actually conceived instead of simply supporting an existing project through a third-party foundation. Created in collaboration with Mitsuru Kariya, the Development Lead on the all-new Civic, the installation took four months for a team of five architects and computer programmers to build and process the data. The choice of venue was an important one, since Ryoji works to forge an intimate and intricate relationship between his pieces and the surrounding space. Data.anatomy[civic] is located in a huge, industrial concrete structure that formerly housed a power plant in the 1960s.

The beautifully poetic video projection creates three disruptive moments on three screens in a large 20m x 4m triptych. The moving images on the black horizontal screen, along with the minimal sound track composd of clear bells, a rapid timer and medical devices give the viewer a feeling of floating without gravity. Bursting from the center and spreading in waves to the borders of the frame, the images call to mind X-rays or distorted Rorshach tests. They bloom on the rhythm of submarine, sonar-like pulses, slipping and splitting on a screen fringed by a bar code frieze. Medical references and quotations call to mind the title’s reference to the anatomy of a car while experimenting with both sound and image on a large-scale display provides an immersion that Ryoji uses to play with visitors’ perception.

What follows is a jarring set of rapidly pulsed horizontal lines of graphics, codes and figures crossing the screen in opposite directions, resembling something like an animated contact sheet or a flat-lined EEG. While the sound mellows out, this moment seems to feature the silent computer calculation or some lonesome medical device’s overnight work. The bar code is once again referenced with a series of white bars extending from the top of the screen.

The third section presents a totally different atmosphere with the negative images of motors and tubes made of thin white threads. Bursting red spots move more slowly, like spaceships through the blackness of outer space. Each screen works separately as occasional images cross them on various trajectories of different speeds, their collisions echoed by bell tones while a timer persists in the background.

This minimal yet highly precise piece of work takes the viewer on a captivating 12-minute journey into the guts of a car to illustrate Ryoji’s search for the intersection between reality and unexplored dimensions. See “data.anatomy [civic]” in action by checking out the video.

Kraftwerk Berlin

19 April through 1 May 2012

Köpenicker Straße 59 -73

10179 Berlin-Mitte

Milan 2012: 14 young designers come together to create an ideal living space for an exhibition called The Front Room: Geometry and Colour inside a listed Milanese house this week.

The show includes a coffee table and wall lamp from Daphna Laurens‘ Cirkel Collection, Phil Cuttance‘s Faceture vases and Mieke Meijer‘s furniture inspired by industrial structures.

Henny van Nistelrooy presents a screen made by unpicking woven fabric, David Derksen and Lex Pott provided mirrors that have been selectively oxidised, and there’s a clock by Studio Like This that can only be read straight-on.

Seating includes stools from Earnest Studio made by expanding foam around the legs and fabric seat, and a rocking chair by Agata Karolina and Dana Cannam that takes centre stage on rugs with graduated colours by Franziska Wernicke.

Lighting takes the form of OS & OOS‘ lamps inspired by the alignment of celestial bodies and Miya Kondo‘s Composition lights leaning against the walls, while swing-seats made of twisted and knotted rope by Tom Price hang in the courtyard.

The Front Room is curated by Matylda Krzykowski and Marco Gabriele Lorusso, all the pieces are for sale and it’s on show at Ca’ Laghetto, Via Laghetto 11 until 22 April.

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile takes place from 17 to 22 April. See all our stories about Milan 2012 here.

Here are some more details from Matylda Krzykowski and Marco Gabriele Lorusso:

The front room is the most diverse of our domestic space. It is where we mingle and entertain, read in solitude, stay up late and doze off early. The front room must accommodate many versions of ourselves, yet it is a place where we present a singular identity through the language of the products that we choose. It is a room where our families gather, for which we gather a family of objects.

The Front Room: Geometry and Colour is a presentation of new objects for the front room. Each object is a fresh version of it’s predecessor, and all are united by the ritualistic nature of sheer geometries and strikingly contemporary color palettes. In a departure from the amorphous forms that have preoccupied the design world in recent years, this up-and-coming group looks to purity with an element of playfulness.

THE FRONT ROOM is a self-initiated project brought to you by Matylda Krzykowski and by Marco Gabriele Lorusso. The show is hosted by Ca’ Laghetto.

Phil Cuttance

FACETURE, 2012 – The Faceture series consists of handmade faceted vessels, light-shades and table. Each object is produced individually by casting a water-based resin into a simple handmade mould. The mould is then manually manipulated to create the each object’s form before each casting, making every piece utterly unique.

David Derksen and Lex Pott

TRANSCIENCE, 2011 – Over time, dark spots start to appear on mirrors. The silver layer is slowly oxidizing under the influence of oxygen and water, thereby showing some of its history. This process can be regarded as degradation, however this project shows the beauty of this material transition of silver. Normally, the oxidation process in a mirror occurs randomly and evolves slowly over time. These mirrors reveal the different states of this process. In this case, sulphur is used to create an accelerated oxidation process. Depending on the time that the silver is reacting with sulphur, different colour tones can be achieved, ranging from gold to brown, to purple to blue. The states of the oxidation process are being shown in a pattern that consists of the elemental geometric shapes.

Earnest Studio

SWELL, 2011 – Swell is a series of stools and benches which play with the conventional method of producing upholstered furniture. The project works by combining several steps of production into one. Instead of molding massive blocks of foam, cutting them down to size, gluing these separate pieces to a wooden frame and hand-sewing fabric on top, Swell uses the fabric and frame as the original mold for the foam. This results in fewer steps in production, less material and less time-consuming handwork. Because the foam fills the fabric, no material is wasted as cutoffs. Because the foam acts as a binding agent between the fabric and frame, no additional adhesives or sewing are necessary. Lastly, since the foam expands in a slightly different way each time, each piece is unique.

Agata Karolina and Dana Cannam

HUMMINGBIRD, 2012 – The hummingbird is a contemporary take on a classic rocking chair. The name reflects the calm state of suspension between being engaged and deep relaxation. When seated, the user is upright and alert, with a gentle tilt and shifting of weight, the chair creates an embracing sensation, producing the feeling of calm. The objects that surround us must adapt to a richer mix of uses, housing types, living and work situations. The Hummingbird accentuates this dynamic lifestyle without sacrificing the value of history and simplicity.

Daphna Laurens

CIRKEL COLLECTION, 2011 – The pieces of collection “Cirkel” have a shared basis, the circle. Composing, cutting and twisting the surface, adding or removing lines, applying materials and colour resulted in the design of the new coffee table 01 and wall light 01 and 02

Mieke Meijer

POWER PLANT 1, WINDING TOWER 01, 2011 – Inspired by the photographs of Bernd an Hilla Becher Mieke Meijer restored the disused industrial shapes and placed them in a new context. By reducing the scale and playing with volume, she created a series of autonomous interior objects with an architectural feel. The third piece in the series, ‘PowerPlant 01′, wasn’t based on a Becher photograph but on a marquant Eindhoven building, heritage from the Philips company. Mieke Meijer translated it into a low table with two conical shaped lamps.

OS & OOS

SYZGY LAMPS, 2011 – A continuous light source inspired by the sun, moon and planets. Syzygy [siz-i-jee] astronomical term from Nasa: a straight line configuration of three celestial like bodies produces eclipses, transits and occultations, but brought down to the human scale. The two foremost disks can be physically turned by hand to achieve the desired light effect. The light can only be put out when both are turned to the correct possession resulting in perfect black, for the light source itself remains constantly on.

Miya Kondo

COMPOSITION LIGHTS, 2011 – Composition Light describes the relationship between individual and object, and individual and space through the use of light, creating different perspectives, frames and shapes of light; offering light itself as a mutable spatial object. The result is a graphic light which, positioned in various ways, uses light as a way of communicating spatial dimension, the environment thus determining the form the light will take.

Lex Pott

TRUE COLORS Exclusively for foundbyjames.com, Lex created 40 limited edition artworks that capture the beauty and irregularity of metals. True Colours started as a research project into colour and was motivated by the desire to create a framework in which nature can express itself and still maintain beauty, a contrast to what is expected in our mass-produced world. Starting with 6 rectangle metal panels of processed brass, aluminium, steel and copper, he applies various chemical processes to generate oxidization of the material. He explains these chemical reactions with scientific formulas neatly recorded with typography on the face of the panels. As a result he creates a rich alchemistic colour palette against an industrialized metal framework: a fascinating contrast at the pivotal point in which nature and industry converge.

Henny van Nistelrooy

MYLTADA, 2012 – Myltada is a double-panel space divider which is the latest edition to the “Shelter” collection. Shelter is a collection of space dividers composed of specially selected fabrics, meticulously unthreaded into new geometrical patterns. In reaction to the machine woven structures Henny has been unthreading the fabrics by hand in order to create new geometrical designs within the fabric. By doing this the tightly woven, opaque textile become translucent and the relation between the different threads that make up the fabrics becomes clear. The project has been inspired by recent journeys to China. Here the beautiful architectural features appearing in many Ming/Qing imperial palaces and gardens have been of influence in the use of color and shape.

Fabian von Spreckelsen

The New York City Bulk and Wave collection – My sideboard is made up of powder coated steel and was painted in a bright colour resulting in a stylish contemporary look to give a smart impression. My object, a folded brick and its creation is like our mind and the way we change our paradigm. It takes a lot of effort to change our old patterns of thinking and to achieve the desired results. Whatever the outcome is, it is always unique and every person perceives it differently. The workings are asymmetric and cannot be seen like our inner mind. In addition to my “folded brick”, I created “welded waves” which functions as a transcript of our transience. The processed metal was exposed to nature as we are to our environment reflecting the paths we chose to live. Both objects were handcrafted in my studio in Maastricht and only the finest materials were used.

Studio Like This

TIME, 2012 – A clock which requires time be sought out rather than have it as a constant reminder of its passing. Only when approached front-on does the clock allow for the transparency to read time. Viewed from any other angle, it disguises itself as a discreet wall object. TIME is a marriage of classic analog time-keeping and modern nano technology.

Franziska Wernicke

ROOM MOMENT c2, 2011 ROOM MOMENT c4, 2011 – The rugs stand out due to their unique color gradation design and their rich, luxurious finishing. The subtle and smooth color gradient effect gives the impression of a change of dimension in the rug. the design opens up the room in which it is placed, it communicates with its architectural surroundings and invites the user to experience a whole new interior dimension. Manufactured entirely in the Netherlands, the rugs make use of an exclusive high-tech tufting technique that is able to create super smooth color changes within the tufted rug. the rugs are made out of 100% pure New Zealand wool through which a luxuriously soft and voluminous rug is obtained.