Hasta La Ideas

London architecture studio Orproject has installed a forest of illuminated paper trees that join up to form a continuous canopy at a gallery in New Delhi (+ slideshow).

Called Vana, meaning “forest” in Sanskrit, the hanging installation by Orproject features four trunk-like structures designed to mimic natural growth patterns.

To achieve this, the team developed a series of algorithms that mimic the veins found in leaves.

“When the leaf grows, the veins develop with it in order to reach each cell on the surface of the leaf and supply them with nutrients,” said Christoph Klemmt, one of the founders of Orproject.

“Also when a tree grows, it tries to get an exposure of each leaf to the sunlight, so a similar mechanism drives the branching of the tree,” he explained. “We wrote a computer algorithm to simulate this development, in order to grow architecture.”

The four trunks branch upwards and outwards from “seed points” on the floor towards “target points” on the ceiling where they join up into a single surface, creating a suspended tensile structure.

The installation is made from triangular segments of paper connected via stitched joints and backlit by LEDs. When the lights are turned on, the light glows through the gaps and highlights the vein-like structure of the piece.

Vana was designed for last year’s India Design Forum and is currently on display at The Brick House in New Delhi.

Photography is by Sumedh Prasad and Orproject, copyright of Orproject.

Here’s a project description from Orproject:

Vana 

Orproject developed a series of algorithms that digitally generate open and closed venation patterns, which can be used to simulate the growth of topiaries. The systems consist of a set of seed points that grow and branch towards target points in order to maximise exposure to light for each leaf. The resulting geometries fulfill these requirements and provide a suitable structural and circulatory system for the plant.

The structural system of topiaries acts mainly in compression and bending. Reversing this, we can obtain a geometry that performs as a tensile system. The installation Vana is designed as a single surface in tension that hangs from the ceiling and descends into the space as four columns of light. The surface is tessellated into triangular segments which are connected by stitched joints. Back lit with LEDs, light shines through the gaps and illuminates the space below with an immersive glow.

As the prototype for a large scale canopy construction, Vana has been developed as an iso-surface around an anastomotic network diagram, as the cortex around the venation system. In a continuous transformation, nature merges into architecture, columns merge into the sky and solid merges into the ephemeral. Vana appears to grow as tree-like branches blending into a continuous canopy that floats above the visitor.

Title: Vana
Architects: Orproject
Project Architects: Rajat Sodhi, Christoph Klemmt
Project Team: Sambit Samant, Manu Sharma

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from paper by Orproject appeared first on Dezeen.

An Alpine choir pivoted on hydraulic platforms as part of French fashion house Moncler’s Autumn Winter 2014 presentation at New York Fashion Week, which concludes today (+ movie).

Moncler created an audio-visual installation called Winter Symphony to showcase the brand’s Moncler Grenoble ski and winter wear collection at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom on Saturday.

Members of the ten-piece Pendulum Choir stood on small platforms and were strapped to the mechanisms around the torso, legs and feet as they sang an updated version of a traditional Alpine song.

Dressed in down-filled morning suits, the nine singers and one conductor tilted in various directions as pistons behind their backs and under their feet contracted and expanded.

Behind them, sixty male and female choir members dressed in black and white Moncler outfits stood in rectangular boxes stacked four levels high.

Each box was illuminated around the edges, separated from each other so they appeared to float in the darkened theatre.

Lights shining on the choir members flashed as the larger collective joined in singing with the smaller group.

The presentation took place on 8 February during New York Fashion Week, which finishes today.

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Autumn Winter 2014 presentation appeared first on Dezeen.

Stockholm 2014: as Guest of Honour at Stockholm Furniture Fair, design duo GamFratesi has installed petal-shaped mobiles above the lounge area at this year’s exhibition.

Stine Gam and Enrico Fratesi decided on a theme of balance for their installation at the annual showcase of Nordic design.

“We’ve been working on this idea of balance,” Fratesi told Dezeen. “We’ve been researching it for a while and it is something that is really difficult to achieve.”

They designed a collection of mobiles to hang above and among the lounge area in the entrance hall of the Stockholmsmässan exhibition centre.

“These hanging elements were really interesting to us, something that was moving slowly,” said Fratesi.

The pair referenced the work of twentieth-century American sculptor Alexander Calder for this project.

“We wanted to bring the feeling behind the artist to furniture in a very industrial way,” Fratesi explained. “We were analysing these mobiles and could see that they were very crafted, very thin and hand bent.”

They spent a long time experimenting with the size and shape of the panels to get them to hang in equilibrium.

“We found that they were so sensitive to any kind of changes,” said Gam. “As soon as you change a milligram or a centimetre on one piece, the whole thing becomes completely unbalanced.”

The petals were upholstered in a palette of red and blue shades, all with greyish tones. Fabric produced by Danish company Kvadrat was heat-pressed over recycled felt, which acts as a sound absorber.

Combinations of three, four and five of petal-shaped elements are hung from black metal rods, attached together with small flexible joints.

The mobiles are suspended on thin wires above an open lounge area, arranged around a central white block. GamFratesi wanted to create an open space rather than a closed environment.

“In the beginning, we thought we’d close everything to make an intimate space where people could relax,” said Fratesi. “But then we thought this was dishonest. People are moving around, so why don’t we emphasise this feeling in the space.”

The lounge area is furnished with sofas, dinning tables and chairs plus other designs the duo have created during their career, including the Rewrite desk with a cave-like shield on top.

A series of embossed paper displaying the same shapes as the petals are mounted on the central walls.

Originally from Denmark and Italy respectively, Gam and Fratesi set up their studio in Copenhagen in 2006. They presented some of their first work in the Greenhouse section of the fair for young designers in 2007.

Stockholm Furniture Fair is open until Saturday and the installation will remain in place for the duration of the exhibition.

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lounge at Stockholm Furniture Fair appeared first on Dezeen.

A twisting chain-link and barbed-wire fence installed by French artist and architect Didier Faustino at an exhibition in Cincinnati determines the path taken by visitors through the gallery space.

Faustino‘s installation is called Point Break and creates a barrier running diagonally across one of the galleries at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center.

Made from a material commonly used to define international borders and property limits within urban environments, the fence is edge with barbed wire to create a feeling of danger that evokes the risks involved in illegal immigration.

“When you cross borders there is always this feeling of guilt, where you feel afraid and in danger, and for me the idea of the piece is to recreate this feeling inside the gallery,” Faustino told Dezeen.

As it bisects the space the fence rotates 180 degrees and rises above the ground to define a passage that visitors follow to cross from the entrance to the exit.

The title of the work refers to the 1991 movie starring Patrick Swayze as an anarchic bank-robbing surfer.

The spiralling form of the fence resembles the tunnel created beneath a breaking wave.

The Point Break installation is an evolution of a previous work that Faustino created for experimental New York exhibition space Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2008.

The original version was called (G)host in the (S)hell and transformed the front of the urban gallery by weaving a fence through openings in the facade.

Point Break is part of a group exhibition called Buildering: Misbehaving the City, which features work by 27 artists who explore the idea of creative misuse of buildings and urban spaces.

In another gallery, Faustino has installed a version of his Home Suit Home artwork comprising a hollow suit made from standard carpet, which was previously exhibited at Galerie Michel Rein in Paris. For the Cincinnati exhibition, Faustino covered the gallery floor in carpet from which the net shape used to create the suit was cut in one piece and folded into shape.

“When carpet – this basic material of architecture – is transformed into the Home Suit Home it becomes a kind of protective element like a real home,” explained Faustino.

Both pieces are part of Fautino’s continuing experiments into the relationship between the body and architecture, which he says are “about experiencing fragility, provoking instability in space and showing how architecture creates a shelter that protects the body at its centre.”

Photography of the Point Break exhibition is by Kelly Barrie.

Here’s some more information from the artist:

Didier Faustino: “Buildering: Misbehaving the City” at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

At the heart of the exhibition ‘Buildering: Misbehaving the City’ at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, two of Didier Faustino’s works help to redefine urban and physical borders, to express his transgressive vision of architecture and the misuse of codes regarding housing, thus exploring limits to physical and psychological freedom.

Crossing the space diagonally, the Point Break installation reflects on the materiality of metal fencing and the use of it in towns and American suburbs. It provides a formal criticism, misappropriating this commonplace material to create a passage. The barriers refer to private property, fundamental in the USA, and the passage that they provide here remains extremely dangerous, requiring visitors to take a physical risk connecting them to illegal immigration and to the notion of border. Changing the exhibition space into an ambiguous territory, Point Break expands as if to delineate space, raising social, political as well as psychological questions.

With Home Suit Home, Didier Faustino invites us to enter a disturbing world, strangely resembling ours but haunted by another ‘us’ in customised armour in the most banal domestic material. The artwork draws on signs from our familiar environment but endeavours to turn it inside out, literally, like a glove, projecting the visitor into an unstable world. It plays with elements representing hindrance, displacement and inversion and takes on bodily characteristics consisting of poor materials from our standardized homes.

Unusually concerned in front of our apartments and offices that have suddenly become unwelcoming, we are drawn to think about the lives that animate our familiar environments and the fictional borders that claim to separate art from our lives, political decisions from our aesthetic models. Reversibility characterises this installation, where the home is in turns designated like a compartment to be occupied and an impossible destination, where the anthropomorphic figure forms an interior as well as an exterior, a container and contents.

Our housing models, our way of organising and accommodating our bodies, our spectacular buildings, the constraints opposing our flesh are in question here. Didier Faustino’s ploy radicalises the architectural intention, to the point of formulating a resolute criticism of future planning for households.

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Faustino at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Amsterdam designer Pieke Bergmans explains that she used a process similar to glass blowing to create the plastic lighting she exhibited during Dutch Design Week 2013 in Eindhoven.

Showcased amongst the pipes in a former pump house in Eindhoven, Bergmans exhibited two groups of objects as part of her VAPOR collection, which she created by heating and rapidly inflating PVC plastic.

Swaying, ethereal shapes were hung in the main room, which Bergmans made by blowing air into the plastic until it stretched into an extremely thin, translucent tube at one end.

“The material is solid and somehow it fades away almost into nothingness,” she explains. “It dissolves like a gas. It’s very thin plastic at the ends, but on the top it’s quite solid.”

A second installation in the basement of the pump house consisted of a series of twisted, rippled pipes.

“The shapes are really organic, they grow like a plant or an animal,” she says. “That is something I really love, because I don’t like to design being very precise. I actually prefer that shapes grow into their natural environments.”

She continues: “So this plastic is actually grown. The only thing I decide is to add more or less air into it, or maybe add a few colours, or maybe add more material.”

Bergmans explains that the pieces she exhibited at Dutch Design Week were the result of many different experiments.

“I’m very free and experimental and I try to understand the boundaries [of a production process],” she explains. “I will make things with lots of air and it will explode, maybe. After lots of experiments I know the limits; I know the edges. And actually, the edges are most of the time the nicest.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

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lighting “grows like a plant or animal” appeared first on Dezeen.