Hasta La Ideas

News: French architect Jean Nouvel will curate an exhibition of office spaces in Milan in April, presenting a range of scenarios to replace the “grey cultural world” of purpose-built offices (+ interview).

“Very often now, our apartments make better places to work,” Nouvel told Dezeen at the preview of the exhibition in Milan yesterday. “The opposite is right too: often it is better to live in the space designed to be an office.”

The installation, called Project: Office for Living, will present eight alternative working environments, with the first three representing a Milanese apartment, a loft and an industrial hangar repurposed as work spaces.

“All of these are new conditions to create space for offices,” said Nouvel. “We don’t have to repeat and to clone exactly the same organisation and the same furniture for everyone.”

At the centre of the installation, a violently ripped-apart system of standard workstations will represent his rejection of bland corporate environments. “The office today is a repetition of the same space for everyone,” he says. “General solutions are bad solutions for everyone.”

The Project: office for living installation will be on show in pavilion 24 of SaloneUfficio at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan from 9 to 14 April 2013.

Above: visualisation of layout for Project: office for living

For skyscrapers, Nouvel advocates flexible spaces that can be reconfigured to suit individual workers: one section of the installation will feature pools of illumination that can be individually altered rather than generic overhead lighting, another will showcase furniture that can be reconfigured like Lego building blocks and a third is partitioned by mobile screens.

Classic furniture by designers Nouvel admires including Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand will be showcased alongside contemporary examples from elsewhere in the furniture fair and Nouvel suggests that furniture companies should make less distinction between domestic and commercial products: “I want people to imagine that furniture for offices is also for the home.”

Portrait is by Barbara Chandler.

Here’s an edited transcript of the interview with Jean Nouvel:

Rose Etherington: You’ve called the project Office for Living. What do you mean by that?

Jean Nouvel: We spend more and more of our lives in work places than at home and it shows a kind of contradiction because for a lot of people, to work is not to live.

Very often now, our apartments make better places to work. And the opposite is right too: often it is better to live in the space designed to be an office. I want people to imagine that furniture for offices is also for the home.

Rose Etherington: What’s wrong with office design?

Jean Nouvel: The office today is a repetition of the same space for everyone. You have a frame and you have the right to a number of squares in this frame, so it’s only a functional and rational approach. General solutions are bad solutions for everyone. This arrived at a very grey cultural world and what I want to show is that now we will have new adaptations of the cities.

It’s possible now to work in other places than the traditional office buildings with glass. It’s right to reuse buildings: all these [traditional] buildings at the entrance of the city or corrugated metal structures at the edge; all of these are new conditions to create space for offices. What is important now is to show that we will probably work in different conditions.

You can imagine different buildings are empty and they could become your office and we don’t have to repeat and to clone exactly the same organisation and the same furniture for everyone.

Rose Etherington: I’m told that you prefer to work at home or in a restaurant. What do you get from those environments that you don’t get from the office in Paris?

Jean Nouvel: It’s quieter and if I have to think with a team in a seminar or something I don’t have to have so many people around and all the noises of the city. So I do it in a quieter place, a more agreeable place. But it depends on the nature of your work.

We’ve talked about “tele-travail” since a long time. You can work at home but you can also work in every place, so every person has to invent his natural office. We will see one of the offices of Philippe Starck in the installation and he works by the sea.

When we do an exhibition like this, it is to talk to people who want to think about the question of offices: the companies designing all the material but also people researching their needs and which kind of furniture they will take.

So the idea is to show that now we do not have to stay in this frame and it’s possible to think in another way in relation to the natural world and empty spaces in the city. I just want to open these new conditions.

Rose Etherington: How have you put this into practice in offices you designed?

Jean Nouvel: The CLMBBDO [advertising agency in Paris] was such a special commission because I was commissioned by Philippe Michel, one of the most famous creatives of advertising in the ’80s and ’90s and he wanted to create this new office.

He said to me: “I want to put out the traditions of the stupid office like I had all my life. We are free and I want a building without an edge.” He said: “Okay, I don’t want a building for the future. I don’t want a building of yesterday. I want to do what is the most agreeable and the most fulfilling for a sense of wellbeing.”

And we arrived at this building along the Seine with balconies. You can open all the façades, you can work outside or you can work inside. When the weather was good, you could open the roof.

You could put the offices in different spaces and you can have flexibilities on each floor. With the furniture, you could walk on every seat and you could sit on the backs. Sometimes the central space was for work, sometimes that was a space to have meetings or to do sport. All of that was completely free.

Rose Etherington: Lots of creative and technology companies have offices with places for play as well as work, almost like playgrounds.

Jean Nouvel: The programme is very important, of course, and you have to imagine spaces for the expressions of the people. We design offices now with one wall where you can do what you want and it becomes a big screen with music or with your preferred image. In my office, for example, nobody controls if you are here or not here, how long you stay and so on. So it’s also one possible way to work.

When someone can have a break, it’s not only to drink a coffee but it could be to do exercise or to meet people. When you work for five or six hours, sometimes you need to find contrast and then you work in a better condition and you are more efficient.

But like in all my work since the beginning, I don’t think we research one ideal solution. We don’t want to have standard conditions and impose these conditions in every city in the world. We just show some examples.

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work than offices” – Jean Nouvel appeared first on Dezeen.

News: the way design is sold to the public is “stuck” in the past and hasn’t changed since the seventies, according to the founder of a brand that aims to sell high-quality furniture online (+ interview).

“I just feel that this whole industry is terrible at seeing that many people are moving online and willing to buy furniture online,” said Joel Roos (above), founder and CEO of One Nordic. “It just feels like, when you go to Italy, time is stuck. Nothing has happened in this field.”

Roos made the comments at the Stockholm Furniture Fair this week, where the Finnish company unveiled new furniture lines that fold flat to enable them to be shipped more cheaply.

“In many other retail fields so much is happening,” he added. “But in the furniture field many, many companies retail exactly the same way as they did in the seventies.”

One Nordic is developing innovative sales strategies that involve working with traditional retailers to showcase products to customers, who then buy them online. Retailers will be given a percentage of sales generated through their stores.

To reduce shipping costs, the brand has introduced products such as the Hai armchair designed by Luca Nichetto (above), which features a folding backrest. This cuts the shipping volume by half.

We don’t want to call it “flatpack” because that has a bad ring to it,” says Roos. “It’s more about effective shipping.”

“Most design furniture costs a fortune and is for this reason not accessible,” says One Nordic’s website, which can ship products to customers across Europe within two weeks. The site adds: “By making the shipping smarter and more effective, we can make our products more affordable.”

Another product, the Levels ceiling lamp by Form Us With Love (above), collapses to around a third of its size while the Pal Stool by Hallgeir Homstvedt (below) can be easily taken apart and put back together.

A prototype shelf by Steffan Holm has a scissor-like structure so you can unpack it, open it up like a concertina and attach it to the wall.

One Nordic debuted at the Stockholm Furniture Fair last year where it showed the Bento chair by Form Us With Love (above), which also comes as a kit.

Innovation in the sale of design online has come from new players rather than established companies. Last autumn online furniture retailer Made.com announced it was opening a physical showroom in London, while flash sales site Fab.com told Dezeen it had “IKEA-sized ambitions”.

This month a private collector put his 1,000-strong of Braun products designed by Dieter Rams up for sale on eBay.

Here’s an edited transcript of an interview with Roos conducted by Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs:

Marcus Fairs: We’re at the Stockholm Furniture Fair on the One Nordic stand. Tell us about yourself and your company.

Joel Roos: I’m the founder of One Nordic, and this is our first birthday. We showed the prototype of the Bento chair by Form Us With Love one year ago, and now we’re at the fair showing nine product families. So we’ve come pretty far in a year I guess.

Marcus Fairs: Tell us about your business model because it’s quite different from other brands. You want to use the internet as much as possible; a lot of your products fold down for easy shipping.

Joel Roos: Yeah. I just feel that this whole industry is terrible at seeing that many people are moving online and willing to buy furniture online. But one of the biggest [limiters] has been the size of the items. What we want to do, without destroying the design and the high-end elements of these products, is to create smart shipping. We don’t want to call it “flatpack” because that has a bad ring to it. It’s more about effective shipping.

So, for example, our new lounge chair by Luca Nichetto has a folding backrest, which means that you get half of the volume of a normal lounge chair. All the air is gone so the shipping is so much more effective. Of course it’s pretty green and good for the environment but also price-wise it’s pretty effective.

Marcus Fairs: Are you going to be working with traditional retailers as well, or will people only be able to buy the products online?

Joel Roos: We are definitely going to work with traditional retailers. We’re building a retailer network as we speak. We want to have good retailers. Because I don’t believe in only online, or only bricks and mortar. It’s about the combination. It’s about having a really nice combo where you can rely on your retailers to show your products but then give back to them by, for example, giving kickbacks for sales online and so forth.

We’re in a very weird situation in the field where some retailers are really suffering because of the big online stores, especially here in the Nordic countries. We have small retailers and customers go to their stores, have a look at the items and then disappear. The store never sees them again because much bigger retailers selling online with zero transport costs ship them for maybe 50% less to the customer.

Marcus Fairs: We call that “showrooming” in the UK. But how do you get around it? If a customer sees one of your products in a physical store but buys it online from you, how does the retailer benefit?

Joel Roos: This is a very interesting issue. We’re looking into different alternatives. One alternative we’ve already started with is to look at where the purchased is based. Let’s say Berlin: say we see a customer from Berlin on our web shop. If we have a good retailer in Berlin we give them a kickback for that sale via our web channel. It means that even though that customer might go home and buy it from our store, the retailer will still profit from this sale.

Marcus Fairs: Will people only be able to buy it online from you, or will they be able to find it cheaper on other websites?

Joel Roos: We’re one of the few manufacturers that really focusses on selling through our own online store. So we’d like to be the most important online seller of our own products. Of course there are really beautiful online stores that we might use as retailers, but those are not the ones that are robbing sales from us.

Marcus Fairs: What about other aspects such as customer service? If someone buys an armchair online and decides they don’t like it, or there’s a fault with it, what will happen? How will you give the customer service that people expect?

Joel Roos: That’s the other part of good retailer contacts. What we’re working on is the mechanism of customer claims, so that unhappy customers can go to their familiar retailer in their city. The problem usually with online sales is that you have nobody in your country: you’re trying to call Germany, nobody answers, they tell you to send an email. But if we have a good collaboration with our retailers they can be the ones doing this. Of course they will get their fair share for the work they do. This way we can make it more secure for the customer.

Marcus Fairs: Another problem with buying furniture the traditional way is you go into your nice local design store, you choose your piece and then they tell you it’s going to take three months to arrive. How long will it take people to get the products they buy online from you? People expect things to arrive faster when they buy online.

Joel Roos: This is of course a problem with online sales: people’s expectations are really high. There’s two sides to it. When people visit an online store they expect everything to work perfectly and their tolerance of mistakes is very low. And then of course with delivery times, people want things to arrive pretty quickly. We are now looking at two weeks, which for a lounge chair is okay.

Marcus Fairs: Worldwide?

Joel Roos: No, right now we’re working in Europe with our online store. Outside of Europe we are working through partners because it would be too difficult to handle. Our own webshop onenordic.com works within the limits of Europe, where we can guarantee transport within 14 days. So far that has been sufficient for our customers.

This is such an interesting topic to think about. Where is this field going? Where are we now? It just feels like, when you go to Italy, time is stuck. Nothing has happened in this field.

I’m a lawyer by education but my family has a background in the furniture field. The family business is furniture retail. I was working as a lawyer in New York in 2008 when the market crashed. At that point my mother who was the CEO of the company called and said could I come back to Finland to help in the furniture business.

So I came and after that I started going to fairs and meeting people. It was so interesting that in many other retail fields so much is happening. But in the furniture field many, many companies retail exactly the same way as they did in the seventies. That’s how this idea came up: that things that could be done differently.

Marcus Fairs: Are all these products available to buy now?

Joel Roos: Almost all. The new shelf by Staffan Holm is still a prototype. The other new items here will be ready in six weeks, for example the Luca Nichetto lounge chair. But all items that we already had in our collection, plus the Levels ??? lamp by Form Us With Love, are already available online.

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Finding refuge in the charm and quiet of Cafe Mogador in NYC’s East Village, artists and friends Scooter LaForge and Johnny Rozsa meet almost every morning for a cup of Moroccan mint tea and a portrait. It is a routine that has become almost ritualistic for the artists in…

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Working out of Berlin and Vancouver, multimedia artist Jeremy Shaw is a busy man supplying both cities with his highly involved works. Currently, Shaw is exhibiting in Berlin alongside artists such as Yoko Ono and Geoffrey Farmer, in the conceptual group show, “One On One,” which is curiously designed…

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Following our story about plans for a 3D-printed house, Universe Architecture’s Janjaap Ruijssenaars tells us about the race to be first to print an entire building (+ interview + slideshow).

Ben Hobson: Our post about your plans to 3D print an entire house is one of the most popular stories we’ve ever published. Tell us about the Landscape House.

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: In 2009 we [Universe Architecture] entered a competition for a beautiful location in Belwell, on the western coast of Ireland. The location was so beautiful that we thought, if you brought traditional architecture here, then you’re going to make a cut in the landscape. So our question was: “can you make a building like landscape?”

Our answer to that question was to create a continuous structure that doesn’t have a beginning and doesn’t have an end. We got a strip of paper and tried to fold it and bend it and see if we could make a structure that is endless in itself. By turning and twisting we got on to the Möbius band principal.

We didn’t win the competition, but I thought the idea was so strong that I proceeded [to develop the design] and approached people that could help me.

Ben Hobson: And one of those people was Enrico Dini, who invented the D-Shape printer [the world’s largest 3D printer]?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: Yes, that’s an important connection. We had been trying different materials to make a small model of the house – we tried to use lead as well as paper – but the only way to make it was with a 3D printer. Having this model in our hands we thought, “why not take it to the next level and see if this principal works on a larger scale?”

Ben Hobson: So you had the concept, and the only way you could realise that was to use 3D printing. Is that right?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: Yes, that’s the chronology. We started off with the landscape and then the right technique seemed to be 3D printing.

Ben Hobson: Tell me a bit about the D-Shape printer.

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: Enrico has dedicated his life to make the biggest 3D printer he can, so he can print the biggest structures possible. So really it is his ambition that makes Landscape House possible. It uses ground-up rock or sand that is put into the printer and then hardened by adding a [binding agent].

Ben Hobson: So it’s a kind of artificial sandstone? Does it have a similar texture?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: In 2D printing you have pixels, with 3D printing you have voxels. The voxels that Enrico’s machine produces are five millimetres high, wide and deep. You can think of them as small cubes. So this will influence the texture on the outside of the building.

Ben Hobson: So the 3D-printed parts will provide the finish for the walls of the building?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: Everything that is printed will be seen in the end product. The curved walls at the ends, even the stairs inside; everything you see that is not transparent will be out of the printer.

Ben Hobson: And will you need to treat that material in any way?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: Inside we will polish it, but outside we will probably keep it as it is. We’re really interested to show the material that is printed.

Ben Hobson: And is the material structurally sound?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: What Dini proposed for this house was to not print the whole floor, or ceiling, for example, but to print the outside shape of the floor or ceiling. So what you get is a hollow structure in which we put reinforced concrete. You can have a beam as well as a column when you do this.

Before our Landscape House design, you could easily use the printer to print columns that go up vertically. But it was not possible to print something that has a horizontal connection, like a beam. By putting reinforced concrete within a hollow 3D-printed structure you can have a vertical load on top of a horizontal structure. And that opens the door for all types of designs. That was Enrico Dini’s idea.

Ben Hobson: Couldn’t you have used traditional construction methods to build this house? Why use 3D printing?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: One important thing is the endlessness of it: you work from bottom to top and there’s no beginning and no end. But maybe even more important is the fact that the shape is already in the computer and you can print the complex forms, the twists and the turns of the stairs, for example, directly as you designed it.

In the traditional way of building [with concrete] you have to make timber moulds which you will later take away again. But it’s very complex with these curves to make moulds that you fill with concrete and then remove – that’s an enormous effort.

Ben Hobson: So explain the construction process. As I understand it, the house will be built in 3D-printed segments that slot together.

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: That’s where we stood last week. That’s a process the [D-Shape] printer in Italy can handle now. But within the media there have been some reactions to the fact it’s in pieces and it’s not one print.

So now we’re also exploring the possibility of the printer following the direction of the house. The printer would go around a few hundred times, and basically print it in one go. That’s my ambition because then it would be continuous, from bottom to top. And I think it’s possible.

To print it in a few large pieces and then put it together is a very important step because you can still print the curves and the stairs. You can print [those complex sections] in one go. But to make the whole building in one go would be even more true to the idea behind the design.

Ben Hobson: And what ramifications will the use of 3D-printed parts have on the rest of the construction process?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: Traditional things like “how do you make a large span?” will remain the same; gravity will work in the same way. But it’s interesting to see how traditional [construction] techniques and these new [3D printing] techniques will work together. For example, the printed parts can incorporate space for the plumbing, or the electricity.

Ben Hobson: And where are you now with the project? When will construction start?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: The ambition is to start at the beginning of next year [2014], but we don’t have a commission that’s fixed at this moment. There’s interest from Brazil to construct a residential centre for a large national park, a few hours away from San Paulo. We’re looking into how serious that is.

Above: basement floor plan – click for larger image

Ben Hobson: Assuming you find a client, how much will it cost?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: My estimation is around five million Euros. But this depends on many things: what country, what site, things like that.

Ben Hobson: And how long would construction take?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: The estimated time for the printed parts is over half a year. So construction will probably take between half a year and a year.

Above: ground floor plan – click for larger image

Ben Hobson: So the speed of the printer is the main thing that slows you down?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: If we continue doing research then we’ll get the building time sharper than that. One option for this house [rather than using a 3D printer] would be to bend steel like you would with the bow of a ship. Then you could have everything pre-fabricated and maybe build it within six months. But I think eventually 3D printing will be competitive.

Ben Hobson: Are there any other architecture firms looking to use 3D printing to build a house?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: We would be first. There is a Dutch company called DUS Architects and they have the ambition of printing a house. I don’t want to offend them, but in my opinion Enrico Dini is the only person who can print a true building at this stage, and he’s sure that this would be the first.

Above: first floor plan

Ben Hobson: And where can this technology go? In the future will buildings be constructed, or part-constructed, using 3D printing?

Janjaap Ruijssenaars: I think it has great potential, but it has to be the best way of constructing [for any given project]. The design has to really relate to the technique, or have specific features that can only be done by a 3D printer. For Landscape House, 3D printing is nice because it relates so much to the design.

Above: long section – click for larger image

See all our stories about 3D printing »

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a “whole building in one go” appeared first on Dezeen.