Hasta La Ideas

News: Jean Nouvel’s One Central Park residential tower in Sydney will feature the world’s tallest vertical garden by inventor of living walls, Patrick Blanc.

Blanc, who has been designing living walls for over 30 years, has been working with Nouvel to install plants and vines up the 166-metre facade of Sydney’s One Central Park tower – which when completed later this year will become the tallest living wall in the world.

“The building, together with my vertical garden, will be an architectural work floating in the air, with plants growing on the walls – it will create a very special result that will be very new to Sydney,” said Blanc.

The vertical garden consists of 190 native Australian and 160 exotic plant species. The shrubbery covers 50 percent of the building’s facade and according to the designers intends to extend the greenery from the adjacent park onto the building.

The Central Park project by Ateliers Jean Nouvel consists of two adjoining residential towers that house 624 apartments. Nouvel’s towers are 116 metres and 64.5 metres in height and are part of a larger mixed-use development that includes apartments, shops, cafes, restaurants and office units.

The tallest tower features a large cantilever that contains 38 luxury penthouse apartments. On the underneath, there is a heliostat of motorised mirrors that direct sunlight down onto the surrounding gardens. After nightfall the cantilever is used as a canvas for a LED light installation by artist Yann Kersalé.

Public tours of Central Park project were held in June and the development is due for completion by January 2014.

Blanc has also created a new living wall that features waves of 7600 plants for Paris Design Week which will be officially inaugurated tomorrow.

Other living walls we’ve featured recently include London’s largest green wall in Victoria that the designers said will combat flooding and a family house that conceals a wall of plants behind its slate-clad facade.

See more living walls »
See more green design »

Images courtesy Atelier Jean Nouvel.

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garden for Jean Nouvel’s Sydney tower appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2013: French architect Jean Nouvel unveiled a pair of leather and rubber boots for Italian shoe brand Ruco Line at the Interni Hybrid Architecture and Design exhibition in Milan this week.

Jean Nouvel’s Pure footwear for Ruco Line reduces the concept of a shoe to its purest form, according to the architect.

The boots have chunky rubber soles and calf leather uppers with a stretchy Lycra lining inside.

The name of the design is printed in abbreviated form – NVL PR 13 – on the top of the boot alongside a serial number, making each pair unique.

They come in white, black, fluorescent yellow and fuchsia and are sold in translucent plastic bags.

The footwear is on show at the University of Milan as part of the Interni Hybrid Architecture and Design exhibition, which runs until 21 April, as well as elsewhere across the city, including at Nouvel’s huge installation of future office environments at SaloneUfficio.

Other fashion launches in Milan this year include Ron Arad’s 3D-printed spectacles and Tom Dixon’s collection for Adidas featuring garments that convert into luggage and camping equipment – see all fashion on Dezeen.

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Here’s more information from Ruco Line:

Ruco Line previews Pure, the capsule collection designed by Jean Nouvel at the 2013 Milan Furniture Fair.

Ruco Line, a company specialised in the making of high quality designer sneakers, presents Pure, the capsule collection created through the collaboration with the French starchitect Jean Nouvel, dedicated to those who love purity of form. It is the first time that Nouvel explores the world of fashion, transferring his creative vision to an accessory that, beyond the standards of quality, functionality and aesthetics, is a true object of desire. A new perspective for the architect, who goes from the macro to the micro, from the designing of large buildings to that of a shoe, for which Nouvel has always had a passion.

The starting point is the architecture of the shoe, the work of taking away that is characteristic of Nouvel and his search for the ultimate essence of things. The result is a sneaker with a strong identity, a tradition with Ruco Line, for which linearity and essentiality are two cornerstones. The basic concept of the design is the monolith, the search for the elementary that is at the foundation of Jean Nouvel’s creative philosophy. The resulting simplicity is only apparent, the fruit of research that aims at the archetype that best expresses the object’s nature. The complexity, therefore, is dissembled and is perceived only when the sneaker is put on: the bottom, highlighted by a double band, is light and the purity of form gives the shoe a versatility that makes it right at any time during the day.

This complexity, or as Nouvel defines it, this contradiction between opposites becomes a creative paradigm. It makes reference to many dichotomies: simple/complex, light/heavy, macro/micro, universal/special.

This last contrast is developed through attention to details, to the personalisation created by means of the graphic elements that make each shoe unique. The graphic element that identifies Pure, which is also the result of the work of taking away in which the vowels are eliminated from the nouns, will be imprinted on the shoe upper together with a serial ID of the sneaker, making it unrepeatable. It is a refusal of standardisation and homologation, bringing the individual and their unique, original being back into the fore.

Pure, which Ruco Line is previewing at the Milan Furniture Fair, is made from the finest leather, emphasising even more the sneaker’s strong identity, in the neutral, white and black variations and in the bright fluorescent yellow and fuchsia colours.

Pure will be presented in Milan, following an itinerary including the symbolic places of fashion and design, two worlds that influence each other more and more often. The first models in the capsule collection will be shown at the Ruco Line stores on Via della Spiga and Corso di Porta Ticinese; in the concept shop 10CorsoComo; at Antonia Uomo on the second floor of the Excelsior; in the Design Supermarket on the basement floor of la Rinascente and in Spazio Rossana Orlandi; at the event Hybrid Architecture & Design organised by interns at the University of Milan; at the Brera Gallery, as part of the Spazio Umbria project and, lastly, at the iSaloni – Salone Ufficio, within the Project: office for living exhibition created by Jean Nouvel himself in Pav. 24.

The capsule collection will be presented in the display case designed by Jean Nouvel, in which one can see once again those elements of clean forms and linearity that have been the guiding thread of his creative opus. The shoes are inside transparent plastic sacks that are hanging inside clear Plexiglas showcases, underlining the importance of arriving immediately at the ultimate essence of the object, the pureness of the shoe.

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for Ruco Line appeared first on Dezeen.

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.

The post “Apartments make better places to
work than offices” – Jean Nouvel appeared first on Dezeen.

Here are the latest images of architect Jean Nouvel’s Philharmonie de Paris, set to become the world’s most expensive concert hall after surviving the French government’s recent cull of major cultural projects (+ slideshow).

Setting out its spending for 2013, the French culture ministry recently announced it was shelving several arts projects – including a controversial proposal for a museum of national history – as well as axing state funding for a Snøhetta-designed replica of the famous Lascaux cave paintings.

But despite running two years late and €187 million over budget, it was decided that building work on the Philharmonie de Paris was too far advanced to be halted.

The 2400-seat venue, located in the Parc de la Villette on the north-east edge of Paris, is now set to become the world’s most expensive concert hall after spiralling costs required the city and the state to sink an extra €51 million into architect Jean Nouvel’s project.

Construction costs are now expected to come in at €387 million, nearly double the original estimate of €200 million, with the opening date pushed back to 2015.

A French senate report recently criticised the “worrying drift” in the budget, suggesting the project is a “risky bet” against a gloomy economic backdrop, while state auditors also warned of the “exorbitant inflation in costs” of the publicly funded building.

When completed, visitors to the Philharmonie de Paris will be able to climb up its sloping metal-clad roof, while concert listings will be projected onto a 52-metre-high aluminium slab visible from the nearby ring road.

We first brought you images of the project back in 2007, after Nouvel’s studio won the competition to design the venue – see more of the first images here and here.

Other projects by Nouvel’s studio we’ve featured on Dezeen include a design showroom where furniture is caged behind chain link fencing and a renovated nineteenth century brewery in Barcelona – see all our stories about Jean Nouvel.

Images are by Jean Nouvel and Arte Factory or Jean Nouvel and Didier Ghislain.

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spared the axe appeared first on Dezeen.

Paris Design Week 2012: architect and designer Jean Nouvel unveiled a collection of aluminium chairs for Emeco at his studio in Paris this week.

“I wanted the lightest object possible,” Nouvel told Dezeen at the launch on Monday evening. “You can see how the material moves with the body and I spent a long time designing the curve of the chair.”

Emeco has been manufacturing aluminium chairs since they made the famously robust Navy chair for the US government in 1944.

Emeco have previously collaborated with other well-known architects and designers – see Norman Foster’s designs for the brand here and chairs by Philippe Starck here.

See all our stories about Jean Nouvel »

See all our stories about Emeco »

The following information is from Emeco:

The So-So Chair

Emeco is launching a new collection together with the French iconic designer Jean Nouvel. The So-So collection, include chairs and stools made of 80% recycled aluminum, reclaiming both post-industrial and post-consumer waste. The chairs and stools are lightweight and durable, all handmade in the factory in Pennsylvania, USA, using the same process as the famous Navy chairs from 1944. “I just kept the same DNA and evolved it into a new light and comfortable chair.” Says Jean Nouvel at the preview launch in Paris Sept, 2012. “Jean Nouvel has really managed to take the back bone of Emeco and leverage a new vocabulary,” says Emeco’s CEO, Gregg Buchbinder. Together Emeco and Jean Nouvel have highlighted the sustainable philosophy of using what others discard to make something beautiful and long lasting. “Working with Emeco is like being in a field of wheat. The crop is grown and my job was to simply harvest.” Says Jean Nouvel.

First installed at the Hotel Sofitel Vienna Stephandom

In true minimalistic Jean Nouvel spirit, the So-So chair follows what Nouvel often calls the quality of “Nothingness”. Curating a lean balance against the multi-colored illuminated video ceilings by Pipilotti Rist covering the cathedral inspired Hotel Sofitel Vienna Stephansdom in Austria. The So-So chair was first installed in the public spaces of the Sofitel flagship, acting as an intimate embracement and a perfect contrary to Rist’s bright and colorful works allowing the guests to engage in the views of the city. The public interiors at the dining areas are dominantly kept its raw grey, as for the So-So chair, made in hand brushed aluminum using the same lean process as its mid century antecedents. “Architecture is an opportunity, to continue games begun by others, years or even centuries ago,“ says Nouvel about the project.

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for Emeco appeared first on Dezeen.