Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: developing “living architecture” could help humanity survive, claims senior University of Greenwich lecturer Rachel Armstrong, who is investigating how we could grow a city in space.
Visualisation of living architecture by Dan Tassell
“The world in which our cities are situated is lively,” says Armstrong. “A living city could confer survival strategies and some form of adaptation to our buildings.”
Living buildings could “absorb pollutants and carbon dioxide,” she claims, and even offer better protection against natural disasters.
“In an age when we’re faced with repeated flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, I think that to design for instability is a really powerful thing.”
Illustration of what the starship Persephone might look like by Phil Watson & Jon Morris
Armstrong, who is also a senior TED fellow and founder of research group Black Sky Thinking, is currently investigating how we would grow cities from soils as part of a project called Persephone. Led by the Icarus Interstellar foundation, the ambition of the project is to achieve interstellar space travel by the year 2100.
Illustration of what the starship Persephone might look like
“Persephone is the design and engineering of the living interior of a starship,” Armstrong explains. “This is a world ship. It contains human inhabitants and therefore the interior of this space needs to support these peoples for the duration of their journey, and that could be hundreds, potentially thousands of years.”
Visualisation of synthetic soil on the starship Pershephone
She continues: “The architectures within this space will be grown from the bottom up, using the soils. The soils themselves will not be made inert like they are on earth – like bricks. In Persephone the culture would be to keep the liveliness of everything. So we will be extruding structures from soils. In some ways I can think of them being like the caves in Cappadocia in Turkey.”
Cappadocia caves, Turkey
While Armstrong admits the realisation of such a “world ship” is far off, she believes research into biological buildings and construction methods is important for life on earth.
“This might seem quite esoteric and ‘out there’,” she says. “But Persephone is essential for us because it asks us questions about what survivability and sustainability is on our planet right now.”
Rachel Armstrong
The music featured in the movie is a track called Everything Everywhere Once Was by UK producer 800xL. You can listen to more original music on Dezeen Music Project.
Despite a conservative fashion industry, rapid changes in technology will transform the clothes we wear, says Benjamin Males, of London-based fashion and technology company Studio XO.
Early development sketches of the Anemone dress
“We believe fashion is quite antiquated,” he says. “While everything around us becomes intelligent, becomes more computational, our clothes are still very old-fashioned”.
This will not be the case for long, says Males, who believes that advances in micro-robotics and transformable textiles will soon make their way into everyday clothing, helping create clothes that can change shape using small motors.
Lady Gaga wearing Anemone
“We believe in the next decade we’re going to see some pretty amazing things happen around transformable textiles and mechanical movement in our clothes: we are looking at introducing that in the next five years,” he says.
He points to the ubiquitous use of smartphones as evidence that people are becoming increasingly comfotable with having sophisticated technology on or very close to their bodies.
Moving up and down a clothes size may soon be possible without having to buy new clothes, predicts Males.
“We [will soon be able to] change the fit of our clothes at the push of a button, or our clothes could form new architectures around us,” he says.
Lady Gaga wearing Anemone
Males is one of the founding partners of Studio XO, whose work includes dresses for Lady Gaga: Volantis, a flying dress powered by 12 electric motor-driven rotors, and the bubble-blowing dress Anemone, which is documented in this movie.
Males describes Studio XO’s Anemone as a provocation and a commentary on the future of textiles.
Development sketches for Anemone
Anemone is a dress that blows large and small bubbles, the small ones creating a foam structure around the wearer and the large bubbles flying away.
Males calls the mechanisms that create this effect bubble factories. These are small, 3D-printed jaw mechanisms. When they open, a fan blows out large or small bubbles depending on the size of the mechanism’s aperture.
The dress was unveiled in 2013, when Lady Gaga wore it to the iTunes festival. It is the second so-called bubble dress which Lady Gaga has worn, the first one being a nude leotard with plastic transparent globes attached to it.
Dezeen Music Project: discoloured images from children’s science journals have been collaged together by videographer Ewan Jones Morris to create this music video for London band Fanfarlo’s Cell Song (+ movie).
Fanfarlo approached Ewan Jones Morris to create the video for their latest album after seeing his previous work, and offered him the choice of which song to create the visuals.
“They were exploring a lot of sci-fi concepts with their new album,” Jones Morris told Dezeen. “I chose Cell Song as much for the subject as anything else and the story of the video grew from that.”
Imagery zooms in and out, showing sections of life forms from microscopic detail, through cellular and tissue levels up to a more familiar, human scale.
During the video, figures and objects transform into strange creatures and the singers’ faces pop-up in bubbles and on screens of vintage TVs.
The director created the animation from images of children’s science magazines from the 1960s.
“I collect a few different ‘knowledge’ magazines aimed at children, most of them printed in the 1960s – back when kids were into science, cross sections of fungus or who invented the sewing machine,” Jones Morris told Dezeen.
“There’s never a shortage of cell diagrams in biology text books,” he added.
“I used to spend hours looking through these kinds of books as a kid, and I always imagined something beyond what was actually happening in the pictures, made connections between completely different images,” said Jones Morris. “That’s what I’m recreating, that process of collaging with my brain as I scanned through those books.”
The visuals were assembled in Photoshop and each frame – 12 per second – was printed out onto paper using an “unreliable” inkjet machine.
“I try and avoid more complicated software because I want to keep everything 2D and a bit wonky,” said Jones Morris.
He tampered with the ink cartridges so the print becomes uneven, then each page was photographed slightly crumpled or wet to distort the pictures.
Cell Song features on Fanfarlo’s album Let’s Go Extinct released in February 2014.
Milan 2014: a product designed by Dutch designer Pepe Heykoop to be made in an Indian slum has been a runaway success, creating employment for 80 families within a year of launch (+ movie + interview).
Speaking to Dezeen in Milan last week, Heykoop said workers making his Paper Vase earned the equivalent of eight Euros per day, which is eight times the average wage in the Mumbai slum.
“The ambition is to have 700 people out of poverty in ten years time,” said Heykoop. “We are pretty much half way”.
Initially launched in February last year, Heykoop presented the vase at Ventura Lambrate in Milan this year along with a range of other products he designed as part of a project organised by charity the Tiny Miracles Foundation to lift people out of poverty in Mumbai.
Online orders for the vase are averaging around 100 per day, allowing the foundation to keep 80 families in regular employment.
However the other products proved unsuitable to the project, which struggled for the first couple of years.
“In 2012 we never thought this was actually happening and now there’s light at the end of the tunnel and there’s a really good vibe going,” Heykoop said.
The success of the flat-pack vase – which is made of paper and sewn together – has led Heykoop to develop another folded paper product. Prototypes of his flatpack Paper Lamp were on show at Ventura Lambrate.
“The paper vase was the breakthrough and for 2014 I have this paper folded light, which has the same principal and has been flat-packed in an envelope,” said Heykoop.
Prototypes of Heykoop’s Paper Lamps
After they’re made, the products are shipped from Mumbai to Heykoop’s studio in Amsterdam then distributed to consumers worldwide. However, if the buyers live east of India then the designs are shipped straight from there to save them travelling all the way around the world.
The Tiny Miracles Foundation, set up in 2010, is half way towards its goal for 2020 to provide 150 families with a wage of ten euros a day – the UNICEF standard for a middle class wage – in return for their production skills.
Heykoop’s original ideas for the project were lampshades from lambskin, transforming traditional water carriers into leathery vases, but the products proved difficult for the community to produce and too expensive for consumers to purchase.
“I started off with leather lampshades; they’re like 550 Euros in the shop,” he said. “It’s nice when you sell a bunch of them but you have work and then you don’t have work for a few weeks. These ladies were coming to me and asking ‘can I work next month’, and I wanted to say yes but I couldn’t, because the products were not selling on a daily basis.”
Women from Tiny Miracles assembling vases
Heykoop hopes to train the families in Mumbai to manage the distribution themselves, so the process becomes contained within the community after the programme finishes in six years time.
“This foundation stops in 2020 but it doesn’t mean that this workshop stops in 2020,” Heykoop explained. “If we stop the workshop in 2020, it will all collapse again. If the foundation stops providing the information, then they should be self sustainable.”
Here’s an edited transcript of the interview with Pepe Heykoop:
Marcus Fairs: Tell us about the project that you’re showing in Milan.
Pepe Heykoop: I’ve been a collaborator for four years with Tiny Miracles Foundation, which has been set up by my cousin. This community group that we’re aiming at lives in a slum in Mumbai and they used to be basketry weavers. They earned one euro a day for the whole family.
Most of them were illiterate, couldn’t count to ten it was like hardcore surviving on the streets. Then my cousin started the foundation and she asked me: “Pepe can you design some items that we can produce with them because we want to bring education, we want to bring healthcare but we also want to provide jobs so they can eventually pay for the healthcare and education themselves.”
So I went there and for me it was the second time in India, and it’s such a different world. When I started designing things, it was really heard to blend in with their way of thinking and their world and my world. It took two and a half years to find something that really worked.
Women from Tiny Miracles assembling vases
Marcus Fairs: What’s the ambition of the Tiny Miracles Foundation? To employ people?
Pepe Heykoop: The ambition is to have 700 people out of poverty in ten years time. I’m only working on the creating jobs pillar and Laurien [Meuter] was taking care of the healthcare and education, other pillars.
Marcus Fairs: So the idea was for you to come up with some products that they could manufacture?
Pepe Heykoop: Well all of them can do basketry weaving with their eyes closed but I said I don’t want to do something with weaving or bamboo, because it has this ethnic look and this fair-trade image and I think we should focus on something new. That a product should sell itself. You want it because you like it, you buy it and then the story is a plus, an extra.
Pepe Heykoop helping with vase assembly
Marcus Fairs: You don’t buy it because you feel guilty, or feel sorry for people.
Pepe Heykoop: No, there’s a lot of good initiatives. You want to support them and then you get an ugly basket, you know what I mean. So these products don’t look like they’ve been made by these people living on the street and that’s where I wanted to go.
But it’s hard. It’s hard when people cannot count to ten to work with them but luckily there was this force within me to not give up and act like a pit bull, hanging on. We found something with the folded paper vase covering to be put around an empty bottle and shipped in an envelope. It comes as a gift and it works out really well. We’ve sold like 100 pieces a day at the moment and that’s why now, starting off with seven people in 2011, now we have over 80 people employed in 2014. We’e heading towards a goal of a group of 700 people, equal to about 150 families.
Marcus Fairs: So that’s the target?
Pepe Heykoop: This is half way. The project takes until 2020, so in four years we are pretty much halfway. In 2012 we never thought this was actually happening and now there’s light at the end of the tunnel and there’s a really good vibe going on since about one and a half years ago.
Group of women from Tiny Miracles assembling vases
Marcus Fairs: Tell us briefly about the other two products.
Pepe Heykoop: The paper vase was the breakthrough and for 2014 I have this paper folded light, which has the same principal and has been flat packed in an envelope. The weight’s really low.
These samples I’ve been making during the last week in the studio are prototypes, and I’m testing colours now and colours of the treads and we’ll see which one it’s going to be. This paper should be coated and then within three seconds you just pop it up and there’s a certain tension in the paper, which gives it shape. So then we’re going to sell this separately, the electricity and separately the shade, if you want to change it for a different colour.
It should also be a low price range. The Paper Vase is 19 euros in the shop and this one we want to have 35, 39 euros for the other. Everybody can buy it, because that’s the only way we can have these women working on a daily basis.
I started off with leather lampshades; they’re like 550 euros in the shop. It’s nice when you sell a bunch of them but you have work and then you don’t have work for a few weeks and then there’s work and then there’s not work. These ladies were coming to me and asking “can I work next month”, and I wanted to say yes but I couldn’t, because the products were not selling on a daily basis.
Group of women from Tiny Miracles
Marcus Fairs: So what techniques do they use to manufacture these?
Pepe Heykoop: There’s paper and sewing. Actually I started off in 2011 with the welding and way too complex techniques, and I had failure after failure. Then at a certain moment, I said I’ll get a folding class and I invited 30 women to come and fold a sheet of paper in half. None of them could do this correctly and then I was shocked because I thought “this is the final try” if folding a sheet of paper doesn’t work.
So then of course after some training, I made something like a game out of it, because I want this workshop to have a really positive vibe and I hate production in China where you’re not allowed to see how stuff is done. If you know where your T-shirt is coming from in these factories in Bangladesh, you don’t want to wear it. So I said we can do, of course we can do production in such a nice way as I can do it in Amsterdam. We can do it there as well and we don’t just take something but we also give something back. That’s the whole.
Pepe Heykoop and women from Tiny Miracles
Marcus Fairs: Do they work from home or is there a workshop they go to?
Pepe Heykoop: We started off with a really dark crappy spot near the street; there were rats running round and cockroaches and rain was coming in, but you should start from something. Then in 2012, we changed into a bigger room and now we have a big room, a proper room that’s clean and light. There’s no rain coming in.
Marcus Fairs: And you said that people get paid to eat, one euro a day. Do you pay them the same, or do you pay them more than the average?
Pepe Heykoop: No no no, they used to earn one euro a day with basketry weaving for the whole family and we go up to ten euros a day, which is the UNICEF standard for middle class. Now it’s eight euros but by 2020, it will be something around ten. If you increase the salary ten times more, you will only ruin the system over there because they will hate each other; who can work with us and who can’t. So we integrate this amount in education and doctor visits. So now behind the scenes we are paying that and every year they should pay 10 percent more for education and doctor visits. So within ten years, they are paying this themselves gradually.
Marcus Fairs: And finally, do they make the products and also ship the products to the customers, or do they put them in a big crate and send them to you in the Netherlands and then you do it from there?
Pepe Heykoop: For the moment, we have everything sent to Holland. Except for orders that go to Japan or Australia, like the other way round, then we ship them directly. But it involves a lot of training, because there should be final checks, so we do some final checking in Holland but we want to train them to do that.
This foundation stops in 2020 but it doesn’t mean that this workshop stops in 2020. So the foundation helps with understanding how it works, with the doctor visits and the schooling and whenever they make the money. If we stop the workshop in 2020, it will all collapse again. If the foundation stops providing the information, then they should be self sustainable.
Milan 2014: designers from MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group have created a shape-shifting table that reacts to human presence with a series of 1,000 tiny motors built into the frame (+ movie).
Named Transform, the table is divided into three separate surfaces, where more than 1,000 small squares attached to individual motors that are hidden from view.
When a user passes their hand across the surface, the individual squares rise up in sequence and create a ripple effect.
The table can also create abstract shapes on its own, and transfer objects across the surface, thanks to a series of pre-programmed animation sequences.
Transform was created by Daniel Leithinger and Sean Follmer and overseen by their professor Hiroshi Ishii.
“A pixel is intangible,” Ishii told Dezeen. “You can only use it through mediating and remote control, like a mouse or a touchscreen. We decided to physically embody computation and information.”
Hiroshi Ishii, head of concept design for Transform
According to the team, the concept is a look at how furniture could evolve in future. It forms part of the MIT Tangible Media Group’s Radical Atoms project, which explores human interaction with materials that are reconfigurable by computer.
“We don’t want the furniture to become more important than the motion. We want to make it feel like it’s a unified design and they are not separate,” said Amit Zoran, one of the product designers on the project.
Transform changes shape by a series of sensors that detect movement above the surface. However, the table could change according to the emotions of people around it, and create a melody to soothe those around the table, said its creators.
“Imagine, this is equivalent of the invention of a new medium. Painting, plastic, and computer graphics. It has infinite possibilities,” said Ishii.
Working with skilled local craftspeople is both a duty and an opportunity for Indian designers, says Prateek Jain of lighting design company Klove, in the third and final movie from BE OPEN’s Made In… India Samskara exhibition in New Delhi.
“It’s the biggest job of a designer to make sure that they work with handicrafts people,” says Prateek Jain, co-founder of Klove. “Whether it’s a fashion designer who works with an embroiderer or whether it’s us working with wood carvers or stone cutters.”
Installation by Klove
Both sides benefit when designers work with traditional craft producers, says Jain, and can help bring craftsmen’s work to new markets. “It’s very important to apply a more contemporary design aesthetic to these handicraft [skills]” he says.
Jain’s chosen medium is glass, thanks to an encounter he had with craftsmen in Ambala, a town in northern India. When he saw local glass-blowers creating intricate glassware for laboratories, he knew he had spotted an opportunity.
One of Klove’s lampshades being shaped
“We saw that they were doing these beautiful, flawless bowls of silica glass,” he says. “The blowers had been making beakers, flasks and test tubes for generations. We realised that [we could use] this skill set to explore home decor.”
A glass blower working on one of Klove’s lampshades
Together with his partner Gautam Seth he took these techniques used for creating lab-ware into unexpected contexts: creating luxury lighting installations for an international client base.
One of Klove’s chandeliers
Klove now creates large, ornate custom-made lighting installations working in a palette of blown glass, brass, steel and copper.
For the show Klove used blown glass and beaten metal to create a large lighting installation in the shape of a peacock, India’s national bird.
“We knew that [the curators] wanted to represent India in a modern way. Instantly the idea of a peacock came into our head because it’s the national bird,” says Jain. “We wanted to represent the peacock in a contemporary manner but at the same time have a strong Indian aesthetic to it”.
The feathers that make up the peacock’s fanned tail are represented by 48 slender glass stems, similar in form to elongated laboratory flasks.
Hand-blown light shades by Klove
“The great part about being in this country is that you have great access to a great resource of talent. You have craftsmen who have been doing this work for many centuries” says Jain.
Detail of hand-blown light shades by Klove
Samskara, which ran from 10 to 28 February at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, launched BE OPEN’s Made In… programme, a two-year-long project focussing on the future of craft in design.
The music featured in the movie is a track called Bonjour by Kartick & Gotam on Indian record label EarthSync.
A year after establishing their architectural practice, Canadian architects David and Susan Scott have created a timber-lined studio for themselves in a converted butcher and grocery shop in Vancouver (+ movie).
The husband-and-wife team co-founded Scott & Scott Architects at the start of 2013 but until now have been without a dedicated studio, so they set about creating one in the former shop premises below their home – a building dating back to 1911.
The architects stripped back the interior of the 70-square-metre space to create a simple rectangular studio at the front, a workshop at the back and a wall of concealed storage in between.
Douglas fir planks were sourced from a local sawmill to line the walls, floor and ceiling of the main room. These were treated with a traditional beeswax, mixed with a solvent of Canadian Whiskey to produce a gleaming surface.
The former shopfront was fully glazed, helping to bring as much light as possible into the space, but also allowing neighbours to see what’s going on inside.
“The priorities were to maximise the use of natural light, enhance the connection to the neighbourhood, use regional materials which have a known providence and acknowledge the lumber-based building culture of the Pacific Northwest,” explained David Scott.
The couple enlisted the help of local carpenters to help them build the space themselves. Wooden cupboards were constructed from plywood and stained in black, creating a contrast with the lighter wood elsewhere.
The space is completed by glass pendant lights and a series of bespoke desks, which the architects designed and made with galvanised steel frames and hand-stitched leather surfaces.
Movie is by Odette Visual, with a score by Joel RL Phelps. Photography is by the architects.
Here’s a project description from Scott & Scott Studio:
Scott & Scott Studio
A year after the launch of their practice architects Susan and David Scott have completed the refurbishment of the historic commercial space in their 1911 East Vancouver residence. Once a butcher shop and a long running grocery store, the space has been stripped back to a simple volume lined with Douglas fir boards and completed with black stained fir plywood millwork.
Using familiar materials from their region, the architects built the space themselves with a couple of carpenters. The fir was supplied from a sawyer on Vancouver Island with whom they have worked for several years. Three fir logs were selected, milled and cut to suit the width and height of the space. The work was completed in a manner rooted in traditional methodology while utilising the availability of modern tooling. The unsalvageable south-facing storefront had been infilled by a previous owner and was restored to an area of glass consistent with the original size using a single high performance unit.
Informed by a desire to create work which is fundamental in its architecture and supportive of a variety of uses over time, the priorities were to maximise the use of natural light, enhance the connection to the neighbourhood, use regional materials which have a known providence, and acknowledge the lumber-based building culture of the Pacific Northwest.
Floor plan
The architects favour materials and approaches that wear in and appreciate over time, taking on warmth with maintenance. The interior fir boards are finished with a variant of a warm applied 19th century beeswax floor finish with the solvent replaced with Canadian Whiskey.
The tables (a first of their self-produced furniture designs) are hand-stitched finished leather tops on blackened galvanised steel bases.
The world’s first flying dress, Volantis, on its first public demonstration in November 2013. Credit: Terry Richardson
Rapidly developing flight technology will make personal flying vehicles commercially viable in the near future according to Benjamin Males, co-founder of London-based fashion and technology company Studio XO, who developed the Volantis for Lady Gaga.
“Volantis might seem very science fiction,” says Males, “but if you consider the developments in vehicle design, if you look at the trends toward space travel and jet pack design, actually the idea of having a personal aerial vehicle that has to have style doesn’t seem that crazy”.
Lady Gaga with Studio XO’s directors, Nancy Tilbury and Benjamin Males. Credit: Terry Richardson
“Who knows, in ten years time we may all be flying round in Volantises,” he adds.
Volantis is remote controlled and flies using 12 battery-powered propellors. Flown by a trained pilot who specialises in unmanned vehicles, it was unveiled with Lady Gaga at a warehouse in Brooklyn, New York City, in November last year.
Speaking to Dezeen at Studio XO’s London headquarters, Males explains how the aircraft is powered by 12 rotor blades and borrows technology commonly used in the manufacture of drones.
“It’s known as a hex 12. It has six arms and 12 rotors. Each arm has two rotors which provide the thrust to lift [it] off the ground,” he says.
The truss section at the centre of the aircraft, to which Gaga was fastened by a belt, is made of titanium. The rotors and her custom-made bodice are made of carbon fibre.
The passenger stands inside a white bodice that is connected to the truss. “Although the machine had to be strong, we also wanted it to have the affordances of fashion. So we made a very beautiful front casing which completed the dress,” says Males.
Volantis hovering above the ground on its first public flight. Credit: Terry Richardson
White cylinders surround the rotors in hexagonal formation and connect in the centre above the dress, which rests on the ground using a circular stand when not in flight.
Lady Gaga in front of Volantis
Studio XO has also worked with other high-profile artists including the Black Eyed Peas and Azealia Banks, to create hybrid stage costumes that combine fashion and technology.
“We bring these subjects together, in this space – in this quite unique environment,” says Males, who is now working on the launch of a new ready-to-wear brand developing some of the ideas from the company’s stage work.
Milan 2014: London studio Poetic Lab has revealed a new iteration of Ripple – a lighting collection that imitates movement on water – at Milan design week (+ movie).
The concept design for Ripple was originally shown by Poetic Lab last year in Milan, but has since been developed further into two different sizes and put into production with Austrian crystal brand J. & L. Lobmeyr.
Each style consists of two unevenly hand-blown glass domes sitting on brass bases. A G4 halogen light shines from within the smaller dome through the larger dome as it slowly rotates. This creates a constantly changing mix of light and shadow to create a ripple effect on the surfaces around the lights.
“When I first saw Ripple I was totally struck by this effect and I had to sit down for about 30 minutes and watch it,” said Lobmeyr’s co-owner Leonid Rath. “It was really an emotional decision to take it into a range.”
“It’s not about designing a lamp, it’s about the experience and the emotion that is created by this moving light,” Poetic Lab co-founder and designer Hanhsi Chen told Dezeen.
Firing the glass in the furnace
“The inspiration of the collection comes from the nature beauty of light and fluid matters. We try to capture the essence of light through its gentle movements, just as all the nature light do,” said Chen.
The molten glass out of the furnace
“The process starts with the hot molten glass and as it interacts with the air, gravity and the breeze of the blower it gradually takes shape into a mysterious bubble,” added Chen.
Blowing air into the molten glass
Ripple is on show at the Spazio Rosanna Orlandi, Via Matteo Bandello 14-16, Milan.
Lasvit launched nine new collections at its Emotions show in Milan, including designs by a host of international designers as well as a series of kinetic sculptures by the company’s in-house team.
Frozen by Maxim Velcovsky for Lasvit
Czech designer Maxim Velčovský, who is also the company’s art director, created a series of hanging glass lamps called Frozen, which are created by pouring molten glass over a dome-shaped mould and left to cool.
“I was very much inspired by nature, when water becomes ice,” he says of the lamps, which are displayed in a cluster with drops of water running down them. “People are not sure whether they are looking at ice or glass, so they they knock on the lamp trying to figure it out.”
Das Pop by Maarten Baas for Lasvit
Dutch designer Maarten Baas created a modular chandelier called Das Pop using his signature Clay method in which a synthetic clay is moulded around a metal frame.
“It’s made all by hand and with Lasvit’s craftsman we also made hand-blown lightbulbs,” he explains. “Das Pop is one of my favourite Belgian bands, which is where the name comes from.”
Crystal Rock by Arik Levy for Lasvit
Arik Levy designed a series of simple crystal-shaped pendants, which are available in a variety of different colours and opacities.
“We get reflections off the facets, even when the light is off,” he says. “When it’s on and when it’s off it always stays beautiful.”
“When you blow crystal, it’s typically bubbly and round,” says the American architect’s son, Lev Libeskind. “Our language has always been more angular and sharp. So we said, “What would happen if we took our sharpness and impose it on the glass?” The result provides a really interesting counterpoint between material and form.”
Alice by Petra Krausova for Lasvit
Lasvit’s Emotions show also features two moving glass sculptures, including a hanging lotus flower designed by Petra Krausová, which opens and closes in time to music and is controlled by an iPhone app.
Magnetic by Libor Sostak for Lasvit
Visual artist Jakub Nepraš also created a sculpture made from shards of glass shaped like a tree, onto which a series of digital images are projected.
Kora by Jakub Nepras for Lasvit
“There is craftsmanship, there is poetry behind each collection and this year there is also a lot of technology on show,” explains Lasvit founder and president Leon Jakimič. “I believe we are the first company to combine glass art with really advanced technology.”
Moluds by Plechac and Wielgus for Lasvit
Lasvit’s Emotions show, which also features designs by Michael Young and Czech designers Jan Plechac and Henry Wielgus, is at Office Stendhal on Via Stendhal in Milan and is open from 10am to 8pm until 13 April.
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