Hasta La Ideas

Footwear designer Tracey Neuls explains why she shies away from “disposable fashion” and reveals that many customers consider her shoes “their best kept secret” in this movie Dezeen filmed at the Designed in Hackney Day PechaKucha, part of a series of talks and discussions we hosted in August.

Neuls starts her talk by saying she considers her work to be more akin to design than fashion, before explaining how she tries to create timeless pieces that customers “grow old with” rather than “bored with”.

She describes how she begins the design process by moulding the shoes from plasticine  and why she believes that approaching design like a child adds to the timelessness of the pieces.

Explaining her approach to manufacturing, she reveals that her shoes are made by families who have passed the trade down through generations, unlike most shoes which she describes as being “designed like a kit car, created by selecting pre-fab components”.

Neuls has two shops in London – one on Marylebone Lane, near Bond Street, and one on Rivington Street in Shoreditch – and she describes how a ”no shoes on shelves” policy in her shops provides a different approach to retail, where unique installations “complete the story of the shoes” and make her customers feel special.

She concludes the talk by showing images of the collection she designed in collaboration with designer Tord Boontje, which features autumn leaf motifs.

Neuls has been designing shoes under her own label Tracey Neuls and TN_29 for almost 12 years – see all our stories about her here.

We’ll be publishing movies of the talks over the coming days and you can also watch architects Studio Weave talk about how architects should be wary of “thinking that they know how to do everything” and James Bridle talking how his projects are designed to look like “the internet has escaped out into the streets”.

Designed in Hackney is a Dezeen initiative to showcase world-class architecture and design created in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

To find out more about the other discussions from Designed in Hackney Day, see our highlights reported here. See more stories about design and architecture from Hackney here.

The post “Customers grow old with our shoes,
not bored with them” – Tracey Neuls appeared first on Dezeen.

Movie: Brazilian architect Marcio Kogan of Studio MK27 used cinematic techniques he picked up in his early career as a movie director to film one of his latest projects through the eyes of the client’s pet cat.

Toblerone House is a two-storey residence in São Paulo comprising a glazed ground floor and a timber-clad upper floor, which are separated from one another by an overhanging concrete slab.

The movie shows the cat taking a walk along the protruding edges of this slab, as well as through each of the rooms and around the garden.

Explaining the decision to film the house in this way, Studio MK27 architect Suzana Glogowski told Dezeen how the team enjoyed making a series of movies for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale to show “the day by day life of one of our houses, where the architecture is not important” and decided to make another for this house.

Studio MK47 also recently unveiled a collection of furniture made by construction workers, as part of the London Design Festival – find out more here.

See all our stories about Studio MK27 »

Photography is by Nelson Kon.

The post Movie: Toblerone House by Studio MK27
through the eyes of a cat appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Spanish architects Alarcon+Asociados have developed a new construction product that allows a six-storey building to fit into a five-storey volume. (+ movie).

Developed for buildings with large construction spans such as schools and hospitals, Holedeck is a concrete waffle slab system that can accommodate electrical cables, plumbing and ventilation ducts within the floor structure rather than hung below. This prevents the need for suspended ceilings, which are installed to hide these services.

“A total of 30-50 centimetres are saved per floor,” explain the architects on the product website.

The first building to be constructed using the system is an office block for the research and development department of communications company Logytel in central Spain (pictured).

See more stories about concrete »

Here’s a list of the product’s features from Alarcon+Asociados:

The new concrete waffle slab HOLEDECK is a patented system of voided slabs for buildings with big spans between supports and a high level of services. It can be pierced all through its thickness by the building conductions and services.

This means that services in cross-sections occupy the same space as the structure itself and thus no additional suspended ceilings are required to hide them all. HOLEDECK is especially suitable for buildings requiring multiple services as well as big or medium spans, such as office buildings, hospitals, schools or any public, commercial or industrial building.

» HOLEDECK is suitable for big spans ranging from 10 to 18 meter high with a 50-60cm slab edge.

» It is possible to keep the structure with fair-faced concrete by adding dyes to the concrete mass.

» It is set up in a similar way to other voided flat plate slabs.

» It provides greater freedom of design for the plant geometry and pillar placing.

» It is modulated according to a 80cm interaxis so its modules are interchangeable with any voided two-way flat plate slab system.

Air may be distributed through conventional semi-flexible conduits or through a plenum system, which requires a sealed suspended ceiling and removable locks in lateral windows.

The post New construction system saves
“50 centimetres per floor” appeared first on Dezeen.

London Design Festival: these clothes hangers by designer and recent graduate Lisa Marie Bengtsson use charcoal to soak up bad smells so clothes need washing less often (+ movie).

The Bye Bye Laundry clothes hangers are attached to a chamber of activated charcoal, a form of carbon that’s been processed with oxygen to be exceptionally porous and absorbent.

Odours from hanging clothes are gradually absorbed by the clumps of charcoal through a filter in the base of the chamber.

“Sometimes we throw half-dirty clothes in the laundry basket because we don’t know where else to put them,” says Bengtsson, explaining that the deodorising hangers can reduce water consumption by refreshing clothes between washes.

The hangers were shown at 100% Design during London Design Festival, where Dezeen also hosted a series of talks with designers and experts including industrial designer Yves Behar.

Bengtsson recently graduated from the Product Design course at Kingston University in London.

Other innovative household projects we’ve featured on Dezeen include a hinged clothes iron by another Kingston graduate and a sewing machine that packs down flat for easy storage.

See all our stories about products »

Here’s some more information from the designer:

Bye Bye Laundry is an object that reflects on our attitude towards dirt with aim to change our washing behavior by using less water. It proposes an alternative solution to freshen up clothes with water, by using activated charcoal to take out smells instead. Today we wash our clothes much more than needed and it harms both the clothes and the planet. I want to raise awareness to this issue and prevent clothes being thrown in the washing machine rapidly.

There is a moment between clean and unclean clothes that has got very little attention. Sometimes we throw half-dirty clothes in the laundry basket too often because we don’t know where else to put them. I saw an opportunity for a piece including activated charcoal that creates a place for clothes that have been worn but are not necessarily ready to be washed.

Each hanger has a glass chamber of ultra-porous activated charcoal and through a filter in the wooden base, the charcoal absorbs odours from the clothes and helps keep them fresh. The activated charcoal need not touch the clothes to function and it takes a few days for the charcoal to absorbs the odour from the clothes. The activated charcoal in the glass chamber is carbon that has been treated with oxygen. The treatment results in a highly porous charcoal. These tiny holes give the charcoal a surface area of 300-2,000 m2/g, allowing liquids or gases to pass through the charcoal and interact with the exposed carbon. It has a great ability to absorb noxious gases and therefore act as a deodorant and an odour remover.

The post Bye Bye Laundry
by Lisa Marie Bengtsson appeared first on Dezeen.

To coincide with the final weeks of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, here’s an interview we filmed at the opening in May with Pierre de Meuron of architects Herzog & de Meuron, in which he talks to Dezeen about how the pavilion was realised in cork to appeal to all the senses and “not only your eyes”.

The architects teamed up with artist Ai Weiwei on the project and De Meuron explains how they worked around the problem that Weiwei isn’t permitted to leave China before admitting that the protective acoustics of the space were a stroke of luck, since they weren’t able to test them beforehand.

On the same day, Jacques Herzog also gave us an exclusive, impromptu tour of the pavilion, which you can watch below or view at a larger size here.

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion closes next weekend with a series of talks and discussions by the architects and a host of other speakers, and Dezeen readers are in with a chance of winning tickets to attend. Find out more here »

See photos of the pavilion and read more about it in our earlier story »

See the initial designs for the pavilion » 
See all our stories about the annual Serpentine Gallery Pavilions »
See all our stories about Herzog & de Meuron »
See all our stories about Ai Weiwei »

The post “Architecture is a discipline that speaks
to all your senses” – Pierre de Meuron appeared first on Dezeen.