Hasta La Ideas

Design strategy collective Urban-Think Tank has designed and built a prototypical house as part of an initiative to improve housing conditions for slum dwellers in some of the 2700 informal settlements across South Africa (+ movie).

Urban-Think Tank, which was involved in the Golden Lion-winning research into the Torre David vertical slum in Caracas, has this time teamed up with ETH Zürich university to search for ways that architects can help improve the environment and security of these slums that house approximately 15 percent of the country’s entire population.

Working under the title Empower Shack, the team organised a design-and-build workshop in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town that is one of the largest in South Africa, and developed a design for a low-cost two-storey shack for local resident Phumezo Tsibanto and his family.

They then worked together to replace Tsibanto’s existing single-storey dwelling with the new two-storey structure, giving the family a new home with a watertight exterior and its own electricity.

The designers are now exploring different configurations of the prototype that will allow it to adapt to the needs of different residents, extending up to three storeys when necessary.

This in turn becomes part of a wider strategy for rationalising the layout of the entire community, known as blocking out. This involves creating access routes for emergency vehicles and providing basic services such as sanitation and water.

“Our work on the Empower Shack project is not the result of the usual architectural pursuit for a new housing typology,” said Urban-Think Tank co-founder Alfredo Brillembourg. “While we are absolutely trying to innovate upon the design and technology of low-cost housing, we’re more concerned with the general ‘system’ that surrounds housing in the context of informal South African settlements.”

He continued: “This includes the infrastructure that makes housing decent, such as power and sanitation, along with the urban configuration of homes. The Empower Shack project seeks to address these larger challenges, and in doing so, hopefully changes not just the built landscape of places like Khayelitsha, but also the social, political and economic structures that shape residents’ lives.”

Brillembourg and partner Hubert Klumpner are now showing their findings from the two-year research in an exhibition at the Eva Presenhuber Gallery in Zurich.

Here’s a project description from Urban-Think Tank:

Empower Shack

Can art and architecture lend a voice to segments of the population that go unheard? Empower Shack is a new exhibition presenting an ETH Zürich and Urban-Think Tank project on South Africa, supported by Swisspearl (Schweiz) AG. A collaboration between the Brillembourg & Klumpner Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, South African NGO Ikhayalami (‘My Home’), Transsolar, Brillembourg Ochoa Foundation, Meyer Burger, the BLOCK ETH ITA Research Group, and videocompany, the Empower Shack team was established as a response to conventional approaches in dealing with urban informality, which are unsustainable and painstakingly slow in meeting the immediate needs of the vast majority of South Africa’s urban poor.

With its roots in a research, design and build workshop aimed at developing an innovative, replicable, affordable and sustainable shack prototype for Cape Town’s Khayelitsha (the third largest township in South Africa), the exhibition uses film, photography, drawings, painting and large-scale architectural installations to explore the complexity of living conditions in informal settlements, and the social role of architects in helping to address the economic, ecological and security challenges faced by residents.

With a population of over 50 million and the continent’s largest economy, South Africa is often seen as a source of relative stability and prosperity in the region. Yet economic inequality remains high. Around 1.5 million households (approximately 7.5 million people) live in 2,700 informal settlements scattered across the country, which faces an overall shortage of 2.5 million houses.

While the government’s record on housing delivery is laudable, the scale of need means informal settlements will remain for the foreseeable future. In response, authorities have slowly begun shifting the focus to incremental upgrading, including committing in 2010 to improve the quality of life of 400,000 households in well located informal settlements by 2014 through improved access to basic services and land tenure.

Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, along with their research and design teams and collaborating partners are engaged in an ongoing project to develop and implement design innovations for rapid and incremental informal settlement upgrading.

The examples featured in the Empower Shack exhibition are intended to provide immediate strategies to alleviate a national crisis, while remaining embedded within community-driven processes around resource allocation.

With Empower Shack, Brillembourg and Klumpner reinforce their broader vision for practical, sustainable interventions in informal settlements around the world. They argue the future of urban development lies in collaboration among architects, artists, private enterprise, and the global population of slum-dwellers.

Brillembourg, Klumpner and their team frequently exhibit internationally in venues such as Kassel (2004), MoMA (2010) and the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture, where they were awarded the Golden Lion in 2012. Through artistic and didactic presentations, they issue a call to arms to their fellow architects to see in the informal settlements of the world a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in the service of a more equitable and sustainable future.

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prototype for South African slums appeared first on Dezeen.

Kitchen and bathroom equipment is lowered into islands made from engineered quartz material Caesarstone in this animated preview of an installation for the brand by London studio Raw Edges, to be unveiled in Milan next month (+ movie).

Raw Edges designed a series of islands using Caesarstone, which have sections removed for slotting in storage units, appliances and accessories.

The movie shows models of these items attached to clasps or tied onto strings and lowered into the holes incorporated into each design.

Sinks, shelves and plants pots are all dropped into their specific places in the units. The animation will be realised as an interactive installation in Milan.

“For the Milan presentation we want to further-explore the concept of the sliding of objects into Caesarstone Islands,” said Raw Edges founders Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay.

“The focus will be on the kitchen, which will be set as a working station – a stage for performing cooking.”

The full Islands range includes units for the kitchen and bathroom, as well as sideboards and a ping pong table.

All the designs comprise a thin surface supported on two slices of the material and feature rounded corners.

Different units in the collection are made in various colours from the Casearstone range.

Following a preview of the products at the Interior Design Show in Toronto earlier this year, the installation will be presented at the Palazzo Clerici in Milan’s Brera district from 9 to 13 April during the city’s annual design week.

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concept for Caeserstone appeared first on Dezeen.

Focus sur cette vidéo de Jonathan Keogh intitulée « 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die » qui rend hommage au livre de Steven Jay Schneider. Un montage impressionnant, nécessitant une année de travail pour arriver à rassembler des filmes de tous les pays, de toutes les décennies et de tous les styles.

Light projected through a soap bubble throws patterns generated by the tiny vibrations of a speaker onto the ceiling in this installation by Royal College of Art graduate Dagny Rewera (+ movie).

For the Invisible Acoustics project, Dagny Rewera set up three speakers with lights attached on brass armatures. To visualise the sound emitted, the designer developed an automated system that dips a hoop into a soap solution and holds it directly above the speaker.

When switched on, the sound waves cause the soap bubble to vibrate, but these tiny aberrations aren’t visible to the naked eye, so a lens is suspended above the soap to magnify the microscopic changes in the surface of the bubble. The results are then projected onto the ceiling to create kaleidoscopic images that change with the music.

“The aim of the project was to change the perception of the everyday,” explained Rewera. “The project tries to enhance the greater understanding of the world we are surrounded by and [suggests] there might be parallel worlds unnoticed in our mundane lives.”

As the water evaporates from the solution, the concentration of soap reveals a range of hues that intensify over time.

The soap film is designed to last up to an hour. If the bubble bursts, the automated system re-dips the hoop into the solution, starting the whole process again.

Each of the three speakers plays tones in a variety of different frequency ranges, meaning each visualisation is different.

“My role as a designer is choreographing these invisible worlds, revealing their beauty and importance and guiding the users from the mundane into the spectacle,” explained Rewera.

Rewara completed Invisible Acoustics for the Design Products course at the Royal College of Art in London. It was inspired by cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration first studied by English philosopher Robert Hooke in 1680.

Here’s some information from Dagny Rewera:

Invisible Acoustics

The project titled Invisible Acoustics is a project that slips suggestively into a different world – one that requires different means for its explorations as well as its interpretations.

The world of the invisible

The project is an audio-visual installation of three sound and light units, which visualise the normally invisible form of sound. Based on the scientific study of Cimatics, the units reveal the true, organic form of sound and vibration.

Using the surface tension of a soap film, the vibration created by the sounds source transforms the soap into a flexible three-dimensional sculpture, unseen with the naked eye. By bouncing light of the film through a lens, the microscopic transformations of the soap membrane are enlarged and projected on the ceiling, creating a hypnotising light performance.

The soap film , designed to last up to an hour, through time transforms the image into an explosion of hues, as the water in the soap lens evaporates. When it finally bursts, the automated mechanism re-dips the soap wand in the solution and starts the performance again.

Each designed device plays different tones in a frequency range. These differences in frequencies are translated real time into individual light projections. At the same time, creating a sound and light spectacle when experienced as a whole.

The aim of the project was to change the perception of the everyday. By choreographing a smaller detail, the project tries to enhance the greater understanding of the world we are surrounded by and put to light that there might be more parallel works unnoticed in our mundane lives.

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in Dagny Rewera’s installation appeared first on Dezeen.

Alchemist Lauren Bowker applied heat-sensitive ink to a sculptural leather garment and used fire to alter its colour during a presentation for her company The Unseen (+ movie).

Coinciding with London Fashion Week earlier this month, Bowker’s design house The Unseen debuted a series of garments embedded with her colour-changing ink at an event in the Dead House – a series of vaulted passages beneath Somerset House where her studio is located.

She created a giant black headdress made from overlapping layers of hand-stitched leather that engulfed the wearer like a shell, completely covering the head and extending down past the hips.

During the presentation, a figure wearing this headdress was lead down a tunnel and positioned beneath a spotlight. Large flames erupted around the garment as wicks that protruded from the body were lit in unison.

As the heat from the fire lapped the material, peacock-tail colours began to emerge and disperse across the surface. When the flames died down, the green and purple tones remained on the material as the model was lead back into the depths of the underground vaults.

The collection also included garments worn over the torso that react to the movement of air, changing colour as environmental conditions shift in varying climates and when people come close or walk past.

“Seasonally each piece exhibits different tones of colour,” Bowker told Dezeen. “The summer environment will create a brightly coloured jacket that will dull in the wind to become black again, whereas in the winter the pieces are black until the wind hits them then revealing the colour shift.”

Made in a similar layered style to the larger heat-responsive piece, these designs were displayed on models in alcoves along the subterranean tunnels.

“The fins in each jacket are shaped and designed to create turbulence trips within the wind – triggering the colour-change response,” said Bowker.

She has previously applied different versions of her reactive inks to feathered garments that are sensitive to light.

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headdress by Lauren Bowker appeared first on Dezeen.