German designer Jule Waibel has created 25 of her folded paper dresses for fashion brand Bershka’s shop windows around the world (+ movie).
London
Jule Waibel produces the dresses by hand-pleating large sheets of paper into forms that fit the body. Each takes over ten hours to complete.
London
She was contacted by Bershka with an offer to exhibit 25 dresses in as many of its flagship stores in cities including London, Paris, Milan, Istanbul, Osaka and Mexico City.
“I was excited and shocked at the same time,” Waibel told Dezeen, “25 dresses for 25 shops?!”
Waibel scores the paper horizontally and vertically before folding along the seams, then repeats the process for the diagonal.
Amsterdam, London, Berlin
The two halves of the sheet are printed with a different pattern, one for the bodice and the other for the skirt.
Amsterdam
Most of the dresses are printed with colour gradients, while a few are covered with detailed patterns.
Mexico
Different colours and graphics were used for each of the cities, but Waibel was keen to move away from stereotypical shades and motifs such as the ones used in the countries’ flags.
Berlin
“I found it too obvious to use the typical colours and instead I wanted to try something different,” she explained. “I figured that the people must be bored with seeing the same style all the time.”
Singapore
Her favourites are the black and white design in Paris, the dress patterned with tiny black and orange fish in Berlin and the installation on London’s Oxford Street that appears to glow like lava.
Milan
Waibel and her team spent just over a week producing the garments and a set of accessories at a studio in Barcelona.
Osaka
“Together with my supportive pleating assistants we managed to fold 25 dresses, two bags and two umbrellas within eight tough working days!” she said.
The origami dresses will be installed until 31 January.
“This place used to be a farm; the chickens and the pigs used to walk around here,” says Baas, who we interviewed in his office in the converted attic of the former farmhouse. “Now we turned it into a design studio.”
Maarten Baas’ offices
Baas’ office is home to the original Smoke Chair that he produced for his graduation project while at Design Academy Eindhoven, which is now manufactured by Dutch design brand Moooi.
Maarten Baas’ original Smoke Chair
“This was the prototype on which Moooi based the Smoke Chair,” Baas says. “It’s actually burnt furniture with an epoxy resin that sucks into the charcoal. It has been reproduced many times by Moooi, and still we make unique pieces here at the farm.”
Clay furniture by Maarten Baas
Baas, who moved to the farm in 2009 with fellow designer Bas den Herder, converted the barn into a workshop where he produces other pieces of furniture such as his famous Clay series, created by moulding a synthetic clay around a metal frame.
“We squeeze our hands in the clay, you can see the fingerprints,” explains Baas. “After that, it dries out and it stays like furniture.”
Shooting for Maarten Baas’ Grandmother Clock
Downstairs, Baas is in the middle of filming for his new Grandmother Clock, commissioned by Carpenters Workshop Gallery, in which an old lady seems to draw the time using a marker pen from inside the clock.
Grandfather and Grandmother Clocks by Maarten Baas, presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery at Design Miami 2013
“You’re very lucky to be here just at the moment that we are filming the new Grandmother Clock,” Baas says. “What you see here is a little cabin in which the grandmother will sit and a video that is recording her. The grandmother will indicate the time every minute with a marker. She will draw the big hand and the small hand and after a minute she wipes away the big hand, does one minute later and like that she goes around the clock.”
Maarten Baas’ homemade sauna in an old wooden caravan
Baas then takes us outside to show us his workshop in the barn, as well as a small sauna he made inside an old wooden caravan, before showing us a limited edition piece of Smoke furniture that is in the process of being charred with a blow-torch.
“This is a chair that we are burning for a client,” Baas starts to say, before having second thoughts about explaining the process in detail. “Ah, f**k it,” he says. “I’m not going to say.”
Maarten Baas. Copyright: Dezeen
We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.
Dezeen Music Project: in this music video by animation designer Nick Cobby, billowing forms are used to visualise a gentle piano solo and spiky geometric shapes appear when electronic sounds are played over the top.
Nick Cobby created contrasting visuals for the different styles heard in the track Fragments of Self, created by musician Max Cooper and featuring pianist Tom Hodge.
Circular forms expand one after another in time with the piano keys and disperse into alien-like tentacles, lines and dots as the notes resonate.
When the electronic glitches kick in, the visuals dramatically change into sharp, spiky shapes that pulse and distort with the beat.
“The track hit me as having two very different styles to it, so I wanted to create two polar opposite visuals – one that followed the piano and one that came in with the glitch effects,” Cobby told Dezeen.
“The piano was more of a free-flowing sound so I wanted some kind of natural or organic element, while the harsh glitch needed to be mechanical, sharper and more defined.”
The movie is purely black and white until muted colours appear as the piano is reintroduced on its own. The colour flickers off again towards the end of the track.
“It didn’t strike me as a video that should have lush colour,” Cobby said, “except for the middle part of the track when the piano comes back in after all the glitch. It sounds so peaceful and I wanted some colour to subtly come in to help signify that.”
“I used a plugin [for visualisation software Particular] called Sound Keys to monitor the waveform of the piano to create the pulses – but with a lot of manual keyframing as well to tweak it,” he said. “I’m a big fan of just using one or two methods to create a whole video, as I think the restriction helps me to be more creative.”
“I wanted the viewer to feel very calm at one point then really on edge the next,” Cobby added. “That’s how I felt when I heard the track and what I really liked about it, so hopefully that comes across.”
This movie we filmed at Dezeen’s pop-up shop of the future at London department store Selfridges demonstrates how augmented reality technology could transform retail.
Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs introduces the shop we curated for Selfridges‘ Festival of Imagination, which includes a virtual retail experience for Dezeen Watch Store and a life-size walkaround digital model of Zaha Hadid’s superyacht – both created by technology company Inition.
“The Imagine Shop is an attempt to visualise the kind of products, services and shops we might have in the future,” says Fairs.
Imagine Shop at Selfridges
The space on the ground floor of the department store contains all wall of 3D-printed products and clothing by Janne Kyttanen of 3D Systems, and even features a giant printed ping-pong table.
“The most exciting thing here is that we’ve worked with Inition, which is a 3D visualisation company, to show how augmented reality could be used in stores of the future,” Fairs says.
Inition lead creative Alex Lambert
Inition lead creative Alex Lambert then talks about the augmented-reality projects that his company and Dezeen worked on for this event.
“Inition and Dezeen collaborated on two pieces of augmented reality,” he says, “one for watches available at the Dezeen Watch Store and another for a £300 million superyacht designed by Zaha Hadid.”
Augmented reality demonstration of Zaha Hadid’s superyacht model
Lambert talks through the technology for the yacht models, which works using a tablet camera that picks up the code from patterned markers then displays the 3D model on screen.
“This type of augmented reality relies on a tablet,” he explains. “You’ll see a live video feed coming through the camera and once you point it at the marker the 3D model will appear.”
Augmented reality demonstration of giant Zaha Hadid superyacht model
Two versions of the yacht are included in the shop: a miniature version and a full-size model that glides across the tablet screen.
“We’ve actually created the yacht in full scale,” says Lambert. “It’s a sunny blue ocean with a full-scale yacht sailing past, just to give people an idea of the scale of the superyacht.”
Alex Lambert tries on designs at the virtual watch store
Using the same technology, shoppers can try on designs from Dezeen Watch Store at a virtual watch shop. Shoppers simply attach a band around their wrist and hold it up to a camera, then the chosen watch manifests over the band.
“We take one of these bespoke trackers… turn to the camera, get the marker in view and boom! The watch appears,” Lambert describes.
Alex Lambert tries on designs at the virtual watch store
Inition added texture and shadows to the virtual watches to make them look as realistic as possible. Different models and colourways appear instantaneously around the wrist on screen as they are selected.
“Dezeen are very forward thinking in employing this technology, especially for watches,” says Lambert. “In the future hopefully people will download the app, use a webcam or tablet and try on the watches at home before they purchase online.”
The resident of a compact apartment in Madrid demonstrates how she can rearrange walls and pull furniture out of the ceiling in this movie by photographer and filmmaker Miguel de Guzmán.
Designed by Spanish studio Elii Architects, the Didomestic apartment occupies the loft of an old building, so it was designed to make optimal use of space by creating flexible rooms that can be adapted for different activities.
Sliding pink partitions allow the main floor to be either opened up or divided into a series of smaller spaces, while a new mezzanine loft provides a bedroom where floor panels hinge open to reveal a vanity mirror, toiletry storage and a tea station.
The architects also added several fun elements to tailor the space to the resident’s lifestyle; a hammock, playground swing and disco ball all fold down from the ceiling, while a folding surface serves as a cocktail bar or ironing board.
“Every house is a theatre,” explained the architects. “Your house can be a dance floor one day and a tea room the next.”
The movie imagines a complete day in the life of the apartment’s inhabitant, from the moment she wakes up in the morning to the end of an evening spent with a friend.
“The idea was to show all the different spaces and mechanisms in a narrative way,” said De Guzmán.
Getting dressed in the morning, the resident reveals wardrobes built into one of the walls. Later, she invites a friend round for a meal and they dine at a picnic table that lowers down from the kitchen ceiling.
A rotating handle on the wall controls the pulleys needed to bring this furniture down from overhead, while other handles can be used to reveal shelving and fans.
A metal staircase connecting the two levels is contained within a core at the centre of the apartment and is coloured in a vivid shade of turquoise.
A shower room lined with small hexagonal tiles is located to the rear of the kitchen, plus there’s a bathroom on the mezzanine floor directly above.
Here’s a project description from Elii Architects:
Project for the complete refurbishment of an attic in downtown Madrid
The scope of the project covers from the development of a customised functional proposal for a user that is turning a new leaf to the rehabilitation of the structure, the insulation, the facilities and the modernisation of the existing construction systems.
The selected approach removes all obstacles from the floor to provide the greatest possible flexibility. Two basic elements are used: firstly, the central core, comprising the staircase, some shelves and the larder. The core is at the centre of the main space under the mansard roof. It connects the access floor and the space under the roof and allows the natural lighting coming through the roof into the living room. Secondly, there are two side strips for the functional elements (kitchen, bathroom, storage space and domestic appliances).
This basic arrangement is complemented by two strategies that provide flexibility to the domestic spaces.
Firstly, the moving panels that are integrated into the core and run along guide rails. These panels can be used to create different arrangements, such as adding an extra room for a guest, separating the kitchen from the living room area or opening the whole floor for a party. The panels have transparent sections so that the natural lighting coming through the mansard roof can reach this space.
Secondly, the secret trap doors that are integrated into the ceiling of the access floor and into the floor of the mezzanine and that house the rest of the domestic functions. The ceiling doors are opened with handles fitted on the walls. These handles actuate pulleys that lower part of the furniture (such as tables and the picnic benches, a swing or the hammock) or some complementary functions and objects (such as the disco ball, the fans to chill out on the hammock or an extra shelf for the guest room).
In addition, the floor of the space under the roof has a series of invisible doors that can be opened to alter the functionality of the raised space where the bedroom area is (these spaces house the dressing table, the tea room and the storage spaces for the bathroom).
All these elements are integrated within the floor and the ceiling and they appear and disappear at the user’s whim. The secret trap doors and the sliding panels complement the basic configuration, fit the needs of the moment and provide different home layout combinations.
Dezeen and MINI World Tour: architect Terrence Riley takes us on a tour of downtown Miami and says that redevelopment of the historic area has coincided with a new emphasis on outdoor living in the city.
Miami River
Downtown is a small nineteenth-century area of Miami located to the north of Miami River and the west of Biscayne Bay. Formerly the economic hub of the city, the neighbourhood was largely abandoned in the nineteen-seventies.
“The developers, their clients and the tenants needed bigger spaces,” explains Riley, a partner at Keenen Riley Architects and former director of Miami Art Museum and curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “Eventually you saw empty stores, empty office buildings and it was really across the river, in the south, where all the development began.”
“This is a very familiar tactic,” Riley says. “Take a really lousy neighbourhood and what do you do? You put the cultural facilities there, because they’ll go anywhere those people.”
“Miami Art Museum, from its earliest days, was put into this situation of trying to be a catalyst for spurring development downtown.”
Miami Center for Architecture and Design in a former downtown post office
Riley claims that downtown Miami is now a very different place compared to when the museum first opened in the nineteen-eighties.
“What were empty lots are being redeveloped,” he says, pointing out the old post office, which has now been taken over by the American Institute of Architects.
Downtown Miami
The redevelopment and repopulation of downtown Miami has coincided with the emergence of a renewed interest in outdoor living in the city, Riley says.
“A lot of people in Miami lived this air-conditioned life 12 months a year,” he explains. “Now I think the attitude is changing. You see that reflected in all the outdoor cafes and things like bike riding.”
“The whole idea that you can live downtown now, shop downtown and have restaurants downtown is something completely new.”
Downtown Miami
Many of the buildings in downtown Miami feature long arcades to shelter people on the streets from the elements.
“Miami was [originally] laid out as a pedestrian city,” Riley explains. “Miami lost a lot of that common-sense architecture with air conditioning and underground garages where you go directly from your car into the building.”
However, he believes that architects are now using similar principles in the design of new buildings.
“You’ll notice on the Herzog & de Meuron museum these long, broad, overhanging eaves that provide protection all the way around the museum,” he says. “These recall some of the more thoughtful, intelligent things that they used to do in the traditional city.”
The new Pérez Art Museum Miami by Herzog & de Meuron, which opened last month, features clusters of columns covered with plants suspended from the building’s large overhanging roof.
Blanc explains that the Swiss architects approached him to create these vertical gardens after they successfully worked together on the CaixaForum arts centre in Madrid, completed in 2008.
“We had already covered a wall totally with plants in Madrid,” says Blanc. “Here, for the museum, they asked me: ‘Do you think it’s possible to have the plants on columns instead?’ I said: ‘Yes, of course.'”
Unlike a green wall, which faces in one direction, Blanc had to use different types of plants on each side of the hanging columns.
“For the outside surface, facing the sea, [the plants] have to face full sun, they have to face strong winds, sometimes salt and sometimes hurricanes,” he says. “The side facing the museum is very dark, so [I used] shade-loving plants.”
Blanc claims the key to creating a successful vertical garden is the diversity of species used.
“I use many, many different species,” he explains. “Here, in Miami, I used 80 different species. Sometimes, I use up to 400. When you have so many species, it looks much more natural.”
Vertical gardens are more than just aesthetically pleasing, Blanc goes on to claim.
“Because the roots are growing on the surface, [rather than into the ground], all of the micro-organisms associated with the roots are totally in contact with the air, [which is important] for de-pollution,” he says, “Also, you have benefits of insulation.”
He continues: “And, of course, the target it to use water collected from the roof. With a horizontal garden you lose a lot of water through percolation in the soil. You only have useful water when you have a vertical garden.”
Blanc believes that vertical gardens have become so popular because they provide an interesting and space-efficient way of introducing greenery into cities and claims he doesn’t mind that so many other people have taken on his idea.
“You use vertical space and usually it is empty space,” he says. “I think that is why they have been such a big success.” “Everybody in the world is doing vertical gardens. Of course, 20-25 years ago, I was the only one. But I am happy because with this idea I created a new vision of the interaction between human beings, the town and plants.”
Design Miami 2013, which took place in Miami from 4 to 8 December alongside the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, featured a large number of vintage furniture pieces by iconic 20th-century designers.
“Design Miami’s intention is to offer a journey through design history,” Goebl explains in the movie. “At the same time we present a strong pillar of contemporary experimental work.”
One of the standout pieces on show this year was a one-room prefabricated house designed by French modernist architect Jean Prouvé, which was on sale for $2.5 million.
“For the first time we have a full-scale architectural structure [at the show], which Jean Prouvé designed in 1945,” Goebl explains.
Prouvé was well-represented throughout the show, but so was the late architect’s frequent collaborator Charlotte Perriand.
“It’s also a year of seminal women designers,” says Goebl. “We have a solo show on Charlotte Perriand, where you can discover an interior that she designed in Paris for the Borot family.”
She continues: “We also have an interior dedicated to Maria Pergay’s furniture made from stainless steel from the 1970s.”
Goebl then goes on to discuss the work of contemporary designers on show, claiming that there is a growing trend towards merging digital and analogue experiences.
Rotterdam designer David Derksen has decorated a set of plates by employing the oscillations of a pendulum to drip patterns of paint (+ movie).
The patterns on Derksen‘s prototype Oscillation Plates were created using both the mathematical shapes of the pendulum’s swing and the human element of positioning and initiating the movement.
“A beautiful pattern that is formed under the influence of gravity, which is normally hidden, is now literally shown,” Derksen told Dezeen. “On one hand it follows the mathematical laws of gravity, on the other hand it is very playful.”
The designer created the brass pendulum so it could hold and drip the right amount of paint. “We had to adjust the size of the hole to the viscosity of the paint, to create a nice thin, constant paint flow,” he said. “It also needs to have enough mass for making a constant oscillation.”
The pendulum contained enough acrylic paint to decorate one set of plates. After the first push, the pendulum released a constant flow of black paint onto the surface of the plates in overlapping oval shapes.
Every rotation added to the pattern, creating criss-crossing lines and darker areas where the pendulum changed direction. The position and swing orientation was then changed for a second round, then the plates were left to dry.
The plates are to be developed by a ceramic specialist and made available for the VIVID Gallery in Rotterdam.
Here is some more information from the designer:
Oscillation Plates
With gravity as the acting force, these plates are decorated by a pendulum. The patterns are a graphic representation of the oscillation of a pendulum, revealing a hidden pattern that exist in nature.
The result is a play between the mathematical rules of the natural oscillation and the randomness of the human that initiates the swing of the pendulum. This combination makes each plate unique.
The 365 wooden sledges used to construct this Christmas tree in Budapest by Hungarian designers Hello Wood will be given to a local children’s charity following the festive period (+ movie).
Hello Wood designed the 11-metre-tall structure for a site in front of the Palace of Arts in Budapest and spent one week assembling the wooden frame then fixing the sledges to it.
Two weeks after Christmas the tree will be disassembled and the sledges distributed to local children living in homes operated by SOS Children’s Village, a charity that helps families care for their children and provides accommodation and support for orphaned and abandoned children around the world.
“We wanted to create a temporary installation, which is not only spectacular, but its main elements remain usable so they can be distributed among kids,” explained Andras Huszar of Hello Wood. “For us, this is the point of social awareness: you don’t only show something, but at the same time you give something unique.”
A steel base weighing 4.5 tons anchors the wooden framework, which is made from sections that were part assembled off-site and lifted into place using a crane.
The sledges were then fixed to the frame by a team who used abseiling equipment to suspend themselves from the top of the tree as they worked their way around the conical structure.
“We were thinking a lot about what the secret of an original Christmas decoration is,” David Raday of Hello Wood said. “The sledges were the good choice, because they are symbolising Christmas, but free from the commercial Christmas clichés and the general bad taste that comes with them.”
Visitors are able to step inside the installation and look up at the geometric arrangement of wooden struts, which creates a pattern that resembles the fractal form of a snowflake.
At night the sculpture is illuminated by spotlights positioned around its base that project different colours onto its surface.
Hello Wood designers build christmas tree to sledge away
Inhabitants of SOS Children’s Village receive unique present
Designers of Budapest based Hello Wood built a huge christmas tree made of 365 sledges in front of the Palace of Arts at the riverbank of the Danube. It is an exceptional piece of art and architecture marking the Christmas period. After the holiday season all the sledges will be given to the kids living in the homes of SOS Children’s Village thanks to Hungarian Telekom.
Christmas is coming. Lights are flashing in the streets, people are carrying big red and green boxes, bright plastic snowflakes are hanging in the hall of shopping malls. Big companies send out their messengers to take presents to everybody, from the youngest to the oldest, supposing that some chocolate bars, candies or a funny t-shirt can cheer them up.
Hungarian designers of Hello Wood, known for their social awareness and tasteful approach, rethought the idea of Christmas present, and put it in the right context. They built a huge Christmas tree made of 365 sledges, which will be given to children two weeks after Christmas.
“We wanted to create a temporary installation, which is not only spectacular, but its main elements remain usable so they can be distributed among kids. For us, this is the point of social awareness: you don’t only show something, but at the same time you give something unique” – says Andras Huszar, architect of Hello Wood about the installation.
The Christmas tree was built in a week. Visitors can step in and have a look at the construction from the inside. The base is made of steel, it weights 4,5 tons, so the construction is perfectly safe from the heavy winds of winter. The four stems of the installation hold 325 kilograms each. First, the carpenters of Hello Wood made the 10,5 meters tall wooden frame, which was brought to the scene, where it was put together with the help of a crane and the use of welding techniques. Then came the alpinists of Hello Wood, who were working on the installation for four consecutive days, fixing the sledges on the wooden frame while hanging down from the top of the tree. Although the installation is pretty heavy, it looks lightsome: if you step inside, it feels like you are in the middle of a huge snowflake.
Maxim Bakos, one of the founders of Hello Wood originally wanted to create a whole forest made of sledges, then came the idea to create a tree instead of a forest. “We were thinking a lot about what the secret of an original Christmas decoration is. The sledges were the good choice, because they are symbolising Christmas, but free from the commercial Christmas clichés and the general bad taste that comes with them.” – says David Raday, creative leader of Hello Wood, one of the originators of the concept.
Hello Wood is best known for its flagship event, a one week long art camp curated by founder Peter Pozsar every summer. It is not by chance that they co-operated with Palace Of Arts in creating the installation. One of the goals of the Palace of Arts is to work together with young and creative designers and architects. The installation of Hello Wood is more than just a nice piece of young creativity, because thanks to Hungarian Telekom, the sledges will be given to the inhabitants of the SOS Children’s Village.
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