Hasta La Ideas

A Dutch artist has captured a fluffy white cloud in a beaux-arts style room in San Francisco for the latest in his series of photographs of indoor clouds (+ slideshow + interview).

Berndnaut Smilde creates his indoor clouds using a smoke machine. He adjusts the humidity of the room by spraying water, and reduces the temperature – this allows the smoke to take a cloud-like shape for just long enough to be photographed before it dissipates.

“It has to be cold, damp and really wet, so I’m moisturising the air as much as possible,” Smilde said in an interview with the BBC. “The moisture will stick to the smoke, making it heavier.”

“I cannot really control the cloud – it’s different every time. So, I create hundreds and hundreds [of images] and select just one to be the [final] work,” Smilde said.

Smilde spoke to Dezeen about his latest installation, Nimbus Green Room, which he created at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, “The space is kitsch, but it has great architectural ornaments,” Smilde said.

“As you probably know the Green Room is an American interpretation of the mirror room [Hall of Mirrors] in the Palace of Versailles, France. Its interior is classic and symmetrical, and represents perfection,” he added. “The green walls and features such as the chandeliers almost look like they’ve turned into plastic because of the extreme sharpness of the photographs.”

For his Nimbus photography series, Smilde has created indoor clouds within buildings including the Hotel MariaKapel in the Netherlands and Aspremont-Lynden Castle in Belgium.

Smilde’s clouds were listed by TIME Magazine as one of the top 10 inventions of 2012.

Here’s a BBC interview, where Smilde discusses how he makes the clouds:

Other stories we’ve posted on Dezeen recently include a cloud-shaped holiday cabin in south-west France, a warehouse filled with luminous clouds in Toronto and a weather-forecasting lamp that creates an indoor cloud to warn of grey skies outside.

See more weather features »
See more installations »

Photographs are courtesy of Ronchini Gallery.

Here’s the full interview with Smilde:

Kate Andrews: Can you tell us about the motivations behind your cloud installations? How did this start?

Berndnaut Smilde: The idea started when I was working in a small scale space for art projects. Model spaces are a recurring subject in my work. Because you have total control over these spaces it enables you to create an ideal situation. This is one of the reasons I think a model can stand for an idea. I wanted to see if it would be possible to exhibit a raincloud. I’ve modelled the exhibition space after my ideal perception of a museum space and wanted to create an ominous situation.

Kate Andrews: What’s unique about the Nimbus Green Room from your other installations? Can you tell us a little about the building and the interior space?

Berndnaut Smilde: The Green Room is a great example of a representation of an ideal space. As you probably know the Green Room is an (American) interpretation of the mirror room in the castle of Versailles. Its interior is classic and symmetrical and represents perfection.

The space is kitsch but it has great architectural ornaments. The materiality of the room really stands out and in the photographs. The green walls and features such as the chandeliers almost look like they’ve turned into plastic because of the extreme sharpness of the photographs.

I also like the reflection in the mirror. The room continues and you can see the backside of the cloud reflecting in it providing the work with an extra dimension.

Kate Andrews: Do you take your own photography?

Berndnaut Smilde: I am not a photographer and always work with local professionals. In San Francisco I worked with RJ Muna. He was great to work with and had fantastic equipment.

Kate Andrews: How does architecture and interior space affect your work?

Berndnaut Smilde: My work is often about situations that deal with duality. They question: inside and outside, size, the function of materials and architectural elements. Lots of time I work in a site-specific way reacting to the architecture or history of a location.

I am interested in in-between situations and situations that don’t really have a function yet and are to me therefore open for interpretation. Sometimes I create these situations, like I did with the clouds.

I also like to collect these moments when I see one. For instance the work Bored Art (2008) represents a ‘found situation’ were a painting is resting against the wall for a brief abandoned moment. Here it is the context of its surrounding (the museum) that changes the interpretation of this painting and situation.

Kate Andrews: What will you be working on next?

Berndnaut Smilde: I am preparing for a project at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, where I will be creating an exhibition with their collection and my work.

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by Berndnaut Smilde appeared first on Dezeen.

Matthew Picton est un artiste britannique qui compose de superbes sculptures cartographiques en papier appelées « Map Sculptures ». Ce dernier représente diverses villes, comme par exemple San Francisco ou Jérusalem, avec des papiers ayant une symbolique par rapport au lieu représenté. A découvrir dans la suite.

Focus sur les différents travaux de Erik Marinovich, un illustrateur et typographe basé à San Fransisco qui multiplie les créations typographique d’une beauté incroyable. Une large sélection de ses travaux et différentes séries en « Lettering Work » sont à découvrir en images dans la suite de l’article.

Reclaimed timber boxes are piled up to the ceiling to create a wall of shelves at the new San Francisco store for skin and haircare brand Aesop (+ slideshow).

Designed by Boston architects NADAAA, Aesop Fillmore Street draws inspiration from pre-twentieth century apothecaries, where assorted bottles and tubes would be displayed on a jumble of wall-mounted shelves.

The boxes were made to measure using reclaimed wooden boards, which were sanded on one side to create a variation between the inside and outside surfaces.

Architect Nader Tehrani explained: “Aesop has carefully considered dimensions of products as well as a clear methodology of display and presentation. We used these measurements as a means to create and array the boxes to best fulfill the quantity and types of products.”

Due to the limited width of the store, the boxes are only located on one wall to prevent narrowing the room and they also integrate a wooden counter with two basins.

The remaining walls are lined with cork, as is a second counter that can be moved into different positions.

“The cork is used as a scalar and textural counterbalance to the wall,” added Tehrani. “Cork has a material depth that softens the surfaces and helps attenuate undesired sounds.”

Aesop stores always feature unique designs because brand founder Dennis Paphitis didn’t want to create a “soulless chain”, as he told Dezeen when we met up with him recently. Other interesting Aesop branches include a Singapore shop with coconut-husk string hanging from the ceiling and a New York kiosk made from piles of newspapers.

See all our stories about Aesop »

Here’s a little more text from the brand:

Aesop Fillmore Street

San Francisco recently welcomed its first Aesop signature store at 2454 Fillmore Street, in a neighbourhood shaped by consecutive influxes of Eastern European, Japanese and African-American residents, and the heydays of American jazz and rock.

The result of a collaboration with Boston architectural firm NADAAA, this space is sibling to another launched simultaneously in Manhattan’s SoHo district. Both stores have been designed around a fascination with pre-twentieth century apothecaries and twenty-first century skin care. The predominant element in each is a tapestry of shelving crafted from reclaimed wooden boxes. Subdivided and pixilated by the varying dimensions of the boxes, the arrangement invites visual and tactile exploration; its dominance is balanced here by a cork wall and ceiling, and dark masonite flooring.

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by NADAAA appeared first on Dezeen.

Hundreds of spinning blades reveal the invisible patterns of the wind in American artist Charles Sowers’ kinetic installation on the facade of the Randall Museum in San Francisco.

The installation, titled Windswept, consists of 612 rotating aluminium weather vanes mounted on an outside wall.

As gusts of wind hit the wall, the aluminium blades spin not as one but independently, indicating the localised flow of the wind and the way it interacts with the building.

“Our ordinary experience of wind is as a solitary sample point of a very large invisible phenomenon,” said Sowers. “Windswept is a kind of large sensor array that samples the wind at its point of interaction with the Randall Museum building and reveals the complexity and structure of that interaction.”

“I’m generally interested in creating instrumentation that allows us insight into normally invisible or unnoticed phenomena,” he added.

We’ve featured a number of kinetic installations on Dezeen recently, including an undulating web that ripples like the surface of water and a gallery that lets visitors play in the rain without getting wet.

See all our stories about installations »
See all our stories about weather »

Photographs are by Bruce Damonte.

Windswept is a wind-driven kinetic facade that transforms a blank wall into an observational instrument that reveals the complex interactions between wind and environment.

Windswept consists of 612 freely rotating wind direction indicators mounted parallel to the wall creating an architectural scale instrument for observing the complex interaction between wind and the building. The wind arrows serve as discrete data points indicating the direction of local flow within the larger phenomenon. Wind gusts, rippling and swirling through the sculpture, visually reveal the complex and ever-changing ways the wind interacts with the building and the environment.

I’m generally interested in creating instrumentation that allows us insight into normally invisible or unnoticed phenomena. The Randall site, like many in San Francisco, is characterised to a great extent by its relationship to the wind. Climatically, onshore winds bring warm weather from the central valley while offshore wind bring us our famous San Francisco chilly weather.

Windswept seeks to transform a mundane and uninspired architectural façade (the blank wall of the theatre) into a large scale aesthetic/scientific instrument, to reveal information about the interaction between the site and the wind. Our ordinary experience of wind is as a solitary sample point of a very large invisible phenomenon. Windswept is a kind of large sensor array that samples the wind at its point of interaction with the Randall Museum building and reveals the complexity and structure of that interaction.

Windswept is 20′ high x 35′ long. It is installed on an 1940s board-formed concrete building. The whole piece sits off the wall to allow an equal volume of air to enter a ventilation intake mounted in the middle of the existing wall. The wind arrows are made of brake-formed anodised aluminium. The arrow axles are mounted to a standard metal architectural panel wall system consisting of 25 panels. The panels have holes punched in a 12″ x 12″ grid pattern, into which the installation contractor secured rivet nuts to accept the stainless steel axles. Once the panels were installed the arrow assemblies were threaded into the rivet nuts.

Artist: Charles Sowers Studios, LLC
Project: Windswept
Location: Randal Museum, 199 Museum Way, San Francisco, CA
Size: 35’ length / 20’ height
Client: San Francisco Arts Commission/Randall Museum
Contractor: Rocket Science
Engineer: Hom-Pisano Engineers
Project Completion: 11/19/2010

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Charles Sowers appeared first on Dezeen.