Hasta La Ideas

American architect Eric Fisher claims to have built the world’s largest residential cantilever with this house in Pittsburgh that protrudes by 16 metres to hover over the roof of a glass factory (+ slideshow).

Designed to house the owners of the factory, the Corten steel-clad Emerald Glass House was completed by Fisher Architecture in 2011, but the studio recently submitted it for entry into the Guinness Book of World Records.

The impressive cantilever forms the uppermost floor of the four-storey residence, which is set into a hillside to the south of the city. “It floats above the owner’s glass manufacturing facility like a foreman’s shack,” said Fisher.

The architect used Corten steel, mesh and exposed steel columns to create an industrial aesthetic, then added large areas of glazing to recognise the trade of the house’s residents.

This includes a fully glazed facade, designed as a beacon for visitors to the factory. Behind the facade, a living room occupies the whole cantilevered space, allowing the structure to function as a giant viewfinder.

Glass also surrounds the interior surfaces of the house’s concrete block core and was used for staircase balustrades and a breakfast counter in the kitchen.

Other cantilevered houses we’ve featured on Dezeen include a Seattle house with a twisted top floor and a house that extends over a river in Wales.

See more cantilevered buildings »
See more American houses on Dezeen »

Photography is by the architect, apart from where otherwise indicated.

Here’s a project description from Eric Fisher:

Emerald Art Glass House

The Emerald Art Glass House is a site-sensitive, cantilevered home for the owners of a glass company. This is contextual design: Located on Pittsburgh’s South Side slopes, it floats above the owner’s glass manufacturing facility like a foreman’s shack.

The home’s industrial forms and Corten steel siding relate to the factory below while a living roof connects the house visually to the verdant slopes beyond. In a building this public, it’s possible to make larger references: Pittsburgh’s neighbourhoods are cut off from one another both geographically and culturally. The new horizontally massed house and the US Steel tower, Pittsburgh’s tallest building, are Corten steel peers. Together, they establish a small but meaningful new dialogue between the residential slopes and the commercial city centre.

Glass products are featured throughout, celebrating the owner’s craft: A radical, north-facing, butted, “Greenheat” radiant-heated glass facade functions from outside as a sign for the glass factory and from inside as a view catcher. A unique, glass rain-screen system clads a concrete block core. Inside the core, a glass stairway winds its way from the ground floor to the kitchen.

And it’s green: 21st century architects must learn to recycle space in the same way we recycle our garbage – finding value in waste. Here, we are putting to use the unused space above the owner’s warehouse in this dense urban neighbourhood. Recycled materials are used throughout. As well, geothermal well-generated forced air complements the radiant heated floors and glass.

Extending three times farther than nearby Falling Water, the Emerald Art Glass House may be the world’s longest residential cantilever. As Jean Paul Sartre once wrote, ‘The human body always extends across the tool that it utilises: it is at the end of the telescope, which shows me the stars; it is my adaptation to those tools. When a structure cantilevers in a daring way, we imagine ourselves leaning out over the space below, which explains why it moves us. This is the thing with feathers, an object that disrupts daily life just enough to make one believe that there is maybe more to life than the humdrum.

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by Fisher Architecture appeared first on Dezeen.

Saman Kesh nous prouve une nouvelle fois son talent indéniable pour la mise en scène et la réalisation avec ce court-métrage « The Controller ». Dans cette création parfaitement maîtrisée produite par Marq Films, une fille prisonnière aux pouvoirs impressionnants prend le contrôle de son petit-ami pour venir la secourir.

Matthew Nurse, director of Nike Sport Research Lab, takes Dezeen behind the scenes at the laboratory where Nike tests new technologies and introduces us to Hal, a sportswear-testing robot that perspires as he runs.

Nike Sport Research Lab is part of a sprawling campus just outside of Portland, Oregon, where the American sports brand is based.

Nike has developed and invested in a range of different technologies to monitor how athletes move, the pressures exerted on their bodies when they do, and what effects different products have on them.

“We can objectively quantify athletes in motion, the environments they play in and the demands of the sport,” Nurse explains.

“We can quantify and understand Nike’s different product innovations, how they affect athletes in the way they perform, the way they’re protected and the perception they have of those different products.”

Nurse demonstrates how, using a combination of motion-capture cameras and a pressure-sensitive plate in the ground, researchers at the laboratory can analyse a sprinter’s motion and the forces they exert as they come out of the blocks at the start of a race.

“We are able to collect the three-dimensional motion of an athlete and from there calculate the power that they produce and the energy that’s produced or lost in the different joints,” he explains.

“[This provides] an understanding of how an intervention [such as a new pair of running shoes] contributes to their overall performance as they do the different movements.”

Nike uses similar technology to monitor the movement of athletes in other sports, such as how a basketball player jumps, twists and lands when scoring a slam dunk.

Nike Sport Research Lab also features a number of sealed environmental chambers, where athletes’ performances and the performance of the clothes they wear can be tested in different atmospheric conditions.

“Our physiology team looks at understanding the body’s regulatory systems, so what happens inside,” Nurse says. “We use that information to quantify things like thermal temperature, to understand thermal regulation and skin wetness as athletes run and move and perspire.”

One of these environmental chambers is home to Hal, a marching humanoid that Nurse describes as “a copper sweaty mannequin,” which allows Nike to test the permeability and breathability of new sportswear.

“Hal is very sophisticated,” says Nurse. “We can set the environmental chamber to different conditions, whether it’s temperature or humidity, and as he moves he actually perspires. It allows us to understand how different constructions or different methods of making affect the permeability of the garment, which is ultimately going to affect the comfort of the athlete and also the thermoregulation of that athlete. He’s an invaluable tool for us.”

With products such the Nike+ FuelBand and Nike+ running shoes, which collect data about the wearer’s exercise routines via a mobile phone application, Nike has already started to commercialise some of the basic technology developed at Nike Sports Research Lab. Nurse says that there is more to come.

“The technology is becoming ubiquitous and the ability to capture the information we collect is getting more and more robust,” he says. “The willingness of different groups to spend money on the kind of tools we have is also growing. The tools that we have are going to be more and more available.”

However, Nurse believes that data alone is not necessarily that useful. How you interpret that data is more important, he says.

“As data becomes ubiquitous and it becomes all-encompassing and all-informing, [Nike’s] competitive advantage is the knowledge we have of how we apply that data to build unbelievable product. With that we’re unsurpassed in the world.”

Looking to the future, Nurse believes that individually customisable designs will become a reality, as will “smart” materials that can adapt to different conditions.

“As we move into the future, I think there are two major frontiers,” he says. “One is individualised product or prescriptive product for individuals. Medicine is already starting to head in that direction and I think ultimately we will also.”

He continues: “We build unbelievable product that works for a wide range of people, but as we start to slice that thinner and thinner, to capitalise on making athletes better, our ability to individually prescribe different products for different people is going to get more robust and is also going to get much more important.”

“Secondly, material that adapts to different movements or different environmental conditions is also going to be important.”

Nurse is confident that Nike will be leading the way in developing these products. “I know that the folks in both the footwear and apparel innovation teams are well aware of what is cutting edge and are pushing the boundaries,” he concludes.

See our story about the new Nike Free Hyperfeel running shoe »
Watch our movie about the Nike Flyknit Racer »
See all our stories about Nike »

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a copper sweaty mannequin” appeared first on Dezeen.

In this movie Dezeen filmed at the opening of the new Camper store in New York, Japanese designer and Nendo founder Oki Sato explains why he covered the interior walls of the store with over a thousand white plastic shoes.

“I’ve been working with Camper for the past few years on their small retail stores,” says Sato.

“The concept [for the small stores] was these shoes walking in mid air, showing that Camper shoes are not for running fast or for luxury or things like that, but something to enjoy walking.”

See Nendo’s design for Camper’s Osaka store with shoes that seem to walk around on their own »

However, Sato goes on to explain that designing the interior for the larger New York store located on Fifth Avenue, one of world’s biggest shopping streets, was much more challenging.

“Camper asked me a few months ago to find a solution for the big stores that have really high ceilings,” he says. “Because the product is obviously very small, we weren’t sure how to use the ceiling height. Before they used a lot of graphics on the ceiling but it looked really empty.”

Nendo‘s solution was to completely cover the walls in the store with white plastic replicas of Camper Pelotas, the brand’s signature shoe design. The current collections are then displayed amongst these replicas in spaces at the base of the walls where customers are able to reach.

“What it’s doing is making the products really stand out – the colours, the forms of the products,” says Sato. “It starts from a single product but by copying and pasting it becomes an interior element. It catches a lot of light and shadow and gives a lot of texture to the space.”

The protruding shoes also provide an important acoustic benefit, Sato says: “It absorbs the sound so it feels much more comfortable as well.”

Sato goes on to explain that he believes physical retail environments are still important, despite the rise of shopping online.

“Just one click on the internet and you can buy any of these shoes from wherever you are,” he says. “But I guess it’s really the experience of the space that is the most important thing. It’s a space that you have to be there, you have to feel something.”

“In the end if a guy comes into the store and he doesn’t want to buy any shoes in the beginning but he gets excited and he buys a shoe I think that’s the victory of design. That is the goal for interior design in a way.”

See all our stories about Nendo »
See all our stories about Camper »

Dezeen was in New York as part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour.

Watch all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies from New York »

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pasting a single product” – Nendo’s Oki Sato appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Dutch firm OMA has seen off competition from Danish studio BIG to land the high-profile commission to renovate Miami Beach Convention Center, home to the annual Art Basel/Miami and Design Miami trade fairs.

In a meeting held last night, Miami Beach City Commission named the winning development team as South Beach Ace, the group comprising OMA, property developers Tishman and UIA, local architect TVSdesign and landscape architects MVVA and Raymond Jungles.

OMA’s design will see a new 800-room hotel constructed over the roof of the existing convention centre, which itself will be expanded and reorganised by a 90-degree rotation that relocates the entrance on the south side of the site.

OMA’s Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu commented: “We are thrilled to be chosen to develop one of the most significant urban districts in the US. Our design will reintegrate Miami’s vital convention centre with the area’s existing neighbours, offering new connections as well as amplifying the character of this vibrant and exciting city.”

Reports claim that Miami Beach city manager Jimmy Morales had recommended BIG‘s Portman CMC team because it would be a cheaper and quicker construction, but that eventually OMA’s proposal was selected on a vote of five to two.

A public vote on the plans will take place in November, and if successful the renovated building could be open by 2018.

Here’s an animated fly-through of the winning design:

See more images of OMA’s proposal in our earlier story, or see the opposing design by BIG.

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Convention Center commission appeared first on Dezeen.