There isn’t a child out there who likes being slathered in sunscreen before a day at the beach, but it’s the easiest way to ensure they don’t end up with a terrible sunburn. And to help make that a little easier for them to understand, this pair of dolls also gets a sunburn if not properly protected.
The Vice Clocks collection, by Poorex, is a pair of industrial clocks inspired by a craftsman’s workshop. Not just a clock, these multifunctional pieces can also serve other duties.
One of the clocks is painted in a bright, bold red and fits perfectly in any workspace. Its clamp-like design allows it to also serve as a note holder, or make it easy to attach the clock to various surfaces.
The wooden clock is inspired by a wind-up toy. While winding it up, it can also smash a nut placed in the rear panel, giving it in an interesting spin.
It's bullshit. The golden ratio's aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn. Many designers don't use it, and if they do, they vastly discount its importance. There's also no science to really back it up. Those who believe the golden ratio is the hidden math behind beauty are falling for a 150-year-old scam.
Do designers ever follow the Golden Ratio? Is it even relevant in architecture? FastCo.Design writer John Brownlee voices his perspective on the old myth.
A single abandoned building can be a gloomy thing, an apocalyptic scene in miniature. But what about when an entire island is built up, inhabited by humans, and then left to rot? As these videos show, they look like footage from the end of the world.
Just got back from an intense couple of days in beautiful Barcelona checking out the OFFF conference for the very first time. And I met so many great people from the industry and saw some really great talks. One that really stood out for me as a type buff, was the one by Rob Gonzalez and Jonathan Quainton from Sawdust – a London based studio that’s been pushing out magnificent work for close to 10 years now. Listening to them sharing their creative processes and the story behind each piece was both interesting and incredibly inspiring. So well done, lads!
New York 2015: New York designer Alexander Gendell has added a chair that pops out of an artwork to his Folditure collection of fold-flat furniture (+ movie). (more…)
Architects including Steven Holl and Bjarke Ingels have created Lego buildings for an installation by artist Olafur Eliasson on the High Line in Manhattan (+ slideshow). (more…)
Architects: Cadaval & Solà-Morales
Location: El Port de la Selva, Girona, Spain
Architects In Charge: Eduardo Cadaval, Clara Solà-Morales
Area: 250.0 sqm
Year: 2014
Photographs: Sandra Pereznieto
Collaborators: Moisés Gamus, Joanna Pierchala, Efstathios Kanios
Building Engineering: Joaquin Peláez
Structural Engineering: Manel Fernández, BERNUZ-FERNANDEZ
Construction Company: Joaquin Gonzalez Obras y Construcciones
From the architect. The Sunflower house sits on a privileged condition of limit; in the border within the water of the Mediterranean sea and the hard rock of the Costa Brava, between the wild nature of Cabo de Creus and the urban settlement of El Port de la Selva, a small fisherman village in the border of France and Spain. A place where the Pyrenees get into the water, generating an exceptional wildlife richness, both in the coast and in the water. The house wants to identify each of the particularities of this magnificent landscape; with its geometry, the house frames a multiplicity of different and specific views, and builds up content spaces that inhabit great big framed views.
Mel and Geoff wanted a house in front of the Mediterranean sea that was fully exposed to the views; but they never imagined that their plot, beyond its closeness to the sea, was tremendously exposed to one of the strongest winds of the peninsula ( the Tramuntana, up to 180 Km/h at this point), and did almost not get any direct sun radiation. So the project starts from this dichotomy: reinforce the relation to the sea, while finding and attracting the sun into the house.
The frontal view from the site is impressive, from France to the Natural Park of the Cabo de Creus, and always the immensity of the open sea right in front of it; the rocks, and a ever changing sky that changes constantly its texture due to the wind.
The project breaks down the panoramic view into the addition of many different conditions; the diverse uses of the house are minced and articulated so that each of them (of small dimensions) is positioned frontally to the diverse landscape conditions previously enumerated. Therefore the project is an addition of small units that each frame a differentiated view, and it is within the transition from one unit to the other where the totality of the panoramic view is comprehended. And it is also in the addition of those units where a major open space is generated, the central space of the house.
The house is also a big solar collector, a mechanism to bring light and heat into the house; like a giant sunflower. The composition of the volumes responds to the generation of a rear patio that enables the sun radiation into the living room, to heat the hole house up. This patio, protected from the Tramuntana through the construction itself and oriented to ensure maximum radiation inside the house, is also an outdoor living area where to stay when Tramuntana is hitting the area. Even more, the sequence of two major glazing enables the view of the sea from this back rear patio, while seating within the rocks and local vegetation.
The segmentation into small units is a programmatic decision that has little impact on the actual experience of the place. Each of this cubes is defined through a solid continuous perimeter that traces a specific relationship with the outdoors; the arrangement of all the individual spaces generates an ensemble that reacts to its not uniform context, opening to the views but protecting itself from neighbors. From the interior the experience of the house is continuous: from any point of the house one feels closely related to the immediate milieu by incorporating one or other view into the numerous spaces.
The strength (and struggle) of the project relies on its geometry. Meanwhile, all the materials used in the construction are typical of the area, from the structure to the outdoor finishes of the walls. Only the glazing, due to the need to respond to the requirements for such strong winds, incorporates thicknesses and technologies more typical of skyscrapers than for single houses. Water, salt, sun.
Sunflower House / Cadaval & Solà-Morales originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 03 Jun 2015.
send to Twitter | Share on Facebook | What do you think about this?
If Crave’s Flex is the Linux of vibrators, with its long menu of settings and programmable waveforms, Minna Life’s Limon is more like a slimmed down iPhone app. It lets you change just one variable – the strength of the buzz – with an equally simple and intuitive method: how hard you squeeze.
Pawn Sacrifice is an upcoming film starring Tobey Maguire and Liev Schreiber about the life of chess player Bobby Fischer (Maguire) leading up to his historic victory over Russian player Boris Spassky (Schreiber) in the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavík, Iceland. The film focuses on the match, but also Fischer’s increasing paranoia and battle with mental illness.
The film will is scheduled to release in select theaters on September 18, 2015.
image via Bleeker Street Media
via Fabiano Caruana
Architects: Helen & Hard, dRMM
Location: Rudskogen, Norway
Helen & Hard Team: Siv Helene Stangeland, Reinhard Kropf, Njål Undheim, Ane Dahl, Randi Augenstein, Nadine Engberding
D Rmm Team: Alex de Rijke, Mirko Immendorfer, Jonas Lencer, Saskia, Koopmann, Junko Yanagsawa, Satoshi Isono
Area: 14250.0 sqm
Year: 2013
Photographs: Sindre Ellingsen, Njål Undeheim, Aeroview, dRMM
Project Architect: Helen & Hard
Landscape Architect: Helen & Hard AS / rum Arkitekter
Project And Construction Management: Kruse Smith Entreprenør AS
Engeneering Consultants: Dimensjon Rådgivning AS, Sig.Halvorsen AS, Energi og Miljø AS, Rønning Elektro AS, Sveco Norge AS, Siv Ing Albert Ølne, Trondheim
From the architect. Rundeskogen is a wooded hill connecting three city centres on the west coast of Norway.
Single-family houses and small-scale housing projects dominate this region, creating a context that accentuates the exceptional height and volume of the project. The density and concentration of the project was developed to keep a required distance from a recently discovered Viking grave on the same hillside.
The three towers contain 113 units in total, ranging from 60m2 to 140m2, with the highest tower reaching 15 stories. The core construction is concrete while secondary parts are made from timber framework. Originally the three towers where designed as timber constructions. Due to the client’s desire to build in a more conventional way, this solution was replaced with hybrid concrete/timber.
The emphasis has been balancing the tall building typology with generous and attractive public green spaces on the ground. To minimize the footprint of the three towers and retain a view of the fjord for neighbours, the first apartment floors have been lifted off the ground, cantilevering from the core. This creates covered outdoor spaces on ground level.
The organizing element of the entire project is a star-shaped core structure of concrete, in which the fins are extended as separation walls between the flats. The prismatic shape of the plan is derived from optimizing the floor plans according to views and sun as well as the creation of diagonal views in between and around the towers. This layout gives special volumetric qualities – letting the light and shade gradually shift around the facades, an effect which is further emphasized by the triangular panels that reflect the light differently as one moves past the building. On the ground floor, the fins and bracing elements of this stem-like core spread out as roots which integrate social meeting places, play and training facilities, generous entrance halls and communal gathering spaces.
Internally, each apartment has an integrated winter-garden, which has fully insulated glass facades allowing for flexible, year-round use. Other environmental features that are added include; solar collectors on the roof, heat recovery from grey water and ground source heat pumps that provide heating.
Every apartment was purchased with a complementary bike and the owners given their own fruit tree in the landscaped site.
Rundeskogen / Helen & Hard + dRMM originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 01 Jun 2015.
send to Twitter | Share on Facebook | What do you think about this?
Even though China has contributed all kinds of good things to the world, from fireworks to pasta, the country has become known as the home of fake- fake products, fake companies and the place to go when you want an imitation product made for cheap.
Usually this fakery is limited to valuable goods like electronics and fashion accessories, but China is apparently also home to some ingeniously inedible fake foods.
There are street vendors peddling cement chunks in walnut shells, which are wrapped in paper so they don’t rattle around, fake rice made out of potatoes and plastic, and fake eggs made out of various chemicals and gelatin. Oh the lengths people will go to just to make a buck!
Everybody freaks out over the idea of getting bitten by a scorpion or spider — but those are nothing. Our planet contains creatures with much more deadly toxins to defend themselves with. Here are some revealing videos of the most venomous creatures on Earth.
In her latest series of paintings, Barcelona-based artist and illustrator Cinta Vidal Agulló defies gravity and architectural conventions to create encapsulated scenes of intersecting perspectives. Painted with acrylic on wood panels, Vidal refers to the paintings as “un-gravity constructions” and says that each piece examines how a person’s internal perspective of life may not match up with the reality around them. The intersecting planes on many of her paintings are somewhat reminiscent of drawings by M.C. Escher, where every angle and available surface is inhabited by colorful characters going about their daily lives. She shares in a new interview with Hi-Fructose:
With these un-gravity constructions, I want to show that we live in one world, but we live in it in very different ways – playing with everyday objects and spaces, placed in impossible ways to express that many times, the inner dimension of each one of us does not match the mental structures of those around us. The architectural spaces and day-to-day objects are part of a metaphor of how difficult it is to fit everything that shapes our daily space: our relationships, work, ambitions, and dreams.
Vidal just opened a new exhibition of work at Miscelanea BCN in Barcelona and you can read an in-depth conversation with the artist on Hi-Fructose.
what the fuck please call an exorcist
A. Kachmarllama faaaace
People who are younger than you but taller
People who are younger than you but better than you at something
People who are younger than you
People
Being turned into a llama
A LLAMA?! HE’S SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD!!!
yeah… weird
“Mommy, I swear I wasn’t doing anything bad.”
The Tempescope is a novel device designed by Ken Kawamoto that displays the upcoming forecast by simulating weather conditions inside a small translucent box. The device is capable of downloading information about upcoming weather off the internet, which it then translates into a variety of modes to replicate sunshine, clouds, rain, and even lighting. Kawamoto made an early version of the device available as a free open-source project called OpenTempescope so you can try building your own, but a consumer version is planned for Kickstarter later this year. If you liked this, don’t miss The Cloud. (via Sixpenceee)
A. KachmarMost cars infotainment systems is a mess, from being unintuitive to handicapped, hopefully more makers will be switching to this.
Chevy has announced it will integrate both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto into 14 of its models next year. That’s a lot of cars, and Apple anticipates that CarPlay will be in 40 models worldwide by year’s end. I tried out both systems at an event yesterday, and left curious: Have cars finally become rolling computers?
"Within about 20 minutes, and after a cup of coffee, I could feel it. A coursing through my veins, like my blood was pumping at full blast, but being kept under control by some external monitoring force.
Read the rest
Dutch studio Concrete has kitted out the suites of an Amsterdam hotel with fittings that include retractable staircases, ceiling-mounted gymnast's hoops and under-bed offices. (more…)
Awesome Chalkboard Designs by Dangerdust
Beautiful type designs by Gemma O’Brien
Modern Architecture and Beautiful House Designs | #1003
