With Monika Sosnowska’s project Ohne Titel, 2010 (Untitled, 2010), the imposing interior courtyard of the K21 Ständehausin in Düsseldorf Germany is made available to an artistic intervention for the first time. At two-year intervals beginning in 2010, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen will be inviting internationally acclaimed artists to use the “airspace” above the piazza as the site of a contemporary intervention, each designed to heighten awareness of the museum as a “house of art” in the eyes of entering visitors.

Chosen for the first project in the series was Polish artist Monika Sosnowska, whose artistic idiom is energized by an enthralling dialogue between art and architecture. As a rule, her works generate tension by suggesting the question: “Already architecture – or still sculpture?” – and vice versa. In terms of content, she draws upon motifs from Constructivism and Minimalism. Formally, Sosnowska is influenced by Socialist Realism, by the modernist functional architecture that shaped the environment in which she grew up in the Poland of the 1970s and 1980s. Sosnowska strives to “create atmospheres,” with the aim of discovering how spaces and emotions interact. In doing so, she demonstrates an extraordinary feel for the linking of elements from the history of architectural modernity with motifs from the Socialist architecture of her homeland.

Up until its conversion into a museum in 2002, the building which today houses the K21 was a site of political confrontation. Erected by Julius Carl Raschdorff between 1877 and 1880, the Ständehaus was the meeting place of the Provincial Diet, and thereafter the seat of the Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia. Monika Sosnowska has appended an additional style to the eclecticism of the architecture of the K21 Ständehaus, which takes the form of a winking, yet apparently functional gesture. Her project was inspired by the external staircases often attached to the façades of residential blocks in her home country which are built in the style of Socialist Neoclassicism. As though deposited there by an enormous hand, the staircase – fashioned in black steel and with a red handrail – hangs downward into the foyer, at the same time seeming to reach out a sisterly modernist hand to the stair tower opposite. But Monika Sosnowska would not be Monika Sosnowska if she left things like that: the staircase is also misshapen, and in the upper, overhanging portion, its materiality seems to have been softened, as though it were melting.

Sosnowska sees in art a legitimate critic of architecture, and the latter in turn as reflecting political and societal relations. In this sense, a critique of architecture is a critique of society. Ever since 1989, when communism collapsed in the East, she has regarded the deformation and reshaping of architecture – especially in cities like Warsaw – as exemplary of social transformation. Her staircase is a commentary on both neoclassical architecture and on the demise of utopian modernism – manifested in the East primarily through ideas concerning socialist residential building.

At the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, Sosnowska exhibited a gigantic modernist steel skeleton structure in the space of the Polish pavilion, itself constructed in the 1930s, thereby counteracting its intellectual conception with a profane industrial building at the same location (“1:1,” 2007).

“It seems to me that what I do is somehow in opposition to what architecture stands for. I also think that my art is a completely different discipline, even though I focus on the same problems as architecture does: the forming of space. Utilitarianism is architecture’s fundamental attribute. My works introduce chaos and uncertainty instead”
Monica Sosnowska

Firefly is an interactive lighting installation by french designers Kkristen and Vincent Moreau. It’s currently presented for the first time at Shanghai World Expo 2010 as a part of lighting design of the Urban Best Practices Area.

Firefly reacts to human behavior like a swarm of glowing insects. These ones change their appearance in human presence : they wriggle, light up and scatter in response to the motion of visitors around. The cloud alternately disperses and merges… and its shape evolves to take a different appearance, again and again.
Firefly is an invitation to play, in search of a sensitive interaction between man and his environment.

Firefly at Shanghai World Expo 2010 from Firefly on Vimeo.

Thomas Heatherwick trained in three dimensional design at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Royal College of Art. He founded Thomas Heatherwick Studio in 1994 to bring architecture, design and sculpture together within a single practice.

Heatherwick Studio exists to make extraordinary projects happen. Established by Thomas Heatherwick in 1994, it is recognized for its work in: architecture, urban infrastructure, sculpture, furniture design and strategic thinking
Team members come from disciplinary backgrounds that include architecture, product design, model-making, fabrication, landscape design, fine art and curation.

[...]‘When I was about nine,” says Thomas Heatherwick, “I thought I’d invented perpetual motion – and they couldn’t really tell me why I was wrong.” Actually, he wasn’t, or at least not very. He had devised a way of powering a vehicle using a dynamo and a motor, much like today’s hybrid cars. It’s a memory that gives him confidence in “the naive thought” as he likes to call it. “There are some remarkably sophisticated things that blow our minds,” he says. “But there are some really simple ones as well.”[...]

[...]“Fifteen years ago,” he says, “if you’d come to my studio, I’d have had to make sure I’d made my bed and cleaned the breadcrumbs off the table – to pretend I didn’t live there.”…
That continuing belief in “the naive thought” has taken Heatherwick a long way. Equal parts sculptor, product designer, engineer and inventor, he has turned his hand to everything from handbags to shopping malls, and running through everything is that same striking execution of a simple idea, usually into something elegant, practical and ingenious. His Rolling Bridge in Paddington lifts up and curls into a free-standing circular sculpture. It is now raised once a week whether a boat is passing or not, since so many people come just to see it.[...]

[...]Heatherwick’s inexpertise is certainly still heavily in demand, and the projects seem to be getting more ambitious. Increasingly, he is asked to design buildings, even though he’s not an architect; he thought about studying architecture, but chose 3-D design instead. “I thought I might have more chance of making things,” he says. “I studied at a time when buildings were sterile things, and their creators were hands-off people – super-intelligent people, but you felt they didn’t love the stuff buildings are made from.”[...]

(Excerpts from Steve Rose interview with Thomas Heatherwick for “The Guardian” May 2009)

Rolling Bridge
London

The structure opens using a series of hydraulic rams integrated into the balustrade. As it curls, each of its eight segments simultaneously lifts, causing it to roll until the two ends touch and form a circle. The bridge can be stopped at any point along its journey.

The whole structure was constructed at Littlehampton Welding on the Sussex coast and then floated up the Grand Union Canal, before being lifted into position and attached to the hydraulic system which powers its movement.

The Rolling Bridge won a number of awards including a Structural Steel Award, and an Emerging Architecture Award. It opens every Friday at midday.

Date: 2004

Image: Steve Speller

Autumn Intrusion

Harvey Nichols, London

Harvey Nichols, a renowned department store in Knightsbridge, London, commissioned the studio to produce an installation to celebrate London Fashion Week 1997. The installation was a single 200m long, veneered wooden element, woven through the façade and rising up the building, engaging with both the architecture and the street.

The installation, named Autumn Intrusion, took a studio team of makers six months to construct and was in place for eight weeks. The structure is a composite of wood and polystyrene, making it both lightweight and strong.

Autumn Intrusion won the coveted D&AD Gold Award selected from a field of 14,000 entries.

Date: 1997

Image: Andy Stagg

Littlehampton, UK

Image: Steve Speller

Bleigiessen

Wellcome Trust, London

The Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research charity, commissioned the studio to design a sculpture for the atrium of its new headquarters. The site for the sculpture was within an eight-storey high atrium space above a pool of water. Although a huge space, the sculpture was commissioned after the building was complete, meaning it had to fit through a standard sized front door.

The vertiginous quality of this space, coupled with the presence of water, suggested the idea of exploring ways of capturing the dynamic shapes of falling liquids. Following extensive experimentation, pouring molten metal into water was found to create extraordinary and complex forms in a fraction of a second. No two experiments produced the same result. Over four hundred of these were produced before a five centimetre piece was created and selected as it was felt it would work well with the building and is the basis of the final thirty metre project.

This original piece was digitised and exactly replicated using 142,000 glass spheres suspended on 27,000 high tensile steel wires; 15 tonnes of glass and just under a million metres of wire. The spheres, made in Poland in a spectacle lens factory, were the result of a collaboration with Flux Glass, their shifting colour and brightness coming from a layer of dichroic film set between the two hemispherical lenses that make up each sphere.

In 2006 Bleigiessen was awarded a Lovells Art and Work Award, and can be viewed on the last Friday of every month at 2pm.

Date: 2005
Awards: Lovells Art and Work Awards (2006)

Image: Peter Mallett

Extrusion

A seat usually consists of many parts and involves complex manufacturing and assembly processes. For some time the studio has been researching the possibilities of simplifying the elements of a seat into only one component made from one material; a single piece of aluminium without any fixtures or fittings. The studio spent eighteen years trying to realise this idea before a facility was located capable of bringing the idea to reality.

A large press capable of exerting up to ten thousand tons of pressure creates the extruded sections by squeezing aluminium through its die (the opening that forms the shape of the profile to be created). Usually the aluminium extrusion process is used to make smaller section components for façade systems, train carriages, automotive parts and so on. Just as when a tube of toothpaste is squeezed, the first and last part come out misshapen, so too with the extrusion process the first and last lengths have unusual and unexpected forms which are conventionally discarded; for these pieces the forms are allowed to exist and are enjoyed for their brutal, sculptural qualities.

Extrusions constituted a show held at Haunch of Venison in October 2009. Seven experimental pieces were shown which comprise the first works that will be derived from fifteen billets of aluminium, to total no more than 200 metres of extrusion, after which the die will be rendered unusable. Each Extrusion will be cut, manipulated and finished under the studio’s direction, and individually signed and numbered by Thomas Heatherwick.

Further developments using large scale extrusions are progressing.

Date: 2009

Materials: Aluminium

Awards: Brit Insurance Designs of the Year nominee (2010)

Glass Bridge

Kings Cross, London

The idea is to make a bridge made of glass with no metal fixings. As one of the principle qualities of glass is its high compressive strength, the proposal is to take sheets of glass and use gravity to apply sufficient pressure to compress them together to act as a beam.

1334 sheets of 12mm thick, low iron glass sheets are compressed together by active bearings that exert 800 tonnes of pressure from each end of the span. The active bearings are mechanisms that apply a constant load through the bridge deck, via a simple lever, loaded with a weight. The compressive force creates sufficient friction to hold the glass sheets together without mechanical fixings. The fail-safe mechanism is having two bearings, allowing one side to be locked off, whilst still applying sufficient force from the other. The deck is non-slip, as the wearing surface is highly textured.

Usually bridges and buildings are lit externally, with light reflecting off their surfaces. The opportunity with the Glass Bridge is to light it internally thus performing as an optical device, with light transmitting through it.

The Glass Bridge won the Bombay Sapphire Award 2002 and has since developed through to the end of the detail design stage (RIBA stage D).

Date: Initial concept 1997; project ongoing

Image: Peter Mallett

Spun

Spun came out of research into the geometric simplification of a familiar object type. Could a completely rotationally symmetrical form make a comfortable chair?

Developed through full size test pieces an ergonomic was established where seat, back and arms were all the same profile. The result is not immediately apparent as a chair and when upright looks more like a sculptural vessel. However, when lent on its side it forms a comfortable and functional chair that the sitter can rock from side to side in, or even spin round in a complete circle.

Dimensions: d88 x h65 cm

Materials: Brushed/Polished steel/copper

Date: 2010

Image: David Balhuizen

Vents

Paternoster Square, London

Paternoster Square is part of a development in a high-profile, sensitive location, next to St Paul’s Cathedral in London. It is a new public space containing a pre-existing underground electricity substation. This substation required a cooling system with outlet and inlet vents, but the client team was unhappy with the proposed solution for a single large object as it would turn the surrounding space into a corridor.

The studio made use of the two existing holes in the concrete slab covering the substation, to reduce the overall size of the vent object by splitting the outlet part into two smaller vents – saving significant space by setting the inlet ducts into the ground using grilles flush with the pavement.

The aesthetic design is derived from experiments with folded paper, scaled up to 11m in height; the vents retain the proportions of the A4-size paper used in these experiments. The Vents are fabricated from 63 identical, 8mm thick, stainless steel isosceles triangles welded together and finished by glass bead blasting.

The Vents are a permanent installation, available for the public to visit.

Image: Daniele Mattioli

UK Pavilion

Shanghai Expo 2010

In September 2007, Heatherwick Studio led the winning team in the competition to design the UK Pavilion for the Shanghai 2010 Expo. The event is set to be the largest Expo ever with two hundred countries taking part and over 70 million visitors expected. The theme of the Expo is “Better City, Better Life” and a key client objective is for the UK Pavilion to be one of the five most popular attractions.

The studio’s design has three main aims: the first is to be a pavilion whose architecture is a direct manifestation of the content it exhibits; the second is to provide significant public open space in which visitors can relax; the third is to find a simple idea that is strong enough to stand out amidst the busy-ness of the hundreds of competing pavilions.

These aims are captured in two interlinked and experiential elements based around the subject of nature and cities – Seed Cathedral, and a multi-layered landscape treatment of the 6,000sqm site. The Seed Cathedral is a platform to show the work of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and their Millennium Seedbank. In the circulation zone under the landscape that surrounds the Seed Cathedral a series of installations explore in more detail the particularity of nature and UK cities.

The Seed Cathedral is a 20-metre high building, constructed from 60,000 transparent 7.5-metre long optical strands, each of which has embedded within its tip a seed. The interior is silent and illuminated only by the daylight that has filtered past each seed through each optical hair; a quiet space in which to contemplate this formidable collection of the world’s botanical resources.

At least five million people are expected to pass through the UK Pavilion, which has consistently ranked in the top five most popular pavilions with the public in the run up to the opening.

In 2006, Laarman’s Bone Chair revolutionized the design process by using an algorithm to translate the complexity, proportion and functionality of bone and tree growth into a chair form. The algorithm, originally used by the German car industry, enabled him to reduce and strengthen his designs by optimizing material allocation, weight and stability, while minimizing material input. In his own words, he sculpted “using mother nature’s underlying codes.”

The upcoming exhibition is the culmination of five years of trial and error, exploratory material research and his continuous quest to translate science into functional objects of beauty now, on a monumental scale. It is a world of new options on the edge of fiction and reality, between efficiency and the sometimes non-efficient joy of experimenting. It gives a peak into Joris Laarman Lab’s future laboratory/ production place which they want to develop. Some of the works are stepping-stones, others further developed bodies of work. All of them are collaborations with engineers, scientists and craftsmen.

“We see the projects as research groups, which we want to develop further into worlds of objects, installations and where possible industrial products in different form languages.”

BONEFURNITURE:

If evolution could create a chair…

Generating constructions using the exact same principle as bone growth first developed by Claus Mattheck and further developed by Opel in Germany.

The optimization video shows the concept that started in 2004 in colaboration with droog and friedman benda. For the first time the completed body of work is presented all together.

The series contain a chair, chaise, armchair, rocker, table and bookshelf.

Bridge Table, 2010

Aluminum and Tungsten Carbide

Joris Laarman’s Leaf Table takes after his previous designs, which meld organic forms and intricate, modern designs. His pieces don’t attempt to imitate organic forms, but obviously take their inspiration from them. The Leaf Table has a large tabletop with abstract leaf designs imposed on it. The legs of the table appear delicate while adding overall strength to the design.

ROBOTS:

Asimov prototype chair miniature installation

Rapid manufacturing with sheet materials.

Computational curved crease origami folded by robots in steel. With developments in origami mathematics, complex instructional diagrams, and technology, designs have taken on ever more sophisticated forms. One key has been the evolution of written instructions that compress hundreds of creases into a single diagram. Recently software has been developed with which curved crease origami can be folded in strong materials like aluminum or stainless steel using multiple robots. This technology allows to create complex but elegantly shaped objects strong enough to be manufacture furniture in a matter of seconds.

IN VITRO:

Half life lamp

And there was light…

Inspired by recent groundbreaking work on the edge of arts and genomics the motivation behind this project is to set up a larger lab in collaboration with university of Twente and Leiden in The Netherlands to study in vitro manufacturable products. This could lead to a whole new world of objects, products and production methods with new formal languages that are unknown until now. Using the beauty and efficiency of biological growth this could revolutionize the way we manufacture objects and might be a solution to the drain of natural resources.

This lamp is half made of living organism and half made of non living material and recently died*. It was born on February 23 in a Dutch tissue culture laboratory. On the video Half life radiated brightly when it was in healthy conditions. The cells responsible for the emission of light in the hood of the lamp originally stem from a Chinese hamster. In 1957 these CHO cells were isolated from a hamster’s ovary and kept alive as a cell culture for research purposes. In the 1990s this cell line was enriched with the fire fly’s luciferase gene. Ever since than these hamster cells glow in the dark in presence of luciferine. According to present state of knowledge in the life science the development of bioluminescence systems in living organisms occurred naturally about 20 or 30 times in evolution. Well known examples of bioluminescence are found in bacteria, fire flies, and jelly fish.

IN CASE OF A THOUSAND BOOKS:

Originally designed as a special commission this is an example of creating objects of an uncommon scale combining the craftsmanship of an architectural model maker and structural engineers. It is a 5.6 meter high bookstaircase in glass stainless steel and poly concrete partly made in the architectural model making workshop of Vincent de Rijk. The bookcase could contain as many books as an early E-reader which visualizes the disappearance of shape, volume and material in the digital world and somehow makes it a monument for ones treasured books and their smell, material, form and feel in general.

PARTICLES:

starlings and cumulus tables

Inspired by the beauty of Dutch skies with its famous dramatic cloud formations, and ballets of starlings and light this project is focussing on creating self supporting sculptural objects based on particle behavior.

Using 3D animation software of the film industry particle behavior can be simulated and stopped at any given moment in time after which it is generated into a self supporting structure of unpredictable shape and porosity.

PAPER STARLINGS:

Originally proposed to the Guggneheim for the Contemplating the Void exhibition, starlings is an interactive installation containing 2000 architypical paper planes autonomously flying in a gracious organic ballet remotely guided by a high tech indoor gps system. These planes can either fly as an interactive swarm that reacts on inteference with the public or be guided in a pre- determined choreography. The planes are motorized as micro robotics with radio transmitters and carry a tiny battery. When a battery is empty the plane lands on a large ground platform and is charged automatically. When the battery is re-charged the plane lifts off to join the rest of the swarm again.

Imagine controlling your own swarm of paper planes…

This collaboration was made possible by a company called United states of entertainment and asctec in Germany. This project has been proposed to the Guggneheim for the Contemplating the Void exhibition.

The show will be on view from March 4 through April 10, at Friedman Benda, 515 West 26th Street.

Photos © 2010 Stefan Hepner

http://www.jorislaarman.com

_grau | 10:01 min | d 2004 | HD premiere from Robert Seidel on Vimeo.

_grau is a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally … various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds …

Robert Seidel began studying biology at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and finished his media design diploma at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. His films have been shown in over 250 festivals (Prix Ars Electronica, onedotzero, DOTMOV, IFF Rotterdam, EMAF), museums, galleries, magazines, books and TV programmes worldwide. In his films Seidel is interested in pushing the boundaries of organic beauty and their emotional perception with visual and scientific technology. By layering different structural, spatial and temporal concepts organically he creates a slowly evolving complexity. This multifaceted perspective, a kind of narrational skeleton is filled by the viewers own memory and creates a seamless blend with the artwork itself.

Media critic Matt Hanson, author of The End of Celluloid and founder of onedotzero festival says: “_grau appeals to me because it is organo-tech. it does not deliberately ape the abstract pioneers of abstract cinema, and it is worlds away from the motion graphic masturbation of many of those enamoured by digital animation. seidel’s work is impressionistic, melding biological and emotional currents. out of amorphous shapes we make out bones, heads, a hand. a spirit leaving the body. at least, this is what i sense out of the chaos of galactic reconfigurations, neurological connections, and biological forms. this is a powerful piece of digital animation precisely because it does not feel like such, it feels emotional, epic. and once you release the background to the animation–communicating a ‘coming to terms’ with the aftermath of a car accident–you realise why.”

Futures – Zero 7 feat. José González | 3:58 min | d 2006 from Robert Seidel on Vimeo.

In “Futures” you will see crushed things, completely abstracted … finding together and building up to something we all have seen before … Like our true wishes and desires they shape over time and get clearer … followed by the next longing … Innuendos, artifacts and the rough synchronization add subtle emotions to the uncertain process that build the morbid tableaux of all possible futures …

phyletic museum | processes: living paintings | d 2008 from Robert Seidel on Vimeo.

“processes: living paintings” is a 35 by 16 meter full façade projection with a corresponding light choreography, ambient music and synced sound effects shown on the 2/2/2008 in Jena, Germany.

www.2minds.de

This is how Simone Micheli describes his project:

The i-SUITE interior architectural plan lies its foundations in the concept of modern luxury I developed after a thorough and targeted thinking. During the “XXX Congreso Colombiano de Arquitectura” ( 30th Colombian Architecture Convention) which took place in Barranquilla (Colombia) in 2007 I asserted: “ …the new luxury does not mean immobility or habit, but rather freedom and movement. It is a light and a stirring thought, at any moment we are able to choose where and how to live and to reinvent the environment we live in.

(…)It has visual and inner harmony, it is the mirror of our mood which becomes calmer and stabler. Spirituality and beauty involve us in a aesthetic experience with all that is around us and with all we build with our body and mind. All this leads to the birth of a new place suitable for the inner growth but also for the development of our present or future family which is proud and grateful for having the chance of enjoying the cohesiveness the family is surrounded by. Daily relations and interactions as well will benefit from this cohesiveness by being enriched with passion and enthusiasm.

I aim at making man the main focus of the attention by stirring up his senses by means of shapes, images, colours, lights, materials and by creating a scenario hovering among trascendence and immanence, concreteness and abstraction, dream and reality.

I am referring to spaces in the world, where man represents a fourth dimension worth studying and to be sensorially satisfied. Moreover, each element in these spaces bring man back to the origins of time when everything was pure and simple.

In my opinion the word luxury could go beyond the limits of its meaning.

(…)This lively place enables our guests to smile,to relax, to meet and have conversation with other people. This is an unforgettable area which enables our guests to enter a dimension of freedom, beauty and uniqueness unconsciously ”.

Photos by Jürgen Eheim

www.simonemicheli.com

DIDIER MARCEL at The Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art – MUDAM LUXEMBOURG - 10.10.2009 – 03.01.2010
“It’s a question of admitting that art is not life and that art is always a difference produced between a real thing and its translation.”
Didier Marcel

“A profound artistic curiosity for sculptural questions concerning shape, size, texture and presentation is combined in the work of Didier Marcel with the know-how of an artist capable of orchestrating craftsmen specialised in contemporary materials to conceive sophisticated results.

The often mundane motifs of the works of Didier Marcel draw from the lands of his immediate environment. The tree trunk moulds in polyester resin adopt the position of supporting columns whose fibrous surfaces perfectly reflect the ornamental character of the bark. Extracts of imaginary landscapes or elements of images in space, his works represent the details of a reality whose alienation underlines how the ideas that one has about nature are a cultural production. Didier Marcel is as much interested in plays of scale as he is in the sophisticated framing of his works. The very particular plinth structures, or the production in a sales showroom style, underlines the artificial character of the situation. It is with a certain elegance that the artist refers to art history without, however, citing it too explicitly. Didier Marcel responds to the sometimes nostalgic tones of his works with an impeccable technical perfection and surprising coloured accents.”

Curator: Clément Minighetti (Mudam)

Hans-Christian Berg is one of the most interesting artists of his generation in Finland. In 2002, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Sculpture Department with an MA and from the University of Art and Design, Ceramics and Glass Department with an MA in Helsinki. In 2007 he has been named as the Young Artist of the Year. Berg’s primary interest is optical illusion and experimentation with perception of light and surface reflection.

“Hans-Christian Berg’s works makes the gaze itself the focus of observation. The subject that relies on the primacy of Cartesian thinking uses its senses in relation to the surrounding world in a way that is a form of taking possession guided by cognition. Berg’s works, meanwhile, challenge the mode of perception itself, and thus intervene in the structure of the genesis of understanding. As he has said, with his sculptures and via the spatial illusions they create, he wants to re-display the boundary conditions for perception, via which the viewing situation is created.

Hans-Christian Berg’s works’ relationship with perception appears to proceed via various kinds of epistemic apparatuses and ontologies. Or, as he himself terms his attitude, “breathing the conception of the future”. The works’ figurativeness contains references both to the history of the development of optics and to the instruments (blown mirrors, observation instruments), to space geometry, and to three-dimensional modelling (geometrical shapes one inside another, the cut-out laser patterns in the acrylic works), to the meta-reality of electronic data transmission (sculptures made out of strings of ones and zeroes), and to the history of cognitive brain research (the bulging phrenological shapes of the brains in the Minds sculptures). Together these elements or this open network of references are directed, on the one hand, at the current technological world as a transparency of observation and as possible worlds; and, on the other hand, at the physical reality as a fixative adaptation of the relationship between humanity and technology. Simultaneously, via artistic creativity, the works refer to science as fantasy, as science fiction, reinforcing its utopias and, at the same time, revealing its illusions.”

Quotation:
Hans-Christian Berg – Optical Pulsations on the World’s Retina by Leevi Haapala

www.hcberg.com

Austrian architectural firm COOP HIMMELB(L)AU presented their design for ‘Pavilion 21 MINI Opera Space’ for the Bavarian State Opera during a press conference in Munich.

The task was to develop a temporary 300 seat Pavilion for the Munich Opera Festival 2010 with a multifunctional stage. Though being one of the smallest projects the Pavilion is one of the most exciting ones the design studio is working on. There is a contradiction between the requirements for mobility on the one hand and excellent acoustics on the other: mobile lightweight construction is usually not suitable for acoustic spaces which require physical mass.

As it is the case with the three opera and concert halls in China, Denmark and Spain which COOP HIMMELB(L)AU is currently planning and constructing, the acoustical properties of a space can be enhanced by tilted walls and increased surface area. Another design strategy is also to reduce the influence of external sources of sound. The Pavilion which is 21 meters long, 17 meters wide and between 6 and 8 meters high will be positioned in such a way on the Marstallplatz that it will act more as a sound reflector than as a barrier to the sound of the cars passing by.

The new digital design methods are highly appropriate to implement in a practical way the idea of surface enlargement designed as pyramid-shaped aluminum structures. Those have been generated parametrically through the overlay of sound frequencies from Jimi Hendrix’ song”…’Scuse me while I kiss the sky…” and Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni”. These shapes act either as sound reflectors or as sound reducers. The arrangement of these elements creates an iconic building consistent with COOP HIMMELB(L)AU’s principle to synergetically combine idea, form and content.

©Isochrom.

www.coop-himmelblau.at

Godiva’s new concept flagship store by Tokyo based studio Wanderwall. Godiva’s idea was “treat thyself”. Wonderwall’s intention was to add a breath of fresh air to the more traditional image Godiva instill. The shop features humorous design details such as the “melting chocolate” ceiling combined with the primarily classical interior design.

The boutique’s popular and fashionable location of Harajuku has also been considered in the overall design. Passers-by can view both its entrance as well as the customers enjoying their time with chocolate on the second floor cafe.

Photos : Kozo Takayama

wonder-wall.com