This project designed by Cheng Gong and Jinming Feng received a honorable mention at the International School Museum of Flamenco Competition. Flamenco is one of the traditional Spanish dancing arts that still exists and is actively practiced.  Its most impressive aspect could be found in the strong rhythm that is generated between the synthetic reaction of music and dancing.

Based on the inspiration of the articulated expression of ancient ornamental iron patterns as well as the order of the columns and arches in Spanish churches, the architects’ strategy is to re-appear the exuberant atmosphere within the context. Architectural programs are mainly defined by the columns and the fluid partitions offset from the outer domain. At the same time, a more active and dynamic roof and vertical sub-structural system grow from the regular column matrix with the purpose of not only forming a highly rhythmic sound wave cover but also extracting people from the surroundings and gathering them into the site to have an interactive moment such as dancing and communication. The transformation of shading and light effects emphasizes the comparison between the columns and the mutated roof. Read the rest of this entry »

Presented at the recently closed Vienna Design Week, the self-powered chair is an object which brought a lot of media attention to its creators. Novague is a Prague based design studio founded in 2008 by Petr Novague. Their design philosophy evolves around the concept of energy, also the key aspect of their Rocking Chair design. The aim was to create a widely used object that would be able to produce energy as a by-product of its exploitation. Eventually, a rocking chair design was decided upon, connecting the act of relaxing to the process of producing energy. A simple steam engine like kinetic mechanism is set under the seat which works with a sliding lever that pulls a flywheel disc while the chair rocks. Read the rest of this entry »

Anisotropia is based on Klavierstück I, a composition for piano by Orproject director Christoph Klemmt. The piano piece uses a twelve tone row which is repeated and altered by the different voices, in order to create complex rhythmic patterns. Anisotropia becomes the physical manifestation of Klavierstück I, a frozen piece of music. The installation is based on a simple strip morphology instead of a twelve tone row, which creates the structure, openings and rhythm within itself, its repetition happening in space instead of time. Layers of the strips form the wall system, and the shifting and alteration of these patterns results in the formation of complex architectural rhythms which are used to control the light, view and shading properties of the structure. The system has also been used for our design proposal for Busan Opera House. Read the rest of this entry »

The design uses light and sculptural space in order to illustrate different aspects of druguse. It doesn’t include conventional tools accompanying similar events. It aims to become a mind-opening experience whose architecture lures the visitors in. Through the creation of a hallucinogenic space, chance is given to discuss drugs. Space, light and sound is interacting with the visitor, giving a personal experience created by the visitors movement and mindset. Only one person is allowed inside at a time and may stay for as long as he/she wants to.

The installation contains three continuously linked spaces – pleasure, repetition and awakening. Entering the first space, the door is shut behind the visitor, who is given beauty and tranquillity. Soft, crystalline music and subtle light phenomenons, bring peace and pleasure. Sliding into the second space, the surroundings are closing in around the visitor. A harsh sound and light environment is brought on the person, who is deprived of direction and is given heaven and hell in a quick rhythm. In the last space the visitor starts to reach for reality and a numbing bass is growing through the body, giving a will to leave for solid ground. The wooden floor hide triggers that activate different scenes manipulating the subjects experience of the journey through the container. Thus reflections on drug use and abuse are raised. Read the rest of this entry »

Augmented Structures: Acoustic Formations” is an augmented structure, an installation created through the use of innovative parametric architecture and audiovisual techniques. The projects deals with a new mediated space: how to translate the logic of media into architecture? In this first experiment field recordings of Istiklal Street were transformed in to parametric architectural structure. The recordings were also used to create an electro-acoustical composition. The project seeks interactions between space, sound, the visual and light (with a reference to the Philips Pavilion of Le Courbusier).

Beyond being an artwork this installation is an urban experience that will nest in collective memory of İstiklal Street visitors through its scale (200sqm of surface) and the dominance of the location (at the heart of Istanbul). Read the rest of this entry »

Designed in collaboration between artist, architect and musician Lawrence Lek and designer Onur Ozkaya, the installation titled “Twins” explores issues of spatial intimacy and light-generated forms. It is one of several installations for an exhibition under Henri Matisse quote “The future of art is light”.

Artist Statement

I was invited to participate in Illumination, the inaugural show at Coldharbour Gallery in South London. I wanted to create a sculpture that you could inhabit, one that you could enter an illuminated world in which light and shadow were as important as structure. I also wanted to combine two contrasting natural forms – the playfulness of wings in flight, and the intimacy of a womb-like enclosure.

The project would combine earlier interests in biological skins and exoskeletons with a simple route or passage through an interior zone. This notion of creating an inhabitable sculpture would operate between our animal instinct to be immersed in nature, and our intellectual desire to create and control our environment.

I wanted the surfaces to behave like pieces of cloth, falling naturally into their final form. To achieve this, I worked together with industrial designer Onur Ozkaya to create a modular material system that could express the concept of the work. Read the rest of this entry »

Innen Stadt Auen (Inner City Out) is the first solo exhibition by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in a Berlin institution. The central theme of the show, which has been curated especially for the Martin-Gropius-Bau by Daniel Birnbaum, is Berlin, the city in which the artist has lived and worked for many years. Here he has set up his multifaceted studio, which combines research, experimentation and production; and as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts founded the Institut fr Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments) in April 2009. The exhibition concerns itself closely with the relationship between museum and city, architecture and landscape, and space, body and time. The site-specific investigations within the museum are amplified through various projects in public space, thus linking the Martin-Gropius-Bau to other places within the city. The entire project includes 28 works, most of which have been created especially for this occasion. Read the rest of this entry »

The natural acrylic stone material HI-MACS® was chosen by eminent French artist Ora-ïto for his entry into the recent Wallpaper/Reebok exhibition in London. Fabricated by Candido Hermida in Spain, HI-MACS® was selected for its outstanding properties, visual and tactile effects and the ability to offer the artist thermoforming capabilities that placed zero restriction on his vision and ability to create a stunning three-dimensional creation.

Five of the world’s leading creative artists were invited to participate and Ora-Ito’s contribution was an interpretation of the Reebok RealFlex shoe in the form of a wall-mounted installation made entirely from HI-MACS®.

The detail of Ora-Ito’s work was what he described as the “iconic sneaker soles”. In creating this by using HI-MACS® the designer was able to exercise various sculptural experiments taking inspiration from the RealFlex sole’s “hidden art” aspects, resulting in a topographic landscape made to touch and explore its own poetic qualities. Read the rest of this entry »

Architects at EMBT did an unpopular thing for their Comic and Animation Museum Design: they addressed the issue of context. The idea was to engage the surroundings in a visual and associative narrative, delivering a design that joins the Confucian geometry to a mystical appreciation of nature. The intense relationship between object and landscape and subtle referencing to tradition aimed to transform the site into, what the architects called-“a kind of magic land that will enhance the impossible and dare the mind to reach unexpected levels of imagination”. The punch-line iconicity and visual overstimulation were replaced with multilayered experiences of the specific and the imaginative.

The basket-like forms of the museum resonate with images of the Chinese vernacular. Their alignment suggests a processional navigation through the exhibition space, a principle immanent to the Taoist idea of “path”, ultimately embodied in the Chinese traditional garden design. The distinguishable imagery of narrow paths and networks of bridges amid lush green ambiance is reinterpreted, while still essentially rooted in the idea of the Chinese garden as “a cosmic diagram, revealing a profound and ancient view of the world and of man’s place in it”. Read the rest of this entry »

Hong Kong’s urban furniture contains multiple functional objects. Each of them belongs to a different set of formal expression or is part of a different style.

While variation is obvious in the style mix of Hong Kong’s public furniture, there is a lack of uniformity in the formal expression that could foster a unique Hong Kong identity. This design proposal by Rocker-Lange Architects for a contemporary city bench seeks to understand the concept of street furniture as a holistic design problem. Instead of offering only one single static design, this scheme suggests multiple varying solutions that meet specific fitness criteria.

The project “Urban Adapter” is based on a digital parametric model. At its core the model utilizes explicit site information and programmatic data to react and interact with its environment. That way the model’s DNA structure is capable of producing a variety of unique furniture results. Read the rest of this entry »