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 »

“Waste Landscape” by French art studio Le Centquatre is a 600 square meters artificial undulating landscape covered by an armor of 60,000 unsold or collected CDs, which have been sorted and hand-sewn.

It is well known that CDs are condemned to gradually disappear from our daily life, and to later participate in the construction of immense open-air, floating or buried toxic waste reception centers. Made of petroleum, this reflecting slick of CDs forms a still sea of metallic dunes: the monumental scale of the art work reveals the precious aspect of a small daily object. The project joins a global, innovative and committed approach, from its means of production until the end of its “life”. “WasteLandscape” will be displayed in locations coherent with the stakes of the project: the role of art in society, the sensitization to environmental problems through culture, the alternative mode of production and the valuation of district associative work and professional rehabilitation. Read the rest of this entry »

Developed by students from “An Inconvenient Studio” at the Institute for Digital Fabrication of Ball State University, MorphoLuminescence utilizes an understanding of fashion photography to find its form and provide optimized lighting, enhancing the experience of trying on clothing. A three-point lighting set up is commonly used by fashion photographers, arranging a bright key light above eye level, in combination with softer fill and back lighting to create subtle shadows and a three dimensional effect.

Comprised of custom laser-cut “petals”, “stems”, and hinges, Morpholuminescence was pre-assembled for testing prior to shipping in pieces to the SPOT ON SCHOOLS exhibition in Florence, Italy. MorphoLuminescence provides variably tuned hue and light intensity levels in order to affect the fitting room experience and adapts its form to accommodate changes in the space. In its idle state the dimly lit surface of petals hangs free, signaling to consumers that it is ready for use. Through simple infrared sensors, human presence and variations in the space are analyzed, initiating its state of change. Read the rest of this entry »

The Grasp Pendulum is part of a permanent exibition in Berlin’s Medical Technology Science Center, elaborating on the human body and its motor functions.  By combining virtual and real movements, the Grasp Pendulum establishes a creative dialogue between visitors and science, the mechanical forces that generate movement and digital inputs used by the authors. The eight-meter high kinetic sculpture is visible through the glass façade of the building. Its movements and ever-changing appearance attract the visitors and connect the building’s interior with the surrounding public space.

It consists of three pendulum arms suspended in parallel, each of which carries 12 inward and outward-facing monitors. The kinetic sculpture is based on real-time control of the motors. The system registers the virtual hand movements on the screens and directly transposes these into real movements, precisely synchronizing the image and the swinging of the pendulum. This principle also enables direct visitor engagement. A light box interface facilitates two modes of interaction: A live silhouette of the visitor’s hand is relayed onto one of the screens. Suddenly, the shadow freezes, and the focus shifts to the next display. All the screens are sequentially filled with the visitor’s expressive hand gestures. Once complete, by wiping their hands across the interface, visitors can influence the movement of the pendulum. Read the rest of this entry »

The aim of the project is to develop a theater / performance / stage project for the Sydney Festival 2012, a one-month festival with hundreds of events occurring in the city. The project was designed along a number of briefs and locations that varied in program, size, character, and location.

Iain Blampied and Oliver Hessian approached the project brief with the understanding that ideally this venue should be an expressive piece of architecture that attracts visitors in its own right while also leaving the inhabiting director as much freedom for creativity and as little distraction as possible. The approach taken involves the investigation of architecture as a temporal, dynamic system, a performative envelope and a machine that mirrors a multiplicity of worlds. Read the rest of this entry »

This thesis by Brandon Clifford posits that our conventional understanding of domesticity is in direct relation to a cultural assumption about property ownership – permanence, prosperity, growth – and, in turn, claims that this relationship is currently in a state of crisis (we move now more than ever and foreclosure rates are through the roof).  This assumption of permanence has served as the foundation for a variety of disciplines – architecture, urban planning, real-estate, the building industry – but our increasing condition of impermanence forces us to reexamine how these disciplines respond.  This project proposes a method of making that operates in direct correspondence with the ebb and flow of property fluctuations, and is demonstrated through multiple scales of architectural design. Read the rest of this entry »