Tuesday 10 November 2020

Video offers glimpse inside Safdie Architects' Jewel Changi Airport

The Rain Vortex inside Jewel Changi Airport by Safdie Architects

This short film provides a brief tour of Safdie Architects' Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore, which is home to the world's tallest indoor waterfall.

The airport, completed by Safdie Architects in 2019, takes the form of a plant-filled greenhouse surrounded by shops and public spaces including a netted play park.

Its centrepiece is the Rain Vortex, a 40-metre-high indoor waterfall that can channel 10,000 gallons of water a minute, making it the tallest indoor waterfall in the world.

The glass and steel bagel-shaped roof that encloses the building spans more than 200 metres at its widest point and was engineered to provide optimal growing conditions for the plants.

Read more about Jewel Changi Airport here ›

Video is by Helen Han Creative with music by Kenyatta Beasley.

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Helmut Smits creates pinhole cameras that take playful selfies of your favourite objects

The Dutch visual artist crafted 27 pinhole cameras to show how a product’s packaging changes our experience with it.



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Feilden Fowles to redesign gardens at London's Natural History Museum

The proposed Garden Building of the Urban Nature Project by Feilden Fowles

Feilden Fowles and J&L Gibbons have unveiled plans to overhaul the gardens at London's Natural History Museum to create a hub for education and biodiversity called the Urban Nature Project.

The Urban Nature Project will involve the redesign of two hectares of land around the iconic 19th-century building by Alfred Waterhouse, alongside the construction of two low-lying, stone-clad pavilions.

Feilden Fowles and J&L Gibbons' aim is to maximise the biodiversity and accessibility of the museum's grounds and, in turn, invite people living in and visiting the capital to re-engage with nature.

The proposed Garden Building of the Urban Nature Project by Feilden Fowles
Above: the Urban Nature Project's Garden Building. Top image: a visual of the Learning Centre

"The Urban Nature Project is a dream commission, embodying so many of our team's social and environmental values," said Edmund Fowles, director of Feilden Fowles.

"Never has the need to re-engage with nature and understand our impact on biodiversity been more urgent," he explained.

"Together with the transformation of the museum's five-acre gardens, two new pavilions embedded within the landscape will provide much-needed facilities to broaden access and engagement with the vital messages of the project."

A view the Urban Nature Project's west garden by Feilden Fowles
The west garden will feature a replica of Dippy the dinosaur

The Urban Nature Project is slated for completion in 2023 and forms a part of the Natural History Museum's wider ambition to protect nature in urban areas and make cities more sustainable places to live.

The proposal replaces another design for the site by Niall McLaughlin Architects and Kim Wilkie that imagined an upgrade to the museum's entrance areas, but was never realised.

A visual of the Urban Nature Project's Garden Building by Feilden Fowles
The stone-clad Garden Building references Victorian orangeries

The scheme is divided into two gardens, positioned to the east and west of the museum's entrance, which will be landscaped to offer a brief overview of natural history and encourage local biodiversity.

In the east-side garden, this will include plants, fossils and exhibits that echo different geological eras ranging from the Cambrian period 540 million years ago to the present day.

The east garden will also feature a replica of Dippy, the Natural History Museum famous dinosaur skeleton that once occupied its main hall, and incorporate the first of the two pavilions by Feilden Fowles.

This pavilion, named the Garden Building, is modelled on Victorian orangeries and contains a cafe, seasonal storage and a display of the exotic plants.

A visual of the Urban Nature Project's Learning Centre by Feilden Fowles
The Learning Centre will also be clad in stone

Urban Nature Project's west garden will be designed by the studios as a model urban landscape, giving insight into biodiversity that can be found in cities in the UK.

Nestled within it will be the scheme's second pavilion, the Learning Centre, which will be used for scientific projects, educational activities, and as space for the volunteers that maintain the museum's gardens.

Inside the Urban Nature Project's Garden Building by Feilden Fowles
The wooden interiors of the Garden building

According to Feilden Fowles, both pavilions will be clad in stone and are being developed with a "low-tech" approach to ensure they have a low carbon footprint.

"[The pavilions] embody our practice's low-tech design approach, providing buildings with exceptionally low energy use to meet the project's net-zero carbon target," explained Fowles.

Inside of the Urban Nature Project's Learning Centre by Feilden Fowles
Inside of a classroom in the Learning Centre

The west garden will end at the museum's existing Darwin Centre courtyard, which will be redesigned to address the future of biodiversity on Earth.

It will showcase pioneer species – types of organisms that are the first to colonise barren environments – and encourage visitors to help preserve nature by highlighting approaches to climate adaptation and ways to improve biodiversity.

A view the Urban Nature Project's west garden by Feilden Fowles
The existing Darwin Centre courtyard will also be redesigned

The scheme will be complete with a bronze sign at the end of a ramp leading to the museum's entrance featuring a quote by David Attenborough, reading: "the future of the natural world, on which we all depend, is in your hands".

Attenborough, a British broadcaster and natural historian, has welcomed the proposal and said it will help "the next generation develop the strong connection with nature that is needed to protect it."

The proposed Garden Building of the Urban Nature Project by Feilden Fowles
A visual of the museum's entrance ramp

Feilden Fowles is a British architecture studio founded in 2009 by Fergus Feilden and Edmund Fowles. In 2019, it was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for its design of The Weston visitor centre and gallery at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Other recent projects by the studio include a red brick school building in Somerset and a showroom and office for Uniform Wares that offers visitors a glimpse of the watchmaking process.

Visuals are by Feilden Fowles and J & L Gibbons.


Project credits:

Architect: Feilden Fowles
Landscape architect: J&L Gibbons
Project management: Mace
Quantity surveyor: Mace
Sustainability: Mace
Planning consultant: Deloitte
Heritage consultant: Purcell
3D design: Gitta Gschwendtner
Structural engineers: engineersHRW
M&E, lighting and acoustic engineers: MaxFordham
Civil engineering: Infrastruct CS
Pedestrian flow access: Buro Happold
Specialist planting consultants: Fossil Plants
Access consultants: Earnescliffe

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Sachi Tungare forms swirly vessels from discarded cigarette butts

Indian designer Sachi Tungare collected five kilograms worth of cigarette butts by hand, in order to create her Jugaad collection of drippy, multi-coloured bowls and vases.

Presented as part of the Rethinking Plastic programme at Dutch Design Week, the series consists of 10 objects, each made from around 300 cigarette filters.

The aim is to draw attention to the little-known fact that cigarette stubs are the most common source of plastic pollution in the world, with 4.5 trillion of them littered every year.

Sachi Tungare's Jugaad collection
The Jugaad collection includes 10 vessels

"They're as bad of a problem as plastic straws, if not worse," Tungare told Dezeen.

"They essentially consist of plastic, cellulose acetate fibres and a paper wrapper, along with multitudes of harmful toxins and chemicals that get leached into the environment," she continued.

"These cellulose acetate filters take a long time to degrade and even then, they degrade into microplastic particles that remain in the environment for years and years to come."

Green bowl from the Jugaad collection
This green bowl is made from around 300 reclaimed cigarette filters

In a bid to give this abundant material a second life, the designer set out to collect the discarded stubs herself while an exchange student at the Design Academy Eindhoven. She said she picked up multiple kilograms of filters from where they had been left on the street.

"This was also a way to gauge the knowledge about this particular kind of waste in the minds of the general public," she added.

"I had people come up to me to ask why I was doing this, which led to conversations with people of all ages and the conclusion that awareness about this issue is seriously inadequate."

Yellow bowl from Sachi Tungare's Jugaad collection
A dye is added to the cellulose acetate solution to create different coloured bowls

Back in India, where she studied industrial design at Bangalore's Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology, she enlisted fellow students to donate their cigarette butts, accumulating jars upon jars over the course of a few months.

These were then amalgamated together and used as a raw material to create the pieces in the Jugaad collection.

"The material is thoroughly cleaned using ecological cleaning agents before it is dissolved, mixed with colour and water and then quickly cast into moulds," said Tungare.

"The nature of cellulose acetate is such that, when its solution comes into contact with water, it forms a precipitate."

This means that a part of it solidifies in the mould and separates from the remaining liquid, which is then poured away in a process that gives rise to the fluid, organic formations that feature throughout the collection.

Blue bowl from the Jugaad collection
The fluid patterns of this blue bowl are created by mixing the cellulose acetate solution with water

The collection's name, jugaad, is a notoriously untranslatable Hindi term that describes solving a problem in an improvised yet ingenious way with the limited resources at hand.

In this spirit, Tungare hopes to scale-up the project by working with a recycling centre that collects cigarette butts from local restaurants, pubs and venues.

"They can be moulded into various forms, hence there are quite a few possibilities in terms of usage," she said. "They can be used as vases, pen stands or even formed into lampshades."

Green bowl from the Jugaad collection
Sachi Tungare hopes to expand the collection to include pen stands and lampshades

The project was recently on display as part of Rethinking Plastic, which was launched as part of Dutch Design Week and over the next two years will span a programme of talks, workshops and exhibitions aimed at rethinking the material's production cycle.

As part of the project, Dezeen livestreamed an interview with HÃ¥kan Nordin, the head of sustainability at Swedish flooring brand Bolon, about how plastic can form "part of the solution" to climate change.

As the media partner for Dutch Design Week 2020, Dezeen also curated a virtual tour of the event as well as hosting five live talks with emerging designers.

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Monday 9 November 2020

Camira launches Sumi and Kyoto fabric collections

Sumi and Kyoto fabric by Camira

Dezeen Showroom: UK textile maker Camira has launched Sumi and Kyoto, a pair of fabrics that combine Japanese and Scandinavian aesthetics.

Sumi is named for Japanese ink paintings and is made of worsted wool fabric, woven from fine marl yarns to create a subtle graduated colour.

Sumi and Kyoto fabric by Camira
Sumi is named after Japanese ink brush painting

Kyoto, name after the temple-filled Japanese city, has a pattern of broken checks printed on to the yarn to add texture.

"With this collection, we really sought to create a textile pairing that reflected the reduced aesthetics of the Scandinese movement," said Camira head of creative Lynn Kingdon.

Sumi and Kyoto fabric by Camira
A broken grid pattern features on the Kyoto fabric

Scandinese, or Japandi, is a portmanteau describing the interiors trend for combining influences from Japan and Scandinavian countries.

"Understated and elegantly refined, Sumi and Kyoto are truly perfect textiles for the new 'less is more' world we're emerging into," added Kingdon.

Sumi and Kyoto fabric by Camira
Sumi and Kyoto are designed to mix and match

The Sumi and Kyoto fabrics are available in six different grey and brown shades that can be mixed and matched for added effect to make curtains, drapes, upholstery, wall coverings or acoustic panels.

Camira was founded in 1974 in Huddersfield, England.

Product: Sumi and Kyoto
Brand: Camira
Contact: marketing@camirafabrics.com

About Dezeen Showroom: Dezeen Showroom offers an affordable space for brands to launch new products and showcase their designers and projects to Dezeen's huge global audience. For more details email showroom@dezeen.com.

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