Daosheng Design creates monochromatic bar with looping bamboo sculpture

The Flow of Ecstatic is a bar in Dongguan, China, designed by Daosheng Design with an all-grey interior featuring a swooping ceiling sculpture of bamboo.

Located in the city's business district, the bar counter is topped by stainless steel, the walls are covered in textured grey silk and the floors are tiled in a matching grey.

Top: the stainless steel bar counter. Above: swooping bamboo decoration

A looping bamboo sculpture is suspended from the ceiling. Daosheng Design said this is intended to evoke the brushstrokes of traditional Chinese calligraphy and the movements of the dragon dance.

This dance is performed on festive occasions and involves a team of dancers moving in synchronicity under a colourful silk dragon costume.

The serpentine bamboo shape is designed to be evocative of this fluid and dynamic performance.

A sculpture perches on the bar

Daosheng Design said the studio deliberately designed the bar to encourage patrons to decompress from their hectic urban lifestyles.

"Life and entertainment should be two sides," said the designers.

"However, in the era of rapid development, life sped by, and modern people hurried to catch up, and it was difficult to slow down and enjoy life."

Different seating areas occupy corners of the bar

Different seating areas invite different forms of leisure activity, such as high brass-backed stools at the bar for sampling drinks or tables with banquettes for dining.

Groupings of triangular stools cluster around low tables for casual drinks with friends.

Grey fabric covers the walls

All of the furniture and furnishings are realised in shades of grey. Figurative sculptures are dotted around the room, including one that is perched on the edge of the bar.

The Flow of Ecstatic has been shortlisted for Dezeen Awards 2020 in the bar interior category, alongside a bar decorated with insects trapped in amber and a bar in London decorated with a mural of female faces.

Photography is by Jack Qin.

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Project credits:

Interiors: Daosheng Design
Lead designer: YongMing He
Participating designers: Daosheng Design Team
Client: Excellence Real Estate

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Rolf designs 3D-printed glasses made from castor beans

Austrian eyewear manufacturer Rolf has designed a collection of glasses that are 3D printed from a mixture of water and powdered castor beans.

The Tyrol-based brand's latest plant-based glasses collection, called Substance, is made from beans taken from castor trees. The range has been shortlisted in the product design category of Dezeen Awards 2020.

Rolf explained that as the peel of the bean is toxic, it removes this before grinding down the remaining contents into a powder. This is then 3D printed into frames for glasses, using mainly water as the binding material.

According to Rolf, the tall, fast-growing plants are grown in tropical climates without any genetic engineering, and they don't compete with food crops.

Rolf's Substance glasses are made using beans taken from castor trees

"Where a spruce or a beech will only grow a few centimetres taller every year, this remarkable plant will shoot up six meters in just six months, and it comes back every year," explained company founder Roland Wolf.

"This makes the new material more sustainable and kinder to the environment than ever – and the perfect foundation upon which to build a new collection of glasses called Substance and meet the current demand for more climate-considerate products."

The castor beans are ground into a powder that is then 3D printed

The Substance glasses utilise Rolf's Flexlock hinge design, which involves no screws or spare parts. This grants the eyewear more flexibility than is already given from its pliable, plant-based material.

The Flexlock hinge can be 3D printed at the same time as the frame to enable the company to make all its glasses in one batch, minimising the amount of external suppliers needed.

The glasses are available in six different shades

The Substance collection offers 23 different frame designs in six colours, including black, grey, dark blue, khaki green and a bright pink hue.

The eyewear company, who is also known for its wooden glasses, manufactures all of its products by hand in Weißenbach, Tyrol. The brand was founded in 2009 and also offers glasses made from titanium and stone.

All of Rolf's glasses are made without any screws in order to rid the need for any maintenance.

The glasses use Flexlock hinge, which involves no screws or spare parts

London-based eyewear brand Kite also employed 3D-printing technologies for its KiteONE range of glasses, which it designed with Benjamin Hubert's agency Layer.

The brand takes 3D scans of customers' faces, measuring the distance between their pupils and head, their nose width and their ear positioning, which is then used to produce perfectly fitting frames.

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Dezeen's "inspirational" Virtual Design Festival named digital initiative of the year and best response to coronavirus

Dezeen's Virtual Design Festival has won two major awards, claiming both the digital initiative of the year and the special coronavirus response prizes at the Professional Publishers Association's annual awards for independent publishers.

The "superb" Dezeen Day conference was separately honoured at the Conference Awards 2020, where it received a bronze award for best new conference.

VDF praised for its global impact

Running from 15 April to 10 July, Virtual Design Festival (VDF) was the world's first online design festival, featuring over 500 elements including live talks, performances, cultural collaborations, student shows and product launches.

The content has received over 1.75 million page views and 2 million video plays.

"What really impressed the judges was the sheer volume of quality content on offer and the innovative ways in which people all over the world were brought together," said the jury of the PPA Independent Publisher Awards at a virtual awards ceremony on Wednesday.

"The thinking behind this range of initiatives is really inspirational and clearly produced excellent results," the PPA wrote on its website announcing the results.

"The depth and breadth of digital experiences that the event delivered to the audience were cutting-edge and market-leading," it added.

Dezeen "built a whole new business model for the future"

The PPA judges also praised VDF for its commercial success and its legacy beyond the festival. Dezeen has now relaunched a number of the innovative new services that were conceived as part of VDF as permanent offerings.

Last month, we launched Dezeen Showroom, an affordable digital platform for brands to launch new products, while we have now produced and broadcast over 200 online talks.

"We've seen other companies pivot their offerings in really impressive ways, but to us, Dezeen did more than that," said London Review of Books commercial director Renee Doegar, who was on the jury for the Digital Initiative of the Year award.

"This was a fast-footed response, it was delivered at remarkable speed and done to an incredibly high standard. But even more than that, we were impressed that you not only adapted and made something excellent out of diversity, but you built a whole new business model for the future and that's really what we were looking for."

Dezeen Day honoured at Conference Awards 2020

Dezeen's inaugural design conference Dezeen Day, which took place in London at the end of last year, has also received an industry accolade, receiving bronze at the Conference Awards 2020 for best new conference with over 400 attendees.

Describing the sell-out event as "superb", Conference Awards judges praised the "ideas and thoughts behind the content", the diversity of the speakers and the fact that it managed to turn a profit in its first year.

Dezeen shortlisted for seven other awards

Dezeen is also in the running for seven other upcoming awards.

We are shortlisted for the brand of the year award at the IBP Awards, while VDF is up for the event of the year prize and Dezeen founder Marcus Fairs is in the running for the digital leadership award.

Dezeen's Face to Face podcast series, which features in-depth interviews with leading architects and designers including Es Devlin and David Chipperfield, is up for best podcast at the Archiboo Awards.

Dezeen Awards is also shortlisted in three categories at the Awards Awards: best awards event by a publisher; best judging process; and best sector-specific awards event.

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Peter Barber Architects creates five terraces of affordable homes in Greenwich

Peter Barber Architects has created a development of brick housing and a microbrewery at Rochester Way in the London Borough of Greenwich.

Built for the Greenwich-council owned developer Meridian Home Start, the scheme consists of 29 homes that will be available to those working locally at discounted rents.

The homes are arranged along three pedestrian streets that span between Rochester Way and Briset Road in Eltham to create a familiar urban arrangement.

Rochester Way contains 29 homes available at discounted rents

"Seventy per cent of all the buildings in London are housing," explained Peter Barber Architects founder Peter Barber.

"Housing is what our city is made of. It compresses public space into streets, it surrounds our squares," he told Dezeen.

"Rochester Way is street-based housing. It is urban. The project employs an unusual courtyard/terrace hybrid type. We are used to seeing terraced housing in London. Courtyard housing is less common."

The housing is arranged around three pedestrian streets

In total the development, which occupies a triangular site, contains 29 homes. At the base of the triangle, the studio created a terrace of mostly two-storey, two-bedroom homes.

The central block contains two rows of back-to-back terraces of two and three-bedroom homes as does the third block, which rises to three storeys and stands alongside a triangular park at the end of the site.

Much of the development is two-storey, two-bedroom homes

To mark the end of the terraces, alongside the existing main roads, the blocks are taller and contain one and two-bed apartments.

Alongside the park, a commercial unit that will contain a micro-brewery is differentiated from the housing by a wavy roof and a series of porthole-shaped windows.

The end blocks contain apartments

"We are looking for an architecture of solidity, heaviness and permanence," said Barber. "The architecture will come with occupation. When people take control of it," he continued.

"Our approach is urban. Three new public mews streets and buildings fronting the green. We have built housing but we think of it as a little bit of city too."

A microbrewery will occupy a commercial unit

Each of the terraced homes is arranged around a street-side courtyard. The majority of these courtyards are flanked by bedrooms on the ground floor, with the main living space and kitchen placed on the first floor, with direct access to a roof terrace.

This arrangement means that all principle windows look towards the courtyard, eliminating homes overlooking the adjacent properties.

All of the terraces have street facing courtyards

The development is the latest housing scheme in London designed by Peter Barber Architects, which aims to create new typologies of housing that are suitable to modern urban living.

"For 35 years we have been exploring ways of doing lower-rise, street-based urban housing at medium and high densities," explained Barber.

The development was clad in brick

"We continue to develop new house types and urban layouts, which are public-spirited and urban yet also provide domestic space for quiet, privacy and introspection," continued Barber.

"Terraced housing fronts a street. It is outward-looking. Courtyard housing is more about introversion. We hope our hybrid type does a bit of both."

Among Peter Barber Architects previously completed housing developments in London are a terraced tenement block of housing in Peckham, a reinterpretation of Victorian back-to-back housing in Stratford, a terrace of mews houses that feature oriel windows in Finsbury Park and a housing scheme fronted with brick arches in east London.

Photography is by Morley Von Sternberg.

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Peter Barber Architects creates five terraces of affordable homes in Greenwich

Peter Barber Architects has created a development of brick housing and a microbrewery at Rochester Way in the London Borough of Greenwich.

Built for the Greenwich-council owned developer Meridian Home Start, the scheme consists of 29 homes that will be available to those working locally at discounted rents.

The homes are arranged along three pedestrian streets that span between Rochester Way and Briset Road in Eltham to create a familiar urban arrangement.

Rochester Way contains 29 homes available at discounted rents

"Seventy per cent of all the buildings in London are housing," explained Peter Barber Architects founder Peter Barber.

"Housing is what our city is made of. It compresses public space into streets, it surrounds our squares," he told Dezeen.

"Rochester Way is street-based housing. It is urban. The project employs an unusual courtyard/terrace hybrid type. We are used to seeing terraced housing in London. Courtyard housing is less common."

The housing is arranged around three pedestrian streets

In total the development, which occupies a triangular site, contains 29 homes. At the base of the triangle, the studio created a terrace of mostly two-storey, two-bedroom homes.

The central block contains two rows of back-to-back terraces of two and three-bedroom homes as does the third block, which rises to three storeys and stands alongside a triangular park at the end of the site.

Much of the development is two-storey, two-bedroom homes

To mark the end of the terraces, alongside the existing main roads, the blocks are taller and contain one and two-bed apartments.

Alongside the park, a commercial unit that will contain a micro-brewery is differentiated from the housing by a wavy roof and a series of porthole-shaped windows.

The end blocks contain apartments

"We are looking for an architecture of solidity, heaviness and permanence," said Barber. "The architecture will come with occupation. When people take control of it," he continued.

"Our approach is urban. Three new public mews streets and buildings fronting the green. We have built housing but we think of it as a little bit of city too."

A microbrewery will occupy a commercial unit

Each of the terraced homes is arranged around a street-side courtyard. The majority of these courtyards are flanked by bedrooms on the ground floor, with the main living space and kitchen placed on the first floor, with direct access to a roof terrace.

This arrangement means that all principle windows look towards the courtyard, eliminating homes overlooking the adjacent properties.

All of the terraces have street facing courtyards

The development is the latest housing scheme in London designed by Peter Barber Architects, which aims to create new typologies of housing that are suitable to modern urban living.

"For 35 years we have been exploring ways of doing lower-rise, street-based urban housing at medium and high densities," explained Barber.

The development was clad in brick

"We continue to develop new house types and urban layouts, which are public-spirited and urban yet also provide domestic space for quiet, privacy and introspection," continued Barber.

"Terraced housing fronts a street. It is outward-looking. Courtyard housing is more about introversion. We hope our hybrid type does a bit of both."

Among Peter Barber Architects previously completed housing developments in London are a terraced tenement block of housing in Peckham, a reinterpretation of Victorian back-to-back housing in Stratford, a terrace of mews houses that feature oriel windows in Finsbury Park and a housing scheme fronted with brick arches in east London.

Photography is by Morley Von Sternberg.

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