Dezeen has teamed up with Carl Hansen & Son for a live talk exploring the impact of Danish design on a global scale. Tune in here at 3:00pm London time.
Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs will be joined by the Danish furniture manufacturer's CEO, Knud Erik Hansen, to discuss its 110-year-long history and the lasting impact of Danish design on the global market.
Founded in 1908 by cabinet maker Carl Hansen, the company is one of the biggest producers of midcentury Danish furniture in the world.
Knud Erik Hansen, CEO of Carl Hansen & Son
The company's connection to Denmark's design legacy began in 1949 when it collaborated with designer Hans J Wegner on a collection of furniture, which included the now-iconic Wishbone chair.
Since the 1950s, Carl Hansen & Son has been the largest producer of Wegner's furniture in the world, while also producing and preserving the work of several other giants of Danish design including Arne Jacobsen, Kaare Klint, Bodil Kjær, Børge Morgensen and Poul Kjærholm amongst others.
"This collaboration and the many that followed demonstrated what can be achieved when unprecedented and uncompromising quality, design and production come together," the brand explained to Dezeen.
With his grandfather, father, mother and brother all having run the company, Hansen has spent his life immersed in an environment that has fostered some of the best-known designers to have come out of Denmark.
Before taking over the family business, Hansen worked for more than 25 years in global shipping and trading.
Since taking the helm from his brother in 2002, the company has grown from 20 to 400 employees worldwide and opened flagship stores and showrooms in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Osaka, London, Milan, Stockholm and Oslo.
The talk will also cover how Hansen has transformed the company since taking over, what the future holds for it, and how Danish design could evolve to meet the challenges of the future.
Balenciaga has released its Fall 2021 fashion collection in the form of a video game, which sees players travel through a wonderland-style future world, passing avatars dressed in ripped jeans and metal-armour boots on the way.
The Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow video game is structured in five different levels, or "zones", which the player simply has to walk through, following a predetermined path of glowing arrows.
The journey starts out in a Balenciaga retail store, before players exit onto a city street and hop onto a bus, which takes flight and warps into thin air.
Participants are then transported to another outdoor environment where they are directed through a series of abandoned concrete structures, and towards a dark forest opening. A white rabbit leads players through the forest to a "secret rave".
Balenciaga presented its Fall 2021 fashion line in the form of a video game
Upon leaving the forest, players traverse upward steps through winding caves to the top of a rocky cliff, where an avatar dressed in knight's armour pulls a sword from a stone.
This action seems to explode the rockface to reveal an opening to a red-rock mountain, which the player is directed to walk over until they reach a sunset, where the game closes.
A blank screen with a pulsating circle in the centre appears where credits would usually be shown, with the words "breathe" and "hold" printed across the circle to encourage the player to participate in a meditation-style breathing exercise.
Players walk through different virtual spaces following a path of arrows
While anyone can now access the video game via Balenciaga's website, a select group of people were initially invited to play the game via Virtual Reality (VR) headsets instead of attending an in-person runway show.
It was within this game that the brand presented its Fall 2021 line, also called Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, which is a continuation of its Summer 2021 pre-collection shown in October 2020.
Avatars are dotted throughout each virtual space dressed in garments from Balenciaga's latest collection. This includes oversized, tailored suits made from t-shirt jersey materials that have been made to look worn and creased.
A White rabbit leads players through the forest to a "secret rave"
The brand also reimagined 400-year-old steel knight's armour in the form of thigh-high boots and stilettos made from a lacquered material, designed to represent fashion as "a type of armour worn to protect against the elements of judgment".
Other looks see ripped jeans with coloured patches visible underneath paired with faux fur and puffer jackets.
The Afterworld collection features thigh-high boots made to look like knight's armour
Balenciaga's creative director, Demna Gvasalia, aimed to create pieces that he thought represented the future of clothing, where "nature and youth co-exist" to offer garments that can be repurposed and last forever.
"People will keep wearing clothes they love until they fall apart. I do myself. So things look quite destroyed, worn-in, pre-crinkled," said Gvasalia.
The collection consists of sustainable garments that can be repurposed and would last a long time
"The game and the collection imagine a near future in which clothing is meant to transform over many years," added Balenciaga. "Treatments tease out the aging process of materials, emphasizing the idea of wearing something for decades or repurposing it forever."
"In the future, a garment that appears to serve one function may serve another, seeing as certain materials will be reinterpreted for new uses," it continued. "A satin trench is not a coat but a party dress."
"Jeans layered over pants and sweats showing a boxer short waistband are actually each a single item," the brand added. "As animal fur is no longer appropriate for people to buy new, a puffer is embroidered with recycled fabric that was laser cut to mimic the movement of a fur jacket."
The list goes on, and includes blankets that become coats, parkas with enlarged pockets that function as bags and military coveralls that have been reconstructed to form evening gowns.
The Fall 2021 line sees garments take on multiple uses, like blankets that are used as coats
Australian architecture studio Wood Marsh has designed the Ocean Grove Surf Life Saving Club to emerge from the surrounding sand dunes on the southern coast of Australia, near Melbourne.
Built on the footprint of a previous building, Wood Marsh designed the clubhouse to greatly expand the facilities for the surf life saving club in the town of Ocean Grove.
To hide the increased mass the studio sunk the two-storey into the surrounding sand dunes, which the studio said gave the building its form.
Wood Marsh designed the Ocean Grove Surf Life Saving Club
"The design approach is derived directly from its location on the rugged Australian coastline, set within the surrounding dune system," said Roger Wood, director of Wood Marsh.
"The robust materials draw strongly on contextual influences as well as the need to be durable," he told Dezeen. "It is a cohesive programmatic response to provide a place of interaction with the waterfront for the incredible life-saving volunteers and the community of Ocean Grove."
The surf life saving club sits within sand dunes
Designed to look like a single storey structure from the sea and surrounding beaches, the clubhouse has a curved timber-clad upper floor above a concrete base.
The lower floor of the building contains the majority of the club's functional spaces including its changing rooms, surf life saving equipment storage, patrol room and ambulance parking that has direct beach access.
The building has a concrete base with a timber-clad first floor
"From the community side, it's a single-story building," explained Wood. "You only see the two stories from the emergency area and even from the beach, it looks like a single-story building."
"The purposeful horizontality of the clubhouse positioned behind the dune system means you don't see the basement podium level below and therefore it floats within the coastal vegetation," he continued.
The cafe has views of Bass Strait
Above the concrete base, the upper floor contains the club's social spaces including the cafe and bar, which both have large windows to give views across the beach and Bass Strait, which separates mainland Australia from Tasmania.
The cafe opens on a large terrace alongside the dunes, while the bar has a small balcony.
The club's control tower stands by the beach
Positioned alongside the beach is the surf life saver club's control tower. The small, angular structure was designed to contrast the more curved forms of the main building and look like a piece of rock that had resisted the erosive power of the sea.
"The coast is typically a very weathered dune system with sandstone escarpments that continue to weather," said Wood.
"The sand is constantly being eroded away so that eventually the harder rocks become more prominent. I wanted the control tower to be like a harder prominent rock."
It is designed to look like an angular rock
Overall Wood hopes that both the main building and the control tower fit in with the surrounding landscape.
"You can see there's no real corners to this building but curved surfaces the shadows bleed around the corners. The ocean is like that. The sand dunes are like that so it sits softly in the context," he said.
"Using a unified conceptual approach inspired the weathered coastline, there is a strong dialogue between the control tower and the club building," he continued.
"Physically and functionally separate, the continuous fluid forms and robust materiality ties them together as distinctly connected."
From the sea, the club appears to be one storey
Wood Marsh is a Melbourne-based architecture studio that was established by Wood and Randal Marsh in 1983. The studio previously designed Towers Road House, which has high concrete walls that arc under a disc-shaped roof, as "a sculpture to live within".
Canadian architect Natalie Dionne has completed a forest retreat in southeastern Quebec, which is raised up on stilts to meet the level of the rocky landscape.
Located in the Eastern Townships, around 60 miles southeast of Montreal, Forest House I was designed for a couple looking to live closer to nature.
Forest House I is built on a rocky outcrop in the Eastern Townships
The site they had chosen for their home featured a rocky outcrop, including one particular boulder that rose three metres above ground level.
Both Dionne and the clients agreed that the house should meet the level of this rock, so they designed a house raised up from the ground surface on stilts.
The house is raised three metres to meet the level of the ridge
As a result, more natural light is able to penetrate the living spaces. Also the house can benefit from better views, looking out over the ridge towards the forest landscape beyond.
"Raising the house on pilings is not a big deal," Dionne told Dezeen. "No one would think twice about doing it a couple of feet off the ground."
The additional height improves light and views for the interior
"In our harsh climate, however, you have to figure out how to ensure the continuity of the building envelope from below," she explained.
"At three metres you just have to make certain that the structure is adequately cross braced and that it is as discreet as possible."
Eastern white cedar clads the building's exterior
A desire to make the house environmentally friendly led to the use of wood for much of the house's structure and surfaces.
While concrete and steel was used for the main framework, and particularly the raised elements, the roof is supported by a structure made from engineered wood produced from Northern Québec black spruce.
Meanwhile the facades are cold with eastern white cedar, which has been pretreated to make it more durable, which will also allow it grey faster.
The roof structure is made from engineered spruce
Dionne's aim was for this material to "blend into the landscape like a chameleon sunning itself on a rock".
"Although most Canadian homes are structurally constructed out of wood, we buy into the idea that using sustainably harvested, locally sourced forest products whenever possible contributes positively towards reducing the carbon footprint of any project," she said.
The kitchen islands are among several elements made from solid maple
"When appropriate, we like using prematurely aged local white cedar because, in theory, clients can just forget about it once it is up," she continued.
"In a forest environment such as this, we like the fact that the grey wood makes the home blend into the natural surroundings, thereby minimising the visual impact on the landscape."
A staircase separates the living spaces from the master bedroom
The building contains two storeys, covering an area of 215 square metres, or 2,300 square feet.
The lower level, which takes up just a fraction of the overall footprint, is predominantly an entrance level, although it also contains a guest room containing bunkbeds – room for up to 10 guests to stay.
Surrounding trees give privacy to the master bedroom
Upstairs, the staircase divides the floor into two sections. On one side is the master bedroom suite, which nestles into the trees to the south. The other side contains a large lounge, kitchen and dining space.
Sliding glass doors allow the living space to open out to a large, partially shaded terrace. This terrace extends out to the meet the ridge, allowing the house to feel like part of the landscape.
The master bathroom features a bath tub with a view
Wood is a recurring theme through the interior. The staircase is made from solid maple, as are the kitchen islands and the vanity units in the bedrooms. Other built-in cabinetry is made from Russian plywood.
Other surfaces are more clean and minimal, preventing a log-cabin aesthetic. Floors are polished concrete, while the windows are framed by natural aluminium, another material that is easy to recycle.
A bunk room on the lower level can sleep 10 guests
She concludes: "There is something particularly pleasant in the feeling that you are floating above it all as you drift seamlessly between interior and exterior spaces, basking in the light and the tranquility of the forest."
Foster + Partners has sparked debate by choosing to leave Architects Declare, stating that architects should be involved in designing more sustainable airports for the aviation sector.
The climate change group, which launched in 2019, has expressed regret at Foster + Partners leaving, saying that although it was not happy with the move Architects Declare would welcome a discussion with the studio over its reasoning.
Readers are divided. "Sadly the only way to achieve what Declare is trying to achieve is to get governing bodies and laws to back their goals, then clients will follow suit, and lastly architects," said Archi. "They are working backwards."
Alfred Hitchcock agreed: "Refusing commissions on purely environmental grounds cannot be the answer. The answer is to make new buildings as environmentally sound as possible. That's what Architects Declare should be promoting, not business-suicide."
"Foster + Partners is going to do what's best for its firm," continued Gabriela Peña Izquierdo. "It's business."
Tom disagreed: "I don't really get all the support for Foster + Partners. I don't think a private airport in Saudi Arabia is a suitable project for a signatory. If the studio wants to continue doing those kind of projects don't sign the statement."
"I'd live there if they gave it to me" says commenter
Readers are in awe of a Victorian house in north London, which Dominic McKenzie Architects has overhauled by adding a bronze exterior and maple wood interior.
"I'd live there if they gave it to me," said Jonathan Smoots. "Bold and restrained at the same time."
Apsco Radiales felt similarly: "Beautiful craftsmanship and design."
Dezeen is the world's most commented architecture and design magazine, receiving thousands of comments each month from readers. Keep up to date on the latest discussions on our comments page.
