Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2020 i AZURE

STATUS LOOK AND EXTREMA WAVE Italian manufacturer Flukso showcased a number of additions to its already expansive offering of fabric coverings at the 2020 edition of Heimtextil. Among them was Status Look (shown in orange) and the vibrant Extrema Wave (shown in yellow), a textured version of its eco-leather Extrema Au. The quilted surface adds depth, comfort and elasticity to the water-resistant product, which is also fungicide-treated and fire-retardant. Reminiscent of thermal insulated outerwear and available in eight tones, the scalloped design is perfectly suited for high-traffic environments. flukso.it RUBBER ON Lightfast, water-repellent and stain-resistant, Austrian brand coverdec.‌one’s latest line marries cutting-edge material science with a refined futuristic aesthetic. Consisting of three unique dimensional designs — the angular Crush (shown), the faceted Diamond and the gridlike Cube — Rubber On…

Does where you heal affect how you heal? C.F. Møller Architects thinks so, as evidenced by its design for one of Europe’s largest hospitals. Located in Denmark, Aarhus University Hospital (AUH) is equal parts urban plan and treatment centre. The firm already knew the site’s full medical history, having devised its last hospital project in the 1980s. This made for a smooth transition when, as part of Denmark’s strategy to consolidate top expertise and equipment in fewer, larger and more efficient super-hospitals, it became time for the complex to grow by 216,000 square metres. After five years of planning, construction of AUH began in 2012; the expansion followed the same logic prescribed by its predecessor, favouring bright, low-slung architecture. “We talked about it as a city, because a city can…

When Thomas Woltz talks about how people, nature and the built environment can live in harmony, he has the examples to back it up. His firm, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, has become one of the foremost landscape design studios in North America through its deft execution of a wide variety of projects, including major urban parks (such as Hudson Yards Plaza in New York City, Centennial Park in Nashville and Memorial Park in Houston), public gardens (the Aga Khan Garden at the University of Alberta) and even private farms (12-square-kilometre Orongo Station, a sensitively restored sheep farm — and 2018 AZ Awards winner — on the eastern coast of New Zealand). Before falling for architecture’s more down-to-earth sibling, Woltz studied and worked as an architect, too. After returning to…

Few contemporary figures embody the continent-hopping post-globalization design gadfly more fully — or flamboyantly — than Karim Rashid. Before Sebastian Herkner and Philippe Malouin, Benjamin Hubert and Oki Sato, there was the Egypt-born, Canada-raised New Yorker who roared onto the world stage with his products for Umbra in the 1990s and went on to design everything from kitchenware and consumer packaging to wristwatches, hotels and even an Italian metro station. Only original provocateur Philippe Starck might claim to have undertaken more disparate commissions (or earned more frequent-flyer mileage). But if Rashid is synonymous with a certain punchy turn-of-the-millennium aesthetic heavy on the use of plastics (Time famously called him the Prince of Plastic, long before the material’s growing disrepute as a far-from-sustainable design tool), he is still a hot commodity.…

“Plant a stick in the mud. Maybe it will bloom into a building.” This is the advice that Diébédo Francis Kéré gave to the aspiring architects in the audience at Toronto’s 2020 Interior Design Show. He was speaking from experience. In 2004, the Berlin-based architect came to worldwide prominence as a winner of the prestigious Aga Khan Award. The prize recognized his first project, a primary school in his hometown of Gando in Burkina Faso. Built from clay-cement bricks, the passively ventilated school combined sustainably minded material innovation with a contextual sensitivity inspired by the local culture and vernacular. In the years since, Kéré has added an extension to the Gando Primary School, a secondary school, a dedicated school library, a housing complex for teachers and a grove of mango…

Desking and Storage Systems 1 Atelier A configurable system composed of four main elements — a workstation, a teamwork table, shelving, and storage units including a mobile pinboard and whiteboard easel — this collaboration with Gensler adapts to any environment. LEDs, power and data ports can be incorporated. Manufacturer Fantoni Group,. fantoni.it 2 Work|Able Designer Brian Graham’s kit-of-parts wall system can be installed just about anywhere and features pegboards, chalkboards, slatted modules and acoustic tiles. Further customization is offered with attachable work surfaces, baskets, shelves and more. Manufacturer Kimball, kimball.com 3 Bahlara Fashioned after the food stalls at the Ballarò market in Palermo, Italy, this adaptable system designed by architect Egidio Panzera includes coordinating desks, benches, partitions and chairs, all of which can be customized according to user needs. Manufacturer…

What design of the past three and a half decades resonates most with you? EVAN PAVKA Azure’s Associate Editor Having grown up in Afghanistan, where unactivated mines continue to endanger civilians, designer Massoud Hassani (along with his brother Mahmud) transformed a childhood toy into 2011’s Mine Kafon Ball. The wind-powered art piece — featuring bamboo legs, plastic feet and an iron core — approximates the weight of a human body to detonate latent explosives. It’s a reminder that even the most daunting of political challenges can be met with the simplicity embodied in a child’s game. What are the next big questions for design? ALICE RAWSTHORN Interviewer, “Paola Antonelli’s elastic mind” (page 74) As the world’s challenges are design’s challenges, there are many important issues to address, from tackling the…

PUKKA BY LIGNE ROSET Paying homage to Italian legend Gaetano Pesce’s 1969 UP5 armchair, Toronto- and New York–based studio Yabu Pushelberg’s latest furniture design features an ultra-flexible polyurethane foam base wrapped in a range of stretch fabrics to form its chubby profile. ligne-roset.com REPETA 01 BY WOAK While also art directing Woak, Milan’s Andrea Steidl designed a number of new pieces for the Swiss brand, including this chunky cupboard. Featuring a marble top and ribbons of thick wood piping, the walnut or oak unit comes in six finishes, from black (shown) and blue to natural stains. woak.ch OASIS BY NORTHERN Rounding out its existing Oasis line, the Norwegian brand completed this series of self-watering terracotta planters with a new 20.5-centimetre-wide version. The interlocking system consists of an upper vessel and…

Meeting Renzo Piano in his studio in Paris almost inevitably means walking past the Centre Pompidou, the High-Tech icon he designed with Richard Rogers decades ago. Inaugurated in 1977, it still looks as audacious today as it did back then. Some of it is covered in scaffolding, so I ask Piano, when I meet him a short time later, if he has consulted on any restoration or renovation work. “Of course,” he smiles. “They come here and we talk about it. Or I call up Richard to discuss it. I walk past it every time I go home. I am like the Quasimodo of the building.” In the years since the Pompidou, Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) has designed everything from a stadium in the Italian port city of Bari…

At the beginning of this century, husband and wife design team Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu had cushy jobs in the office of American architect Michael Graves. By the middle of the 2000s, the couple had decamped to China, where they founded Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, their Shanghai-based practice. Although Shanghai has a rich architectural history — it’s home to masterpieces from the Qing Dynasty to the Deco era and everything in between — the city, at the time, was hardly a global design hub. But Neri and Hu have presided over a kind of Shanghai renaissance. Their work across architecture, interiors and furniture design is bracingly original but never iconoclastic. In their practice, creativity coexists with a strong sense of tradition. Few architects pull off this balancing act…

More connective pieces of infrastructure than simple stand-alone buildings, the designs of Danish firm Cobe typically interweave architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism and much more. Dan Stubbergaard, who founded Cobe in 2006, describes what his firm does a little more expressively: creating “urban living rooms.” Having successfully realized that concept in its home city of Copenhagen, Cobe is now practising what it preaches elsewhere in Europe and as far afield as Canada, where it’s currently working on two major residential projects in Toronto: Block 8 in the city’s emerging West Don Lands neighbourhood and The James at Scrivener Square in the tony midtown Summerhill area. According to Stubbergaard, both Toronto projects reflect Cobe’s vision of urban structures as places where people of all stripes can intersect and interact without self-consciousness. Between…

Daan Roosegaarde doesn’t waste your time: He follows a tight schedule in his Rotterdam studio and moves and speaks briskly. Yet he also makes regular trips to Rome to gaze at the Pantheon and to even warmer climates to go diving at night and marvel at the bioluminescence of tiny sea creatures. That all may sound contradictory, but it makes sense once you learn about Roosegaarde’s embrace of the whimsical, of his sincere recognition that, like most designers, he loves to control things — sometimes driven by his own fears — and so must regularly seek out experiences that require a bit of surrender, to keep finding balance. Roosegaarde is best known for his vast public art installations, which often include new technology applied in an original way: a dance…

Over the centuries, the pastoral Sauerland region in northwest Germany has witnessed the rise and fall of emperors, the ebbs and flows of industry and much more. A record of this past is preserved at the Sauerland-Museum of local history, housed in the Landsberger Hof, a 17th-century neoclassical palace in Arnsberg. Originally built for Gertrud von Plettenberg, the mistress of Ernest of Bavaria, the palace functioned well as a piece of living history, but lacked the technical capacity to host more complex shows. In 2012, Stuttgart-based Bez + Kock Architekten was tasked with designing an extension to the historic museum to support its expanding exhibition program. The resulting 1,247-square-metre addition straddles the border between old and new in the most literal of senses. A stepped, three-tiered volume clad in sand-coloured…

Dignity Glass by Skyline Design Developed with Rosalyn Cama of health-design studio CAMA, this architectural door system provides both privacy (visual and acoustic) and a durable and attractive alternative to conventional cubicle curtains. The laminated safety or tempered glass can be printed with different patterns and transparencies that protect patient modesty while maintaining the necessary sightlines for care providers; a variety of biophilic patterns and calming abstract motifs are available, including the CAMAflage Dayglow in Blue shown. Easy to clean, the impermeable material helps reduce the transmission of bacteria and infection, plus its translucent nature means daylight can still filter through. skydesign.com Rejuvenations Restore by Armstrong Flooring Directly addressing the needs of healthcare professionals, the Rejuvenations Restore series of resilient flooring features a comfort base layer that reduces foot and…

Optimistic, inclusive, politically incisive and epically ambitious, “Broken Nature: Design Takes On Human Survival” was as much a call to arms as an exhibition. Presented last year at the Triennale di Milano in Italy, it explored one of our most important design challenges: how to mitigate the devastating damage caused to the environment and society by industrialization. By doing so with intelligence, wit and grace, “Broken Nature” cemented the reputation of its creator, Paola Antonelli, as the most influential design curator of our time. Born in 1963 in Sassari, Italy, Antonelli studied architecture in Milan and worked as an architecture and design writer and lecturer before joining the curatorial team of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1994. Now MoMA’s senior curator of architecture and design and…

Since establishing his San Francisco studio Fuseproject in 1999, Swiss-born product guru Yves Béhar has been Silicon Valley’s go-to designer. From the Jawbone fitness tracker and One Laptop per Child to The Frame for Samsung and Herman Miller’s Public Office Landscape, he has consistently woven cutting-edge technology and bold ideas into brilliant, user-friendly creations. Béhar’s success is partly a result of his studio’s “design venture” approach: Even when it isn’t a founding partner of a start-up — as was the case with August, the smart home-entry system — Fuseproject has been intimately involved in the full process of designing products that have launched companies. An example is the Snoo robotic bassinet, which soothes and rocks a crying baby to sleep to help alleviate some of the stresses that contribute to…

What a difference a mere half-decade makes. In 2015, when Azure published its “30 Years of Design” journal (our ever-expanding compendium charting design’s evolution since our founding*), we were living in the relatively placid Obama era, the United Nations had just announced the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the future looked like a technoutopia where all of our smart devices would endlessly augment our lives and the wider world. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that utopian visions rarely play out exactly as envisioned. Over the past five years, we have witnessed the erratic presidency of Donald Trump, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the #MeToo movement, uncontrollable wildfires and a new coronavirus pandemic — in short, a whole novel set of briefs for those who believe in design’s fundamental role…

Ceramic 1 Break Up Each 15-centimetre square of Pack is its own exercise in shape and shade. Available in five colourways and inspired by the fragmentation of polar ice floes, the digitally printed floor and wall tiles combine to form a playful yet delicate pattern of lopsided silhouettes.  41zero42.com 2 Stone Look Ceramica Sant’Agostino’s Silkystone collection consists of three designs that mimic natural limestone, including Decor (shown), a stone-look tile interrupted by irregular fragments of varying light and dark segments. The 90-centimetre-square modules are available in four muted tones.  ceramicasantagostino.it 3 Dash Array Rectangular one-by-three-centimetre tiles appear randomly placed within these 31.5-centimetre-square mesh-backed sheets by Mosaico+. Developed with Studio Irvine, the P-Saico line comes in four shades (solid colours or blends) and has a low-relief effect when installed. mosaicopiu.it, studio-irvine.com…