Since 1990 Theo Jansen has been occupied creating new form of life.
Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. He makes skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don’t have to heat.
Over time, this skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storm and water and eventually he wants to put these animals out in herbs on the beaches, so they will live their own lives
More info at http://www.strandbeest.com/index.php
From the Studio website: “Following a tradition that began with the Great Exhibition of 1851, World Expo is a vast international fair in which countries participate by creating themed pavilions, representing their nation’s technology, culture and achievements. In 2010, the event was held in Shanghai, China. With more than 200 countries taking part, it was the largest ever Expo.
The competition to design the United Kingdom’s pavilion was won by a team led by Heatherwick Studio. Like the other western countries, the UK’s site was the size of a football pitch but, unlike those countries, the budget given to the project was much smaller. In addition, our brief was that the UK’s pavilion must be one of the expo’s “top five” most popular attractions.
If it was to meet this target, the UK Pavilion would have to stand out from the other 200 pavilions. Instead of trying to shout above the noise, we aimed to do one powerful thing with simplicity and clarity, insisting on surprising visitors by the absence of screens and technological devices. And, because many of the Expo’s seventy million visitors would only see the pavilion from the outside and many more would only experience it on internet or television, we also realised that the outside of the pavilion needed to tell you what was going on inside. The way to achieve this was to make the building be a manifestation of its content.
But we still needed to decide what to say about the UK. Instead of perpetuating outdated stereotypes like London fog, bowler hats and red telephone boxes, we wanted to represent the inventiveness and creativity to be found in contemporary British life. Taking our cue from the Expo theme, which was the future of cities (“better city, better life”), we started to explore the relationships between cities and nature and the significance of plants to human health, economic success and social change.
Developing the masterplan of the site, the restricted budget forced us to be strategic and pragmatic. Because the budget would not go far if we tried to make a building that filled the entire site, we chose to concentrate our resources on creating a memorable focal object, occupying one-fifth of the site, and then devised a quiet, cost-effective architectural treatment to house the functional spaces. Our strategy was to create a public space that filled the site, place our focal object on top of this landscape and tuck the functional facilities underneath it. This space would provide a breathing space, where visitors might recuperate from expo-exhaustion, and frame the focal object by separating it from its chaotic surroundings.
Predicting that many of the Expo’s pavilions might follow architectural trends in form-making, we chose instead to concentrate on exploring texture. We were thinking of the opening sequence of the 1985 film Witness, in which the camera pans across a field of grass swirled into patterns by the wind. On this windy riverside site, we wanted to make the building’s façade behave like this grass. We had once developed a proposal for treating a building like the Play-Doh figure that grows hair when you squeeze coloured paste through the holes in his head, conceiving the tips of these hairs as forming the outward projection of his original shape. It also seemed that if you magnified the texture of a building enough, the texture would actually become its form. We were excited by the idea of making the outside of the building so indefinite that you cannot draw a line between building and sky because they merge into each other. This notion of texture gave us a way to relate to the theme of nature and cities; our pavilion could be a cathedral to seeds, which are immensely significant for the ecology of the planet and fundamental to human nutrition and medicine. For the future-gazing expo, seeds seemed an ultimate symbol of potential and promise.
The Seed Cathedral is a box, 15 metres high and 10 metres tall. From every surface protrude silvery hairs, consisting of 60,000 identical rods of clear acrylic, 7.5 metres long, which extend through the walls of the box and lift it into the air. Inside the pavilion, the geometry of the rods forms a space described by a curvaceous undulating surface. There are 250,000 seeds cast into the glassy tips of all the hairs. By day, the pavilion’s interior is lit by the sunlight that comes in along the length of each rod and lights up the seed ends. You can track the daily movement of the sun and pick out the shadows of passing clouds and birds and, when you move around, the light moves with you, glowing most strongly from the hairs that point directly towards you. By night, light sources inside each rod illuminate not only the seed ends inside the structure, but the tips of the hairs outside it, covering the pavilion in tiny points of light that dance and tingle in the breeze.
The pavilion is sitting on a landscape that is crumpled and folded like a sheet of paper, which suggests that the pavilion is a gift from the UK to China, still partly enclosed in wrapping paper. With inclined surfaces and lifted edges forming a gentle amphitheatre, the landscape is entirely carpeted in silvery-grey Astroturf, which translates the softness of the Seed Cathedral into a more tactile softness underfoot and invites you to sit anywhere, lie down or even play, rolling down the slopes. Its atmosphere of intimacy and ambiguity of purpose allows people to treat the space like a village green, invoking the UK’s record as a pioneer of the modern public park.
Also incorporated within the landscape’s sloping surfaces are the ramps into the pavilion, along which are a series of artistic installations, designed by Troika, exploring the theme of nature and cities. Underneath the landscape 1500 square metres of required accommodation that includes a VIP suite, hospitality facilities and offices can be found.
Working with structural engineer Adams Kara Taylor, we spent many weeks setting out the geometry of the pavilion’s hairs. We designed a specific quirk into the outside, which meant that, from every angle, the image of the Union Jack appeared within the hairs of the pavilion.
In the duration of the six-month Expo, more than eight million people went inside the Seed Cathedral, making it the UK’s most visited tourist attraction. At a state ceremony, it was announced that the UK Pavilion had won the event’s top prize, the gold medal for pavilion design.”
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“Benton’s images allow us to slip our earthly bonds and see the world from new heights, his aerial views offering a fresh perspective on familiar landscapes. Surprising and sublime, Saltscapes can be enjoyed equally as a collection of art photography and a portrait of ecological transformation and resilience.”
CRIS BENTON is a retired professor of architecture and former department chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was engaged in teaching and research in the Building Science Laboratory as well as a program of post-occupancy building case studies. His kite aerial photography in the South Bay began during a sabbatical year spent as artist in residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and it has continued under special use permits from the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The resulting images documenting the salt ponds have been shown at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Exploratorium, and the Coyote Point Museum, as well as conferences and art galleries. Benton’s aerial images have been used by over one hundred nonprofit agencies.
Thibault Penven says he was walking along the banks of Lake Geneva when he met a “passionate” fisherman. It inspired Penven’s graduation project at University of Art and Design Lausanne (ECAL). “I decided to design a boat,” the industrial design student remembers, “intended for use as a shuttle between the shore and a boat.” Penven’s boat is super-lightweight. And unlike traditional inflatable dinghies, Ar Vag assembles in minutes for Life Aquatic-style exploits. Ar Vag’s assembly sequence seems similar to a run-of-the-mill camping tent. The plastic sheet unfolds and a series of metal rods are strung along its edges to give it shape. The bench is what keeps the whole thing stable (“like a keystone,” explains Penven), acting as cross-bracing for the flimsy shell. When it’s completely folded up, the boat can be worn like a backpack. “The hull of the boat consists of a series of fiberglass sheets, covered with heat welded plastic tarpaulin,” Penven writes in a press release. Heat welding is a pretty common industrial fabrication technique, involving the use of a heat gun to create watertight seams between plastic pieces.The boat folds into a tiny square of material that can be worn as a backpack. Ar Vag isn’t meant for long adventures–rather, it’s a shuttle to take you from shore to a larger boat.
Smiljan Radić is the fourteenth architect to accept the invitation to design a temporary Pavilion outside the entrance to the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. His design follows Sou Fujimoto’s cloud-like structure which was visited by almost 200,000 people in 2013 and was one of the most visited Pavilions to-date.
Occupying a footprint of some 514 square metres on the lawn of the Serpentine Gallery, plans depict a semi-translucent, cylindrical structure of fibreglass, designed to resemble a shell, which rests on large quarry stones. This work has its roots in the architect’s earlier work, particularly The Castle of the Selfish Giant, inspired by the Oscar Wilde story and the Restaurant Mestizo – part of which is supported by large boulders.
The 2014 Pavilion is designed as a flexible, multi-purpose social space with a café sited inside. Visitors will be encouraged to enter and interact with the Pavilion in different ways throughout its four month tenure in the Park.
What do our favorite superheroes and villains get up to when we can’t see them? Are they as super as they seem?Grégoire Guillemin decided to explode the myth. This French digital illustrator shows that reality is always stranger than fiction, making no exceptions for these idealized characters. Off duty, many of them look just like us mere mortals, and in Guillemin’s work, they share our vices too.
Using pop-art style snapshots of mundane, sometimes compromising scenes, Guillemin hints at the private lives of characters from our best known comics and cartoons. This collection, entitled “The Secret Life of Heroes”, is made up of over 60 pop art illustrations.
from Rino Tagliaferro website:
Over Beauty, there has always hung the cloud of destiny and all-devouring time.
Beauty has been invoked, re-figured and described since antiquity as a fleeting moment of happiness and the inexhaustible fullness of life, doomed from the start to a redemptive yet tragic end.
In this interpretation by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro, this beauty is brought back to the expressive force of gestures that he springs from the immobility of canvas, animating a sentiment lost to the fixedness masterpieces.
Its as though these images which the history of art has consigned to us as frozen movement can today come back to life thanks to the fire of digital invention.
A series of well selected images from the tradition of pictorial beauty are appropriated, (from the renaissance to the symbolism of the late 1800s, through Mannerism, Pastoralism, Romanticism and Neo-classicism) with the intention of retracing the sentiment beneath the veil of appearance.
An inspiration that returns to us the sense of one fallen, and the existential brevity that the author interprets as tragic dignity, with an unenchanted eye able to capture the profoundest sense of the image.
Beauty in this interpretation is the silent companion of Life , inexorably leading from the smile of the baby, through erotic ecstasies to the grimaces of pain that close a cycle destined to repeat ad infinitum.
They are, from the inception of a romantic sunrise in which big black birds fly to the final sunset beyond gothic ruins that complete the piece, a work of fleeting time.
The second phase of the Darwin Centre is an extension of the famous Natural History Museum in London, taking the form of a huge eight-storey concrete cocoon, surrounded by a glass atrium. The Natural History Museum is both one of the UK’s top five visitor attractions, and a world-leading science research centre. The architecture of the Darwin Centre reflects this dual role, and reveals to the public for the first time the incredible range and diversity of the Museum’s collections and the cutting-edge scientific research they support.
The centerpiece is made to appear like a large silk cocoon, and forms the inner protective element that houses the museum’s unique collection of 17 million insects and 3 million plants. The shape and size give the visitor a tangible understanding of the volume of the collections contained within. The collections areas within the Cocoon are world class, the regulation of temperature and humidity reduce
the risk of pest infestations ensuring that the collections will be protected and preserved for many years to come. The exposed thermal mass of the continuous sprayed reinforced concrete shell maintains a stable internal environment, and minimizes energy loading.
Public access to the scientific core of the second phase of the Darwin Centre takes the form of a visitor route up and through the cocoon, overlooking the science and collection areas. Visitors can experience the Darwin Centre as a compelling and interactive learning space, observing the scientific and research activities without interrupting scientific work in progress.
C.F. Møller Architects was chosen for the commission in 2001, in competition with 59 other international architectural firms.
Dina Goldstein is a Canadian conceptual photographer and a Pop Surrealist artist with a background in editorial photography.
Dina explains the work by saying, “For me, photography is intended not to produce an aesthetic that echoes current beauty standards, but to evoke and wrest feelings of shame, anger, shock and empathy from the observer so as to inspire insight into the human condition. I have always felt that my experience as a documentary photographer complements my conceptual photography — they inform each other technically and creatively. For example, my Fallen Princesses series was born out of deep personal pain, when I raged against the “happily ever after” motif we are spoon fed since childhood. The series created metaphor out of the myths of fairy tales, forcing the viewer to contemplate real life: failed dreams, pollution and ocean degradation, war, obesity, the extinction of indigenous cultures, cancer and the fallacy of chasing eternal youth. By embracing the textures and colors created by Walt Disney, which built a multi-billion dollar empire exploiting these fairy tales, Fallen Princesses exposed the consumerism that has negated the morality of these ancient parables. It also begged the question, “how do we define the concept of ‘good’ and how do we live a ‘good’ life?”
Soft Light is a soft and flexible light shade made of foamed polyurethane. Its curvy fluent shape that resembles a calabash pumpkin provokes an organic and familiar appearance for a thoroughly synthetic and industrialized material.
Soft Light can be placed in unused spaces like cavities in furniture and other places as an object that fills a void in one’s living environment. Its warm and tangible surface invites to touching and literally feeling light. The result is a light which is extremely flexible in use without having a technical characteristic.
The light shade has been crafted from a massive block of polyurethane foam on a simple self-constructed device for rotational milling. The device allows for a precise production of a desired shape. An energy saving light bulb, protected by a cage, illuminates the porous foam from the inside.
