Table of contents for June 2017 in AZURE

1 HOLY CINNAMON BUNS It’s hard not to conjure up Princess Leia’s distinctive coiffure when confronted with LucidiPevere’s bentwood and upholstered seat, appropriately named the Chignon. gebruederthonetvienna.com 2 COMMUNITY NETWORK Up to eight can share Dune, Front’s sofa/ bench/boardroom ottoman, and the Swedish studio’s answer to communal seating. The four tabletops are embedded with USB charging sockets. offecct.com 3 THE HUMAN DIMENSION Rising Milanese star Serena Confalonieri says the inspiraton for her Ulu & Baba collection is fashion, evident with its thin steel almost human-like structure – ideal for coordinating textiles and colours like outfits. myhomecollection.it 4 MAKE IT WEIRD There are eight wonky-shaped backrest options to Maarten Baas’s 101D Chair for Lensvelt. With 14 colourways to choose from, the designer’s goal is that no two chairs will ever be…

THE PARTICIPATORY QUALITY of facades is not always overt, but it should always be present. At least, that is what Andrew and Jodi Batay-Csorba believe. The principals behind Toronto firm Batay-Csorba Architects have made unique cladding systems a focus for their small but growing practice. Recently, along a treed street in downtown Toronto, they completed a three-storey duplex with a facade that quietly interrupts a row of Victorian-era red-brick dwellings in a way that is wholly original; the front appears as a curious abstraction of vertical geometries found in the neighbourhood of mostly bay-and-gable architecture. We wanted to engage passers-by in a dialogue,” says Andrew of the screens. Made from thermally treated eastern pine, the brise-soleils are affixed to the upper two storeys of each house and extend just over…

1 LONGOTON BY SHILDAN The large-format panels of this terracotta rainscreen system are sold in lengths of up to 10 feet, and in various profiles and finishes. shildan.com 2 CCMYK BY KENNWERTE Best known for its light-reflecting BlingCrete concrete, Kennwerte has launched a material featuring vibrant and long-lasting colour. blingcrete.com 3 HEXCHAR BY ELEGANT EMBELLISHMENTS The German brand is currently testing this carbon-negative facade module prototype. It’s made with carbon char and biodegradable binders. elegantembellishments.net 4 HI MACS STRUCTURA BY LG HAUSYS This 3-D textured solid surfacing can be used as exterior cladding to add subtle, large-scale patterns to a facade. The panels come in 10 textures and as many colours. himacs. eu 5 FIBREC BY RIEDER Measuring just 13 millimetres in thickness, FibreC glass fibre-reinforced concrete panels are highly…

WHEN soldiers say “I’ve got your six” they mean they’re covering your back, and a block of affordable housing partially reserved for homeless and disabled veterans takes its name from that phrase. The Six is located in MacArthur Park – a densely populated, low-income neighbourhood of Los Angeles – and is the first project to be developed by the non-profit Skid Row Housing Trust beyond downtown (though a second, designed by Michael Maltzan in Van Nuys, has just been completed). The commission for the Six went to Brooks + Scarpa, an award-winning L.A. practice with a strong commitment to social housing and sustainability. The architects created a LEED Platinum block of 45 single-occupancy rooms and seven one-bedroom apartments that also includes generous shared spaces. “The challenge was to create an…

Film by Don Freeman First Run Features (88 minutes) DESIGNING A SET OF UTENSILS or amassing a collection of decorative tiles would be enough for some. However, the artists and designers featured in Don Freeman’s documentary Art House set their sights higher. The former home of industrial designer Russel Wright, in Garrison, New York, is an all-encompassing realization of his thoughts on ecology. Environmental architect Paolo Soleri’s experimental town in the Arizona desert is both a residence and an expression of transcendent artistic visions. And the preserved Catskills cabin of sculptor Raoul Hague remains, decades after his death, a repository for all the obsessions that contributed to his creations. Over the course of visiting 11 houses (from a decrepit shack to a labyrinthine castle) across the United States, Freeman calls…

AS THE OWNER of Vancouver’s Powers Construction, Patrick Powers relishes building modernist marvels designed by such architecture firms as Olson Kundig, Battersby Howat, and Measured. So why, he wondered, should he put up with a typical, trailer-based construction-site office when working on such buildings? “I could never exist inside one of those,” he says. “They’re horrible – just a tiny window, with terrible lighting and decor.” No stranger to coming up with inventive solutions on-site, he knew he could do better. So he bought a six-metre-long steel shipping container, cut it in half to create two square pods, and added glass walls to cap the open ends. Inside, he finished the walls and ceilings with whitewashed fir plywood and siding, built U-shaped desks against the windows, and added cabinets and…

Members D. Calen Knauf and Conrad Brown, both born in Vancouver, 1983 Location Vancouver Education Industrial design, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, 2013 Occupation Industrial designers Selected awards 2017 Rising Star Editors’ Choice Award, Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair; 2013 Student Notable for Furniture & Lighting, Core77 Design Awards; 2013 Design Exchange Emerging Designer Competition shortlist Selected exhibits 2017 Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair; 2016 JonaldDudd, New York; 2014 Sight Unseen Offsite, New York Selected clients Souda, Esaila, Tetra BEGINNINGS CALEN KNAUF: We met skateboarding outside the Vancouver Art Gallery when we were teenagers. Conrad was taking a lot of photos, and he worked at The Foam Shop [a mattress and foam store] doing graphic design making flyers. I thought it was cool that he had a real…

IT’S 9:15 A.M. in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. I’m late for our interview, but Maxime-Alexis Frappier, president of ACDF Architecture, isn’t complaining. The extra time has given him a chance to sign off on a package of drawings due that morning. “It’s going so fast! It’s so busy!” he says, ushering me into a conference room on the third floor of a repurposed clothing factory. As we sit down, he explains that dealing with deadlines has become an important concern for his growing firm, which now employs 62 full-time staff. “The challenge is the office structure,” he says. “You must be structured to answer the market. The clients want you to be rapid and precise and solid and lean.” It’s an unusual statement coming from an ambitious Quebec architect. The…

You’ve said you do “everything but architecture.” When you started out in 1987, how did you define your scope? I didn’t define it literally. In art school I had a weakness for creating three-dimensional environments. I later became an assistant curator at the Stedelijk Museum in the applied arts department, which is where you have all the disciplines, with the exception of fine arts, as subjects: architecture, design, crafts, photography and graphic design. So, it wasn’t like, “Oh, I want to go into architecture.” It sort of grew by itself. I was working with OMA in the late ’80s, and they were working on a dance theatre in the Hague. Rem Koolhaas had recognized some kind of talent in me, so he asked me to join his team to help…

In the future, near and far, people will tell the story of a hilltop in the shadow of Songshan Mountain in Henan Province, central China, where Buddhist monks – spiritual but mortal men – soared skyward without wings, aloft on nothing but air. The tale begins in 2010, when a young Latvian architect named Austris Mailitis receives an unusual commission: to design a space where the monks of Shaolin Temple, home of Kung Fu and the birthplace of Zen Buddhism, can fly. Mailitis is awed by Buddhist philosophy and martial arts practice, spanning more than 1,500 years. But foremost, he’s impressed by the monks’ near-supernatural physical prowess (which, it’s rumoured, includes levitation). He sees images of the region’s rocky skyline and cypress-covered hills, and an idea forms. Mailitis’s vision for…

THE MARSHLANDS of the Wadden Sea National Park in southern Jutland in Denmark are a vast horizontal landscape, UNESCO World Heritage Site–listed, and famed for the millions of migratory birds that stop for food on their way north and south. “You have this enormous horizon, so we tried to make the building rise from the ground,” says architect Dorte Mandrup of the Wadden Sea Centre, a 2,800-square-metre reimagining of the visitors’ centre that incorporates a new exhibition space. Composed mostly of thatched walls and roofs, the four-winged building sits low, almost camouflaged in the landscape. It dares not upstage the almost monochromatic surroundings. The project arose from a 2014 competition for which Mandrup’s proposal drew on the area’s history of Viking settlements and traditional thatched roofs made of reed from…

THERAPEUTIC CANNABIS may well be the fastest growing retail category of the decade. Enter Surterra, a U.S. company that last November launched the first of what promises to be an extensive chain of stores selling medical marijuana products to sandwich-generation caregivers and their baby-boomer elders looking for relief from such maladies as cancer, Parkinson’s and ALS. Toronto’s figure3 developed Surterra’s inaugural retail outlet, slotted into a 218-square-metre space in a strip mall in Tampa, Florida. Before any of the actual drafting took place, the firm’s researchers employed a generative design process that studied the clientele’s needs and subconscious assumptions in depth. They soon discovered that they had to shed some preconceptions of their own. “Before going into this project,” says design and research strategy lead Tyler Gilchrist, “we knew we…

AFTER A DECADE, Atlanta’s premier design event Design is Human has changed its name to the Atlanta Design Festival. The Design Economy Expo, held at the Atlanta Decorative Arts Center, will continue to be a major highlight under the new moniker – the exhibition hosts a variety of innovative brands that don’t have a regular presence in the city. On the bill for this year are Swedish acoustic panel maker Baux (shown), French furniture manufacturer Roche Bobois, and Italian lighting masters Artemide, among others. Exploring the less-tangible potential of good design, keynote speakers include Saskia Boersma, director of brand management at Transport for London. The event spreads city-wide with a series of commissioned installations activating the streets for the run of the festival. Showroom presentations, talks and workshops are all…

COULD A BUILDING covered in solar panels also be beautiful? C.F. Møller’s latest project is changing the conception of what sustainability looks like. The Copenhagen International School’s Nordhavn campus boasts 12,000 solar panels, covering more than 6,000 square metres of the facade. The on-site solar-power plant provides more than half of the massive 25,000 square-metre school’s electricity. In brilliant sea green, the modules are individually angled to create a dynamic surface that highlights the school’s stacked-box form, which, says partner Mads Mandrup Hansen, was inspired by nearby shipping containers. Adding a push and pull effect to the imposing building, the panels’ varied tones come from new technology, developed at Swiss research institute EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), that imparts colour to the glass surface without pigment. A light-interference process…

“THE LAST THING an office should be is a living room,” says Joost Baks, co-founder of Space Encounters, a young Amsterdam firm that is quickly gaining a name for itself, in part by challenging the status quo of work environments. One of the firm’s signature projects is a line of office furniture designed for Lensvelt called Boring Collection, and it is intended to be just that: boring. Its defining feature is the uniform matte grey tone of the collection’s task chairs, shelving units, desks and trash cans. The idea, of course, is to let people, rather than furniture, shine within a space. When the line was launched in Milan in 2016, it was a massive hit. On this spring day, I am meeting with Baks and co-founder Remi Versteeg to…

WHAT DOES YOUR DREAM WORKDAY LOOK LIKE? How about four hours of hard work in the morning balanced by an afternoon of restful activities such as naps or long walks? Or, would you be open to short yet regular restorative vacations throughout the year? And what about a sabbatical every seven years? If these ideas sound idyllic, then perhaps bring them up with H.R. at your next appraisal. Or read about the benefits of downtime in Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s new book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. Pang is among a growing number of researchers who believe – as the book’s title suggests – that we can all work less while being more productive and creative, simply by resting in a deliberate and disciplined way. A…

1 Berlin Loft by Ligne Roset The back of this adjustable settee can be set at different angles, even unfolding completely to create a bed. There are a variety of solid and patterned fabric options, including Jungle (shown). ligne- roset.com 2 Steve by De La Espada A rugged cast-iron and wood frame supports the upholstered body of these pouffes by Luca Nichetto. Available in two sizes, they are intended as standalone pieces but also pair with a number of chairs from the designer’s collection. delaespada.com 3 Belt by Moroso The folded sides and back of this sofa by Patricia Urquiola are cinched with leather belts to hold the cushions in place. Multiple colours are available, and the die-cast aluminum feet come in five finishes. moroso. it 4 Soft Modular Sofa…