Table of contents for November/December 2018 in AZURE

What design object would you most like to receive as a gift? ERIN DONNELLY Azure’s Senior Associate Editor The Resting Bear from Vitra, seen in our gift guide on page 42, is definitely top of my list this year (either turquoise or mauve is fine, thank you). But I’d also love to take the new wireless BeoSound Edge speaker (above) for a spin. It’s Michael Anastassiades’s first collaboration with Bang & Olufsen, and it’s essentially a wheel of sound that you roll across the floor to turn up the volume. Once the level adjusts, the speaker rolls itself back into place. Super cool, and apparently it sounds fantastic. What is the most impressive interior you’ve experienced lately? MICHAEL WEBB Writer, “Free Flowing” (page 064) Espai Transmissor, a tiny museum containing…

Tasmania’s privately owned Mona museum (aka the Museum of Old and New Art) is designed to disconcert visitors – and its new AU$32-million addition is no exception. Simply reaching the wing – named Pharos, for the ancient Egyptian lighthouse – is an expedition akin to that of Theseus setting out to slay the Minotaur. There is no signage or clear path from the main entrance, where visitors descend a spiral staircase that winds deep into the museum’s belly. At the back of one of the lower-level exhibit halls, a glass panel conceals a light tunnel, dubbed Beside Myself, created by American light artist James Turrell. At the culmination of this tunnel is Faro, the new wing’s tapas bar. But don’t expect the confusion to subside there. Obscuring the restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling…

Basket Case Last year Sebastian Herkner teamed with Colombian brand Ames to launch the Caribe furniture series. Each colourful plastic piece is handmade in Colombia using traditional weaving techniques. Now Herkner and Ames have released the complementary Ames Bici bicycle. Sold in four colour combinations borrowed from the furniture line, the bike is fitted with a woven basket made of recycled plastic ties. ames-shop.de Animal Instinct From the infamous series of horse lamps and pig tables for Moooi to the abstract Anomaly seats for Moroso, animals have long inspired Stockholm studio Front. This year the duo launched Resting Animals, a series of sleepy sculpted creatures from Vitra. A cat and two sizes of bird are realized in ceramic, while Resting Bear is as much a friend as furniture. A knit…

Taiwan has recently garnered international attention for high-profile cultural centres by Toyo Ito & Associates, OMA and Mecanoo, but local architects are also doing good, if less showy, work. A warehouse conversion by the Taipei firm Waterfrom Design, for instance, is a model of frugal creativity. The client was Forest Spring Enterprise, which manufactures water dispensers and related equipment. The challenge was to transform a 30-year-old storage facility into a light-filled office. Overall, it was a happy marriage between a client whose business is water purification and a firm that takes its name and inspiration from water. Indeed, the studio’s mission statement likens design itself to water, extolling the “simple and pure, organic and ever-changing. We maintain the belief that aesthetics come from approximating what is natural.” That ideal –…

“We invent the future,” Javier Arpa of the Why Factory, the architectural think tank and research centre at TU Delft in the Netherlands, is telling me without irony. We are standing at the top of a towering set of tangerine-hued steps that essentially lead nowhere. The stairs, which double as student seating, ascend to the top of what’s known as the Tribune, a three-storey structure housing the Why Factory’s main offices as well as rooms for meetings and lectures. It is the first week of September and there’s a familiar tension in the air: that unmistakable mix of anxiety and anticipation that marks the beginning of a new school year. In such a heady setting and atop such a lofty perch, Arpa’s words sound more than plausible. Indeed, envisioning the…

With the official launch of Collection O, its inaugural line, Toronto’s Hi Thanks Bye has announced itself as one of Canada’s hottest emerging studios. Comprising five sculptural steel pieces (a laser-cut shelf, a geometric chair, a fringed floor lamp, an angular side table and a sleek bar stool) plus a shaggy wool rug, the series was introduced in a matte forest green so deep it appears black at first glance. Designers Stein Wang and Topher Kong, who established their brand in 2017, say that their own Chinese Canadian backgrounds inspired them to combine the aesthetic appeal of a traditional Chinese garden with the natural beauty of Canada’s islands, including Azure’s favourite architourism destination, Fogo Island. Hence the VO table, resembling a lily pad, and the OO rug, a collaboration with…

The pièce de résistance is an idiosyncratic curtain made of leather offcuts One of the most elegant streets in Madrid, Calle de Serrano is a long, busy thoroughfare where many old businesses have been replaced by contemporary stores. The latest addition is Malababa, a shop showcasing the leather bags and shoes of designers Ana Carrasco and Jaime Lara. To transform the former auction house into their flagship, the pair engaged the local designers Ciszak Dalmas along with Matteo Ferrari Studio. The first thing the team did was open up and enlarge the four windows on each side of the building, which sits on a corner, in order to show off the merchandise to street traffic and bring in natural light. The 160-square-metre space, featuring 3.9-metre ceilings, is organized into two…

Soft Solutions 1 Sculpting Sound Named this year’s best in acoustic panels at NeoCon, Unika Vaev’s Ecoustic Sculpt PET ceiling tiles are available in nine sculptural designs. From triangular blades to desert dunes, the diverse styles can be arranged in linear, checkerboard and mirrored patterns. unikavaev.com 2 Grey Tones Crease Ceiling System, from Turf Design and MNML, connects to a T-grid using rare-earth magnets, enabling the tiles to completely conceal existing dropped ceilings. Fabricated from recycled water bottles, the tessellated felt panels come in two grey-tone finishes. turf.design 3 Deep Colour A collaboration with New Mexico studio Submaterial, Ribsy is the latest felt-and-cork creation from FilzFelt. Sold in 50 colours, the sound-absorbent wall panels use alternating shades of wool to enhance a deeply ribbed appearance. filzfelt.com Metallic Looks 1 Connect…

Helsinki’s newest art museum has made quite an impression on the city, but not necessarily on its skyline. All of the freshly built gallery space at Amos Rex, a reincarnation of the half-century-old Amos Anderson Art Museum, is located underground. When the trustees of the Amos Anderson decided to move to Lasipalatsi, a distinguished functionalist pavilion built in the 1930s, they inherited the adjacent listed plaza, a former military parade ground that had to remain an open public space. That meant that the architects enlisted for the reboot, Finnish practice JKMM, had few options but to situate much of the 6,230-square-metre museum below grade. A happy upshot is the resulting “roofscape,” a uniquely whimsical plaza that has become a civic hit. The undisputed stars of the new square are the…

“We wanted to create a rhythm and music on the facades, the same way that nature, cliffs and water have rhythm. A big concrete box could never have given us that.” Japanese architect Kengo Kuma is in Dundee, talking about the new waterfront V&A museum he designed for the Scottish city. Jutting out into the River Tay, the structure’s angled facades, Kuma explains, are inspired by the rocky cliffs of northeastern Scotland, their jagged cladding comprising 2,429 precast concrete fins of varied depths and lengths. Structurally bold, the new £80-million building is composed of two inverted pyramids that rise as separate, twisting volumes at ground level and join together on the upper floors. “The main point of this split was to create a void that allows people to walk through…

1 POWERBALANCE Lighting innovator Philips has developed LEDs that contribute to overall wellbeing in the office by mimicking the physiological effects of daylight. Shown here in the Czech headquarters of energy company Innogy, the tunable white lights are calibrated to boost energy levels throughout the day by fluctuating in colour temperature and intensity. lighting.philips.ca 2 COALESSE PATTERN Designed to bring nature to the boardroom, the nine textural surface patterns in Coalesse’s digital program can be applied to two of the brand’s glass tabletops and its carbon-fibre LessThanFive chair. Each motif – derived from the earth, water, sea or sky – can be custom coloured and is offered in multiple scales. coalesse.com 3 VERDANTA An award-winning collaboration with Gensler, Sagegreenlife’s Verdanta living-wall series includes Productivity, a moveable divider that can hold…

On first impression, the new restaurant Quetzal, a high-end Mexican eatery in Toronto, seems conspicuously lacking in Latin American flair. The long, linear and distinctly low-ceilinged space is composed of 12 modular bays, each about two metres wide, that create alcoves for seating – plus a striking canopy over the bar-slash-kitchen. The palette has a minimalist, art gallery vibe: The bays are crafted from fibreglass-reinforced gypsum and the bar is a geometric jigsaw of lightweight Ductal concrete and Canadian maple. The local wood species, also used for the floor and banquettes, has been left blond except for the dark-stained dining surfaces, which include a trio of two-person tables that ingeniously cantilever from the bar. “It’s our most restrained space so far,” says Pooya Baktash, a co-founder with Alex Josephson of…

After 11 years in business, the Montreal-based fashion retailer Ssense decided to overhaul its website, settling on what was, in 2014, an early example of web brutalism, an aesthetic that shuns conventional frameworks in favour of stripped-back design. Simple and uncluttered, such pages load more quickly, fit all screens and are easy to navigate and digest. The following year, Ssense (pronounced “essence”) commissioned David Chipperfield Architects to design a new hometown flagship. The retailer asked the architects to recreate its online ethos in physical form. The result – a five-storey, 1,200-square-metre space designed by Chipperfield’s Milan office and unveiled in May – certainly does that. Installed behind the existing walls of an ornate Second Empire structure in Old Montreal, the store is really a building within a building, its sandblasted…

Multi-use Contract Collections 1 Designtex 5.5, A Crypton Collection A collaboration between Crypton and Designtex, this series features dynamic, digitally printed interpretations of work from five artists from around the globe. Each pattern is available in five colour combinations. Materials Crypton Dimensions 137 cm wide Manufacturer Designtex, designtex.com 2 Fall 2018 Collection Including twills, embossing and raised yarns, the four designs in this series offer a textural alternative for interiors. Six to 11 cheerful colourways are offered. Materials Recycled polyester, nylon and cotton Dimensions 137 cm wide Manufacturer HBF Textiles, hbftextiles.com 3 Break Line Part of Line Art, a collection that emphasizes strong linear patterns, Break Line features broken stripes that appear as repeated dashes. The textured collection’s palette ranges from neon to neutral. Materials Polyolefin-linen-polyester blend Dimensions 137 cm…