Natural Connections exhibition aims to “help people rediscover nature”
CategoriesInterior Design

Natural Connections exhibition aims to “help people rediscover nature”

Designers Inma Bermúdez, Moritz Krefter, Jorge Penadés and Alvaro Catalán de Ocón have created three playful wooden furniture pieces on show at Madrid Design Festival.

Devised by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), Natural Connections was on show in the entrance hall of the cultural building Matadero Madrid.

Natural Connections by AHEC
Top: Natural Connections features playful furniture pieces. Above: the exhibition took place in the Matadero Madrid

Each of the three furniture pieces was designed to encourage interaction with wood – with one acting as a bench, the other a climbing frame and the third a hanging light installation.

The designs were created in response to a brief provided by AHEC, which sought pieces made by Spanish designers out of maple, cherry, and red oak hardwoods sourced from American forests in an effort to encourage the use of the material.

The inside of a light installation at Natural Connections
Catalán de Ocón designed Nube, a hanging light installation

“We challenged the design studios to present these chambers in a public space – in a public context – so that visitors get to experience a connection,” AHEC European director David Venables told Dezeen.

“The design teams worked with maple, cherry, and red oak to create playful, original, and highly innovative installations that we hope will provide engagement, excitement and a connection for visitors to these wonderful natural materials,” said Venables.

The Lost Herd furniture pieces
Inma Bermúdez and Moritz Krefter created several “bovine-shaped” seats

Designer Catalán de Ocón created a six-metre-long hanging light called Nube  – which translates to cloud in English – made of 4,000 interconnected spherical and cylindrical individual pieces of wood.

Nube is lit by several LED lights that were placed in the middle of the hollow structure. A brass cable runs from the bass into the mesh structure, branching into positive and negative electric currents.

Positive poles run through the cherry wood while negative poles run through the maple pieces, which form a complete circuit when they touch and illuminate the bulbs.

The Lost Herd by Inma Bermúdez and Moritz Krefter
Visitors can perch on the benches and touch the woods

Its design was informed by Catalán de Ocón’s fascination with the manufacturing process for small utilitarian wooden objects such as pegs, matches and blinds.

“I was inspired by the little match or the pencil, or the wooden pin for hanging the clothes – those kinds of manufacturing techniques, where you get an object which is repeated over and over and over again,” Catalán de Ocón told Dezeen.

Wrap installation at Madrid Design Festival
Jorge Penadés produced a bleacher-style structure

Meanwhile, La Manada Perdida, or The Lost Herd, by Inma Bermúdez and Moritz Krefter was influenced by the Matadero’s former function as a slaughterhouse and cattle market.

The Spanish design duo produced a series of red oak, maple and cherry benches for Natural Connections that reference equine and bovine animals such as horses and cows. The pieces were given minimal finishing to mimic the texture of the tree they came from.

“They appear as benches or seats, but their design goes beyond furniture to incorporate aspects of imagination and play to help people encounter and rediscover nature,” said AHEC.

Madrid-based designer Penadés responded to the natural connections theme by producing a tiered seating piece called Wrap that is connected by ball joints.

The designer, who is known for his interior projects with Spanish footwear brand Camper, glued and rolled 0.7-millimetres-thick pieces of cherry veneer into tubes to create tubular hollow components, which form a bleacher-style seat when joined together.

Natural Connections furniture by Jorge Penadés
Wrap is made from thin rolls of cherry veneer

Natural Connections is one of several exhibitions at Madrid Design Festival, a month-long event that sees a design programme take over the Spanish city. After the exhibition ends, the furniture will remain in the cultural centre for a year.

Also at this year’s edition is Slow Spain, an exhibition by university students that aims to explore American hardwoods and mindful furniture consumption.

Last year saw lighting designer Antoni Arola and Spanish light manufacturer Simon use a smoke machine, lasers and a small tree to create Fiat Lux 3 Architectures of Light.

Natural Connections is on show at Matadero Madrid as part of Madrid Design Festival 2023, which takes place from 14 February to 12 March. See Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the month.

The photography is courtesy of AHEC.


Project credits:

Designers: Inma Bermúdez and Moritz Krefter, Alvaro Catalán de Ocón, Jorge Penadés
Partners: American Hardwood Export Council, Matadero Madrid, Madrid Design Festival, Tamalsa

Reference

Ubiquitous Energy aims to make solar windows the global standard
CategoriesSustainable News

Ubiquitous Energy aims to make solar windows the global standard

US company Ubiquitous Energy has invented a thin coating that turns windows into transparent solar panels, providing other ways to harvest renewable energy in buildings beyond rooftop panels.

Ubiquitous Energy describes its technology as being the only transparent photovoltaic glass coating that is “visibly indistinguishable” from traditional windows.

Any surface could become a solar panel

The company was founded in 2011 by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Michigan State University (MSU), who engineered a transparent solar panel by allowing the visible spectrum of light to pass through and only absorbing ultraviolet and near-infrared light to convert to electricity.

Standard solar panels look black because they absorb the full spectrum of light, and because of their appearance, their deployment has been typically limited to roofs, walls and large rural solar farms.

With Ubiquitous Energy’s coating, which it calls UE Power, potentially any surface can be turned into a photovoltaic panel.

Gloved hands holding a transparent solar panel
Ubiquitous Energy’s transparent solar windows (above) are installed at Michigan State University (top)

“The mission is to turn all these everyday surfaces around us into essentially renewable energy generators,” Ubiquitous Energy VP of Strategy Veeral Hardev told Dezeen.

“Windows is where we’re focused first, but beyond that, think about vehicles, transportation in general, portable consumer electronics devices, sustainable farming like greenhouses – these are all things that see sunlight to some degree,” he continued.

“Why not improve them so that they can actually generate renewable energy themselves without changing their appearance?”

Hardev said the company’s modelling shows that with broad adoption of the technology to the point that in 30 years the coating is as standard as low-emissivity (or low-E) coatings on windows are now, it could offset 10 per cent of global carbon emissions.

All components are completely transparent

The solar window works in the same way as any other solar panel. It contains cells of a semiconductor material that create an electric charge in response to sunlight.

Wiring hidden in the window frames connects it to the building’s energy management system to direct power to where it’s needed in the building or to store it in a battery.

Close-up of person in a lab holding a vial and spatchula
The coating is made using light-absorbing dyes

The innovation with Ubiquitous Energy is that all of its materials are transparent to the human eye, including the semiconducting compounds, which take the form of light-absorbing dyes.

To achieve its thinness – the coating is about one micrometre thick, or about 80 to 100 times thinner than a human hair – it is made with nanomaterials, similar to those used in display technologies.

The semiconductor layers are deposited onto glass using vacuum physical vapor deposition (PVD) – a standard coating process using in the window industry – and Ubiquitous Energy plans to license its technology to existing glass manufacturers so that they can incorporate it into their product offerings.

Transparent panels only half as efficient

Ubiquitous Energy estimates the windows would provide about 30 per cent of a building’s electricity needs, depending on factors such as geographical location, elevation and tree cover, and imagine them being used in conjunction with rooftop solar panels to reduce the building’s reliance on the electrical grid.

Because some light is allowed to pass through, the transparent solar panel is only about half as powerful as a typical rooftop solar panel of the same size. But Hardev claims their potential scale of deployment compensates for this loss of efficiency.

“A few years ago, we reported the highest-ever performance for a transparent solar device, with near 10 per cent efficiency,” said Hardev. “Although there are options that are 20 per cent efficient today, we’re making this conscious trade-off of being transparent so we can put it in places where you can’t put traditional solar panels.”

Cities would theoretically be able to produce substantial amounts of solar power locally without changing in appearance, reducing the need for land for large solar power plants.

First factory to open in 2024

Applied in other ways, the coating could be used to make mobile phones that don’t need to be recharged, more energy-efficient cars and self-powering greenhouses, Hardev says.

“We’re first starting with windows because we think that is the area that is going to have the biggest overall impact,” said Hardev, citing the statistic that nearly 40 per cent of total global energy-related CO2 emissions come from buildings.

Ubiquitous Energy has completed a number of demonstration projects, including at Michigan State University and at the Boulder Commons apartment community in Colorado.

Ubiquity Energy solar windows installed at Michigan State University
The company is working to expand the coating’s applications beyond windows

The company plans to open its first factories producing floor-to-ceiling solar windows in 2024. It also hopes to grow its partnerships, which have so far included window companies Asahi, Pilkington and Andersen.

Past aesthetic solutions to the issue of intrusive solar panels have come from designer Marjan van Aubel, who created colourful skylights reminiscent of stained glass, and Tesla, which released camouflaged Solar Roof tiles.

Architects have also been creatively integrating the technology into buildings, with designs such as BIG and Heatherwick Studio’s “dragonscale solar skin” on the roof of Google’s Bay View campus in Silicon Valley and Shigeru Ban’s sail-like moving wall of photovoltaics at La Seine Musical near Paris.

All images are courtesy of Ubiquitous Energy.


Solar Revolution logo
Illustration is by Berke Yazicioglu

Solar Revolution

This article is part of Dezeen’s Solar Revolution series, which explores the varied and exciting possible uses of solar energy and how humans can fully harness the incredible power of the sun.

Reference

NFT-funded pavilion by Iheartblob aims to promote decentralisation
CategoriesArchitecture

NFT-funded pavilion by Iheartblob aims to promote decentralisation

Architectural design studio Iheartblob has revealed the puzzle-like Fungible Non-Fungible Pavilion at the Tallinn Architecture Biennale in Estonia, which was partly designed by the public using NFTs.

Located outside Tallinn’s Museum of Estonian Architecture, the experimental structure was built from physical versions of NFT objects designed by the community.

Iheartblob climbing the Fungible Non-Fungible Pavilion in Tallinn
Fungible Non-Fungible Pavilion is an installation at the Tallinn Architecture Biennale

Fungible Non-Fungible Pavilion was the winning entry of the Slowbuilding competition held for the main installation at Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB) 2022.

According to UK studio Iheartblob, it is the first pavilion designed by the community using NFTs.

Wooden structure outside Museum of Estonian Architecture
It was designed by Iheartblob with the community

“This is the first NFT pavilion in the world that is designed by the community together, it’s also co-owned by the community and co-funded by the community,” Iheartblob told Dezeen at the installation’s opening.

“The technology we’re using is very new and experimental, and we find it important to integrate it in architecture because architecture can benefit a lot from it.”

Aerial view of Fungible Non-Fungible Pavilion at Tallinn Architecture Biennale
Its puzzle-like form was built using NFT technology

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are certificates of authenticity and ownership that exist digitally and can be assigned to both physical and digital assets. Each one is individually recorded, or “minted”, on a blockchain similarly to a cryptocurrency transaction, allowing it to be purchased, sold and collected.

Iheartblob’s intention is for the pavilion to promote a slow and decentralised approach to architecture, in which the community replaces the architect as the “master builder”.

Photo of pixelated wooden pavilion
Its components are physical versions of NFT objects minted by the community

Its design responds to the theme of the sixth edition of the biennial TAB festival, for which Dezeen is media partner. Called “Edible; Or, the Architecture of Metabolism”, it was curated by architects Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou to explore food systems through the lens of architecture.

The pavilion is currently built from 78 unique puzzle-like pieces, although it is expected to expand.

Iheartblob climbing Tallinn Architecture Biennale pavilion
Iheartblob (above) created an NFT-generative tool for the project

To facilitate this, Iheartblob built an NFT-generative tool that anyone can use to design and mint objects. Every NFT minted by this tool funded a unique physical twin that is now used in the pavilion.

The end result is a fragmented structure that has a presence in both the metaverse and real space and is co-owned by and reflective of the community that designed it.

Detail photo of Fungible Non-Fungible Pavilion at TAB 2022
The blocks are made from wood

The tool is still open for use, meaning the pavilion will evolve and grow in size over the course of its installation until the opening of the next TAB in 2023.

“The idea here is that since we have decentralised the process of architecture, since anyone can design a block that becomes part of this piece, since anyone can add to the pavilion, this will change over the course of the biennale,” the studio explained.

“To date, I think we’ve had designers as young as five, create a piece we’ve had people here locally in Tallinn create many of these pieces. We’ve also had people from all over the world from Asia from America, designing different pieces that have come together.”

While Iheartblob handed over the reins to the public when it came to the pavilion’s design, it did provide a series of constraints to ensure the structure could be physically realised.

This included predefined forms for the interlocking components and predetermined timber materiality. There is also a maximum of 165 pieces, which will create a width, depth and height of roughly five metres.

Detail photo of Fungible Non-Fungible Pavilion at TAB 2022
The structure sits on the grass outside the Museum of Estonian Architecture in Tallinn

While promoting the idea of decentralisation in architecture, the studio hopes the Fungible Non-Fungible Pavilion will demonstrate the value of NFTs in the sector.

“We think blockchain and NFTs can feed into many aspects of the profession from having NFTs determine authenticity of architectural drawings to more experimental approaches which determine ownership and authorship, with royalties, of shared housing or even entire cities,” the studio explained.

Pavilion built from wooden blocks
The pavilion is expected to evolve over the course of its installation

The Fungible Non-Fungible Pavilion was selected to create the pavilion shortly after the original competition winners, Australian duo Simulaa and Natalie Alima, withdrew their proposal for an installation made of mushrooms.

Alongside the pavilion, this year’s TAB includes a curational exhibition at the Museum of Estonian Architecture and other fringe events. The event was previously expected to take place in 2021, but it was pushed back to 2022 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The seventh edition remains scheduled for 2023.

It is intended to promote decentralisation in architecture

At the previous TAB in 2019, the central installation took the form of a twisted pavilion designed by SoomeenHahm Design, Igor Pantic and Fologram. The structure explored augmented reality and old-fashioned woodworking such as steam-bent hardwood.

Tallinn Architecture Biennale takes place from 7 September to 20 November 2022 at various locations across Tallinn, Estonia. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

The photography is by Tõnu Tunnel.

Reference

Terra Nova soil monitor aims to avert future food crisis
CategoriesSustainable News

Terra Nova soil monitor aims to avert future food crisis

To fight the threat of soil degradation to food supply, design graduate Ryan Waterhouse has invented a portable device that monitors the health of topsoil.

Terra Nova allows users to measure the levels of three critical nutrients within topsoil — nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous — as well as its moisture content.

Waterhouse developed the smart farming device as his final-year project in Bournemouth University’s product design course, after learning that soil degradation presents an imminent threat to arable land.

Photo of a hand holding the Terra Nova prototype
Terra Nova is a soil monitor that measures levels of moisture, nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium

“The world grows 90 per cent of its food in topsoil – the uppermost layer of soil – making it one of the most critical components in our food system,” said Waterhouse.

“Current rates of nutritional soil degradation suggest that topsoil will run out in just 60 years, posing a significant threat to food production,” he continued. “Every minute, 30 football fields’ worth of topsoil is lost due to degradation.”

According to Waterhouse, Terra Nova could help to reverse this trend. The device enables farmers and gardeners to track degradation and assists them to improve the quality of the soil, in turn improving their crops.

Small circualr LCD screen on the top of the soil monitor shows four sets of numbers prefixed by the initials N, P, K and M
A small screen on the device shows real-time readings

It has three retractable probes on the bottom that stick into the soil, with sensors that measure the levels of moisture and key nutrients in the soil.

The collected data is then displayed in two ways: on a small LCD screen on top of the device, which shows the soil readings at the present time, and on a web app, which presents weeks, months or even years of data in graphs and visualisation.

The app also has additional functionality, as users can tell which crops they are planting and get recommendations for their care, such as when to add a particular fertiliser.

Laptop open to the Terra Nova web app showing line graphs of various data sets
Full data can be viewed on an accompanying web app

The soil monitor connects to the app using Long Range Networking (LoRa), a low-power wireless technology, so it can relay data even in remote locations with no Wi-Fi.

According to Waterhouse, growers can use Terra Nova in one of two main ways: the first option is to leave it in the ground long-term, in which case one device per fruit or vegetable variant being grown is usually recommended.

Alternatively, the user can pick up the device and replant it to test a variety of areas at one time. Waterhouse suggests this option would suit allotment holders growing multiple fruits and vegetables.

Waterhouse sees Terra Nova as being of extra use now amid skyrocketing fertiliser prices, which are particularly putting pressure on farmers in Africa.

Terra Nova device planted in a garden bed surrounded by plants
The device is recommended for farmers, gardeners and allotment holders

“It is increasingly becoming more and more important to make educated and informed decisions on fertiliser usage because of recent cost increases,” Waterhouse told Dezeen. “I believe Terra Nova could significantly impact developing countries with education in increasing crop yields through correct farming practices.”

Waterhouse won the 2022 New Designer of the Year award, the top award at the UK’s New Designers showcase, with Terra Nova.

Other recent innovations designed for sustainable farming, include Pasturebird’s robotic chicken coop, which is meant to integrate animals with crops, and Studio Roosegaarde’s Grow light installation, designed to stimulate plant growth.

Reference