Kustaa Saksi creates vivid tapestries to explore “reality and illusion”
CategoriesInterior Design

Kustaa Saksi creates vivid tapestries to explore “reality and illusion”

Multidisciplinary designer Kustaa Saksi has unveiled In the Borderlands, an exhibition of jacquard textiles at the Helsinki Design Museum, which includes a piece featuring scenery generated by AI software.

Conceived as objects that straddle both art and design, Saksi’s large-scale textiles were hung from the ceilings and arranged across various rooms within a gallery at Helsinki’s Design Museum.

Ideal Fall tapestries
Ideal Fall is a duo of tapestries featuring AI-generated imagery

To create his pieces, the designer uses jacquard weaving – a technique invented in 1804 where patterns are woven with yarn using a loom to create a textile, rather than printed, embroidered or stamped onto fabric.

Ideal Fall is a single oversized tapestry featuring bright and abstract forms depicting waterfall- and plant-style forms.

Large-scale colourful textiles by Kustaa Saksi
Kustaa Saksi also created a series exploring migraines

Saksi created the colourful textile using AI software, which he instructed to generate images that would depict “ideal” scenes of nature. The designer then picked his favourite suggestions and used the imagery as a stimulus for the tapestry’s patterns.

“The exhibition explores moments between reality and illusion, which are the starting point for many of Saksi’s works,” said the Design Museum.

Dramatically lit tapestry at Helsinki Design Museum
The tapestries were suspended from the ceiling at the Design Museum

Migraine Metamorphoses is another series of textiles featuring similarly bold designs, which Saksi created to refer to the various phases of migraines – intense headaches that the designer has suffered since the age of seven.

According to the museum, the soft texture of the textiles intends to “mitigate the painful subject matter”.

Colourful textiles
Monsters and Dreams is a series informed by stories about hallucinations

Often influenced by the boundaries between dreams and imagination, Saksi’s first-ever tapestry series was also on show at the Design Museum.

Called Monsters and Dreams, it is characterised by striking patterns that take cues from hallucinations experienced by one of the designer’s family members. These textiles were draped across or hung from the ceiling of a single room with dark blue walls, which had been painted to enhance the pieces’ dramatic theme.

Saksi has created his pieces in collaboration with Dutch studio TextileLab since 2013.

“The jacquard technique can be referred to as one of the early precursors to the computer,” said the Design Museum.

“It was the first mechanised technique which enabled the transfer of information about a particular pattern to a weaving machine with the help of a punched cylinder, to eventually become a piece of textile.”

In the Borderlands exhibition by Kustaa Saksi
The exhibition is on display in Helsinki until mid-October

Throughout the gallery, the textiles were illuminated with controlled levels of lighting in order to preserve their appearance, according to the museum.

In the Borderlands is on display until 15 October as part of the museum’s 150th-anniversary programme. Elsewhere at Helsinki Design Week, designer Didi NG Wing Yin presented a series of amorphous timber furniture while last year’s edition of the event featured projects including plant-based textiles.

The photography is by Paavo Lehtonen.

Helsinki Design Week takes place from 8 to 17 September 2023 in Helsinki, Finland. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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yuji tanabe completes capsule toy shop in japan with mirror optical illusion
CategoriesArchitecture

yuji tanabe completes capsule toy shop in japan with mirror optical illusion

‘ONARI capsule’ toy shop BY Yuji tanabe ARCHITECTS

 

Located on the Onari shopping street in Kamakura, Japan, the ‘Onari Capsule’ by Yuji Tanabe Architects was once an optics shop but has now transformed into a fun capsule toy store. With 65 capsule toy machines and two mirrors facing each other inside the compact space, the Japanese architect aimed to make the interior look as wide as possible from the outside. It was important to create a visual presence that stands out in the shopping district while maintaining a Japanese traditional feel in the city of Kamakura using lanterns, oren curtains, cypress lattices, En-Mado, and faintly reflective silver-leaf paper on the ceiling. The architects also introduce the idea of collecting used capsules by creatively designing an interactive lattice wall to place used capsules between the intervals. 

 

onari capsule capsule toy shop in japan 1
street view of the Onari toy store

all images courtesy of  Yuji Tanabe Architects

 

 

glass windows and a low wainscot reveal the capsules

 

Yuji Tanabe Architects creatively aimed to renovate and revive the previously known optics store. The Onari shopping street, leading to the West exit of the city’s station, is more frequented by locals, which is where the toy shop is located. Nevertheless in recent years Onari has also been used as a sightseeing route to the sea and the Great Buddha of Hase, thus adding historical value to the shopping district and preserving culture and tradition within the Onari Capsule shop. Originally this compact store had about six tatami mats with a width of 3.4m (11.2 ft)  and a depth of 2.8m (9.2 ft). On the exterior facing the street, there was a frame door and a glass window that leaves a low wall wainscot–an area of wooden paneling on the lower part of the walls of a room– that effectively exposed the interior of the store to the passers-by on the street.onari capsule capsule toy shop in japan 7

 

 

65 capsule machines are mirrored to illude an infinite space 

 

From the shop’s entrance, 65 capsule toy machines look multiplied infinitely by a 3.4m (11.2 ft)  high mirror on the right side. In addition, the 45mm square Japanese cypress lattices on the mirrored surface are arranged at intervals of 4 types (45mm, 55mm, 65mm, 75mm). The interval spaces account for the standard capsule sizes since the lattices function as a system that collects empty capsules. The capsule is inserted between two lattices after taking out the contents inside– a fun way to recycle the capsules. 

 

The cypress lattice was cut out with En-Mado (circles) of different sizes on both sides. By making the En-Mado on the entrance side smaller than the one on the opposite side, the reflection on the mirror makes it appear smaller. In other words, the perspective is emphasized, and therefore  it feels farther than the actual distance. Kamakura was a capital city in 800 years ago and it has a long history, which is why the Onari Capsule is a place that holds historical value and proposes a new way of sustaining the culture around capsule toy shops while providing a fun approach to recycling the capsules. 

 

onari capsule capsule toy shop in japan 6
mirror wall on one side of the store creating the illusion of infinite capsules

Reference