Filed under: Design,Nature by Orangemaster @ 11:00 am
Dutch design brand Moooi has partnered with Argentinian 3D artist Andrés Reisinger to mass-produce his Hortensia chair, also known as “the chair that could not be made”.
Back in 2018, Reisinger designed the chair as a ‘digital’ piece of furniture, but it has now been made into a physical chair covered in 30,000 fabric petals, available in the original pink as well as grey. This chair is said to be the first time that a product designed for the digital world has gone into mass production. The updated version being released by Moooi features a steel frame, rather than wood, covered in injection-moulded foam, while using lightweight polyester fabric laser-cut into long, scalloped strips that are then bunched together into clusters of 40 petals each. Moooi used special sewing machines to sew the petal modules onto a thick, elastic backing textile that is then wrapped around the chair.
“The Hortensia was considered impossible to produce – and yet here we are,” said Moooi CEO Robin Bevers.
A video by SEB Urban Design provides an overview of Amsterdam recreated in video game Cities Skylines. It claims to include all tourist destinations, parks and transport. The goal was to strive for realism and a close simulation of the real situation (the tram sounds are spot on).
Besides praise, we’re all wondering how long this took and we’ve noticed things we’d like to add. There’s some nice lingering on the Rijksmuseum, a very different take on Dam Square and a beautifully uncluttered Amsterdam Central Station. The canal houses are straight, the streets are super clean and you need to watch this video.
The two main parks near 24oranges HQ are there, and that’s good enough for us.
Famous Dutch designer Jan des Bouvrie has passed away at age 78 after a battle with prostate cancer.
As an interior and product designer, he was probably best known for his 1969 ‘kubusbank sofa’, easily considered a design classic and still being sold today. In fact, it is said that his sofa is a symbol of modern Dutch interior design and can be found in the collections of both the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. As well, the Jan des Bouvrie Academy in Deventer, Overijssel was named after him. Last year, he celebrated his 50th anniversary as a designer at his studio Het Arsenaal in Naarden.
Filed under: Design,Fashion by Orangemaster @ 5:59 pm
Dutch design duo Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren (aka Viktor & Rolf) have recently presented their spring-summer couture collection at Paris Fashion Week, featuring highly ‘instagrammable’ dresses.
The bright coloured tule dresses boast texts that read ‘I’m not shy I just don’t like you’, ‘Go to hell’ and ‘Go fuck yourself’, the later with each word on a colourful candy hart.The ‘weed’ dress shown above matches the colours of many of the tourist shops in downtown Amsterdam.
Fun fact: eight kilometres of tule were used to make the dresses.
Dutch furniture and interior design company Moooi has launched their own app, so that customers can verify the authenticity of the products they buy from the company. Moooi’s products all have a unique digital identity in the shape of a flower that customers can scan, which contains a wireless chip. Moooi has described it as “a tiny digital superhero that provides Moooi products with an authentic digital identity.”
Moooi launched the initiative as a way of helping their customers in the face of a growing number of counterfeits. At present, many companies stick holograms on their products, rely on customs control border forces to check or even using DNA spray. “But all these solutions are only really doable by people working at the border, so you’re not protecting average customers,” explained Jan Haarhuis, a specialist in customer experience at Moooi. The app is available for Android and iPhone.
Theo Jansen‘s world-famous ‘strandbeests’ [strandbeest = beach beast/animal — Dutch plural would be ‘strandbeesten’] have been around since 1990 when he started experimenting with mechanical engineering, building skeletons from plastic pipes that use the wind power to move ‘magically’ all on their own.
“The mini-strandbeest uses the same mechanism designed specifically by the artist for the project and like its forebear comes with a fan at one end that catches the wind, propelling the legs to move in a cyclical fashion. Built from 120 parts that snap together to form 12 jointed legs, a spinelike crankshaft, and a wind turbine, it takes about 90 minutes to build.”
Where can you buy them? Give Google a whirl using ‘mini-strandbeest DIY’ and quite a few results will pop up that seem quite affordable.
Two Dutch students from Breda have launched an online shop called hype-online that sells scented phone cases. There’s even one that smells like coffee, a scent that stays on the case for four to six months. The cases are sustainable, made from polyurethane.
Much of hype-online’s cases are quite unique and specially made from a start-up in Slovenia, called MMore. Of course, you could order your cases from MMore, but if you’re in the Netherlands, hype-online also delivers and promises to have some new scents soon enough.
Dutch design duo Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren (aka Viktor&Rolf) celebrated their 25th anniversary with a “collection of memories”, called the Immaculate Collection, an entirely white collection, adorned with Swarovski crystals, an ode to many of their iconic creations, from a reimagined Bedtime Story collection to the ‘No’ trench coat seen above.
The presentation of this collection coincides with the Viktor&Rolf Fashion Artists 25 Years exhibition running until 30 September at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam.
Amsterdam-based Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen has created a series of dresses that replicate the feathers and soundwave patterns of birds in flight, which was presented a few days ago at Le Trianon, Paris for the Paris Haute Couture fashion week.
To go along with them, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of Amsterdam’s Studio Drift had an installation of moving glass tubes that also capture the motion of birds in flight. Inspired by Studio Drift, Van Herpen also used chronophotography, a Victorian photographic technique that captures movement in several frames of print.
Rotterdam-based architecture firm MVRDV won an international competition with their design of a Möbius strip like viewing platform called SeaSaw for the city of Den Helder, North Holland, the northernmost point of the mainland, across from the island of Texel.
Set to be completed in 2019, the platform will offer an all-around view meant to underline the city’s connection to the sea. And although Den Helder is a charming place where you can enjoy the sea, the country’s main naval base, the end of the railway line and generally nice folks, it also has some ugly old buildings that were in the running for the best ugly place in North Holland.
