Industrial Design

[sabshine]

Dont Let This Thread Die!

[Colette_B]

^ i agree, what a wonderful thread. i love everything here!!
...when i have more time, i'm def. going to go back and read all the previous posts...

very inspirational and beautiful creations here. thanks to softgrey for this thread...

although it's been here for quite sometime. .

[coq*]

I just love this one!

[lemeray]

Interestng woodwork. Where did you find those pics and who's the designer?

[coq*]

I read about it in an issue of Wallpaper, don´t remember the homepage or the designer though.

[Cypresses]

An Architect in Kabul

A Columbia University professor brings modern design to postwar Afghanistan.

By Belinda Lanks

Posted June 19, 2006

After the American-led invasion that toppled the Taliban in 2001, New York-based Swiss architect Frederic Levrat joined the legions of international aid groups streaming into Afghanistan to begin the process of reconstruction. His wife, Zolayka Sherzad, an Afghan native and fellow architect, was already doing humanitarian work in the country through School of Hope, a nonprofit she founded in 2000. Levrat’s motives were less altruistic: “Forget philosophy,” he says, “I was seduced.” But he was quickly confronted with the stark realities of a country devastated by more than 20 years of civil war. Before long Levrat began offering his expertise for a series of projects to reconstruct downtown Kabul, build health and education facilities, and help restore civil society.

“There is no electricity, no roads, no qualified workers, no indigenous material,” says Levrat, who worked with the likes of Peter Eisenman and Tadao Ando before taking on a different sort of design challenge in Afghanistan. “My last project had been a conceptual construction made of laser-cut translucent Plexiglas with a margin of error of less than .25mm. Nevertheless, nothing compares to the questions raised by the reconstruction of an entire city, civil society, and culture.”

Afghan authorities immediately recognized the value of Levrat’s expertise, installing him in the newly formed City Center Reconstruction Authority to plan the rebuilding of Kabul’s old town and business district. Lacking funds and infrastructure, the agency never instituted Levrat’s vision. “Anybody who had any skills had left the country, so the first step was simply to entertain what was possible,” he says. Filling the knowledge gap, however, was a small group of expat professionals, among them Abdullah Rafiq, who had abandoned his computer business in Thailand to return to Afghanistan. In 2004 Levrat and Rafiq won a bid to construct 18 primary schools and 36 clinics for USAID.

Since most of the reconstruction money was being funneled through foreign firms, Levrat was particularly interested in employing local labor. “You don’t really have a local construction company, so there are two or three large Turkish companies making a fortune out there. The problem is, What’s the capacity building? What’s the learning curve? How much are Afghans involved in the process?” A simple interlocking brick system that Rafiq imported from Thailand ended up perfectly suited to the task. The bricks could be built on-site by unskilled laborers, stacked in durable straight walls, and reinforced by rebar threaded through holes in the aligned bricks. Within a few days of signing the contract, 80 local workers were being trained in a former wheat field to produce 5,000 hand-pressed blocks a day. To date 12 schools and 25 clinics have been built.

[IMG][/IMG]

Source:Metropolismmag.com

[enak]

Thats a really great thing you've just posted. It really warms my heart when I see things like this happening.

[SomethingElse]

Marloes ten Bhömer - marloestenbhomer.com

[ilaughead]

Wow! Those shoes are amazing! It's always interesting to see industrial designers do fashion. (Like Starck and Behar's forays.) I love the shape of the first one, especially, but they'd be rather difficult to walk in, no?

[SomethingElse]

Another curious industrial design shoe



Working Ludens

When we are walking , we are looking for comfortable shoes to put on and to take off without any touching. Also we hope it to be light. These shoes are made in the smallest. So ordinary elasticity of these shoes make good fit for wearing. And also these shoes are made by soft materials such as elastomer.

sdesignunit.com

[ilaughead]

^It took me a second to figure out how those were to be worn. I was thinking they were attached to each other or something!

[tctra]

haha, i can tell you now there's no way that shoe will be comfortable or even work properly.

[adorefaith]

i hope this thread is the right place for this....
i thought it was really interesting....

solid poetry
by Frederik Molenschot

Direct contact with water reveals a floral pattern on these seemingly plain Solid Poetry patio tiles.




more photos on his site
http://www.frederikmolenschot.nl/

[lemeray]

^ Hmm interesting. I like the first two, the third one is too excessive.

[adorefaith]

they're not three different tiles....
it's the one tile in the process of revealing it's design....
the 3 stages....