'Just light' by Garth Roberts

There is a roughly 50-50 chance of meeting up with Garth Roberts in Milan. Like so many product designers nowadays Roberts darts from client meeting to seminar to fellowship with seeming disregard for international borders. Yet Roberts’s peripatetic leanings run deeper than protocol. Currently he divides his time primarily between Berlin and Milan, and these homes mark the latest destinations in a career journey that spans continents.

'Not-just light' by Garth Roberts

It began in Toronto, where the Canadian-born Roberts first went to work for Jonathan Crinion, the designer intimately linked to Knoll. By 2000 Roberts was in New York, shouldering industrial-design tasks for a local architecture studio for the next three years. The work may have been gratifying, but certainly not profile-raising. Crinion suggested to Roberts that he attempt designing contemporary furniture. He made trips to Milan to circulate his portfolio, and there he met Jeffrey Bernett, an exemplar of the field who also offered him a job back in New York.

Garth Roberts

continue the article @ Architonic

'Modulares Licht' ('modular lighting') by Robert Hoffmann

The German designer Robert Hoffmann presented this series of lamps at the DMY festival in Berlin this year.

‘Modular Lights’ (‘modular lighting’) are adjustable luminaries made of aluminium and steel. The basic technical structure with illuminants and joints bears the outside surface. By spinning and tipping the outer flats, the inner light-room of the ashlars breaks open. The spatial reception is changed. Slim lines of light transform into flats of light. The variability of the modules enables surprisingly new light-room-constellations.

With a closed surface

As a table lamp

to the Robert Hoffmann website

'Phyte' by Nicolas Mouret

When Gustave Eiffel buit his iron tower in 1889 he caused a sensation because of the industrial look and the bare construction of the town´s landmark to be.

This year at the end of March the young designer Nicolas Mouret unveiled his proposal for the Eiffel competition, a flexible and light tower, which caused a furore, partly because of its beautiful appearance but also for another less pleasant reason.

The flexible construction

The construction consists of eight mono-bloc structural members which are articulated by gimbals and guys that ensure stability while allowing rotating movement. They are fibre concrete tubes filled by ultra strong fibrecrete and carry spoke- beams with triangulated extremities, stiffened and tied by cables. 

'Phyte' by Nicolas Mouret

“This project is a part of a reflection concerning the lack of naturalness in a city and the way to balance it without the use of organic matter, living vegetable matter.

My conclusion was that the city would be a vast expanse of static buildings buildings in which the only movements would be the streams of traffic. On the contrary, nature would be a synonym for perpetual motion. Therefore this tower (ultra strong fibrecrete) would be moving in a frozen city. 

The other constraint was to take a stand in the tradition of Gustave Eiffel’s works, and to build with resources that he wouldn´t have been able to use in his time.

Also in my opinion it wasn’t possible for me to think of a building of 380 meters in height that would be functional only at its single root, that’s why the stance of this moving tower that would give life to Paris, reminding us of natural movements like the dance of the grass, the flow of the waves, clouds of sand in the desert…” Nicolas explains.

Detail

The 24-year old Nicolas actually won the Eiffel competition, but was disqualified immediately after the jury found out that he wasn´t an architecture student but a design student, which is against the rules of the competition. By the way, Gustave Eiffel wasn´t an architect but an engineer.

to the Nicolas Mouret website

'Linienlampe' by Yeayea

Yeayea is not a band from New York but two designers from Leipzig, Germany – Johannes Heinzmann and Franz Gabel.

At this year´s DMY Festival in Berlin they presented pendant light ‘Linienlampe’ made of three neon tubes. According to the height of the ceiling the spare cable can easily be wrapped around the joint which is made of heat resistant silicon.

to the Yeayea website