The Design Line: 28 May - 3 June
It’s not the end of the week until the Design Line is here! Rounding out May and Jumping into June we have MVRDV taking to the rooftops, Volvo entering its video gamer era, and a somewhat underwhelming foliage-themed homage to the Jubilee from Heatherwick Studio.
Have Londoners been collectively catfished by an architectural render again? (image: Heatherwick Studio).
Render to reality
Look, can designers stop trying to make natural features out of steel? We all had to sit through MVRDV’s Marble Arch Mound slowly turning brown in disgust at its own awfulness, and now London is gearing up for a repeat of the horror with the first photographs of Heatherwick Studio’s Tree of Trees appearing online. Stripped of the cosseting sepia of its original render, Tree of Trees emerged as a decidedly underwhelming contribution to the nationwide The Queen’s Green Canopy (QGC) planting project: a slightly clunky metal trunk, inexplicably made of pipes, patchily decorated with a spritz of saplings stuffed in buckets. The render, suffice to say, had played down quite how dominant the buckets would be. There is much to dislike about the project politically and ethically (including the greenwashing lunacy of celebrating nature by recreating it in steel, sponsored by companies linked to deforestation), but it’s the aesthetic limitations that immediately leap out. Regardless of the critical backlash against its work, Heatherwick Studio is meant to be able to provide spectacle (the genuinely excellent 2012 Olympic Cauldron is a case in point), but Tree of Trees falls short. A tree of trees it would seem, is far less impressive than, erm, pretty much any regular tree.
MVRDV is in the pink with The Podium (image: MVRDV).
Take to the roofs!
Speaking of the OG mound-makers, this week saw MVRDV continue to rehabilitate its reputation for temporary public installations with The Podium: a hot pink, 600sqm platform installed on the rooftop of Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Similar in spirit to last week’s Rotterdam Rooftop Walk, also created by the studio, the Podium is accessible by a 143-step scaffolding staircase and is scheduled to host events throughout the Rotterdam Architecture Month Festival. It’s a fun, cute space that will hopefully offer new perspectives onto the city (who wouldn’t want to get up on a roof, given half a chance?), and which also serves as a reminder that MVRDV is actually good at these things. The fiasco of the Marble Arch Mound aside (and perhaps the studio was telling the truth when it blamed the whole thing on Westminster City Council), this isn’t the first time that MVRDV has created successful scaffolding-based public spaces: take a look at 2016’s The Stairs to Kriterion, for instance. Perhaps we’re just easy to please, but a shocking pink roof to hang out on sounds like a pretty fun place to be.
Four arms are faster than two, but don’t forget to charge your berry-picker bot (image: Fieldwork Robotics).
Berrybot and Robo-Pingu
Robots are coming for our jobs, but at least they look quite adorable while they’re at it. A combination of Brexit, the pandemic, and war in Ukraine has left much of Europe facing a chronic shortage of seasonal farm workers. Picking produce is traditionally backbreaking labour, performed in hot sun for little pay. Automation has been tricky up until now, however, with robots unable to compete with the dexterity of human hands, particularly when it comes to delicate berry fruits. Enter Fieldwork Robotics, a £2m project to develop robots s such as their vertical harvester, which is currently rolling through the poly tunnels of Portugal. It carefully plucks raspberries with its four waving 3D-printed arms and can roam the bushes 24 hours a day, picking 25,000 berries to the two-handed humans’ 15,000. In much colder climes, meanwhile, ECHO, a yellow remote-controlled robot, is driving around the ice of Antarctica, monitoring penguins. ECHO can scan and collect data from microchipped birds and transmit it back to scientists, who are presumably thrilled not to have to go out into the cold to try and creep up on a colony of stinky penguins. We reckon an iRobot scenario is still a few years off, yet.
Barnacled with slurs
“Social media platforms have transformed the way people communicate with each other and obtain news,” said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., speaking this week after the USA’s Supreme Court moved to block a Texas law banning large social media companies from removing posts based on the views they express. Voting five to four, the court halted Texas’s law H.B. 20, whose legislation had been driven by claims that platforms were removing posts expressing conservative views. Given the clear split in the court, however, the matter is far from closed, with Justice Alito expressing scepticism as to whether content moderation policies could be protected by the First Amendment: “It is not at all obvious,” he wrote, “how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.” Yet the law’s critics, a set of trade groups which had applied to the Supreme Court, argue that content moderation is essential to the design of such platforms and should be safeguarded at all costs. “Without these policies,” they wrote, “these websites would become barnacled with slurs, pornography, spam and material harmful to children.”
Edward Cullen’s favourite car brand just got cool (image: Volvo).
Epic Volvos
Dependable Volvos don’t get much airtime in terms of popular culture, with the notable exception of their starring roles in the Twilight franchise. An automotive brand announcing a partnership with Epic’s Unreal Engine is something you’d expect of electric vehicle (EV) bad boys Tesla, maybe, not the sensible Swedish carmakers who are renowned for their safety-first approach. But it’s Volvo that announced this week that it will be using the Fortnite creators' technology to power its Human-Machine Interface (HMI) in its future EVs. The plans are fairly nebulous, with no exact dates discussed, but it’s expected that the Unreal Engine will power the graphics and visualisations for the cars’ onboard sensors. There will be no first-person shooter games, though. Hardcore gamers may be disappointed to see the technology used to make sure the car can be reversed into a parking spot safely. As the hype over driverless Apple cars continues, despite the terrible safety record of autonomous vehicles, it’s nice to see software being applied sensibly for once.
It’s a dog’s life for the Barkitecture competition models (image: RSHP).
Gone to the dogs
There was uproar this week as an underdog architecture firm unseated the starchitects to win the most anticipated design prize of the year: the Barkitecture competition. The contest to design the most stylish dog kennel was fierce, but Birds Portchmouth Russum Architects snatched the top spot out from under the noses of Foster + Partners, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP)and even Marc Newson and Jony Ive (Ive with all his Apple pedigree, no less). The winning design, called Bonehenge, featured a colonnade of Bonio-shaped wooden columns, modelled by the studio’s cocker spaniel Illy. The august panel judges, including Kevin McCloud, were particularly impressed by the roof, which harvests fresh organic rainwater for its occupant. A nice touch, but Disegno also very much enjoyed RSHP’s contribution: a Star Wars-themed shuttle-shaped kennel, waggishly dubbed Dog Pod 01. The auction of the bespoke dog houses raised £30,000 for the Dogs Trust, earning applause and belly rubs all round.