Dornob | Design Ideas Daily

Dornob | Design Ideas Daily

Fabulous Floating Villa: Island-Shaped Floating Home Design

Posted: 29 Oct 2013 10:00 AM PDT

floating villa

Part architecture, part landscape and entirely mobile, this lovely concept design sports lush greenery, sheltered interiors and a floating dock for auxiliary vessels.

floating sea villa

Designed by WHIM Architecture, this RE:Villa work in progress (toward a prototype) is partly a response to coastal pollution – its proposed construction material of choice would be recycled plastic.

floating villa details

It has “the typical components of the family home: shared space, private space, garden, and service spaces have new constraints imposed by their new littoral contexts, and so the organization of the components themselves is rethought. The recycled plastic creates the possibility of translucent materiality and more fluid connections between spaces.”

floating villa closeup

It is also intended to be self-sufficient, able to weather storms and of course rise above floods, though it remains unclear the mechanisms by which it would gain and retain energy and/or produce food (or if that is indeed the targeted degree of self sufficiency).


    

Modified Social Benches Transform Traditional Public Seating

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 04:00 PM PDT

interactive social benches

We are all familiar with the public bench as a conventional type – some horizontal slats for sitting on, some more for leaning against, and four legs to hold up all of the above.

interactive alternative benches

Jeppe Hein takes this convention and adds a series of twists, turns and inversions to create something new and interactive that plays on our sense of the familiar as well as our curiosity about the exotic.

interactive sleeping bench variant

Some encourage playful interaction from children, while others encourage people to sit and face one another, communicating rather than sitting in silent parallel. Still others are changed around apparently just for fun, or to let people take a nap in public – something normally prohibited and actively designed against when it comes to city benches. What the disparate pieces share is a childlike intuition that little changes can make a big difference in the urban landscape.


    

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