Q19 2014
Q19 2014 SUPERYACHTDESIGN CASE STUDY
DOMUS DESIGN
MATERIALIST
DESIGN EVENT
Espen Øino discusses his design philosophy and reveals his favourite project. Page 12
Step inside the Australian home designed by Gabriel Bernardi for the owner of Perle Noire. Page 22
New advanced materials will allow designers to push boundaries further than ever before. Page 30
Discover what stood out for Marijana Radovic at this year’s Salone del Mobile. Page 48
MITSU EDWARDS THE VIEW FROM LAND
M
itsu Edwards is a structural engineer and partner at Hugh Dutton Associates. Her expertise is in complex geometries and atypical materials and fabrication techniques developed through collaborations with some of the world’s bestknown architects and artists. Using land-based projects as examples, Edwards explores the key ingredients needed to bring extraordinary visions to life.
My work as a structural and cladding engineer has been spent running to keep up with the pace of geometrical, material and fabrication changes that have been propelled into being by the shared desire between a client and an architect to create something radical. Epicentres of enthusiasm, they spur each other on into deeper commitment, and jointly create an upward demand on time, research and finance in service of their common vision. When this is invested with intelligent awareness, the process can generate enormous positive energy and radiate in expanding circles from their individual catalysts to affect whole industries. The result, for both client and designer, has often been influence on an unprecedented scale. Examples abound of the extraordinary degree of innovation, which has been generated by these symbiotic relationships. Steve Jobs’ design ambition, combined with the glass engineering expertise of Eckersley O’Callaghan and the industrial precision of Seele, resulted in the commissioning of new equipment and the ground-breaking use of new high-strength interlayers for laminate glass. This has led not only to admirable allglass structures for Apple stores worldwide, but also to radical progress in glass production and assembly techniques across the industry. Fittingly, his superyacht project Venus has benefited directly from this progress—will it remain a one-off, or initiate a trend? Another example can be seen in the efforts of the British government, in commissioning their pavilion for the Shanghai Expo 2010 from Thomas Heatherwick. The project underwrote the creation of an extraordinary anti-gravity building skin made of interactive glass fibreoptic hairs, and generated huge popular visibility for the country as a consequence. When environmentalist Tim Smit selected architect Nicholas Grimshaw and space frame specialist Mero for the Eden Project in Cornwall, they designed a skin of transparent 10
inflatable cushions in ETFE plastic, spanning four times as far as glass, and a steel structure so light that the combined structure and skin weigh less than the air inside the building that they enclose. The Water Cube Aquatics centre, commissioned by the Chinese government for the Beijing 2012 Olympics, later exploited this innovative skin type at a much larger scale, allowing significant energy savings to be realised in the process. Bernard Arnault's appointment of Frank Gehry to design his new Parisian tour de force, the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Creation, has generated as by-products new cost-effective forming techniques for ultrahigh-strength concrete, and the arrival of largescale variable-curvature tempered glass on to production lines. Years earlier, Gehry’s iconic Guggenheim museum for the city of Bilbao broke new ground by using the Catia interface, already familiar to the naval and aeronautical industries, to develop coding, which allows steel fabricators to build directly from 3D geometry files. These are all extraordinary projects but how has each improbable dream been brought to life? Open communication, shared passion and reciprocal respect are essential prerequisites of course, but success also requires the putting in place of checks and balances. Too much of a good thing is indeed counterproductive, and projects given a surfeit of design time or of budget will tend away from, rather than towards, perfection. Constraint is often painful to the designer, yet some restriction is indispensable; it brings focus and hones the design towards its quintessence. But apply too much and the soul of the project dies, to be replaced by banality. Enlightened and timely management of risk is also essential to successful innovation. Confirming technical prediction by physical and numeric testing becomes indispensable when venturing on terrain where the design codes haven’t yet been written. Timing is key when looking for the right industrial partners with whom to develop a concept. Investing up front in materials research or in the manufacture of new tooling equipment, hard to justify on the basis of a single project, can enable significant progress and sometimes lead to radical breakthroughs, provided the brief remains clear. New shapes have required new materials and new processes to be grafted into the construction industry, historically risk-averse and slow to change. The 3D expertise of the naval shipyards and the production line techniques of the automobile industry
have each played a crucial role in getting things started. Embedding precision into the fabrication process is the key requirement, and this has become easier with the progressive arrival of numeric command, laser-cutting, robotic assembly and adhesive technologies. Above all, personal enthusiasm is contagious; it feeds inspiration and commitment. No matter where we sit around the table, communicating our passion with enthusiasm will always bring more excitement and innovation to the design in hand, and enable our contributions to mark the future.
HU DU GH T AS SOC TON FR IAT AN ES CE