materiO’

We already talked about it 3 years ago for its opening but we do not resist to show you this magnificient Dutch building once again on the occasion of Hermes’s move-in. An impressive realisation of solid glass bricks for an Hooftstaat facade (a busy commercial road in Amsterdam). Designed by the Dutch architecture office MVRDV, this facade carefully reproduces the traditional aesthetic of a clay brick building but with glass brick on the first two floors. This glass then fades slowly away to let the opaque bricks take its place. Though this project was ambitious as glass bricks are difficult to make, hard to work and very demanding regarding joints, the result is breathbreaking. So very advanced processes (specific moulds, revolutionnary transparent UV bonding) for a realisation that plays with the traditional architectural codes of this beautiful city of Amsterdam.

More information about the Crystal Houses on the MVRDV website.

On May 30, Fredrik Tjaerandsen, a student at the famous fashion school CSM, thrilled the audience with his inflated collection during the year-end fashion show: We saw models in wrapped in bubbles clothes, walking voluptuously wrapped in oxygen, and stopping to let some pieces deflate elegantly and become draped clothes of different shapes, seeming to play hula-oop slightly around the sizes of the models, still imbued with their old gigantic dimensions. These balloon dresses, made (for the most part) of natural rubber, are designed according to an air pressure system that allows the wearer to control the volume or open a latch inside to release the air, and exit from the bubble.
Each dress was inflated by the designer before the show, and requires about two to three thousand liters of oxygen: While smaller bubbles take 10 minutes to fill, the largest bubble takes about 1 hour to form! If you are claustrophobic, don't panic, these rooms contain enough air to breathe 3 hours quietly immersed, it gives you time to experience the feeling that the designer tried to re-transcribe : this misty and uncertain memory that we have of our childhood, suddenly broken and connected to the world when our "naive" box explodes... So now, we leave you alone in your bubble to think about all this.

The annual production of milk in the world is highly fluctuating, periodically leading to significant overproduction. It is therefore interesting to find uses other than food for this milk, which quickly becomes unfit for consumption. One of the solutions adopted today is to transform milk into a bio-sourced polymer, itself then declined in the form of fibres, which can then be woven or compacted into milk felt. The Italian company nat-2 now offers several models of shoes whose upper is made of milk felt, for comfortable, breathable, anti-bacterial shoes or slippers, all in a palette of colors ranging from off-white to light brown...

For the producer, it's here

Today, a bit of geography! Does micronesia mean anything to you? A Pacific federal state, with a tropical climate, located in the east of the Philippines, composed of 607 heavenly islands! If we had to give only three colours to set the mood, take a turquoise blue that flirts outrageously with transparency, add an almost white sand, and a lush green, and here we are in Micronesia... No need to add the sunny blue of the sky, it is automatically induced in the light scale. And it is in the heart of this archipelago of beatitude that a company quietly makes papers from banana fibres, handmade, very versatile, printable and adjustable (size, thickness...). The company also offers wallets, made of very thick and slightly waxed banana paper, closely looking like leather... It is exactly in Kosrae, the smallest, least populated and least dense state in the country that this paper is made! An island where the tranquility is such that only one plane a week disrupts it and ensures a minimum of exchange with the rest of the world. And it is this plane that allows us to receive an envelope filled with stamps that look like paradise, full of banana paper that leaves us dreaming...

Seeing rain falling in May is like opening an ice cream pot and finding it empty…it’s devastating and should never happened. Then when you’re in this kind of mood, why not using a Pennywise umbrella? With the intimidating face of Stephen King’s monstrous clown, this brolly starts bleeding with a few drops of water. But since every cloud has a silver lining, this bloody umbrella should free you the way in the street. The principle is quite easy, a white hydrochromic coating is applied on the drawing so that the blood only appears when water make the pigment disappear for a short time.

To purchase this umbrella, follow this link.

"Slow lens" is the last piece of the artist Vincent Leroy, a fine explorer of matter and its capacities, whom he likes to push to his limits by playing with light and its optical effects. This assembly of suspended lenses seems to float in the air, a kind of spatio-temporal flaw capable of cutting, splitting, reflecting but also revealing the space it occupies. The artist has installed this poetic mirage in several places in the Paris region, including under a bridge (see images), and offers us a disturbing play of light and shadow!

Vincent Leroy website here