Called Landscape Abbreviated, it comprises moss-filled planters hooked up to sensors and motors that constantly reconfigure the maze but ensure it's always possible to solve.

The project was commissioned by the Wave Hill Sunroom Project Space, where it was on show until last week.

See more stories about machines on Dezeen »

Photos are by Raymond Yeung.

Here's some more information from Nova Jiang:

Landscape Abbreviated is a kinetic maze consisting of modular elements with rotating planters, which form a garden that is simultaneously a machine. I am interested in the way that simple interventions can make the experience of space dynamic and unpredictable.

The planters are controlled by a software program that continuously generates new maze patterns based on mathematical rules; they rotate to form shifting pathways that encourage visitors to change direction and viewpoints as they move through the space.

I envision this sculpture not as a classical labyrinth built to ensnare, but rather as an architectural abbreviation of grand ideas. In this way, the maze relates to literature, mathematical beauty, game play and the rigor of software programming, as much as it does to architecture and landscape.

The planters contain live moss collected from the sides of buildings, cracks in the pavement, subway grates and other urban nooks and crannies in New York City’s landscape. Full of particles of broken glass, plastic and other detritus, they form a patchwork of unintentional archaeology.

Curator: Gabriel de Guzman
Commission: Wave Hill Sunroom Project Space

Special Thanks: Jacob Tonski & Greg Witt
Software: Olov Sundstrom

Camera: Raymond Yeung
Sound: Maria Chavez

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by Nova Jiang appeared first on Dezeen.

Our most popular story this week featured a plant-covered house in Vietnam, so we've compiled a new Pinterest board featuring all plants, flowers and gardens from the pages of Dezeen. Over 20,000 people now follow us on Pinterest – join them here.

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Built for a couple and one of their mothers, the building is 20m deep but just 4m wide, typical of the narrow but long 'tube houses' common in Vietnam.

Concrete planters span between the side walls to cover the front and back facades, and are spaced according to the height of the plants.

At the rear of the house, an exterior staircase is positioned between the planters and the back wall, while glazing separates the front of the house from the plants.

Automatic irrigation pipes fitted inside the planters allow for easy watering and maintenance.

A rooftop garden provides shelter from the noise and pollution of the streets below.

Inside the house, there are few partition walls in order to maximise views of the green facades and encourage ventilation. The rooflights also allow natural light to penetrate.

Sunlight pokes through the leaves of the plants to cast dappled shadows on the granite walls.

Photographs are by Hiroyuki Oki.

See more stories from Vietnam »

Here's some more text from the architects:

Project Name: Stacking Green
Location: Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam
Completion: 2011

Architect’s Name: Vo Trong Nghia + Daisuke Sanuki + Shunri Nishizawa
Contractor: Thuan Viet Company + Wind and water House JSC.
Floor area: 250m2 (4 floors)

Whoever wanders around Saigon, a chaotic city with the highest density of population in the world, can easily find flower-pots cramped and displayed here and there all around the streets.

This interesting custom has formed the character of Saigon over a long period of time and Saigonese love their life with a large variety of tropical plants and flowers in their balconies, courtyards and streets.

The house, designed for a thirty-year-old couple and their mother, is a typical tube house constructed on the plot 4m wide and 20m deep.

The front and back facades are entirely composed of layers of concrete planters cantilevered from two side walls.

The distance between the planters and the height of the planters are adjusted according to the height of the plants, which varies from 25 cm to 40 cm.

To water plants and for easy maintenance, we use the automatic irrigation pipes inside the planters.

We named this tropical, unique and green house “Stacking Green” because its façades filled with vigorous and vital greenery.

Click above for larger image

The house structure is an RC frame structure widely used in Vietnam. The partition walls are very few in order to keep interior fluency and view of green façades from every point of the house.

During the day we get the varying light with the time of day trimmed by the top-light in the centre.

In the morning and the afternoon, the sunlight enters through the amount of leafs on both façades, creating beautiful shadow effects on the granite walls, which are composed of strictly stacked 2cm stones.

The green façade and roof top garden protect its inhabitants from the direct sunlight, street noise and pollution. Furthermore, natural ventilation through the façades and 2 top-lights allow this house to save a big energy in a harsh climate in Saigon.

Concerning these ecological approaches, we referred a lot to the bioclimatic principles of traditional Vietnamese courtyard house.

In this chaotic city, we defined the full variety of surrounding greenery as a context of Saigon and applied to the main concept of this house.

Although the Saigon townscape is getting uniformed and boring under the influence of the furious urban sprawl of recent years, we intended this house to inspire people to re-define and re-increase the greenery as the character of this city.

“Stacking Green” is just one small house, but it is generated from the context of Saigon. We hope that “Stacking Green” makes Saigon become more distinguished and fascinating with much more tropical greenery in the future.

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by Vo Trong Nghia appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2012: designer Werner Aisslinger of Berlin and Singapore will present a chair growing inside a greenhouse at Ventura Lambrate in Milan this week.

Shown as part of an exhibition of design from Berlin called Instant Stories, the Chair Farm project envisages furniture that's grown rather than produced and harvested locally rather than exported globally.

The plant is trained inside a metal mould then released once it reaches maturity.

In October we published a story about a building grown from cherry trees that won't be completed for 100 years - take a look here.

The Ventura Lambrate design district is open from 17 to 22 April. Download the free map and guide here and see all our stories about Ventura Lambrate 2012 here.

See all our stories about Werner Aisslinger here, including his Iconograph watch for Lorenz at Dezeen Watch Store.

Photographs are by Nicolo Lanfranchi.

Here's some more information from Aisslinger:

“Plant yourself a chair …”

Werner Aisslinger presents his plantation chair at the Milan Furniture Fair

Once again in April, the most recognised fair of the furniture industry opens its gates for design aficionados from all over the world. At the Milan Furniture Fair, visitors will witness a small sensation at “Instant Stories”, the special exhibition from Berlin at Lambrate: Amidst the platforms showing the latest in furniture design, a greenhouse is staged. Visitors are confronted with a gigantic box that gives the impression as if it has just fallen from heaven. This laboratory-like stage setup promises to be as spectacular as watching a dinosaur hatch from its egg: A chair is born from a steel corset! The only difference to the egg-comparison is the fact that the shell of the “chair farm” prototype is inside the chair’s structure instead of being outside.

After the removal of the corset, a unique chair is revealed – truly singular, because nature cannot be programmed to deliver a certain result. The chair is no longer produced in the classical sense of the word. Instead, it grows of its own volition in a greenhouse or on a field. When it has reached maturity, the steel corset is opened and removed, revealing a naturally grown chair. The title of the project by this Berlin-based designer, who imagines huge “product plantations” in the future, reflects this utopian means of production: the “chair farm”.

Urban Gardening

Strawberries in winter, pumpkins in spring – everything is possible. But since the early 80s, or since discounters have moved into urban environments instead of staying out of towns, we have been witnessing a contradictory movement: a wish to return to a more primary and genuine way of living. Global markets with their unpredictable mechanisms increasingly intimidate consumers. More and more people are discovering the advantages of buying and consuming regionally grown seasonal products - advantages such as eating healthier, saving resources and being environmentally friendly. People know and care about their CO2 footprint. They want to make their own decisions about which resources they tap to eat, live, travel, etc. This new and different state of mind centers on leaving the role of a passive consumer and becoming an active, mindful individual. Home-grown food is harvested and stored. A new activism is blossoming. At the same time, a re-orientation towards collective living and working spaces is taking place. A good example for this is urban gardening, where residents open and share their garden space instead of having small individual allotments. In Berlin and other cities, project teams have formed which trade different kinds of services – car sharing, sofa surfing and urban gardening are no longer mere fashion statements.

Green Design

People are discovering that life in all its multitude is much too beautiful to wrap it up in sanitized and ready-to-eat packages according to EU and DIN regulations. A cheer to the unconventional and surprising things in life!

This structural change has also influenced the world of product design. Many designers have anticipated the change towards green design or eco-pluralistic design and have recognized it as a chance - one of the most prominent ones being Werner Aisslinger from Berlin. He has been experimenting with new materials and sustainable production methods for years.

Design and Technology

Aisslinger’s first technological experiment with polyurethane foam used in the automotive industry was serialized in 1996 by Cappellini and was added to the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1998. This was the genesis of the “Juli chair”, an integral part in the world of modern design.

His first synthetic gel-furniture “soft cell” caused a sensation at the Salone del Mobile at the turn of the century. The “soft cell” lounge chairs found an enthusiastic audience with their mixture of medical technology, two-plane TechnoGel, and slightly transparent honey-combed upholstery in space-ship optics.

In the following years, Aisslinger turns to different design worlds: He designs the ideal work space for vitra, builds hotels which live up to their name, and with “loftcube” he creates the true 21st century dacha.

In 2011, Aisslinger achieves another major coup in regard to chair design: The “Hemp chair” is made of natural fibers that are turned into a high-tech composite by using an environmentally friendly water-based binder (Acrodur). The chair is hardened by strong heat and mechanical pressure without producing hazardous or toxic substances. The Hemp chair is lightweight and has a cardboard texture – masking its extreme resilience and durability. This chair received a great deal of attention at the Furniture Fair in Milan last year, clearly standing out with its curved, organic shape and its subtle color among all other designs in the colorful sea of novelties.

Chair Farm Project

The development from “Hemp chair” to “chair farm” was merely a logical consequence in Aisslinger’s work. It is a further development in his three-component master-plan: sustainable production, new materials, and an outstanding simplicity in design.

One of Aisslinger’s main concerns is the cutting edge between aesthetics and everyday culture. He commutes between Berlin and Singapore, where he maintains a second studio. From a bird’s eye perspective, structural connections often seem clearer than on the ground: In an airplane with a view of the Indian Ocean, Aisslinger wondered if food and everyday products will still be decentrally produced and shipped around the globe in the future.

As a matter of fact, tendencies such as “urban farming” and “integrated farming” are not merely the eco-utopian dreams of urban Bohemianism. They are at this moment tested and tried on the rooftops of Paris or Berlin and surpass the output and efficiency of industrial agriculture by a factor of 15. So Aisslinger is convinced that food production in urban spaces – giving everyone the possibility of becoming a passionate producer of agricultural products – will be the future in regard to quality and sustainability. Therefore, he thought about a way to invert production in furniture design back from globalized serial manufacturing to resource-conserving local production. And he came up with the answer: Chair farm is as simple as it is radical. Aisslinger states his intention as wanting to offer design-users a chair that is made with as little resources and as reduced an amount of waste as possible.

Project: Chair Farm
Year: 2012
Designer: Werner Aisslinger
Exhibition: "Instant Stories", Milano-Lambrate
Location: Ventura Lambrate: "Overlite," Via Privata Oslavia 8, 20143 Milano
Press Preview: Monday April 16, 15:00 – 20:00
Opening Hours: Tuesday April 17 – Sunday April 22, 10:00 – 20:00
Opening Night: Wednesday April 18, 19:00 – 23:00

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at Ventura Lambrate appeared first on Dezeen.

Singapore and Barcelona designers Outofstock presented floating islands made of crumpled copper and moss during the International Furniture Fair Singapore this month.

Inspired by the fictional floating island of Laputa featured in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the installation for their own showcase called The Workshop Gallery hung inside a Tyvek tent on a city-centre street.

The moss was harvested from unnoticed nooks and crannies in the city like tree trunks and drains."The intention was to let visitors view the moss up close, appreciating the nature that thrives unseen around us," says Gabriel Tan from Outofstock.

See more work by Outofstock on Dezeen here.

Photographs are by Ng Xin Nie.

Here are some more details from Outofstock:

A meditative space, an introspective journey. Imaginary landscapes we create to escape the banality of city life.

The installation is inspired by Laputa, from Gulliver's travels, a fictional flying island created by a small civilization of educated mathematicians, astronomers and musicians. Set in the heart of the city, Laputa is a juxtaposition of its context - the urban city. We live in a society full of products and information, flawed value systems, and endless material pursuits, noise and visual clutter. Perhaps, it is only in such a fictional landscape that we can finally make sense of our increasingly surreal realities.

Every piece of the hanging installation was unique in its formation and the way it was crinkled, the more facets and 'imperfections' appeared, the more they bore the uncanny resemblance to miniature hills and valleys. The unfinished copper was allowed to weather with the natural elements and produce a changing patina, in this way both copper and moss were continually growing alongside each other.

The Workshop Gallery is founded by Outofstock as a space dedicated to their passion for handcrafted objects.

Bruno Munari once said, ”If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall have nothing to hide.” The Workshop Gallery too seeks to bring us objects that rekindle our long-lost contact with the art of making in our daily lives.

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