This week on Dezeen, architecture and design looked to the ocean as whales informed the shape of both a wooden chair and a cultural building in China.
Chinese studio Open Architecture designed Pinghe Bibliotheater, a new library and theatre at the Shanghai Qingpu Pinghe International School China, to resemble a blue whale rising from the ground.
Woocheol Shin also drew on the ocean mammals when designing his Whale Chair, which the graduate designer made from bent plywood and stainless steel to mimic the shape of a whale’s tail.
We introduced our new Dezeen Lookbooks section, which features a selection of home interiors and design trends from Dezeen’s image archive chosen by our editors.
The aim is for the lookbooks to help designers and design lovers to find ideas and inspiration for interiors projects, whether it’s for a living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen or bathroom.
Visions for two large infrastructure projects were unveiled, with Weston Williamson + Partners showcasing its design for the Water Orton viaducts that it will design for the UK High Speed Two railway. The concrete viaducts were designed to be as slender as structurally possible and will rise above public green spaces.
In Los Angeles, Frank Gehry teased his ideas for the masterplan of the LA River. Gehry’s design would feature platform parks on stilts bridging the waterway, as well as green areas landscaped along the river.
In design news, two Icelandic design projects on Dezeen had new takes on traditional crafts. Designer Valdís Steinarsdóttir looked at ways of reusing waste products from the meat industry to create biodegradable vessels and food packaging that dissolves in water.
Textile designer Ýrúrarí gives new life to worn-out garments by decorating them with knitted details, including cartoon-style body parts and knitted hotdogs covered in condiments.
Tech design news included a concept for a clear plastic face mask with lights and a built in sound-system by Razer, and SpaceX’s Transporter-1 mission that set a new record for the most spacecraft that have ever been deployed in one mission.
Joseph Henry, the co-host of architecture diversity platform Sound Advice, spoke of the need for conversations about diversity to focus on people of colour’s work, not just their background, in order to make positive change in an opinion piece for Dezeen about Sound Advice’s Now You Know publication.
“Discussions that focus solely on diversity feel like an excuse to not move things forward,” Henry said.
Popular projects this week included Studio Puisto’s black cabin elevated on a single column in a woodland near a Finnish national park, a ticket pavilion in corrugated aluminium by Carmody Groarke, and a crescent-shaped villa off the coast of Abu Dhabi.
This week on Dezeen is our regular roundup of the week’s top news stories. Subscribe to our newsletters to be sure you don’t miss anything.
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