ReThink explores the future of textiles and interiors. As new priorities emerge we look to the designers, thinkers and free spirits who are leading the way in this new material landscape of wellbeing, nature, and community.
Design Briefing
Health Inside
Will Jennings looks to recent designs for hospitals and healthcare settings to discover what is changing and ask what designers can learn from them about healthy interiors.
Radical Thinking
Architectural Acupuncture
At the forefront of a new generation of Chinese architects, Xu Tiantian is transforming rural China with precise, light-touch interventions that use local tradition and heritage as a tool for dynamic regeneration.
Environment
A Difficult Loop: the realities of textile recycling
Recycling is a much talked-about solution to the sustainability challenges faced by the textile industry. Here we look at the current state of textile recycling and discuss the key challenges.
Design for Wellbeing
Clean Air, Naturally
Recent scientific research is explaining exactly how houseplants improve indoor air quality and designers are harnessing the power of plants to naturally filter air.
Design Briefing
The Future of the Home
Residential design is notoriously slow-moving, but experiences over the last 18 months are changing that, and prompting architects and designers to look at how we actually live now. In this Design Briefing, Debika Ray considers the new possibilities opening up for the design of our homes.
Design for the Senses
Smelling Reality
For 25 years Sissel Tolaas has explored new roles for smell. Smell and air have recently become a pertinent focus of attention - here we consider how Tolaas’s work can lead the way for designers engaging with smells.
Restoration
E-1027: Rediscovering the Colours of Gray
Following a painstaking restoration, the Modernist masterpiece Villa E-1027 once again showcases the interiors, colours and textiles as originally intended by architect Eileen Gray.
Environment
Kvadrat Sustainability Strategy
Kvadrat is launching a new strategy that charts the company’s ambition to lead the sustainability agenda for textiles. Here we look into how this will happen.
Watch
Remastering Natural Dyes
This beautiful film about the astonishing work of Japanese master dyer Sachio Yoshioka reassures us that abandoning synthetic dyes does not limit the range of textile colours possible.
Short
Boro: From Rags to Riches
‘Boro – The Art of Necessity’ shows how craftsmanship can elevate old rags to an art, and a culture of reuse can become an opportunity for creativity.
Design for Wellbeing
Cosmic Architecture
Charles Jencks intended his Cosmic House to be a conversational icebreaker, but thirty years later it also serves as a reminder that buildings can be fun and funny. Recent research into humour suggests this could be an overlooked tool for wellbeing.
Design for Wellbeing
An Everyday Liturgy
Master colourist Giulio Ridolfo selects colours to sustain us as we navigate the tangled emotions and yearning for comfort and tranquility that characterise summer 2021.
Design Briefing
Towards a New Tactility
How has the design world reacted to society being turned upside down and our sense of touch denuded? In this Design Briefing, Grant Gibson explores how designers have reacted to ‘touch deprivation’ and how, as we’ve understood more about the virus, we have started to re-establish the importance of tactility.
Listen
Sound of Hope
The sound of design this summer is surely the work of Cosmo Sheldrake, the musician and composer who has created a soundscape as part of design studio SuperFlux’s ‘Invocation of Hope’ installation at the Vienna Biennale for Change.
Design for Wellbeing
Spirit of Work
Sevil Peach’s practice is known for creating human workplaces that put the needs of those who work there first. Here we talk to Sevil about the new design for Kvadrat’s headquarters and the designer’s role as a host.
Short
Dressing the Home for the Seasons
To find ways of reintegrating seasonal change into our domestic lives, the Warsaw-based architecture studio Centrala have looked to historic ways of using textiles and fabric to ‘dress’ the home, adapting spaces for the annual cycles of weather and daylight hours without relying on energy intensive central heating and air conditioning.
Short
Connected Learning
Con-nect-ed-ness at the Danish Pavilion has been one of the talking points of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. For those of us who haven’t yet been able to visit in person, the photos of the installation give a strong sense of its multi-sensory appeal. Wet ferrocement, saturated fabric, Raw wood, soft cushions, fragrant herbs and the sounds of trickling, dripping and running water.
Short
The Handshake of a Building
The door handle may be the handshake of a building, but handshakes are currently out and ‘elbow bumping’ a door is unlikely to have the desired effect. Understanding materials and their inherent antimicrobial properties can help make it safe to open doors again, enabling the return of tactile interactions with our surroundings that have been sorely missed during the pandemic.
Radical Thinking
Botanical Mind
Camden Art Centre’s project 'Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree' is one of a number of recent endeavours to refocus attention on mankind’s inescapable dependence upon the natural world and its unfathomed wonders. A fungus might be the biggest living organism on earth, but it is plants that make up 80% by mass of all living matter on the planet.
Competition - Homeworking
A Foldable Way
Thank you to all the architects and designers who responded to our call. We much enjoyed getting a glimpse of your realities, and your fantasies. Congratulations to the winner Mustafa Afsaroglu.
Design Briefing
The Future of the Workplace
The challenges posed by the pandemic have thrown up all sorts of questions and initiated the most dramatic shift in workplace culture in decades. We look to the leaders in office design to see how they are imagining a more humane and productive future for the workplace.
Competition - Homeworking
Calling Architects and Designers!
It is now a year since the majority of us were abruptly thrown into ‘WFH’, ill-prepared and with no support. Learning from the pandemic and its aftermath, ReThink will explore the latest research and ideas about work – in the office, at home, and in between. Homeworking is a call to designers and architects to submit a photo of your current homework set-up, together with a visual and short text describing your ideal home workplace and how your experiences of the pandemic period have informed this.
Design for Wellbeing
Architecture of Healing
The latest Maggie’s center at The Royal Marsden hospital by Ab Rogers Design valiantly reflects the belief of founders Maggie and Charles Jencks in the power of the environment to heal. As the late Charles Jencks said, Maggie’s centres are built from the ‘Architecture of hope’. Here Ab Rogers reflects on the 12 principles that inform his life-affirming design.
Radical Thinking
On Taking Time
Taking Time, the title of the solo exhibition by Anupama Kundoo at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art until 16 May has turned out to be uncannily prescient. In the last year our sense of time has changed fundamentally and many of us are questioning how we ‘use’ this finite resource. Anupama talks to Jane Withers about how this subject has preocupied her from the outset of her career and led her to question aspects of architecture and construction and propose alternative systems that put ‘taking time’ rather than ‘saving’ time at the centre of discourse.
Short
Modern Nature
You could be forgiven for thinking, from 2020’s astronomical sales of house plants, that the benefits of living with plants has only recently become understood. Not so, as the design historian Penny Sparke demonstrates in her new book Nature Inside: Plants and Flowers in the Modern Interior; it has long been known that plants make an indoor space more salubrious, although this is an aspect of interior design that often slips under the historian’s radar.
Listen
Brain Science and the Arts
A fairly universal experience of being in lockdown has been the dragging apathy that comes from a lack of social interaction, visual stimulation and too much time indoors. Susan Magsamen researches the neuroscience behind being well; in this podcast she discusses how she has coped with lockdown and describes why making things by hand and interactions with nature can give our brains a boost.