Be Open think tank

#BeOpenNEWS BE OPEN Art is happy to announce that Sajid Hussain, emerging contemporary painter based in Karachi, Pakistan, has been voted the Artist of the Month by the visitors of art.beopenfuture.com in July. Aiming to showcase emerging talents, every month we invite people passionate with art to choose the best artist among those exhibited in our online gallery. Congratulations to Sajid, whose expressionist paintings have gained him a majority of votes! We also take the opportunity to applaud all the featured artists and thank everyone who voted.

#BeOpenDESIGN Concerned by the energy-intensive and resource-intensive nature of avocado production that might be especially foreboding due to the fruit’s ever growing popularity, Arina Shokouhi has come up with an avocado alternative. Working at her final-year project at Central Saint Martins, she joined forces with food scientist Jack Wallman from the University of Nottingham's Food Innovation Centre to invent a recipe approximating the flavour and texture of avocado, which is based on local, natural, low-impact ingredients. The product named Evocado contains a pale green, creamy foodstuff made from a combination of broad beans, hazelnut, apple and rapeseed oil and packaged in a fake avocado skin fashioned from wax. For a makeshift avocado stone Arina has experimented with many options, including a wooden ball and a seed ball, and ended up with a whole nut, either a walnut, chestnut or hazelnut.

#BeOpenDESIGN Two Bangkok-based studios – studio Kaoi and THINKK studio – were inspired by the geometric lines that defined the 1980s Memphis collective when they developed their Ebba modular chair collection. The series features three deckchair-style seats that can be mixed and matched with four graphic armrests to offer different aesthetic "personalities," from gentle, simple lines to super playful and fun curves. Taking their titles after typically Danish names, the armrests – Han, Somma, Franz, and Mujoel – boast bold forms in the shape of squiggles, zigzags and arcs reminiscent of the confetti-like pattern called Bacterio that Sottsass designed in 1978. More Memphis-informed designs in our blog

#BeOpenDESIGN When travelling to school in the mornings, Brighton College student Pietro Pignatti would often take avocados on the train and felt uncomfortable bringing a knife on the train to cut open the avocado. This led him to develop Avogo, a compact tool that could safely cut and destone an avocado on the go. Developed as part of a school project, Avogo incorporates a metal blade and is extremely compact. The product has a curved blade that is hooked inwards to reduce the risk of injury. Since the blade is hooked and short, it falls under the maximum restriction on knives, allowing it to be transported on the go. More innovative tools for avocado-on-toast aficionados in our blog

#BeOpenART Commissioned by English Heritage to mark 1,900 years since construction began on Hadrian's Wall, one of England's most iconic landmarks, The Future Belongs To What Was As Much As What Is by London-based artist Morag Myerscough is a colourful reinterpretation of the original gatehouse at Housesteads Roman Fort, which dates back to 122AD. The pavilion was constructed from a scaffolding frame and covered in brightly coloured panels designed by Myerscough. According to the artist, the contemporary installation, replicaing the size of the original Roman gatehouse standing next to the ages-old fortification that marked the northern border of the Roman Empire, seeks to connect people of 2022 back to 122AD.

#BeOpenDESIGN Kelli Anderson is a designer and paper engineer whose work operates in the space between conceptual art, graphic design, and tech. Just as its name suggests, her whimsical book This Book is a Camera is a working pinhole camera contained within an educational pop-up book. It explains—and actively demonstrates—how a structure as humble as a folded piece of paper can tap into the intrinsic properties of light to produce a photograph. The camera accepts light through a single hole in a flat plan, which is why there are no mechanics to “focus” a pinhole camera—it is a projection from a single beam, much like a camera obscura. The result is that objects near the camera and objects far away from the camera have the same exact amount of focus. The book comes with detailed instructions and a starter pack of B/W Ilford photo paper (any 4×5” or smaller light-sensitive material can be used).

#BeOpenARCH What looks like a setting for an utopian movie is in fact the European Library of Information and Culture (BEIC) proposal by noa*, an architecture practice with offices in Italy and Germany. Titled The Tree of Knowledge, the project is characterized by the atmosphere of a natural landscape permeating the whole place and is dominated by a distinctive organic roof ring, which unexpectedly houses a blossoming park. The new nine-storey cultural centre is topped by a circular study room for 200 people, with a 360° view over Milan, where the building is set to be erected. This can be accesses via a one-of-a-kind elevator that comprises a tower of books, picked up as needed by an automated system.

#BeOpenARCH Approached by a young family, whose children longed to have a treehouse but could not have one because of the lack of trees in their backyard, London-based architecture studio De Matos Ryan has designed Penfold, a timber playhouse that rises as high as the surrounding canopy. The structure consists of prefabricated triangular Douglas Fir frames combined to make a truncated pyramidal form. The Siberian Larch slatted cladding has a stainless-steel cable lattice to encourage climbing plants over the volume and ultimately create the sense of a tree that never was, while a low portal at the base of the build is the only way to access the treehouse, which is a great way to keep adults out.

#BeOpenARCH Dutch architecture studio MVRDV has been commissioned by non-profit educational institution TUMO Tirana to convert the deteriorating 1980s brutalist Pyramid of Tirana in the Albanian capital into a youth-focused cultural hub. The team has chosen to remove additions from previous renovations to reveal a voluminous interior space and radically open up the building by replacing the original glass façade with large glass flaps that can be closed when it rains. Exterior steps made using the stone tiles that originally adorned the façade are added to the sloping concrete beams. The steps can be used for sightseeing and temporary events, as well as for literally walking over the pyramid, right to its top. One of the beams will be preserved as a slope that visitors can slide down – at their own risk. More modern pyramids in our blog

#BeOpenDESIGN Aiming to fight food waste, Northumbria University graduate Harriet Almond has developed Snoot, a prototype for an aroma detector that detects gases released by decaying food and suggests ways to cook the product based on different levels of its freshness. The playful design comprises a handheld sensor that consists of an aroma detector, and a small mouth-shaped printer that prints out recipes by a zero-waste chef inputted manually and randomised within different freshness bands. In such a way Snoot demonstrates how the food should be prepared in order to extend its life and reduce unnecessary food waste. via dezeen.com