Be Open think tank

#BeOpenARCH Inspired by the vision of a ‘city in a garden’ imagined by Lee Kuan Yew fifty years ago, London-based Heatherwick Studio has built a 20-storey apartment building in Singapore, which comprises a vertical stack of homes that each have a garden. By moving the services to the perimeter, each apartment has a large central living space, surrounded by smaller individual rooms and wide plant-filled balconies. Made from polished concrete, the shell-like forms of the balconies serve as giant planters for the tower's greenery. Acting like raised gardens, they create the lush immersive experience of being surrounded by nature. More fascinating high-rise buildings that incorporate large amounts of planting in our blog

#BeOpenDESIGN Notch, a motion-tech company based in New York and Budapest founded by BEOPEN Community member Eszter Ozsvald, builds products and apps to either help improve health-related or sports-specific physical fitness. Their latest initiative, Yoganotch, offers yoga practitioners a personal yoga assistant by providing live personalized advice and live guidance through virtual classes. The app uses award-winning wearable 3D motion sensors to reconstruct the yoga posture in 3D space, where it is analyzed based on laws of biomechanics and yoga principles. It interprets the joint angle data, reconstructs the wearer’s skeleton and matches their posture to asana models defined in the database. Using AI and voice feedback, the machine intelligence-driven system can then detect and correct the flaws in the user’s alignment taking into consideration their practice history and body metrics.

#BeOpenNEWS We are thrilled to finally announce three of the four winners of “Design for Sustainable Cities” student competition, co-held by BE OPEN and Cumulus in support of the United Nations SDG Programme. The Main Prize of €5,000: Renova by a team of students from Politecnico di Milano, Italy (Beril Beden, Angela Corrado, Anika Rieth, Brenda Villafana, Luiza Braga, Mariah Giacchetta). The Safe City Prize of €2,000: the Urban renewal design around Qilu Hospital project by a team of students represented by Zhixiang Yang from Shandong University of Art & Design, China. The Public Vote Prize of €2,000: Innovation Laboratory project by Catalina Mutis Gutiérrez from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. Our last winner, the awardee of the Founder’s Choice prize of €3,000 will be selected in May by the Founder of BE OPEN Elena Baturina from the shortlist of the top 10 submissions in the ranking. Stay tuned!

#BeOpenDESIGN ‘Seam of Skin’ by interior and product designer Chiaki Yoshihara is a furniture collection that boasts a texture mimicking wood grain but is made from polystyrene foam. The series consists of two colored stools, a seat and a box. Yoshihara has developed a unique technique to craft the furniture pieces. She cuts a large block of polystyrene into thin strips using a hot wire before spray-painting the thin sheets, pressing them together and eventually slicing through the resulting layered curved shape. The color of the paint exposed on the cut surface creates the wood grain-like texture. Due to the foam’s insulation properties, the seats of the collection feel warm, while its water resistance and cushioning quality make it the perfect material for boxes that protect the contents inside.

#BeOpenDESIGN #BeOpenARCH Developed as part of the new initiative of Colombia’s biggest botanical garden to highlight the diverse ecosystems of the country, Tropicario by local studio DARP (De Arquitectura y Paisaje) comprises a cluster of six glass modules. Appearing to float between the tall palm trees of the site, each volume is developed according to the specific height, temperature and humidity requirements of a different environment inside. Developed as a water receiver, each structure has an oculus in the upper part to harvest rainwater, which passes into lakes located inside the spaces and then to the perimeter artificial wetland - it works as a large reservoir for irrigation systems, creating a closed cycle. More extraordinary botanical gardens in our blog

#BeOpenNEWS BE OPEN Art is happy to announce that Bernadett Timko, Hungary-born and London-based painter, printmaker and sculptor, has been voted the Artist of the Month by the visitors of art.beopenfuture.com Aiming to showcase emerging talents, every month we invite everyone passionate with art to choose the best artist among those exhibited in our online gallery. Congratulations to Bernadett Timko whose impressive true-to-life paintings has gained her a majority of votes in April! We also take the opportunity to applause to all the featured artists and thank everyone who voted.

#BeOpenDESIGN British-Chinese textile designer Elaine Yan Ling Ng has created a collection of speckled wall tiles made from shells of eggs discarded by bakeries. The collection’s name – Carrelé – is a fusion of "carreler" (French for "to tile" or "to pave") and CA, the chemical symbol for calcium in reference to the calcium carbonate that makes up an eggshell. Inspired by experiments in using chicken eggshell agricultural waste in medical and dental therapies, which proved that it has great strength and stability, the designer became interested in its potential uses in other industries such as architecture. The designer has also produced a series of minimalist stools and accessories from eggshells and is collaborating with Nature Squared, internationally operating brand of sustainable surfaces for architects, to extend the collection to include flooring tiles.

#BeOpenARCH Australian practice Koichi Takada Architects has developed a new 30-storey mixed-use tower to be built in South Brisbane, Australia. Aptly named Urban Forest, the project is designed with the ambition to become the world’s greenest residential building. To reach the goal, the living façade will feature over 1,000 trees and more than 20,000 plants selected from 259 native species, which will provide natural shade and insulation from the sun, wind and rain. Other sustainable features include solar panels to generate renewable energy, gardens irrigated by harvested rainwater and grey water collection, carbon offset, and the use of sustainably sourced and high quality, low maintenance materials. Residents will also have access to a rooftop wellness garden complete with a communal swimming pool and various social communal spaces. By integrating private and public spaces, Urban Forest seeks to restore a sense of community and create ‘breathing spaces’ for social interaction that will help reduce the kind of isolation experienced in high rise residential living. More green high-rises in our blog

#BeOpenDESIGN Studio Hai, an art and design practice with bases in New York, Georgia, and Shanghai, China, is dedicated to enhancing the celebrity of nature within our daily lives. Successfully blending nature and the built environment, they conjure visions of more eco-centric cities. One of their recent works is a series of whimsical outdoor benches and planters that could be used as interactive social distancing devices during the pandemic. Named Nomo Fomo, an acronym of No More Fear of Missing Out, the collection features objects that can be interpreted in multiple ways, as a sculpture, planter, or an interactive object that is suitable for sitting on, standing on, leaning against or playing around. The team is planning to produce them with aluminium frames covered in hard-coated expanded polystyrene, a lightweight and affordable yet extremely durable material. The project could be a great entry for our #BEOPENUrbanGreen Instagram open call for visual responses. Share your visuals of plants in the cityscape to get a chance to win €300. More details: beopensocial.com

#BeOpenARCH Swiss studio Manuel Herz Architects has created a pop-up synagogue at Babyn Yar in the west of Kyiv, Ukraine, to mark the 80th anniversary of a massacre that took place at the site in 1941, when around 34,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis over two days. The massacre is known as one of the largest mass killings during the Holocaust. The place of worship consists of two large walls that can be manually opened and closed like a pop-up book. When closed, the building is a flat, vertical structure of approximately 8 m in width and 11 m in height. Just as a congregation comes together during the religious service to collectively read the book of Torah, the process of opening the synagogue is a collective ritual, performed manually, intentionally without the support of a motor. The building is constructed from steel and clad in centuries old oak sourced from all parts of the country, which symbolically connects the time of before the massacre to the contemporary era. The architects painted the ceiling of the synagogue with a myriad of symbols referencing the interior of the historic synagogues of Ukraine from the 17th and 18th century that have since been destroyed. For the visitors, looking up into the ceiling of the new synagogue will create a subtle link to the night that the massacre started.