Be Open think tank

#BeOpenARCH Designed by architect Chan-Joong Kim, landscape artist Ou-Gon Jon, and master planner Zoh Kyung-Jin, the Seoul Botanic Park is the largest greenhouse in South Korea. The design consists of four main areas: a theme park, an open forest, a lake garden, and a wetland garden, that represent botanical cultures and climate of twelve geographical locations. Externally, the garden encompasses a flower-shaped glass dome, which measures 100 m in diameter and is clad in a special glass-like plastic ETFE. This allows excellent light transmission, while its lightweight fabric reduces carbon dioxide emissions into the air.

#BeOpenARCH With its continuous arrangement of vaults, Tsuruoka house by Kiyoaki Takeda Architects forms a cool cave-like environment where the plants will grow, and birds and insects will introduce unplanned species. Lush garden areas are placed around and on top of the building, opening towards the river nearby. These, the team hopes, will eventually become a natural habitat themselves.

#BeOpenARCH Maison Al-'Ula, the collaborative project between Nicolas Dorval-Bory Architectes and artist Caroline Corbasson, blends and blurs the limit between art and architecture. This short-stay home in the Saudi Arabian desert favors local mineral materials for the main structure, including rocks, aggregates, and rammed earth to produce an architecture that looks permanent and will age beautifully. The two concrete waffle slabs are designed to resist bidirectional forces. Outside, the slabs are supported by two other rocks, by four thin metallic walls (aligned with the rammed earth walls), and by another columns where the span is too large. Taking into account the energy of the sun’s rays as one of the most important resources of the area, the project is topped with a roof solar concentrator device to produce electricity.

Dear friends and followers, please be aware that this Facebook page is the only active official one for BE OPEN Foundation. We can no longer manage the old one due to circumstances beyond our control, and no posts published thereon beyond December 31, 2022 are associated with or created by BE OPEN.

#BeOpenDESIGN Brunel University London student Reece Jerrett has developed a playful, yet functional set that offers children the opportunity to learn cooking skills safely, allowing them to chop, dice and cut using a functional metal edge. As its name suggest, the Little Cook Children's Chef Knife and Finger Guard set includes two products that work together. The knife handle is designed with specific gripping points, and its shape and size are customised for three to six year olds to ensure a secure hold. The finger guard protects fingers and promotes the 'claw' grip method, encouraging children to engage in supervised food preparation and helping foster a lifelong love for cooking.

#BeOpenNEWS BE OPEN Art is happy to announce that Ahoo Hamedi, an emerging artist based in Tehran, Iran, has been voted the Artist of the Month by the visitors of art.beopenfuture.com Passionate with art as we are, every month we invite art enthusiasts to choose the best artist among those featured in our online gallery. In July, paintings by Ahoo characterised by a striking method that includes watercolour and plexiglass have gained the Iranian artist a majority of votes. We also take the opportunity to applaud all the featured artists and thank everyone who voted.

#BeOpenARCH Beijing-based practice Atelier Folie has topped the building of Huanxiu Lake Science Popularization and Education Center with a curved roof shaped by 24 steel rafters of varying length, each supported on the inner and outer ring beams and placed at a different angle. The sculptural roof informs the overall ring-shaped design of the building. The beautifully designed shingle roof slowly extends downward, which makes the building become long and slender taking the shape of a rounded triangular form that integrates seamlessly into the oval plot of land. More sculptural roofs in our blog

#BeOpenARCH Situated in a mountainous countryside area within a two-hours drive from Beijing, China, The Chapel of Sound by Chinese studio Open Architecture has been designed to resemble a piece of the natural landscape. The team completed this monolithic semi-outdoor concert hall entirely from concrete enriched with an aggregate made from crushed local stone, which makes it resemble some prehistoric boulder. According to the architects, the concert hall pursues the experience of sound in its purest form—collecting, reflecting, and resonating nature itself. More architecture blending in nature in our blog

#BeOpenaARCH In its design of the Furnish Studio designed to house a creative working space for artists working with oil paint, Bangkok-based 11.29 Studio makes use of local and sustainable materials to reduce embodied emissions from transportation energy. The design team wrapped the facade in clusters of bamboo battens that form flexible shutters along the facade, which open up to allow fresh ventilation and views to circulate around the space. The studio’s entrance wall is shaped by a sequence of concrete spacers from the region’s industrial sites where mass construction and concrete waste are unavoidable.

#BeOpenDESIGN Rainwear brand Rains has updated its flagship store in Aarhus, Denmark, originally opened in 2016. The brand’s in-house design team has filled the space with custom works from local artists. The centerpiece amidst the industrial aesthetic of the store is a blob-like sculpture by Danish artist Jacob Egebjerg, which envelops the functional area of the cash desk. Carved from polystyrene foam, the sculpture resembles a cascade of liquid frozen mid-splash as a clever nod to the brand’s waterproof rainwear. The rest of the interior maintains a cool, restrained minimalism, with display cases of transparent glass and large-format concrete tiles underfoot. via Surface mag

#BeOpenARCH The dramatic, geology-inspired mixed-use building Valley stands out in Amsterdam’s Zuidas neighbourhood with its three towers of 67, 81, and 100 metres and its spectacular cantilevered apartments covered in dense planting. Unlike other buildings in the business district, the skyscraper designed by the international practice MVRDV is characterized by a green valley that winds between the towers on the fourth and fifth floors and is accessible to everyone via two external stone staircases. It is a building with multiple faces. On the outer edges of the building is a shell of smooth mirrored glass, which fits the context of the business district. Inside this shell, the building has a more inviting natural appearance, as if the glass block has crumbled away to reveal craggy rock faces inside replete with natural stone and greenery.

#BeOpenART #BeOpenNEWS BE OPEN Art is happy to announce that Maziyah Yussof, a multidisciplinary artist from Brunei who specialises in painting, pattern-making and digital illustration, has become the first of the three candidates to the title of the Regional artist (Southeast Asia) and the 500 euros prize. She has been selected the Regional Artist of the month (July) by the highest number of votes of BE OPEN Art online gallery visitors. After two more monthly winners are defined in August and September, the BE OPEN Art expert team will select the one winner who best represents the artistic tradition of Southeast Asia: Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

#BeOpenARCH Seeking to carefully blend the new building into the landscape, local practice Aleš Fiala Studio has topped the Gurdau Winery located among fields and vineyards in the Czech Republic with a grass-toped roof. Placed above concrete tunnels dug into the terrain, the roof is punctured with large circular cutouts designed to let natural light penetrate the interior. These are aligned with areas of glazing on the ground floor. Where the sloping roof meets the ground, it blends with a series of winding concrete walls supporting planters around a paved patio. More architecture blending in nature in our blog

#BeOpenARCH Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, founder of the eponymous studio, described bamboo as the "green steel of the 21st century.” The architects used approximately 42,000 bamboo culms to create an entrance building for a resort on the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc. The construction method developed by the practice involves using ropes and bamboo pins to connect the culms together. The resulting bamboo framework allows to produce interior spaces that feel open and transparent, due to the grid structure letting light to penetrate through it. More exciting examples of bamboo architecture in our blog

#BeOpenDESIGN Miguel Acebron is a young architect from the University of Navarra in Spain with experience in built environment carbon footprint and energy impacts. His recent project, BOTIJO, is the first passive fridge that preserves medicines and fresh food below 5ºC to avoid expiration in contexts where energy is scarce or insecure because of frequent network outages. By boosting the drying of the outer surface with an airflow, the chimney effect creates a current of air that speeds the water evaporation rate and therefore the clay fridge cooling. The project was awarded the first prize of the Better Energy by Design competition, held by BE OPEN and our partners to promote the United Nations’ SDG7: Affordable and Clean Energy and encourage creation of innovative solutions by students and young professionals for the more prosperous and sustainable future.

#BeOpenARCH With climate change continuing apace, the advantages of a floating house are obvious. Vietnamese studio H&P Architects has created a prototype for a floating home made of locally sourced solid-cored bamboo that is designed to withstand rising sea levels. Named Floating Bamboo House, it aims to provide locals living in and around the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, one of the hardest-hit countries in the world by climate change, with a useful alternative to create a stable and safe accommodation themselves. Several houses can be connected with each other by floating playing grounds, vegetable-growing rafts and fish-raising areas, which would enable locals to form climate-resilient floating villages. More noteworthy floating homes designs in our blog

#BeOpenARCH Commissioned to create a design for the Nunavut Inuit Heritage Centre in Canada, Danish architecture studio Dorte Mandrup is planning to build a partly underground structure informed the patterns formed in snowdrifts by the prevailing wind, kalutoqaniq. Nunavut Inuit Heritage Centre will support relationships between Inuit and non-Inuit communities serving as a place for the preservation and celebration of Inuit heritage.

#BeOpenART João Charrua is a Portugal-based artist creates expressive and detailed human faces from single sheets of paper. Charrua began exploring origami around 13 years ago, when he was looking for a pastime to share with his daughter. Before creating the final piece, the artist makes three-dimensional drafts, which allow him to visualize specific features and make changes before starting on the formal model. “Origami requires rational and sequential thought, where each fold goes to form part the whole, and they all have to come together to produce the final result,” he says.

#BeOpenARCH The property called House on the Cliff was designed by Madrid practice GilBartolomé Architects for a young couple who bought a difficult plot on a steep cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Spain's Granada province, which has a steep inclination of 42 degrees. The task has been to integrate the house within the magnificent landscape that surrounds it and to direct the livable spaces towards the sea. The resulting two-storey residence is largely buried in the ground and covered by an undulating zinc-covered roof. The form creates a cavernous interior described by the architects as a "Gaudiesque contemporary cave". More Gaudi-inspired architecture in our blog

#BeOpenDESIGN Designer Yoshihiro Yamada has designed wearable rubber gear that can help muscles relearn how to walk after an injury or even for the elderly. Named Futto, the gear is made up of an abdominal belt and then four rubber straps that can be worn on each leg. When a person wearing Futto starts walking, the bands will contract on all sides “replacing” the muscles. The device is able to “straighten” your posture due to the abdominal pressure from the corset while the rubber is able to stabilize the lower limbs and stretch the spine.