In the final episode of our Climate Salon podcast series with SketchUp, architects discuss why sustainability should guide the aesthetics of a building, as opposed to the reverse.

Titled "A sustainable approach to aesthetics", the conversation explored how architects can help develop a new sense of what is beautiful and desirable based on what is most beneficial to the environment.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

Hosted by Dezeen's design and environment reporter Jennifer Hahn, the episode featured Swiss-Danish architect Kathrin Gimmel, MEE Studio founder Morten Emil Engel, and Andrew Corney, engineer and product director at Trimble's SketchUp.

The panel discussed whether designing sustainable buildings necessitates a different approach to aesthetics, touching on how clients and the wider public can be convinced to adapt their sense of beauty in architecture to include its impact on the planet.

"As a whole society, we still have a big step to take to accept that not everything needs to look new," Gimmel said. "Things can be weathered and change their look over time."

"We can't pretend that aesthetics is not important when it comes to sustainability"

Corney highlighted the importance of tying aesthetics and sustainability together, noting that people often choose architects and buildings based on their aesthetic appeal.

"We can't pretend that aesthetics is not important when it comes to sustainability," Corney said.

"We have people who are still sort of seeing aesthetics as something that's just an add on, but it needs to be something that's part of the design."

The panel emphasised the need to move away from resource-intensive, high-tech architecture towards a more holistic, environmentally responsive approach. Engel noted how architects could look to historical building practices to inform contemporary methods in a sustainable way.

"This 'back to basics' approach is actually a lot more charming," Engel said.

"I'm not saying that buildings should be more primitive as such, but we need to look at how buildings were designed in the past, because they were basically responding to the environment a lot of the time."

"Perfection is unachievable"

The panel underscored the importance of finding beauty in imperfections and the evolving aesthetics of buildings over time. They discussed embracing a narrative of repairability, giving the examples of the Japanese concepts of wabi-sabi and kintsugi, which celebrate, rather than conceal, imperfection and impermanence.

"There's an Eastern philosophy where they realised a long time ago that perfection is unachievable, so we should appreciate the imperfect," Engel said. "I think we can really learn from that, actually."

"If you produce something beautiful, then you should also take care of it," he continued. "And even though it's seemingly broken, it can be repaired, and it can actually become maybe more beautiful, and the storytelling becomes more interesting."

"Imperfections are a part of beauty," added Gimmel. "One thing is how a building looks when it's finished, but over its lifetime, we should appreciate how both its exterior and interior develops."

The conversation turned to the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to merge technology and sustainability.

While acknowledging AI's potential to streamline design processes and analyse environmental impacts, concerns were raised about the generic, superficial solutions that lack human insight into specific climates and contexts.

"There is really a huge amount of knowledge that designers just don't have"

Instead, the panel envisioned AI as a potential co-pilot in design software, providing real-time feedback on sustainability metrics and material choices.

"I could imagine that AI is built into design software," Engel said. "So when we design, it tells us: 'what if you change the facade material to this? You would save so much CO2.'"

"With this green transition, there is really a huge amount of knowledge that designers just don't have," he continued. "We're designing AI – it's not autonomous – so we can design the AI that we want to have. And if we designed it in such a way, I think it could really be a game changer."

In practical terms, the panellists urged architects to prioritise sustainability from the outset of every project. This includes selecting low-carbon and local materials, considering the lifecycle of buildings including their maintenance and adaptability, and shifting towards the reuse of existing structures.

The conversation marked the final episode of Dezeen and SketchUp's Climate Salon. Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team, the podcast series explored the role that architects and designers can play in tackling climate change.

Across six episodes, Dezeen spoke to industry experts ranging from architects, designers and engineers to explore how to better collaborate across their respective disciplines to create a more cohesive response to climate change.

The sixth episode is now available to download. Subscribe now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts to make sure you don't miss an episode.

SketchUp is a piece of 3D design software used to model architectural and interior design projects, product designs, civil and mechanical engineering and more. It is owned by construction technology company Trimble.

Partnership content

The Climate Salon podcast was produced by Dezeen in partnership with SketchUp. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post "Imperfections are a part of beauty" says Kathrin Gimmel in Climate Salon podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

In the fifth episode of our Climate Salon podcast series with SketchUp, architects discuss the importance of designing with community resilience and empowerment in mind.

"Designing resilient communities", the fifth episode of the podcast, explores how urban design can positively benefit and strengthen social groups in the context of climate change.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

Hosted by Dezeen's design and environment reporter Jennifer Hahn, the panel featured software brand Trimble SketchUp's product manager Aris Komninos, building consultancy Arup's associate director for cities and global leader for social value and equity Sara Candiracci and charity The Glass House's design champion Jake Stephenson-Bartley.

Resilient design is often thought of in terms of response to immediate crises, such as natural disasters. However, the panel emphasised the importance of laying the preliminary groundwork for this resilience through strong and integrated social structures.

"What is important is to really promote the many systems that contribute to a resilient community, which is not only the capacity to respond to disaster, but the overall social systems and also the sense of togetherness and connection, which is essential in a time of need," said Candiracci.

"There's not one singular definition [of resilience]," added Stephenson-Bartley.

"Resilience itself is rooted in wellbeing, imagination and foresight. So supporting the wellbeing of individuals and communities, so that they can participate collectively or as individuals in placemaking," he said.

"It's a way of showing communities that they're important, and that they have a role to play in decision-making and planning," added Candiracci.

The panel also discussed the challenges that architects and individuals face when trying to implement community-focused work.

"There is an effort to create more scale interventions which benefit communities. For instance [Barcelona] is doing an amazing job in terms of adopting desegregated data to inform transportation," said Candiracci.

"But I think there is a need to do this at scale, so it becomes not just something nice to do, but something that becomes part of a new way of designing," she said.

"Often the larger kind of socio-economic and political structures become barriers towards time and resource being given to supporting communities being resilient," explained Stephenson-Bartley.

"Even within the same city, between two different urban blocks that are next to each other, you will have those kinds of inequalities," added Komninos.

"If you really look at the granular level of the data, it is actually also very telling how critical it is to adopt a more on-the-ground approach when we design, and not a top-down approach," he continued.

The panel agreed that changing practices regarding resilience at scale should involve introducing education on the topic at a much earlier stage than is currently the norm.

"The key thing to do is to talk to users every week", said Komninos. "If you don't do that you're completely cut off. I realised, as a designer, I was not doing that at all. To me, this is a mindset shift that needs to happen in design".

"This idea of building resilient communities and looking at cities as a whole emerges in different places," he continued. "But again, this is taught at a very late level to a very small cohort of people. This needs to be something that is taught at a much earlier level."

"I think it's important to think about how we can embed these topics, these conversations, in alternative routes beyond university," added Stephenson-Bartley, and proposed apprenticeships as a platform for young people to start thinking about resilience.

The conversation is the fifth episode of Dezeen and SketchUp's Climate Salon, a podcast series exploring the role that architects and designers can play in tackling climate change.

Across six episodes, Dezeen is speaking to architects, designers and engineers to explore how to better collaborate across their respective disciplines to create a more cohesive response to climate change.

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team, Climate Salon episodes will be released over the coming months, along with opinion pieces by SketchUp relating to the topics featured in the series.

The fifth episode is now available to download. Subscribe now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts to make sure you don't miss an episode.

SketchUp is a piece of 3D design software used to model architectural and interior design projects, product designs, civil and mechanical engineering and more. It is owned by construction technology company Trimble.

Partnership content

The Climate Salon podcast is produced by Dezeen in partnership with SketchUp. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post Resilience means more than "capacity to respond to disaster" says Sara Candiracci in Climate Salon podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

In the fourth episode of our Climate Salon podcast series with SketchUp, architects discuss how involving communities in the design process is paramount to achieving sustainability.

Titled "Collaboration and co-creation as a tool for positive change", the fourth episode explores the need for working cohesively when it comes to tackling an issue as complex as the climate crisis.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

Hosted by Dezeen's design and environment reporter Jennifer Hahn, the panel featured German architect Anna Heringer, IF_DO co-founder Thomas Bryans and Sumele Adelana, an architectural designer and product specialist at Trimble's SketchUp.

The panel talked about the importance of engaging communities from the project's inception, explaining that this approach often yields richer and more sustainable outcomes.

Expounding on this, Adelana said that engaging with communities should be viewed as "something that will enrich the outcomes of your project."

"You have the technical collaborators, the experts that are bringing in their own layer to it," Adelana said.

"But we should be making sure that the end users – the citizens, the public, the occupants, the people who will maintain the thing – have a front row seat early and often," she added,

"Without that, you will always just be stitching together like patchwork, as opposed to something where you've woven all the different factors together from the very beginning."

The panellists emphasised that sustainability thrives through co-creation and collaboration.

Bryans talked about the difference in a "power over" approach, which he described as "a single idea that is dropped on to a city or a place", versus a "power with" approach, which involves envisioning and creating a space in collaboration with communities.

"If you are truly co-designing and co-creating with a community, that is a 'power with' approach," said Bryans. "And that can often result in a far richer outcome, both for that place and for those communities."

He also elaborated on the idea that fostering a sense of ownership among communities for the spaces built for them would contribute to the space's longevity.

"It's about making sure that the community feels ownership and has invested in that building, because it means for the long term, they know that it is for them," he said.

The panellists also emphasised the significance of actively involving communitites in the hands-on construction process.

"Human beings are made like this, it's part of our human matrix that we want to build," Heringer said. "Every child wants to build. It's totally boring if you get a playhouse that is perfectly made and finished."

"It's much more fascinating if you get some sticks or branches, some blankets, and you build your own thing," she continued.

Speaking about the METI Handmade School in Bangladesh, which she received the Aga Khan Award for, Heringer explained how involving local people in the construction of spaces strengthened community and team spirit and built trust between the designers and users.

"We had everyone included: elderly people that usually don't get jobs on sites anymore, kids coming in the afternoon after school helping us, people with disabilities," she said.

"Because earth is an inclusive material – you can touch it with your hands, you don't have to have sophisticated tools, it's not toxic, it's wonderful to touch – you can include everyone," she continued.

The conversation is the fourth episode of Dezeen and SketchUp's Climate Salon, a podcast series exploring the role that architects and designers can play in tackling climate change.

Across six episodes, Dezeen is speaking to architects, designers and engineers to explore how to better collaborate across their respective disciplines to create a more cohesive response to climate change.

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team, Climate Salon episodes will be released over the coming months along with opinion pieces by SketchUp relating to the topics featured in the series.

The fourth episode is now available to download. Subscribe now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts to make sure you don't miss an episode.

SketchUp is a piece of 3D design software used to model architectural and interior design projects, product designs, civil and mechanical engineering and more. It is owned by construction technology company Trimble.

Partnership content

The Climate Salon podcast is produced by Dezeen in partnership with SketchUp. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post Engaging with communities will "enrich" projects says Sumele Adelana in Climate Salon podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

Architects Katy Ghahremani and Sumele Adelana, and POOR Collective's Shawn Adams, explore the link between sustainability and inclusivity in the third episode of our Climate Salon podcast series with SketchUp.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

The third episode, titled Designing diversity into buildings, explores the role of architects in facilitating a just transition to a green economy and creating universal access to sustainable, reliable and climate-resilient buildings.

Jennifer Hahn, host of the podcast series and Dezeen's design and environment editor, spoke to Ghahremani, partner at Make Architects, Adams, architect and co-founder of POOR Collective, and Adelana, architectural designer and product specialist at Trimble SketchUp.

The panel argued that buildings that cater for a diverse range of communities are inherently sustainable.

"Of course there's a link between places and spaces that are sustainable and diversity and inclusivity," said Ghahremani.

She went on to describe how the practice of adaptive reuse of buildings is more sustainable than knocking down old buildings and building new ones, while having the potential to welcome new communities of people into existing spaces which hadn't previously accommodated them.

"Retrofit is great," she said. "We love doing retrofitting, because you get a building that has a narrative and a history already that you can build on rather than starting from scratch. And that makes it so much richer, it's already part of the community."

According to Adams, adaptive reuse projects need to be better celebrated in architectural media, awards programmes and academia.

"If we want to see more architects and designers repurposing buildings and pushing for retrofit, one of the things that we need to do is make it more sexy," he stated. "We need to be seeing refurbished or repurposed dilapidated buildings that have been given a new lease of life celebrated on the front cover of magazines."

The conversation is the third episode of Dezeen and SketchUp's Climate Salon, a podcast series exploring the role that architects and designers can play in tackling climate change.

Across six episodes, Dezeen is speaking to architects, designers and engineers to explore how to better collaborate across their respective disciplines to create a more cohesive response to climate change.

The panel agreed that buildings that better serve the needs of diverse groups within a community are likely to have a longer life and be used to their fullest potential, reducing wasteful uses of space, energy and materials.

"When I think of a sustainable space, I think of a space that's respected," said Adams. "If a space is respected, then people want to ensure that there's continuity in that space, and the space lives on for decades, if not centuries."

Ghahremani explained the importance of pubic consultations which include representatives from all communities who will inhabit a building, rather than just those who more readily offer their thoughts.

"When we start talking to the local community local businesses, what we find is that there are always voices that are loud and organised, and like to portray themselves as the voice of the community," she explained.

"What we really need to find are all those other voices that are quieter and further away, because we want to bring everyone in. We don't want to design places just for the people who are engaged in the process, we want to bring in everybody else."

Adams stated that educating local communities and young people about architecture gives them a greater understanding of their place within their urban environment, enabling them to better articulate their needs when called upon to consult on a development.

"When [people] recognise the power of architecture and design, an interest can then be developed… because they understand architecture, now they feel as if they can make a change in their area, or they can contribute positively to that area."

Adelana described the way in which technological advancements have the potential to make the design process more accessible to future inhabitants of buildings when they're being involved in the design process.

"We can leverage technology in a way that opens things up to people that in the past would have shut them off from it," she said.

"If you can immerse me in the reality of it in three dimensions, or experience reality with a headset for example, then I can tell you: hey, this space is not working for me, or: in my culture, where I come from, this colour is pretty bad."

Each episode of the Climate Salon podcast provides insight into how specialists across diverse disciplines can work in conjunction to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team, Climate Salon episodes will be released over the coming months along with opinion pieces by SketchUp relating to the topics featured in the series.

The third episode is now available to download in advance of the 3 Days of Design festival in Copenhagen. Subscribe now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts to make sure you don't miss an episode.

SketchUp is a piece of 3D design software used to model architectural and interior design projects, product designs, civil and mechanical engineering and more. It is owned by construction technology company Trimble.

Partnership content

The Climate Salon podcast is produced by Dezeen in partnership with SketchUp. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post "Of course there's a link between sustainability and inclusivity" says Katy Ghahremani in Climate Salon podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

An expert panel including designer Sebastian Cox and architect Rikke Juul Gram advocated for a regenerative approach to design and architecture in the second episode of our new Climate Salon podcast series with SketchUp.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

In the second episode, titled Forging a Regenerative Future, Cox, Gram and Trimble SketchUp's sustainable lead Hugh McEvoy discussed how design and architecture can work in conjunction with nature to have a positive impact on the environment.

Speaking to Jennifer Hahn, host of the podcast series and Dezeen's design and environment editor, the panel explored what the term 'regenerative' means in the context of architecture and design.

Cox, whose furniture business is focussed on restoring biodiversity to the environments from which it harvests materials, suggested that regenerative practices are ones that allow natural environments from which materials are harvested to replenish themselves using naturally occurring processes, in contrast to practices associated with sustainability such as tree planting.

"Sustainability is about offsetting … and just balancing the books. It feels quite technocratic," he said.

"When we start thinking about regenerative design or regenerative construction, architecture, agriculture, it focusses on biodiversity," he continued. "It's about making the habitat better than if we had not intervened to harvest materials."

"It gets us away from just, let's minimise [damage], and into a world of, let's do something that's actually a great experience for people that live there and an upside for the planet," added McEvoy, who is sustainable lead at SketchUp.

The conversation is the second episode of Dezeen and SketchUp's Climate Salon, a podcast series exploring the role that architects and designers can play in tackling climate change.

Across six episodes, Dezeen is speaking to architects, designers and engineers to explore how to better collaborate across their respective disciplines to create a more cohesive response to climate change.

Using existing resources

Gram, who is a partner at Copenhagen landscape architecture firm Schønherr, described how a regenerative approach to urban planning should create spaces for natural systems in cities in order that they are able to perform functions.

She has explored this principle with an urban planning project called Copenhagen Islands, which is presented as part of the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, opening later this week.

The project is a proposal for Copenhagen that would allow it to better coexist with rising seawater and rainwater levels by replacing its existing plan with a reconfigured system of islets and sponge-like coastal zones.

"Water is maybe one of our most valuable resources, and we tend to think of it as just something coming out of a tap, or something that we need to defeat because of rising sea waters and too much rain," she said.

"Actually, it's our finest resource to create nature," she continued. "The only thing it needs is something also very precious, which is space. A new way of connecting cities with nature is to release space for the systems."

A new approach to aesthetics

McEvoy proposed that a greater focus from the outset of a project on understanding a building's systems, rather than on its aesthetics, would be required for a more regenerative approach to architecture.

"Historically, there's been a very strong emphasis in architecture on aesthetics," he said. "What happens then is the impact gets neglected."

"Were architectural designers and interior designers to take more interest in understanding how the whole system fits together, they're going to design buildings that perform better, and they're going to be able to preserve the design integrity of the building throughout its whole lifecycle."

Both Cox and Gram advocated for a change in what is considered aesthetically appealing in architecture and design.

"We need to transform our toolbox, as designers, in terms of what is actually beautiful," said Gram. "We need to have aesthetic research at the same time as functional research, looking at new materials."

"You can build into your design and into your systems of production, and into your clients and their cultural attitudes, a degree of tolerance for the imperfection, or an understanding that variation is to be welcomed," offered Cox.

Each episode of the Climate Salon podcast provides insight into how specialists across diverse disciplines can work in conjunction to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team, Climate Salon episodes will be released over the coming months along with opinion pieces by SketchUp relating to the topics featured in the series.

The second episode is now available to download to coincide with the launch of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Subscribe now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts to make sure you don't miss an episode.

SketchUp is a piece of 3D design software used to model architectural and interior design projects, product designs, civil and mechanical engineering and more. It is owned by construction technology company Trimble.

Partnership content

The Climate Salon podcast is produced by Dezeen in partnership with SketchUp. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post Regenerative design is "making habitats better" says Sebastian Cox in Climate Salon podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

A panel spanning design, architecture and technology stressed that building and living more sustainably requires a universal approach in the first episode of our new Climate Salon podcast series with SketchUp.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

In the launch episode titled Radical Sustainable Living, designer Tom Dixon, Siv Helene Stangeland, founder of Norwegian architecture firm Helen & Hard, and design software company SketchUp's Sumele Adelana discussed the importance of working across industries and disciplines to reduce the environmental impact of building and designing for homes.

Speaking to Jennifer Hahn, host of the podcast series and Dezeen's design and environment editor, the panel concurred that effecting serious change requires a united front between design disciplines as well as across consumers, clients and localities.

"It requires enlightenment from everybody for the thing to work," said Dixon. "A universal attitude is what is needed. We need a United Nations of climatology."

Dixon proposed that a more collaborative approach would be driven by changes in legislation or socioeconomic circumstances. "Change will not happen until people are forced to act collectively," he said.

Adelana, architectural designer and product specialist at SketchUp, agreed, emphasising the power that local administrators hold.

"There is a lot more work that needs to be done to push a collective effort, right through from legislation on the global level, and the national level, and however deep you want to go," she said.

"The local boroughs have a huge part to play because they own building stock, they influence the work that happens in their boroughs."

The conversation is the first episode of Dezeen and SketchUp's Climate Salon, a new podcast exploring the role that architects and designers can play in tackling climate change.

Across six episodes, Dezeen will speak to architects, designers and engineers to explore how to better collaborate across their respective disciplines to create a more cohesive response to climate change.

The first episode is now available to download in advance of Milan design week. Subscribe now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts to make sure you don't miss an episode.

Leading from the top

In the first episode, the panel touched on topics including the role of designers in educating consumers and clients on the potentials of more sustainable materials, how co-living could offer a more sustainable model for housing people, and the continued importance of upholding the basic principles of designing long-lasting and appealing homes and products.

The panel agreed that sustainable practices need to be championed by leadership, whether within architecture practices or in government.

Describing the situation within architecture practices, Adelana stated: "if there are no champions right at the top, then the team that works within these practices either has to be highly interested in delivering sustainability, so that they do it as an add on to the work that is already required of them, or it just doesn't happen at all."

Stangeland emphasised that changes in industry practices should be bolstered by political change.

"The building industry is embedded in systems that are stuck with old ways of doing things," she said. "If we are going to change systems, we also need to have help from from governments. You can't expect designers to do that job, it's a collective effort."

Importance of good design

Stangeland described how designing homes that people want to live will encourage a longer lifespan, leading to less resource and energy consumption.

"The best way of making something last is that we make something of value, and people want to take care of it," she said.

Dixon added that "the best things you can do is make things not fashionable, make things that people will be able to reuse."

"You can build things in a more durable way and then find economic models where people can share them, or lease them or pass them around a bit more," he continued.

Alternative ways of living

The panel also discussed the ways in which buildings can be designed to encourage inhabitants to make more sustainable choices in their day-to-day lives.

Stangeland is a board member of Norwegian co-living developer Gaining by Sharing, and lives in its Vindmøllebakken community, which was designed by Helen & Hard.

"If we can live on a smaller footprint by sharing space and things and services, it will have a big impact," she said.

"[The success and popularity of the project] is proving that people are also willing to change quite a lot if they know that this is really making an impact."

"Instead of feeling that you are reducing something to cope with climate action, people are in fact feeling that they gained something because living in a community is really a rich and life full of opportunities and possibilities."

Each hour-long episode of the Climate Salon podcast will provide insight into how specialists across diverse disciplines can work in conjunction to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The series will also explore the role that technology can play in cutting down emissions, focussing on tools that are readily available to designers and engineers today.

Future episodes will explore topics like regenerative architecture, integrating nature into design processes, how designing for inclusivity is related to sustainability, and the potential of new green technologies.

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team, Climate Salon episodes will be released over the coming months along with opinion pieces by SketchUp relating to the topics featured in the series.

SketchUp is a piece of 3D design software used to model architectural and interior design projects, product designs, civil and mechanical engineering and more.

Partnership content

The Climate Salon podcast is produced by Dezeen in partnership with SketchUp. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post "Change won't happen until people act collectively" says Tom Dixon in Dezeen and SketchUp's new Climate Salon podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen has teamed up with design software brand SketchUp to create a new podcast series exploring the role that architects and designers can play in tackling climate change.

Launching tomorrow, the six-part Dezeen x SketchUp Climate Salon podcast will bring together architects, designers and engineers to explore how to better collaborate across their respective disciplines to create a more cohesive response to climate change.

The first episode, titled Radical Sustainable Living, gathers designer Tom Dixon, architect Siv Helene Stangeland, founder of Helen & Hard, and Sumele Adelana, architectural designer and product specialist at SketchUp.

The host of the series, Dezeen's design and environment editor Jennifer Hahn, will speak to the panel about how design choices in the home can encourage us to build and live more sustainably.

The first episode will be available to download Wednesday 12 April, in advance of Milan design week. Subscribe now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts to make sure you don't miss an episode.

Each hour-long conversation will provide insight into how specialists across diverse disciplines can work in conjunction to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The series will also explore the role that technology can play in cutting down emissions, focussing on tools that are readily available to designers and engineers today.

Future episodes will explore topics like regenerative architecture, integrating nature into design processes, how designing for inclusivity is related to sustainability, and the potential of new green technologies.

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team, Climate Salon episodes will be released over the coming months along with opinion pieces by SketchUp relating to the topics featured in the series.

SketchUp is a piece of 3D design software used to model architectural and interior design projects, product designs, civil and mechanical engineering and more.

Partnership content

The Climate Salon podcast is produced by Dezeen in partnership with SketchUp. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post SketchUp and Dezeen launch new podcast series about designing for climate change appeared first on Dezeen.

Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Jean-Philippe Vassal discusses the architectural approach of his studio Lacaton & Vassal in this special episode of Dezeen's Face to Face podcast.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

Vassal and his partner Anne Lacaton recently won the 2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize for their studio's body of work, which is based on its principle "never to demolish" and aims to refurbish, rather than rebuild, social housing.

This bonus episode of Face to Face features a previously unheard interview. It is conducted by Dezeen's acting US editor India Block, whom Vassal sat down with ahead of his lecture at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2019.

Based in Paris, Lacaton & Vassal was founded in 1979. The studio has become known for repairing or renovating existing buildings to give residents more room and access to outdoor spaces, an approach Lacaton says is driven by the idea of generosity.

"Generosity is absolutely essential in any act of architecture, in any act of urban planning, I think we should be only pushed by this idea of generosity," Vassal said in the interview.

Repairing rather than demolishing

The interview was recorded after the practice was awarded the Mies van der Rohe award for their project 530 Dwellings, a social housing project in Bordeaux.

The project saw the renovation of a 1960s housing block. Instead of demolishing the building, the architects made interventions such as the addition of 3.8-metre-deep winter gardens, open-air balconies and bigger windows to every apartment in order to improve the quality of life of its residents.

"Just try to repair and add what is missing," said Vassal. "You will give much more pleasure than by rebuilding after demolition."

"We cannot just do the minimum," he added. "We have to really think of how to do the maximum."

Renovation is "first step towards sustainability"

Vassal argued that repairing and renovating existing buildings is the most environmentally sustainable approach architects can take.

"If we talk about keeping buildings instead of demolishing them, it's the first step towards sustainability; to make sustainable what already exists," he said.

He stressed the benefits of using materials that are already available to architects, including what he calls the "free elements".

"Using as few materials as possible, by keeping into account what is already there, working with natural and free elements, such as the air, the light and the sun."

Check out the full Face to Face series

Dezeen's Face to Face podcast series was produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team Dezeen Studio.

The first series included seven episodes with architects and designers including Es Devlin, Thomas Heatherwick and David Chipperfield.

The podcast features original music composed by Japanese designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki.

Subscribe to Dezeen's podcasts

You can listen to the full series on Dezeen or on podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

The post "Generosity is essential in architecture" says Jean-Philippe Vassal in Dezeen's Face to Face podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen's Face to Face podcast is now available on our Youtube channel, where you can binge on the full series featuring conversations with Es Devlin, Thomas Heatherwick, David Chipperfield and more.

In the Face to Face series, Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs sits down with leading architects and designers to discuss their lives and careers.

Along with Devlin, Heatherwick and Chipperfield, the first series featured Hella Jongerius, Roksanda Ilinčić, Tom Dixon and John Pawson.

Listen to the first seven episodes in the playlist above or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts to download the whole series onto your device.

If six hours of interviews is too much for you to handle, you can also listen to individual episodes below.

Es Devlin: "Every time someone wanted me to write an essay, all I wanted to do was paint a picture"

The first episode of Face to Face featured artist, designer and director Es Devlin who started her career as a theatre designer but became known for her set designs for musicians like Kanye West, Beyoncé and U2.

The interview took place at Devlin's home and studio in south London and covered her seaside upbringing, her maverick student years and her meteoric career.

Find out more ›

Thomas Heatherwick: "My studio is a giant version of my bedroom when I was nine years old" 

This episode featured British designer Thomas Heatherwick, who is known for projects such as the new London bus and the 2012 Olympic Cauldron, as well as his large scale architectural projects like London's Coal Drop Yards and the ongoing Google Campus in Mountain View, California.

Recorded at his studio in King's Cross, London, Heatherwick discussed his childhood fascination with engineering, his distaste for architectural discourse and how he completed his first building while still a student.

Find out more ›

Hella Jongerius: Design industry is "slow, boring and bullshit"

Next up is an interview with Dutch industrial designer Hella Jongerius, who is known for her influential work with colour and textiles and has previously worked with Swiss furniture brand Vitra and Dutch airline KLM.

The interview, which was recorded in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week, explored how Jongerius grew up on a tomato farm and discovered her creative ability when she took an evening course in carpentry.

Find out more ›

David Chipperfield: "I feel like a bit of a fake"

British architect David Chipperfield is one of the world's most celebrated architects and is known for his calm and rational style evident in projects such as the Neues Museum in Berlin and The Hepworth Wakefield in England.

The interview took place at Chipperfield's London office and covered his childhood, growing up on a farm, how he struggled at school, how Zaha Hadid saved him from failing his architecture diploma and why he still suffers from imposter syndrome.

Find out more ›

Roksanda Ilinčić: "I think of my clothes as shelter"

Serbian fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčić has become known for her colourful clothes that are worn by celebrities, politicians and royalty.

Recorded in her office, which is located on the floor above Dezeen's office in Hoxton, London, the podcast explored how Iliničić learned about dressmaking by slicing up her mother's designer outfits as a teenager.

Find out more ›

Tom Dixon: "As long as you have attitude, you don't have to be talented"

Designer Tom Dixon is one of the few British designers to become a household name, producing furniture, lighting and accessories under his own brand.

The interview took place at his combined office, showroom, shop and restaurant in London and explored how, before he became a designer, a motorcycle crash forced him to abandon a career as a bass guitarist.

Find out more ›

John Pawson: "I am irrational and the work stops me going mad"

The final episode of this series of Face to Face features British architectural designer John Pawson. Celebrated for his minimalist approach to architecture and design, Pawson has previously designed projects such as the new Design Museum in London and the Novy Dvur monastery in the Czech Republic.

In the podcast, recorded in his office in King's Cross, London, Pawson recounts his brief spell as a Buddhist monk, how Calvin Klein changed his life and explains how minimalism helps calm his "untidy mind".

Find out more ›

Subscribe to Dezeen's podcasts

You can listen to Face to Face here on Dezeen or subscribe on podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Dezeen's Face to Face podcast series was produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team Dezeen Studio. The podcast features original music composed by Japanese designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki.

Face to Face is sponsored by Twinmotion, the real-time architectural visualisation solution that can create immersive photo and video renders in seconds.

The post Dezeen's Face to Face podcast series is now available to binge on Youtube appeared first on Dezeen.

The latest episode of Dezeen's Face to Face podcast features architectural designer John Pawson, who recounts his brief spell as a Buddhist monk, how Calvin Klein changed his life and explains how minimalism helps calm his "untidy mind".

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

In the Face to Face series, Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs sits down with leading architects and designers to discuss their lives.

This episode of Face to Face features architectural designer Pawson, who has become celebrated for his minimalist approach to architecture and design, which he says has helped him counter his "untidy and unruly" mind.

"I feel more comfortable without the stuff around or without the clutter. It allows me to think," he said in the interview. "[I have a] very untidy mind, very unruly and, and that's why, you know, it's helped me a lot to have these sorts of spaces."

World tour

Pawson grew up in Halifax in West Yorkshire, England, where his family owned a textile business, but he moved to London to attend Eton, where he admits to not having been a great student.

"I just couldn't knuckle down to studying," he said. "I just couldn't cope with the subjects."

After finishing school, instead of joining the family business, Pawson decided to embark on a world tour that took him to India; Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco during the hippie era; Sydney, where he made friends with actress and singer Liza Minelli; and finally Japan, where he tried to become a Zen Buddhist monk.

"I'd seen a documentary about Aichi," he said. "It was a really beautiful film about the Zen Buddhist monks and I thought, well, this is for me. I lasted four hours."

Meeting Calvin Klein

After giving up on the Buddhist monastery, he travelled to Tokyo where he worked for Shiro Kuramata, one of the most important designers of the 20th century, who convinced him to apply to study architecture at the Architectural Association in London.

Despite never finishing his architecture degree, Pawson attended the AA for three years between 1979 and 1981 and was taught by the likes of Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Nigel Coates.

"What I learned at the AA was something that I didn't think you could learn and that was to design," he said in the interview.

After setting up his own office in London, Pawson's career took off when he was approached by fashion designer Calvin Klein in 1993 to design a flagship store for him in New York.

"He was the most known fashion designer at the time. So it was quite surreal," he explained. "Because of his endorsement, people who weren't quite as adventurous or secure felt much better about hiring me for things."

"I am irrational" 

Pawson has since designed large-scale architectural projects such as the Novy Dvur monastery in the Czech Republic and the Design Museum in London, as well as smaller home objects designed for brands such as Wästberg and Tekla.

Although he is celebrated for the calm minimalism of his projects, Pawson says his work has helped him compensate for his busy mind.

"I am irrational. The calmness is an exterior and I think the work has been brilliant to me because filling the day and working really hard stops you slightly going mad," he explained.

Check out the full Face to Face series

Dezeen's Face to Face podcast series was produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team Dezeen Studio. Past episodes have featured Es Devlin, Thomas Heatherwick and David Chipperfield.

The previous episode of Face to Face featured British designer Tom Dixon who described how a motorcycle crash forced him to abandon a career as a bass guitarist.

The podcast features original music composed by Japanese designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki.

Face to Face is sponsored by Twinmotion, the real-time architectural visualisation solution that can create immersive photo and video renders in seconds.

Subscribe to Dezeen's podcasts

You can listen to Face to Face here on Dezeen or subscribe on podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

The post "I am irrational and the work stops me going mad" says John Pawson in Dezeen's latest podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

Designer Tom Dixon describes how a motorcycle crash forced him to abandon a career as a bass guitarist in the latest episode of Dezeen's Face to Face podcast.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

In the Face to Face series, Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs sits down with leading architects and designers to discuss their lives.

For this episode, Fairs sat down with British designer Tom Dixon at his combined office, showroom, shop and restaurant at The Coal Office, a Victorian structure that previously hosted a nightclub in London's Kings Cross.

One of the few British designers to become a household name, Dixon produces furniture, lighting and accessories under his own brand name. He describes the Tom Dixon brand ethos as "expressive minimalism". This involves "trying to reduce the object as much as possible whilst maintaining its character".

Early creative streak

Yet he left school with only one qualification in pottery and worked in the music business and in nightclubs before turning his hand to producing hand-made metal furniture.

Born in Tunisia, Dixon spent his early childhood in Morocco before moving to London with his family at the age of six. While he admits to not having been a good student, it was at school that Dixon discovered his creative streak.

"I managed to fill my time, not with the stuff I should have been learning but tinkering around in the ceramics and life drawing departments and that's where I first encountered the joy of creation," he said in the interview.

When a first motorcycle accident put an end to a brief stint at Chelsea School of Art, he delved into the world of music, playing bass in disco-punk band Funkapolitan.

Opening for the Clash in New York

After signing a record deal, Funkapolitan enjoyed moderate success, touring, playing Glastonbury and supporting bands including The Clash.

"The people that went to see the Clash were punks and we were disco," Dixon said, recalling a gig in New York where the audience threw bottles and spat at the band. "That was a pretty scary experience. It was quite nasty but character-forming, you know. I was always a shy boy."

While he wasn't a fan at the time, the DIY ethos of the punk scene influenced the way he approached the beginning of his career.

"The thing about British music is that you can actually be shit," he said in the interview. "As long as you got a unique attitude, people will collect around that. You don't have to be naturally gifted, you don't have to be naturally polished and you can teach yourself how to do something."

Welding with scrap metal

After a second motorcycle crash ended his music career, Dixon started producing welded furniture made from scrap metal, which he sold to people he'd met on the London nightclub scene.

"I get bored so easily, so there was something about the speed of action in metal that really appealed to me," he explained. "Peering through the goggles at the fire and seeing the molten metal fuse together and then suddenly having a structure that you could sit on."

Dixon started to gain prominence as part of the ad-hoc Creative Salvage movement, alongside Ron Arad, Mark Brazier-Jones and other London designers who produced hand-made objects from found materials.

The iconic S-Chair, featuring a sinuous steel frame with straw upholstery, was designed around this time and later became the first Tom Dixon piece to be added to the catalogue of Italian furniture brand Cappellini.

Dixon later worked as creative director at retailer Habitat before setting up his eponymous brand.

"I had 10 years of life in a corporation," he explained. "I'll always be grateful because I learned so much but I was hungry to design again rather than telling other people how to design."

"I'd managed to meet some of the great designers of that time, including [Achille] Castiglioni and Verner Panton, and managed to commission lots of people like the Bouroullecs and other younger designers," he added. You know, I was a bit jealous of them, so it was time to start again."

Dixon now employs around 140 people at his London headquarters and sells around 1,000 different products, including fragrances and textiles, in 75 countries. Last year he opened The Manzoni, a second combined restaurant and showroom in Milan and recent ventures include a collaboration with Swedish synthesizer outfit Teenage Engineering.

"I don't want to be like in the music business where you have to play your greatest hits again and again," he said, before heading off for a jam session with a Danish techno musician.

Check out the full Face to Face series

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team Dezeen Studio, Face to Face episodes will be released every Tuesday. Past episodes have features Es Devlin, Thomas Heatherwick and David Chipperfield and future interviewees will include John Pawson.

The previous episode of Face to Face featured Serbian fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčić who described how she learned about dressmaking by slicing up her mother's designer outfits.

The podcast features original music composed by Japanese designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki.

Face to Face is sponsored by Twinmotion, the real-time architectural visualisation solution that can create immersive photo and video renders in seconds.

Subscribe to Dezeen's podcasts

You can listen to Face to Face here on Dezeen or subscribe on podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

The post "As long as you have attitude, you don't have to be talented" says Tom Dixon in Dezeen's latest podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

Fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčic describes how she learned about dressmaking by slicing up her mother's designer outfits, in the latest episode of Dezeen's Face to Face podcast.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

In the Face to Face series, Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs sits down with leading architects and designers to discuss their lives and careers.

Ilinčić, whose studio is located on the floor above Dezeen's office in Hoxton, London, is known for her colourful garments and draped dresses which take stylistic queues from her Serbian heritage.

"When you break down my work and look at the shapes, it's all very much part of where I come from and our national costumes," she explained. "Many of those details, I use in my designs as well. Pleats, floral embroidery and humongous big sleeves."

Cutting up Yves Saint Laurent dresses

Ilinčić grew up in Belgrade and learned about fashion from her mother's glamorous wardrobe.

In the interview, she recalls how she would steal designer garments and customise them with a pair of scissors to wear to parties.

"I used to cheekily steal things when she wasn't around and even go as far as chopping them up and making them shorter," she said in the interview.

"Some of the pieces were brilliant pieces, even by Yves Saint Laurent. Unfortunately even those ended up dissected."

Studying at Central Saint Martins

While she initially studied architecture in Serbia, she couldn't keep away from fashion.

"Instead of buying architecture books, I would just go and spend all my money on buying the most expensive fashion magazines," she remembers.

After reading about the work of London-based fashion designers such as Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, she moved to the city to study fashion design under the late Louise Wilson at Central Saint Martins.

"I thought I knew quite a lot about fashion already, but when I arrived at Central Saint Martins, I realised 'actually I'm clueless'," she said.

After graduating, she set up her eponymous label Roksanda, which produces two womenswear collections a year at London Fashion Week.

"Soft armour"

Despite abandoning her architecture studies, Ilinčić says her work remains influenced by the discipline.

"I always think of my clothes as some sort of shelter. I think that's where the strongest connection with architecture is, not in a shapes, sculptural elements or designs but more how you feel when you wear it," she said.

"And I think you need to feel protected, you need to feel shelter. Like you're wearing some sort of soft armour."

Read more Dezeen stories about Roksanda Ilinčić.

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team Dezeen Studio, Face to Face episodes will be released every Tuesday. Interviewees will include Tom Dixon, John Pawson and Norman Foster.

The previous episode of Face to Face featured British architect David Chipperfield, who describes growing up on a farm, struggling at school, how Zaha Hadid saved him from failing his architecture diploma – and why he still suffers from imposter syndrome.

The podcast features original music composed by Japanese designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki.

Face to Face is sponsored by Twinmotion, the real-time architectural visualisation solution that can create immersive photo and video renders in seconds.

Subscribe to Dezeen's podcasts

You can listen to Face to Face here on Dezeen or subscribe on podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

The post "I think of my clothes as shelter" says Roksanda Ilinčić in Dezeen's latest podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen's Face to Face podcast series continues with an interview with British architect David Chipperfield, who describes growing up on a farm, struggling at school, how Zaha Hadid saved him from failing his architecture diploma – and why he still suffers from imposter syndrome.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

In the Face to Face series, Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs sits down with leading architects and designers to discuss their lives and careers.

Chipperfield is one of the world's most celebrated architects, known for his calm, rational style that resists the wild experimentalism of many of his contemporaries. "I was brought up on a heavy diet of good old-fashioned modernism," he said in the interview.

Childhood influences 

Chipperfield grew up in Devon and worked on his father's farm before attending boarding school, where he discovered he was good at long-distance running and art, but not much else. "I was not very good at school," he explained. "Fairly hopeless I would say. But I was good at art."

His poor grades dashed his early hopes of becoming a vet, so he instead pursued architecture thanks to the encouragement of his art teacher. After graduating from Kingston School of Art in London, he attended the Architectural Association school, which was then a hotbed of radical ideas.

Studying at the AA

Chipperfield studied at the AA at the same time as the late Zaha Hadid, who once stood up for him during a difficult review that could have resulted in him failing the course. "Zaha, until her dying days, reminded me that if it hadn't been for her, I would have failed and that she got me my diploma," he remembered during the interview.

Chipperfield went on to work for both Richard Rogers and Norman Foster for a number of years, despite not being partial to the high-tech architecture movement they helped pioneer.

"I wasn't particularly interested in high-tech, funnily enough," he said. "Although I had the opportunity to go to Paris and see the Centre Pompidou during construction with Richard and I thought that was just the sexiest building I'd ever seen," he added.

"I feel a bit of a fake"

After setting up his own office in the mid-eighties, his career took off when he designed a series of stores for fashion designer Issey Miyake in Japan.

His practice, David Chipperfield Architects, has since designed acclaimed projects all over the world, including the Neues Museum in Berlin, the Amorepacific headquarters in Seoul and The Hepworth Wakefield museum in England.

However, despite his success, Chipperfield said he feels like "a sham" compared to his contemporaries. "I have a sense of purpose maybe but I don't have innate creative talents to the level of someone like Renzo [Piano] or maybe Frank Gehry or Álvaro Siza," he said. "So in that sense, I feel a bit of a fake."

However, he remains motivated "more than ever" to promote the role of the architect in society as possible solutions to issues such as the housing and climate crises. "Architects used to work for the common good and now we work for the market," he said. "So I think that this crisis is forcing everybody to rethink things that we fundamentally believe."

Read more Dezeen stories about David Chipperfield.

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team Dezeen Studio, Face to Face episodes will be released every Tuesday for the next eight weeks. Future interviewees will include Roksanda Ilinčić, Tom Dixon and Norman Foster.

The previous episode of Face to Face features industrial designer Hella Jongerius, who explains how she grew up on a tomato farm and discovered her creative ability when she took an evening course in carpentry.

The podcast features original music composed by Japanese designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki.

Face to Face is sponsored by Twinmotion, the real-time architectural visualisation solution that can create immersive photo and video renders in seconds.

Subscribe to Dezeen's podcasts

You can listen to Face to Face here on Dezeen or subscribe on podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

The post "I feel like a bit of a fake" says David Chipperfield in Dezeen's latest podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen's Face to Face podcast series continues with a conversation with Dutch industrial designer Hella Jongerius, who explains how she grew up on a tomato farm and discovered her creative ability when she took an evening course in carpentry.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

In the Face to Face series, Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs sits down with leading architects and designers to discuss their lives and careers.

Jongerius, known particularly for her influential work with colour and textiles, is not afraid to speak out about the industry and about her gender.

"I find it stupid," she said when asked how she feels about being regarded as the world's most important female designer. "As if my creativity is in my breasts."

Raised on a tomato farm

The daughter of a tomato farmer, Jongerius' childhood was devoid of cultural experiences. Her earliest brush with designing and making came via traditional women's handicrafts.

"I was raised up in the 70s and we girls sat together and knitted and macraméed and decorated our rooms," she said in the interview. "The creativity was in the air and I knew I had intelligent hands."

She initially rejected attempts to persuade her to pursue such stereotypical activities.

"A teacher once told me 'you have to do something with textiles' and I was not interested at all," she remembered in the interview. "I thought they had pushed me in the female corner but in the end I knew my talents were in that direction."

She studied creative therapy but abandoned her course, instead taking an evening class in carpentry and discovering a talent for it. She decided to go to design school but was initially rejected by Design Academy Eindhoven for being "too technical".

Designing for Vitra and KLM

She was eventually accepted and graduated from the academy in the early 1990s. She then became part of Droog, a highly influential design collective started by Gijs Bakker and Renny Ramakers that launched the careers of a new generation of Dutch designers including Jongerius, Richard Hutten and Marcel Wanders.

She quickly began to get work from design brands around the world including New York textile firm Maharam and Swiss furniture brand Vitra.

The radical, blocky Polder sofa she designed for Vitra in 2005 became one of its best-selling products. However, when Vitra's then-chairman Rolf Fehlbaun first asked her to design it, her reaction was:  "I don't have a sofa. I hate sofas!"

Jongerius has also worked with Dutch airline KLM to transform its cabin interiors, using textiles and colour in a way never before seen in aviation design.

"I think we created a human space within this very hard industrial world and inconvenient space," Jongerius explained.

"Too much shit design"

Jongerius has previously spoken out about the wastefulness of industrial production. Her 2015 manifesto Beyond the New, written with theorist Louise Schouwenberg, called for an end to "pointless products, commercial hypes and empty rhetoric" in design.

"There's too much shit design," she said in the podcast. "It's easy to say but the answer is so much more difficult."

However, Jongerius remains optimistic about the role designers can play.

"I want to fight the battles within the industry," she said. "It is slow, it's boring and it's bullshit but there are the real challenges and there we can really change something."

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team Dezeen Studio, Face to Face episodes will be released every Tuesday for the next eight weeks. Interviewees will include David Chipperfield, Roksanda Ilinčić and Tom Dixon.

Designer Thomas Heatherwick featured on the previous episode of Face to Face, where he discussed his childhood fascination with engineering, his distaste for architectural discourse and how he completed his first building while still a student.

The podcast features original music composed by Japanese designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki.

Face to Face is sponsored by Twinmotion, the real-time architectural visualisation solution that can create immersive photo and video renders in seconds.

Subscribe to Dezeen's podcasts

You can listen to Face to Face here on Dezeen or subscribe on podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

The post The design industry is "slow, boring and bullshit" says Hella Jongerius in Dezeen's latest podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen's Face to Face podcast series continues with an interview with designer Thomas Heatherwick, who talks about his childhood fascination with engineering, his distaste for architectural discourse and how he completed his first building while still a student.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

In the Face to Face series, Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs sits down with leading architects and designers to discuss their lives.

Heatherwick started off by talking about his studio, which is located close to Kings Cross station in London and is full of models and collected objects.

"My studio is a giant version of my bedroom when I was nine years old," he explained. "A lot of the objects are remnants of design processes that we've been working on and failed experiments."

Childhood influences

Growing up in north London, Heatherwick was curious about objects from an early age. "I was interested in engineering, so my parents would watch what I was interested in," he said.

"And so if we were talking about cars, the next weekend we would go to [...] the car show. Or if we were looking at buildings, my father then took me to Milton Keynes, where a whole new city was being built."

Architecture "left me cold"

Though he was interested in architecture, the aloofness of the profession put him off, so he decided to study design instead. "I'd witnessed how disconnected the architectural world at that time was from the real creation of places," he said. "It left me cold."

Yet he was always interested in architecture and city-making. He designed his first building when still a student of three-dimensional design at Manchester Polytechnic University.

The small wood, metal and plastic pavilion was inspired by a collapsing farm building. Realising he couldn't build it on his own, he involved people from other departments and local industry to help him.

"I can't work effectively by myself"

Heatherwick explained how this collaborative approach has defined the way he has worked since.

"I can't work effectively by myself," he said. "And it's no fun. I feel sorry for artists who work by themselves. And so the studio has grown out of that."

While Heatherwick isn't a trained architect, he's now building on a huge scale, with projects such as the new Google campus in Mountain View, California underway.

His large-scale projects, including the new Coal Drops Yard in London and the Vessel in New York, feature a strong dimension of public accessibility designed to encourage social interaction. Coal Drops Yard, for example, features lift buttons that are "a bit rude" to provoke people to touch them.

"People are lonelier than ever"

According to Heatherwick, this stems from his interest in a "human-centred approach" to design that counters the effect the digital realm has had on placemaking by creating "hyper-physical spaces".

"People are potentially lonelier than ever," Heatherwick said. "The digital has meant the hyper-physical has become more important than ever."

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team Dezeen Studio, Face to Face episodes will be released every Tuesday for the next eight weeks. Interviewees will include Hella Jongerius, John Pawson and Roksanda Ilinčić.

Artist, designer and director Es Devlin featured on the first episode of Face to Face, where she discussed her seaside upbringing, her maverick student years and her meteoric career.

The podcast features original music composed by Japanese designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki.

Face to Face is sponsored by Twinmotion, the real-time architectural visualisation solution that can create immersive photo and video renders in seconds.

Subscribe to Dezeen's podcasts

You can listen to Face to Face here on Dezeen or subscribe on podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

The post "My studio is a giant version of my bedroom when I was nine years old" says Thomas Heatherwick in Dezeen's latest podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen's new Face to Face podcast series kicks off with an interview with artist, designer and director Es Devlin, who discusses her seaside upbringing, her maverick student years and her meteoric career.

Listen to the episode below or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts to catch the whole series.

In the Face to Face series, Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs sits down with leading architects and designers to discuss their lives.

Working with Kanye West

The first episode features Devlin explaining how she first became a theatre designer before branching into stage design, creating sets for artists including Beyoncé, Kanye West and U2. The interview took place in the bedroom of her home and studio in south London.

"I've known Es for a few years and she really is one of the most amazing, electrifying people to speak to," said Fairs.

"She peppers her dialogue with references to art, science, movies, culture, theatre, literature and quite often the references go over my head and I have to sit there nodding as if I've read that book or seen that play."

Obstacle courses for guinea pigs

Devlin grew up near the coast in East Sussex, England. "We were making a lot of stuff because there wasn't a lot else to do," she said of her earliest creative experiments.

"And it was mainly using Kellogg's cornflakes packets or toilet rolls or making runs for the gerbils and obstacle courses for the guinea pigs."

Devlin studied literature at Bristol University but was a rule-breaker from the outset.  "Every time someone wanted me to write an essay, all I wanted to do was to paint a picture," she said. "I deviated a lot from the course."

Later, when studying theatre design, she continued with her maverick approach. "I didn't pay any regard to the stage direction," she explained. "So if it said on the play, this play takes place in a room with doors, I didn't actually read that part."

"A fluke that happened three times"

She describes her move into the world of pop stars as "a fluke".

"It was a fluke that happened three times," she recalled. "There were three pop artists who all asked me to design their concerts at the same time. It was the Pet Shop Boys, a singer called Mika, and Kanye West."

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team Dezeen Studio, Face to Face episodes will be released every Tuesday at 9:00am for the next eight weeks. Interviewees will include Thomas Heatherwick, Hella Jongerius and Norman Foster. The podcast features original music composed by Japanese designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki.

Face to Face is sponsored by Twinmotion, the real-time architectural visualisation solution that can create immersive photo and video renders in seconds.

Subscribe to Dezeen's podcasts

You can listen to Face to Face here on Dezeen or subscribe on podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Read on for a full transcript of the interview:

Marcus Fairs: Hi Es.

Es Devlin: Hi Marcus.

Marcus Fairs: Could you just describe yourself? Who are you and what do you do?

Es Devlin: I'm a designer, artist, director who works across a range of fields, quite a wide range of fields, including large scale architectural works, gallery installations, theatre, opera and concerts.

Marcus Fairs: And do you describe yourself as a designer or an artist? What's your favourite creative title here?

Es Devlin: So actually, at the moment, I'm calling myself an artist, designer, director.

Marcus Fairs: And if you could just explain where we are – It's quite an unusual setup you have here.

Es Devlin: Well, my studio is in my house in southeast London. And my studio is quite busy today. So we have taken refuge upstairs in my bedroom.

Marcus Fairs: And describe your studio because when I walked in there earlier there were two giant hands there and all kinds of other things. There's models all over the place, describe the setup and describe your working environment.

Es Devlin: So we're in an Edwardian house on a street in southeast London, and the front part of the house is a series of Edwardian living rooms that have been knocked together to form a series of workspaces which are aligned with books, models, relics of previous projects. There's a giant pair of hands that are left over from a Carmen opera that we did on the lake in Bregenz. There are lots of models of Abel from the Weeknd’s head lying around. We rather like being surrounded. There are eight of us in there and we rather like being surrounded by a little memory palace of works that we've touched on before.

Marcus Fairs: Because a lot of your work is ephemeral, isn't it? It's a stage set. It's something that you build and then gets taken away. So I guess these are little mementoes? Are they from things that don't exist anymore?

Es Devlin: Yes, I mean, lately, of course, I've realised that everything I've been saying about the ephemerality of my work is utter crap because it leaves the most massive carbon footprint. So it's just the little bits of ephemera in my studio and a shit load of carbon in the atmosphere, unfortunately.

Marcus Fairs: We'll come back to your working process later. But just to give everyone an idea of the scale of these hands that I was talking about. Were they three meters high or something?

Es Devlin: Indeed, the ones that were in my studio are three meters high, and they were the small scale model of the ones that emerged out of Lake Constance, which were 29 meters high.

Marcus Fairs: Let's take it back to the beginning. Tell us about your upbringing. Where did you grow up? What did your family do? What were your earliest memories and where, how was your early life?

Es Devlin: I'm fundamentally a child of 1970s/19080s suburbia. I was born in Kingston upon Thames, and that's where I spent the first six years of my life and my mother was a teacher of English and my dad was an education journalist on The Times. And they went for a romantic weekend in the small town of Rye in Sussex. And they came back having changed their life and we moved there in 1977.

And that changed everything for us because we then grew up more or less on the beach. We went to Camber Sands after school pretty much every day or Winchelsea beach and it was a much more feral, wild upbringing. We went to Beckley Woods we picked things in the forest, we foraged. So that changed everything really in my childhood. And there was such a mythology around that town. Rye had a way of telling its stories. They had a little model that lit up and told its own town stories. So storytelling and architecture, and the countryside became very much linked to my mind.

Marcus Fairs: So you're a child living in this kind of cute little seaside town with these expanses of beach and forest and marsh around you. But did you, at that time, realise that you had a creative streak? Were you in the woods making tree houses or weaving reeds or anything like that?

Es Devlin: We were making a lot of stuff. Yes, because there wasn't a lot else to do. I was one of four children. I am one of four children. And our constant refrain was we're bored. I'm bored. What should we do? And our parents always said, Well, if you're bored, it's because you're boring. And we didn’t want to be boring. So we found something to do. And it was mainly using, you know, Kellogg's corn flakes packets or toilet rolls or making runs for the gerbils or making, you know, obstacle courses for the guinea pigs. We spent a lot of time on our hands and knees on the floor, making stuff. I actually think I developed a little kind of flatness in my chin because I used to rest my chin on my knee when I was concentrating, cutting things up on the floor.

Rye has a sort of pagan tradition of Bonfire Night and Guy Fawkes. And we would always make a Guy you know, we would make that up. And then Halloween was a big time for making things, cutting up masks and costumes. So there was quite a lot of theatre just in the sort of ritual available in that town anyway. And my parents made stuff. My dad crochets my mom paints, they're both very hands-on creative people.

Marcus Fairs: And did you find that you were good at that? Were your masks better than all the other kids' masks?

Es Devlin: I was really hard worker. You know, I was diligent. I would just spend hours and hours and hours on it. I was slow, diligent. I think probably in that sort of Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours thing, I clocked up a lot of hours.

Marcus Fairs: So what would the next step then how did that start to become a career? You went to art school, didn't you?

Es Devlin: Yeah. Well, we moved from Rye, largely because of the schools actually. Oddly Stella McCartney lived there and they all went to the local school but my mum and dad didn't want us to go there. So we moved to Cranbrook in Kent, which has a really nice school that you can go to for free. So we went there. It was one of those, you know, grammar schools that probably shouldn't exist, to be honest, but it was a really nice school. So all four of us went there. And they had a great art department.

And at the time, it was around the resurgence of land art. So there was Richard Long that was Goldsworthy. Our art teacher, Chris Thomas, was really into the land art movement. So he would take us into Bedgbury Pinetum and we would make a shelter and sleep in it, and then spend the days making sculptures in the forest. So that was sort of my way into sculpture and environmental sculpture a bit. I didn't take the course of going to art school straight from school.

And largely because in that period of 1989, or whatever it was, if you went to art school, you stayed living at home. So I would have gone to Maidstone art school and lived at home and all I wanted to do was to that thing of going away to university. I wanted to leave home. So I decided instead to study literature. And I went to Bristol University and read for three years, which I am really glad I did now because I would never have had time again in my life to sit for three years and just read.

Marcus Fairs: And during that period we're you still being creative? Or was it all channelled through writing?

Es Devlin: No, of course, every time someone wanted me to write an essay, all I wanted to do was paint a picture. I painted the floor of my house. I made stained glass windows. Yeah, I was busy making stuff. I got involved in the theatre there. I deviated a lot from the course and also the literature that attracted me was very concrete imagery. So I would always find the concrete imagery, the thing that was very imagistic in the writing.

Marcus Fairs: And at that point were you making a connection between literature and three-dimensional space? You mentioned you went to the theatre but was that something that you were already experimenting with? How could you realise your ideas and relationships to plays or did that come later?

Es Devlin: Oddly enough, my connection at Bristol University was that I directed a piece: Joe Orton’s autobiography called Diary of a Somebody. Again, the reason I chose that piece to direct was because [English playwright] Joe Orton famously used to go to the library and steal pages and cut them out and made this massive collage on his wall. And I was drawn to that play because of that piece of imagery. I wanted to make that collage. So I said, Well, I'll direct the play so I can make that collage. So that was really the theatre connection. At that point, I wasn't specifically thinking of translating from text to image directly, but I think I was building towards it subconsciously.

Marcus Fairs: So you directed the play. Did you also design the set or did you get someone else to do that?

Es Devlin: No, me and my friend Becky Hardy, who's now Margaret Atwood's editor actually, one of my dearest old friends. She and I did it together. And we just sort of directed it, designed it and generally cried in the corner and did our best.

Marcus Fairs: And what happened after that then?

Es Devlin: Then, of course, I wanted to go to art school. I had no clear concept of a job. And I was privileged enough to have had a boyfriend who was quite a bit older than me. He was paying the rent. So I didn't have to get a job. I was lucky. So I went to St. Martin's and did the foundation course after I'd done the degree, and I loved that. That was such a great year.

Marcus Fairs: So tell us about that time then.

Es Devlin: God can you imagine! I was 21. Everyone else was 18. I had no interest in going out and hanging out with 18-year-olds. I was like a little swat and I was just working, working working. I was a mature student. There was another one as well. We got on great actually. I got on with quite a lot of them. They're really interesting people. And yeah, can you imagine suddenly, having been in a library for three years, that foundation course at St. Martin's was, you know, a week in the darkroom doing photography, a week in the fashion studio, a week in the theatre studio, a week in the sculpture room? It was like Christmas. It was really rich education.

Marcus Fairs: And what was that era in London? What was going on in music and culture?

Es Devlin: Well, that was it. I think it was around 93. I went out every night. [Influential dancer and choreographer] Pina Bausch was here. [Experimental theatre director] Robert Wilson was here. There was a load of stuff going on at the South Bank. Tons of stuff going on at the Hayward. It was rich, rich, you know? Well, it was for me. I guess London's always rich. It was a period where I went to things rather than missed things. You know, it's had a big influence that period.

Marcus Fairs: So you were very much involved in literary culture rather than the pop scene because it was also a lot of music going on around that time?

Es Devlin: Well actually, the guy I was going out with, Clive Martin, is a record producer. So we would go to gigs a lot. But his special area of interest was live bands. So it was just that period where the live bands were beginning to resurge having been overwhelmed in the 80s somewhat by electronica. So we were going to see an awful lot of things live. I guess it was around the time of Britpop as well. It was all that Pulp and Blur and all that stuff.

Marcus Fairs: I was going to mention Pulp because that song about, you know, "she studied sculpture at Saint Martins college"...

Es Devlin: That was pretty much me. Not the whole lyric. Maybe that lyric.

Marcus Fairs: You did the foundation course and what happened after that?

Es Devlin: So after the foundation course then of course, I got offered a place to do another degree. And it was going to be in photography and printmaking at Central Saint Martins. And there was a wonderful teacher called Susan. I'm not gonna remember her surname right now, but I'll look it up. She was a beautiful bookmaker, and I wanted to make sculptural books. And we were going to just roll on and do that. And then I sort of looked at myself in the eyes and thought I can't really do another three years in education. And actually, my boyfriend at the time, his dad rang me up and said ‘you can't sponge off my son forever’. Get a job.

Marcus Fairs: Did the boyfriend know about this call?

Es Devlin: Yeah, I mean, he didn't mind but it was just a general feeling that I ought to perhaps make some money at some point. So I thought, well I better do something somewhat more directed towards making money and I thought better not do another three-year degree. So people kept saying to me, literally five different, completely unrelated people, said you really should do theatre design. And actually, although I went to see quite a lot of very visual pieces like Pina Bausch or Robert Wilson, the actual straight out theatre, I didn't go to too much. Just the text on its own with a sort of box scenery environment didn't excite me as much.

And actually, when we had done the theatre design module during the foundation course, although it was very well taught by a wonderful teacher called Michael Vale, it didn't make me think ‘oh, yes, this is for me’. So I hadn't really been drawn to it diagnostically through that diagnostic foundation course process. But people kept saying "why don't you check out this little course called Motley Theatre design course", which was a one year course only taught by people who already practised.

So I went around, walked in, and they had this little grotty studio around the back of Miss Saigon, in the back of the theatre on Old Drury Lane. And it was full of old pot noodles and mice and 10 feral students who were there all night. And I just thought this feels good. Everyone was making little models and reading books. And every night at 10pm, you could hear the helicopter lift up in Miss Saigon, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical next door.

The thing that clinched it for me was that the studio was open 24 hours. And by then whatever I was doing, I was doing it 24 hours a day. So the idea of going into a degree at Saint Martins where you had to be out of the place at six. I thought "I can't really work like that". I need a studio 24 hours a day. And I thought, well, if the theatre design thing doesn't work out, I'll just use that studio space.

Marcus Fairs: And you found a love for designing for the theatre. You already had a love for theatre itself, but how did it come about that you became a theatre designer?

Es Devlin: I just got locked into the rhythm of practice. I found an architecture for my particular sort of rambling trains of thought to lock into. There was a system. Through that course we designed six pieces. And the final piece was put on at Rose Bruford College. And then at the very end of that course was a competition called the Linbury Prize for stage design. And the prize in that competition was to put a show on at the Octagon Theatre in Bolton.

So in a way, what I'm trying to say is I didn't have a chance to look down. I was rattling through this course and having given quite a lot of consideration and pondering… "What might I do? What would be the best thing to do?". I was too busy to think about it. I just got on with it. And I think that's true for a lot of people at that point in their life. You just need to step on one tread and then just keep plodding forward in a direction and find some developments. That's what I did. I ended up designing the show in Bolton and realizing I could do it and then after that people asked me to do other ones.

Marcus Fairs: And you talked about your upbringing on the South Coast being feral and you talked about how you loved this studio next door to Miss Saigon because it was open 24 hours and the sense of freedom and you used the word feral again. How did you then find a discipline to work? You're such a wild child that you could never have developed the discipline of being able to deliver.

Es Devlin: I may have misrepresented the wildness of my childhood because although, you know, we were running around the place, my mom was a teacher. And my dad was a journalist in education. They were education obsessives, we were very diligent at school. We were real workers. You know, we studied for all our exams, we got all our A's and B's. By the time we'd hit end of school, we had a really solid work ethic. So knuckling down and working wasn't a problem. I just needed to find a direction to sort of run that Duracell battery.

Marcus Fairs: So you knew what a deadline was then?

Es Devlin: Deadlines I wasn’t so brilliant at. Working hard I was.

Marcus Fairs: So tell us how your career took off then?

Es Devlin: Well, I did that first piece. And then because I was, you know, excited and enthusiastic, I wrote letters to a lot of directors and said "I'd love you to come see my play." I did a little play at the Bush theatre. And I was audacious enough to write a letter to Trevor Nunn, who at that point was running the National Theatre. And I said "Dear Trevor Nunn, please come see my little play". And he did. And he then asked me to do a play at the National Theatre, a Harold Pinter piece called Betrayal on the big Lyttleton stage, and then it progressed from there really. I went to the Royal Shakespeare Company, a lot of stuff at the National Theatre, The Royal Court. Once you got going, it was pretty fluid.

Marcus Fairs: And how did you approach theatre design? Because I'm not someone who goes to the theatre that much but my view of theatre design was that it wasn't that exciting. Of all the visual arts, it was not one of the ones that I would say was where things were happening, where avant-garde ideas were being experimented with. So how did you approach it? How did you make it different? How did you make it exciting?

Es Devlin: I didn't pay any regard to the stage direction. So if it said on the play ‘this play takes place and room with doors’, I didn't actually read that part. I was used to studying literature and imagining directly from text into image. I made sculptures and I was heavily immersed in contemporary art. So those are my influences. Sort of drawing on contemporary art and the wider art history that I had been studying. So I drew from that. I guess I was practising within the framework of a theatre with the primary text of a play by my side, but I was kind of practising like a visual artist.

Marcus Fairs: So you literally didn't stick to the script.

Es Devlin: I treated the script like a primary text for me to respond to. And I made my response to it, knowing that there would be a performance within the environment I created. So it wasn't creating illustrations or a translation of the text because the performance would do that. I was creating a kind of counterpart.

Marcus Fairs: I read an anecdote about the Harold Pinter play Betrayal that you mentioned. Tell us what he said to you afterwards.

Es Devlin: It's funny because the way this anecdote got reported recently was as if I was saying it was a compliment when it was actually a complete backhanded slap. It's quite funny. Basically the play Betrayal is a very perfect, exquisite work of art. And the one thing it really did not need was little old me responding to it, to be honest. It would have been much happier in a white box. But at that time, it was 1998. Rachel Whiteread had just done her house at Bow. And that piece was so compelling at that moment, I was intoxicated with it.

And actually, when Trevor Nunn asked me to do Betrayal, I said ‘why don't we just ask Rachel Whiteread if we can perform this piece at House’ because it was so much about memory. To me the piece had been designed, Rachel had done it. And actually I wrote to Rachel. And I said ‘Listen, Trevor, doesn’t think that we can do it underneath your building, but can we bring your building into the National Theatre?’ And she wrote back and said ‘knock yourself out’. So we sort of recreated chunks of her house and in my mind, that just seemed like the right thing to do.

And then we projected all over it. And, you know, it was the thing in itself. One could argue now that it was entirely surplus to requirement. Harold, because he'd seen Betrayal done in a white box 50,000 times, he was quite happy to see the sort of Baroque version of it. But yeah, as a backhanded compliment when he introduced me to Antonia, his wife, he just said "this is her, she wrote the play" as a joke.

Marcus Fairs: Or rewrote the play.

Es Devlin: He didn't even say that.

Marcus Fairs: Let's jump forward then. So you established yourself as a theatre designer, but now if we look at the things that you do. You're working with rock stars, pop stars, stages, opera. You delved into AI, you've done fashion and everything like that. How did you start to then diversify outwards, which is not easy to do? Most creatives, they find their niche and they stay in it.

Es Devlin: Yeah. And before I answer that question, I just want to say one more thing about why I did theatre because as you rightly say, it wasn't the most glamorous. You didn't look at it and go right, that is where it's at. Right at that time, I could see that there was a structure of resources and teams and humanity available to collaborate with to put stuff on. I liked those people. I like that tribe of people. Remember we had come out of the 80s, I was a child of Thatcher most of my time. You know, we just ended decades of Conservative government just passing 1997 and I found a group of people who none of them were being paid.

There were a lot of people working in the theatre, working late at night, working around the clock collectively. Not to express themselves, but to make a collective expression. And doing it basically because they wanted to do it for free. There wasn't a client. And if the client was anyone, it was the person who bought a ticket. But there wasn't a client. You made it together because it was the right thing to make. I think that's why I was drawn to it. And I could see that the people were great. Yes, people weren't doing particularly interesting things with it all the time. But I could see some people were. You know, Pina Bausch. There was a lot of stuff that was great.

So that's why I think I was drawn to that group of people, thinking I can make something with them. But to answer your second question, your question was, how did it then sort of transpire that I shifted from one medium to another, and you know what, I think it may have been luck because theatre naturally leads to opera. I think people have got a little fed up with my overreach in the world of text and straight drama, so I was slightly moving out of that anyway. Whereas people who worked in opera, especially European opera, were quite drawn to what I was doing. So I moved pretty much into doing opera design.

I say it was a fluke. But it was a fluke that happened three times. There were three, three pop artists who all asked me to design their concerts at the same time. It was the Pet Shop Boys, a singer called Mika, and Kanye West. It was all in 2005. And for different reasons. Mika because David McVicker who's an opera director, and I were doing a Salome opera at the Royal Opera House, and there was a Southbank show documentary about it.

And Mika watched it. I was very pregnant in 2008, or it must have been earlier than. Anyway I was pregnant in 2006 and he saw me being actually kind of torn apart. A design I had put together was not liked by the director, and he observed how I responded. Apparently, I flinched and then carried on, tore the spiral staircase out of the design and just carried on. And Mika is a sensitive guy and he picked up on that. He said "I want her to work with me".

Alex Poots used to run a festival called Only Connect at the Barbican Centre. And he put on this festival and his whole fascination was to put unlikely collaborations together. And he thought it'd be interesting if I would collaborate with post-punk band called Wire. And he asked me to do it, but I didn't respond. It was the early days of email and I didn't respond. So he then asked the Chapman brothers to do it. Then I did see the email and I did respond. He said ‘well, can I have both?’. So I did the second half of the show and the Chapman Brothers did the first half and that was in 2003. So he has to be credited really with that first transference to pop music.

Marcus Fairs: And then you said about these three musicians that got in touch and did you work with all of them?

Es Devlin: Yeah, I was excited to do that. You know, I was really excited. I mean, although I've been to a lot of small gigs, I hadn't really spent much time in a stadium or an arena. So pretty much my first experience was when working in there. It's quite a sensation being around 100,000 people roaring.

Marcus Fairs: It must have been quite a culture shock as well, because you talked about what you'd liked about the theatre was this culture of people, this dedication to the cause, people working for no money, probably taking quite a long time to put things together and get the funding, the rehearsals and then rock and roll, which is fast, big bucks, international people getting on and off planes. How did you cope with that transition?

Es Devlin: I rather enjoyed it. Can you imagine? The epitome of this must have been around 2006 where I found myself at the sort of junction of these various fields I was working in, and I was in Miami rehearsing for Kanye’s Touch the Sky tour, but I had also committed to being at a meeting in Spain about a production I was doing with an Australian Director at Hamburg. We were doing a Benjamin Britten opera, Midsummer Night's Dream. And I had committed to being in Manchester doing a new play called All the Ordinary Angels. And I'd sort of managed to mess it up so that these things had to happen on the same day.

So I found myself flying from Miami to Manchester, just to go to a little meeting. I then sat in this rather quiet room in Manchester, where the only question that came up for me as the set designer "was did I like this prop teacup? Was it the right one?". I said "yes" and then I got into some kind of transport to Liverpool to fly to Spain to sit in a quiet rural house to talk about Benjamin Britten for a week. You know, so you're absolutely right. It was a clash of timescales and rhythms.

Marcus Fairs: But you're still juggling those different worlds and then some more as well. Including, now you’ve started to become an artist in your own right rather than just working for other people. So why don't you talk about that transition as well?

Es Devlin: Really, I have to credit that to Louis Vuitton. I was invited in 2014 to work with [Louis Vuitton creative director] Nicolas Ghesquière on his runway shows. He has already done one, but this was his second. The Fondation Louis Vuitton, the beautiful Frank Gehry building, had just been built. And we were to make the first show there. I hadn't been to a fashion show. I didn't know anything about how to do them, which is just how I like it really, because I think my mind, and I think many people's minds, are much more agile when you're an outsider, and we don't know the rules.

And you're somewhat wrong-footed at every point. And you need to keep doing that to yourself. So we began making shows and at a certain point, they wanted to make an exhibition. Knowing that not many people can visit the fashion show, how do you communicate the clothes to the public. So at 180 The Strand, before it sort of became what it is now in London, we took over that 22,000 square-foot [space] and tried to turn the fashion catwalk show inside out so that it was the audience who we're walking, and the show communicated itself to as you walked through.

This, to me, was an utter treat of a canvas. A perambulatory, promenade piece of theatre communicating an artist's train of thought, in this case Nicolas Ghesquière’s train of thought. So having just come out of doing that, I got an email from i-D magazine. I couldn’t quite understand the email. I misread it and I thought they said would you like to make an installation of 12,000-square-foot in a warehouse in Peckham of your own? And I actually looked back at that email to re-scrutinise it not that long ago. It actually said ‘can you make us a three minute perfume advert’. I read into it what I wanted to say.

So because I had this in my mind I went straight on from the Louis Vuitton series three-piece into making this mirror maze installation, which was just me doing what came as naturally the next step. I made a short meditation on architecture, geometry and identity. But because I've had a long anxiety about filmmaking, something I always kind of feel I should one day do but haven't got around to yet. I often put forward a little critique of films, when I sit in the cinema I go ‘god that was good, but what could have made it better’. And often, I reached the conclusion that the film would have been better if it had a hole in it. So you could walk through the hole and into something sculptural, rather than just watching the effect of the light that creates the sculptural illusion.

So I fulfilled that ambition and made a film with a hole. So you came in, you watch a two and a half minute film with a hole in it, an oval hole. And then at the end of the film, you walked through the hole, and you were in the environment that you'd seen being created in the film, which was this large scale mirror maze. And then finally, you found yourself in a scent that Chanel made specifically just for five days that we called Chanel SE15. And so that was the first piece and it worked well.

Marcus Fairs: So you did both then, you did a three-minute commercial, and you filled this big space as well, so you managed to keep everyone happy.

Es Devlin: Well, I mean, this is a larger point. The opportunities and the resources that are available within the communication of a market. And there's no reason why one can't slightly hijack those resources and use them in pursuit of one's own methodology, right, which is what I did.

Marcus Fairs: And tell us about how you work. I remember coming here 18 months ago or something like that. You were working with Katy Perry at the time. And I was really astonished to see that she would be sending you an email, you’d print out the email, draw some sketches on it, get your assistant to scan it and send it back. Is that typical?

Es Devlin: Yes, sketching. Whichever field it's in, it’s always just a piece of paper and a pencil. I can sketch and often I will do a scale drawing. But I often don't have a ruler. I want to scale the drawing to the piece of paper. So I tear off the edge of the piece of paper. And I just draw some pretty even looking lines and say "well, those will be meters for this drawing". And sort of organically make my own scale drawing like that. I don't really use the computer or ruler. I just draw it like that.

Marcus Fairs: And how do you work with someone like Kanye West then. Someone who's like a genius in his own right and probably has very strong ideas. What happens when your brain meets Kanye’s? How does that process work?

Es Devlin: Well, I haven't worked with Kanye for a while. I last worked with Kanye in 2013. He's doing extraordinarily brilliant things. Any of those artists who are in my opinion quite bionic people. You know, in that Malcolm Gladwell definition of someone who's done something for 10,000 hours. They've all done stuff for at least 200,000 hours I would say. Forget 10. And I guess artists like that work with people like me in that they know what my framework is going to be there.

I think Kanye once said "I just want a lot of people in the room". Vanessa Beecroft, John McGuire, myself, Virgil Abloh and he just said "I want to hear the Virgil of it, the John of it, the Vanessa of it and the Es of it". So often those people they know exactly which segment you're going to bring to the train of thought.

Marcus Fairs: And is that a community similar to the community you liked so much in theatre?

Es Devlin: My goodness it can be. November is awards season in rock and roll. So it's a moment for a lot of artists to create small sketches. Incredibly well-resourced sketches, so it will be a three-minute performance on the MTV Awards or something and it can go for nothing. Or it can be an exquisite little short film. Those people at MTV, I've actually been working with them for the past 10 years. And I know them all. I've seen their children grow up. And we have a two-hour rehearsal segment. The budget can be up to a million pounds or more.

And you're spending that pretty much in two hours with the decisions that you make. "That will go there, this light will come on, this will be yellow, she will stand here, this camera shot will be static". Those decisions are made like that. Only this little huddle of people who know each other, who trust each other. And we'll just take and execute at speed to make that the right thing that it needs to be. It's a very tight set of parameters that particular one to work in and it's the opposite of a sort of luxurious, sprawling, around the table, conversational theatre process. But equally when you make a piece of theatre a lot of the final work comes down to decisions that were made in quite tight stretches of time in a technical rehearsal.

Marcus Fairs: And we were talking at the beginning about your studio downstairs and the shelves of all the models of the opera sets and the theatre sets, which are probably handmade at scale over a period of time. But with some of these faster TV-based things is your scribble on the torn off piece of paper it? Is that your input that's then sent off?

Es Devlin: I mean no because everything has to go through the studio. Something I didn't mention earlier, which I should mention is when I talk about theatre and how these things come about, it's endless conversation with collaborators. You know, I have these ongoing trains of thought conversations with theatre directors, Lyndsey Turner, Sam Mendes, Kasper Holten in opera. Those are ongoing conversations that get translated into work as well. None of this happens out of my little head on its own at all.

And equally, my little sketch goes into those amazing group of women and men downstairs, who translate it into a buildable thing. You can't build up my sketch, it's meaningless. It all gets translated into beautiful 3D models and they give their lives to it. You know, these people downstairs, they are working around the clock, they are missing their boyfriends and girlfriends. They're missing anniversaries and dinners. They are dedicated. They're extraordinary people.

Marcus Fairs: And you talk about a lot of decisions being made on the fly. But if someone asks you to come up with a brief - do you go for a walk to come up with ideas? Do you lock yourself in a dark room? Or do ideas just flood your head all the time?

Es Devlin: Often it's an ongoing part of a conversation and there's a few conversations going on at once. So there's conversations directly with these musicians and these artists. There's conversations with theatre directors and opera directors. And then there's the conversation with the eight people in my studio. So generally, yes, there's the thing where I do wake up in the morning and usually something's there for me.

But it's the beginning, or it's a fragment. And I take that into a room full of people. And it's never alone. It's always with a group. And it's always conversation. I would just say ‘well, what if it's this and what if it's that?’. In the case of musicians, they often have an extraordinary series of people already around them who they've been talking to for five years. So I want to pick up on that depth of engagement. I don't want to just turn up and start from scratch, you know,

Marcus Fairs: And of course now you're working at an architectural scale as well. You’re commissioned to design the British pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. So tell us about that jump of scale.

Es Devlin: If you think about the first Great Exhibition in 1851, and you think about this country that we live in and the impact that a small island has had pretty much igniting the Industrial Revolution, which led to so much progress. We now find ourselves in this calamity of where the Industrial Revolution has led us from a climate point of view. Isn't it incumbent upon us, this little small island, to now be broadcasting from this building. It is designed a bit like a musical instrument in that it is there to broadcast. Shouldn't we now be broadcasting ways in which we can try and unravel and unpick this calamity?

Listen, the Expo’s in Dubai. The site that we will be building on, is sponsored by Saudi Aramco. It's incumbent upon the UK, who has been the first country to declare a climate emergency – we’re the first of the G7 countries to commit to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. We have to put all our effort in that particular realm to broadcast and celebrate and explore and examine ways to communicate that.

Marcus Fairs: So tell us quickly what the pavilion will be then?

Es Devlin: It's a giant musical instrument, sort of like a conch. A big conical shape made from extruded, cross-laminated timber. On its facade, big circular facade, concealed LEDs illuminate and communicate a collective poem. And the collective poem is achieved by each visitor contributing a single word, which then passes through an algorithm. And on the front of the building, the collective text is broadcast ever-changing.

Marcus Fairs: And that's one of your ongoing experiments using AI isn’t it? To generate poetry and so on and so forth and crowd sampling and things?

Es Devlin: Yeah, it came about because in 2016, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yana Peel at the Serpentine Gallery invited me to make some kind of work to celebrate their annual gala. And I wanted to make a piece that could gather that 1500 people into a single work. Google Arts and Culture already had an algorithm Ross Goodwin had created. And we pushed that forward and made this collective poetry algorithm. So I've been working with it. I then, as a sort of anti-Brexit comment, took it to Trafalgar Square and painted one of the lions red and got one of the lions to make a collective poem anyone could contribute a word to. So this is a progression of that work.

Marcus Fairs: Some people think that artificial intelligence is going to take over and even take over what creative people like you do. Do you have a view on that?

Es Devlin: I know that my ability to predict is poor. I was given the first camera phone in 2003 Nokia and asked to predict how it would change us as a species. And I was absolutely un-visionary and just said ‘it's not a very good camera.’ So I don't have much faith in my ability to predict what AI will do but I do recommend anyone who wants to delve into that to read the wonderful Max Tegmark book Life 3.0.

Marcus Fairs: Which talks about a future in which artificial intelligence plays a prominent role.

Es Devlin: That's right, it hypothesises about the possibilities of a benevolent general AI. What would happen if the AI could predict conflicts before they arose and could influence those on each side of the conflict in such a way that the conflict never happened?

Marcus Fairs: And back briefly to the British pavilion in Dubai, I think you're the first woman to ever be given that commission. Do you see yourself as a woman creative or just a creative?

Es Devlin: Listen, I only know the experience that I've lived. It would be really interesting to have a go at the other version of life, maybe as a tiger or as a mouse or as a man. I only know the female version. I mean, I often find myself in rooms where I'm the only woman, but that's the only way I know it to have been.

Marcus Fairs: And do you see yourself as an active role model or a pioneer for greater diversity and equality and in industry,

Es Devlin: If you're a woman and you decide to have children then you are faced every day with the choice of going out and doing your absolute best you can in a project or being the best mother you can. But I do think that challenge is also faced by men. My husband feels as conflicted as a father. So I don't think that conflict is restricted only to women. But hopefully, I set an example of trying to find a balance and be content with equally failing as a mother and failing as an artist on a day by day, carefully calibrated basis.

Marcus Fairs: And you can see from being in your home that you have achieved some kind of balance because your studio is here, your husband's studio is here, your family is here.

Es Devlin: That's about using precise little, what I call, shoulder moments of time. The moment when I'm on the way out, the moment when I'm on the way in. Those can become moments of spending valuable time with the family, with the children, which if my studio was elsewhere, those moments would be taken to get there and back. And also, by the way, it's another way of trying to limit the carbon footprint of what we do. You know, there's eight people working here and we all eat together. We eat vegetarian food, we’re around the table, we use one cooker, we use one kitchen. And we're using one electricity bill. We're just trying to keep it as lean and mean as we can really.

Marcus Fairs: And just now we were talking about how you've now started to do projects under your own name, in your own right. Do you have a plan for the future? Are you going to carry on working in all these different areas or even expand that?

Es Devlin: This reminds me of a conversation that I had when I was at secondary school, and I was probably about 16 and the teacher said ‘are you going to focus or are you just gonna be a jack of all trades forever?’ and here we are 40 years later, 30 years later. I am a bit greedy it turns out. Like the Memory Palace piece that we've just made at Pitzhanger Manor has been the sort of next natural progression in that train of thought.

So it's a large scale installation. It's not associated with anyone who was trying to make an advert. It is bonafide in an art gallery, because it wants to be there, because someone commissioned it for the Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing which is the most stunning house. It was John Soane's country house and it's absolutely breathtaking. And they've given over one area of it to be a gallery and then rather visionary they had Anish Kapoor do their inaugural exhibition, and have invited me to do the next one and that and the one following me is also going to be really interesting. That was an absolute gift really because the brief was "do whatever you want, have this 60-foot-wide space and do whatever you want". And I knew that I wanted to make an imaginary map, a sort of gathering together of all the threads of things I've been thinking about.

So it's a map of a shift in human perspective over the past 73,000 years. Not least because I find myself at the moment really concerned with how as a species we're going to, and I know you're concerned with this too, how are we going to make the shift in perspective and the change of attitude and the change of habit that we know we need to make? Perhaps all the work I've been doing Marcus, perhaps all of this learning how to work with audiences, all of this learning how to use flashing lights and quiet sounds and loud sounds and colours and bright colours.

Maybe it's just been a sort of training to try to learn how to say the thing that really needs to be said, which is how we're going to protect our species and our biosphere from extinction. Not in a preachy way but just that I am rather influenced by Timothy Morton’s writing and his manifesto to artists when he says "please don't preach, just amaze us into changing our mind". And I guess that's where a lot of my energy is going at the moment.

Marcus Fairs: And right back at the beginning of this conversation when I mentioned your room full of models, and the ephemerality of a lot of your work. You immediately responded to say ‘but I realised I have a huge carbon footprint’ so this is clearly playing on your mind.

Es Devlin: Massively. I've just read a book which I can't recommend highly enough called Are We Human? by Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina. Oh, my goodness, it's a breathtaking book about the feedback loops between objects and humans. We design a flint, our hand now becomes a different kind of prosthesis. We design a mobile phone, you know, that redesigns us. You design an object, the object redesigns us. And it draws our attention to the web's networks that we’re caught in and I’m kind of beginning to reach a sort of train of thought, which suggests that I actually don't mind being caught up in a big web of interconnections.

You know, I love the fact that I can draw on the shared intelligence, the collective intelligence of so many people on the planet. I am delighted to be able to find the collective richness of connected minds there. What I'm less interested in being drawn into as a shop at every point. So I don't think there's anything wrong with the webs that we're weaving around ourselves. I think the trouble is that they're getting polluted and infected with market. It’s sort of a messy, old, tangled piece of string. How can we just unpick and keep the beautiful geometric web of connections between us, but know where to cauterize the ones that are really just shopping?

Marcus Fairs: And you make it sound like this is a process of becoming aware that you're still going through, but have you settled on a view of what you can do about this?

Es Devlin: I think it's a lot of small things. You know, really basic things markers, like making sure that my energy supplier is only renewable energy. Trying to divest my banking from a bank that isn’t heavily invested in fossil fuels will be this afternoon's mission. The word offset I find unhelpful because it suggests that one can but at least balance each flight I take with some trees that I'm planting in Sebastiao Salgado reforestation project and trying to tread lightly.

There was a beautiful thing that [environmentalist] George Monbiot said recently when he said: "Listen, I'm going to be accused of being a hypocrite". He said: "If we trouble ourselves with that – if all of us who are absolutely tangled in the system that we want question, if we're not allowed to question then who the hell can? If we're only gonna be called a hypocrite".

There's no option of moral purity so it isn't really a question of do you want to be a hypocrite or morally pure because there's no real option to be morally pure. So it's really a question of do you want to be a hypocrite? Or do you want to be a cynic? And I'd rather be a hypocrite than a cynic. So yeah, it's stepping lightly. My life takes me into places that are using massive amounts of resources. I do ridiculous small things. If I'm in a hotel, I use one towel. It's stupid little things. I go rapidly around the house turning off lights. I think the most useful thing I can do probably is use the skills I've learned of storytelling and communication to try to find those patterns, to try to find the patterns of connection.

I'll give you an example. You know, that Body Worlds exhibition and you see just the arterial system, devoid of anything else, and you look at it, and just as a visual person, you go "well, I'm obviously related to a tree". And then you read the James Gleick book Chaos, which explains to you that the equation that governs the division of an artery is the same equation that governs the division of the branches of a tree, which by the way, is the same equation that governs the way rain falls down your windscreen or the way that sheep arrange themselves randomly on a hill. So if we can, perhaps, recognise that a bit more and feel that connection between us and the rest of living and non-living beings. Perhaps we'll feel more able to consider ourselves worthy of not going extinct, if you see what I mean.

Marcus Fairs: And a final question, just now you said "the thing is with me is that I'm greedy" but I don't think you meant materially greedy or financially great. Is it greedy to experience everything? Is it greedy to be at the centre of this network? Or is it a kind of greed to be the one that finds the solution? What did you mean by that?

Es Devlin: Maybe greed was the wrong word. I think my curiosity is quite insatiable. I like the word "curiosity" because I found when looking up its etymology that it comes from the same root as to care. So "cure" means to care. So care, curate, curious all come from the same route. And I do think profound curiosity is profound caring and I think mine is endless.

Marcus Fairs: So it’s not that you're greedy, it's that you care.

Es Devlin: I think so. Curious.

Marcus Fairs: That's a good point to end on. Thank you so much, Es.

Es Devlin: Thank you.

The post "Every time someone wanted me to write an essay, all I wanted to do was paint a picture" says Es Devlin in Dezeen's new podcast appeared first on Dezeen.

Next week sees the launch of Face to Face, a new podcast series from Dezeen featuring conversations with the biggest names in architecture and design including Es Devlin, Norman Foster and Thomas Heatherwick.

The first episode, featuring a conversation with artist and stage designer Es Devlin, will be available to download on Tuesday 10 March. Subscribe now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts to make sure you don't miss an episode.

In the meantime, listen to the trailer below for a preview of what's to come:

Hosted by Dezeen's founder and editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs, each hour-long conversation will give intimate access to the biggest names in architecture and design, exploring who they are and how they got to where they are today.

"We report on the work of architects and designers every day, but we rarely get a chance to get close to the people behind the work," Fairs says in the trailer episode.

Tune in over the next eight weeks for hour-long interviews with leading figures in architecture and design.

As well as Devlin, Foster and Heatherwick, the series will feature industrial designer Hella Jongerius, architect John Pawson, fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčić, designer Tom Dixon and architect David Chipperfield.

Subscribe to the podcast to hear Devlin describe her earliest creative experiments, which involved making obstacle courses for her guinea pigs.

Other highlights include Pawson describing the time he joined a Japanese monastery, and Ilinčić explaining how she got a taste for fashion by cutting up her mother's Yves Saint Laurent dresses.

Produced by Dezeen's in-house creative team Dezeen Studio, Face to Face episodes will be released every Tuesday at 9am for the next eight weeks.

The podcast features original music composed by Japanese designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki, while graphic designer Micha Weidmann created the Face to Face identity.

Face to Face is sponsored by Twinmotion, the real-time architectural visualisation solution that can create immersive photo and video renders in seconds.

You can listen to Face to Face here on Dezeen or subscribe on podcast platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

The post Dezeen to launch Face to Face, a series of podcasts featuring leading architects and designers appeared first on Dezeen.