Month: April 2020

As one of Europe’s largest and busiest children’s hospitals, Alder Hey requires feedback from hospital staff and users to inform continuous improvement and innovation. Vox Pod was commissioned by the Future Developments Team to facilitate this process by providing a space for people to record their thoughts and suggestions on video. The space needed to be mobile, moving between locations, serving multiple departments within the hospital, and forming an orientation point for key public events. 

I recently viewed a public art commission at Dubai’s foremost cultural district – Alserkal Avenue: it was an installation by an artist collective – METASITU, who had transformed a warehouse on the Avenue previously known as Nadi Al Quoz, into a 21st-century ruin. The work titled: ‘we were building sand castles_but the wind blew them away’, was inspired by the perennial demolitions that have become an integral part of contemporary placemaking around the world. Through this piece of work, METASITU reflects on the extractive city-building processes, while contextualising them within different human and ecological timelines. The long-term vision of the artists was to deconstruct the building and return its constituent materials to their ‘original state’. Later this year, they plan to further deconstruct the installation into a public landscaped environment.

It’s pretty standard for kitchen cabinets to run in a straight line until they meet the end of a wall or the start of a doorway. But sometimes, that isn’t the smoothest route. These six kitchens employ clever alternatives for ending a run of cabinets….