a house that looks like a giant hershey kiss crossed with a mushroom is not my idea of a home i would choose to live in, but when i saw this design i was able to overlook the sixties era retro design and focus exclusively on the windows. now here’s the thinking of the clients and architects - and it’s kind of clever. . . . . but i still wouldn’t live there!
the clients, are a young couple with two children who after living in a conventional home wanted to change to one more integrated with nature. the metaphor for the design was to feel like the internal inhabitant of a snail, or like a mollusk moving from one chamber to another, like a symbiotic dweller of a huge maternal cloister. the social life of the home flows inside the nautilus without any division: a harmonic area in three dimensions.
look at the designs and the colours and the way the light plays into the home!!
the house itself is put together using a frame of steel-reinforced chicken wire with concrete spread over it. nothing extraordinary there.
the car (or cars) i would own to drive up to and park in front of this home would have to include the zoop car. as oil prices and gas prices continue to rise (and i will not be especially clever or prescient by saying they wil continue to rise because everyone and their cat knows that that’s where we’re heading), alternative fuels and vehicles that use fuels more carefully are the way of the future and hopefully not the fantasy future but the real future becoming present.
the zoop is the brainchild of designers andre and coqueline courreges of courreges fashion house fame (who got their start in fashion working for the legendary french house balenciaga, the zoop is a three-seater electric car.
weighing in at just 690 kilograms and with a range of 450 kilometres, the zoop offers real potential as a stylish yet practical vehicle for people not afraid to be seen in something that looks like it was designed by callelo.
if you are not familiar with the work of callelo, then read on. callelo has a very organic, curvaceous, fluid design aesthetic that shows up on products as familiar as the handle of a well-known laundry detergent, and as obscure as a line of wooden modular automobile toys. i own two of callelo’s automoblox modular vehicles:
the s9 . . .
and the x9 . . . .
here’s the callelo automoblox range . . .
the automoblox cars are made of solid wooden bodies, rubber tires, and plastic accents, making them a sort of cross between the classic plastic and wooden toys many of us grew up with and the unique designs of contemporary automobiles like the zoop. what is very cool is that because it’s a modular system, each vehicle in the collection can be taken apart and rebuilt in various configurations. parts from one can be switched with another, allowing endless possibilities for new vehicle designs to be created. you get to use your imagination and you get to design your own automobile.
want to know more about callelo’s design aesthetic and especially to see how it applies to products other than toys? then you might like to go here.
and i think that somewhere in my hershey kiss/toadstool house i'd hang some of zdzislaw beksinski's art. you see, somewhere in the space occupied by renaissance artists, bosch, and the surrealists sits polish artist zdzislaw beksinski . his work has a quality that echoes somewhere deep in the primal portion of my brain. echoes of something i can’t pinpoint!
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