info@elegantembellishments.net

+49 (0)177 1560192
axel-springer strasse 39
10969 berlin

+44 (0) 7951 909 898
top floor, 100 de beauvoir road
london n1 4en

>> ee's "depolluting clouds" (right) are published in the book W (Is for Warsaw)_Synchronicity: No Hear, No see

>> ee is featured in "Design Now!" edited by Charlotte and Peter Fiell, recently released by Taschen.

is a London and Berlin based, interdisciplinary collaboration between innovators and materials manufacturers, architects and city councils.

ee was formed in 2006 to investigate and develop new materials and methods for the quick modification of existing buildings and spaces. These modifications are used to “tune” buildings, converting previously inert surfaces into active surfaces that can meet new challenges set by a rapidly changing world.

A key interest of the work is the visual expression of innovative technologies that have the potential to alleviate the ecological impact of cities but often require a re-examination of current practices, in particular the slow institutional processes of architecture. Existing applications of such new technologies often aim at visual integration with conventional building materials, missing their potential as catalysts for behavioural change and public discussion.

elegant embellishments are designers interested in modifying the built environment, in sometimes impermanent ways, eliciting the scale of architecture in a product-focused process.
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elegant embellishments is developing a decorative, three-dimensional architectural tile that can be installed quickly to reduce air pollution in urban environments. The tiles provide councils, developers, and designers with the ability to rapidly improve urban environments in terms of air quality and visual appeal.

ee's tiles respond to the priorities set by the EU Clean Air Strategy 2005; the policy will reduce pollution deaths by over 100 000, and air pollution related damages by up to 45 billion Euros annually. Emissions from combustion engines are identified as the largest contributor to air pollution in cities and often invisibly affect our breathable air. The tiles, when positioned near pollutant sources, can re-appropriate these polluted spaces for safe pedestrian use.

Using the latest computer based manufacturing techniques, these tiles increase the effect of the underlying technology while also creating visually striking installations that highlight the problems of air pollution and its possible solutions.

The preferred territories for such modifications are the standardized, repetitive surfaces of modernism, housing estates, traffic spaces, etc, which often fail to inspire a sense of ownership in citizens and deny individual expression in a homogenous, standardized world.

ee's tiles respond directly to a need to find appropriate architectural expression of a whole class of new high-performance "smart" materials. They incorporate sophisticated processes that occur on a molecular, invisible level and that are radical enough to transform our conceptions of buildings. LINK top

"Synchronicity 1: No hear No see"

The brief was to propose a project for the future of Warsaw using ignorance of the city as a starting point.
We addressed instead a common metropolis' fate:
"The significance of socio-cultural building, orthogonal urban grids, places for cars, for pedestrians, for war, for spectacle, will be obsolete to the new directives facing designated polluted and clean spaces, reception of communication networks, innovation clusters, and cyclical energy systems."


De-Polluting Clouds

These clouds are composed of a swarm of crystalline structures; they are coated in photocatalytic titanium dioxide, creating a complex set of surfaces that respond to ambient daylight. The clouds effectively absorb and neutralise nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), the leading contributors to low-lying smog in cities. The substrate is grown, rather than assembled, using minimal material.
Floating in the smog layer above the city's main traffic ways, the clouds are photo-sensitive sponges. They are tethered to the ground via stainless steel poles, and move freely with the wind. Once released over traffic ways, the nebulae are transparent and subtle in the atmosphere, appearing and receding from view. LINK top

"Stand here for cleaner air"

elegant embellishments exhibited two installations at the 2006 London Architecture Biennale. A freestanding tiled screen marked the St. Johns Street entrance, acting as a de-polluting filter between pedestrian and vehicular zones. A second, cylindrical structure surrounded a city-owned tree, demarcating a zone where the immediate air is reclaimed for safe breathing. LINK top

We launch, ....into the extreme strata, and what we encounter up there is meaningful, intimately linked, with down here. A machine-made microclimatic link? Motion, if there is a universal reference to which everything moves, is absolute.
On the housing estate, a violent territory, we imagine objects that are defenseless, can be kicked and broken, are fragile in a hostile environment. Once collapsed, instead of defunction, a product death, they transform, change state, produce a garden beneath them. .......The process extends to the mass housing in Kreuzberg and the pigeons that claim it. ........We dream of the production of architecture as if it were the production of a pen. We're thinking Bic....... Konopkes is a shack and a fortress; it survives, selling sausages under the pervailing pollution and soot of the U-Bahn trains above it. ......We loiter around Neukolln's air pollution testing equipment; Neukolln has tested as the highest pollution collecting neighbourhood in Berlin. Every surface is receptive, every surface can be activated. .......Bio-mimicry is the potential we have to design a product as close as possible to the intelligence of biological life. LINK top

millennium chem
3Dsystems
momentum engineering
designmai (DMY)
london biennale
100% detail
the bartlett
arup
glas architects
know your chicken
R&Sie(n)...
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"W (is for warsaw): no Hear, no See" Jakub Szczesny, Fundacja Bec Zmiana, dec 2007
green magazine- issue 4, march-may 2008
"design now!" Fiell, Charlotte & Peter, ed. taschen publications, nov 2007
pasajes de architectura y critica- 2007,vol.9
hise magazine- issue 39, 2007
gulf interiors, march 2007
domus magazine 898 - december 2006
AJ specification - november 2006
bldg blog
we make money not art
dwell magazine - october 2006
world changing
tree hugger
future feeder
the economic times

high resolution images available on request.

download full press release:
pdf | word

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