Design news: adult Lego, dissolving plastic and Brad Pitt’s jeans

This month’s news honours the film industry’s finest costume archive but also looks at the latest efforts to combat e-waste. From gadgets to your favourite movie, choosing the best design makes a big difference.

Brick by brick

This month, a very special honour has been bestowed on 15 AFOLs (adult fans of Lego ). Their creations have been selected by Stuart Harris, Lego master builder, to appear at the Masterpiece Gallery at the Lego House . The AFOLS range from the UK’s Victoria Worsley – who’s made a 1950s-style diner and a house – to Australia-based Donny Chen. Among his exhibits is a golden dragon made using roughly 7,000 pieces to commemorate the Lunar Year of the Dragon.

Lego House is Mecca for AFOLs, a 130,000 sq ft building in Billund, Denmark, designed by Bjarke Ingels to look like giant lego bricks stacked into a 30m colourful tower. It combines the history and philosophy of the building blocks with hands-on play and tributes to Lego-inspired creativity, such as the exhibitions in the Masterpiece Gallery.

Now nearly 25% of visitors to Lego House are adults without children, despite a declining toy market. Lego began actively marketing certain sets to adults by adding an 18+ age guidance to the packaging, though the number of conventions held around the globe and celebrity endorsements over the years show many adults never stopped playing. This month also brings the release of Piece by Piece directed by Morgan Neville. This documentary about Pharrell Williams was shot entirely in Lego animation. Williams has also brought out a Lego set to coincide with the film release.

So the exhibitors at Lego House are in good company. As Harris said: “The Masterpiece Gallery is the pinnacle place for this pride of creation to be celebrated. We really take it as an opportunity to highlight the creative talents of our community and inspire the many guests that come to visit.”

The new exhibition of AFOL creations is on show at Lego House, Billund, Denmark

Out in the wash

E-waste is one of the growing problems caused by our huge reliance on tech and devices. Close to 60m tonnes of waste electrical and electronic equipment is produced every year, and that figure is growing at 4% each year. But two new inventions are looking to challenge this.

Tech start-up Pentaform has come up with a biodegradable and water-soluble plastic called Aquafade . This will be used to make circuit boards and body components for electronic products, such as remote controls and phones. It dissolves in water in around eight hours leaving only electronic components behind for recycling (don’t worry, there’ll be a waterproof coating to prevent your device dissolving while you’re out in the rain). Jiva Materials, meanwhile, has come up with Soluboard, a recyclable, printed circuit-board laminate that can be dissolved in hot water in the right conditions.

Both products have benefits beyond replacing plastic. Jiva hopes Soluboard will help reduce the £8bn worth of critical minerals landfilled every year. Pentaform hopes that, “if Aquafade replaces 1% of e-waste, it will reduce the emissions associated with transporting this waste by approximately 4.25m tonnes of carbon dioxide”.

Road art

Though British artist Andrew Holmes trained as an architect, his true design obsession is the highways of America and the trucks, trailers and cars that ride them. He moved from the UK to study first in New York City and then California in the early 1970s, and started photographing the roads. He became frustrated by the limited ability of his old camera to capture the depth of these roadscapes so he turned to art and has been creating hyperreal colour pencil drawings of Kenworth trucks, gas stations and city streets ever since.

The Architectural Association is holding an exhibition of Holmes’s work to coincide with the publication of the art book Gas Tank City , which gathers together over 100 of his drawings and commentary written over the years by the likes of American art historian and critic Thomas E Crow, architect Mark Fisher, cofounder of Archigram, and Cedric Price, the British creative and architect.

The drawings feel particularly powerful as the era of oil in American society comes to an end. A paean to the cultural and technological pzazz of the automobile, a life on the road. As Crow writes in his 1986 essay on Holmes: “[His] work is a reminder that landmark pictures in the history of modernism, from Manet to Seurat to Cubist collage and beyond, have found their flattened internal order in the world outside, most often in the overlooked margins of commercial culture.”

Ingrid Schroder, director of the Architectural Association, said: “This exhibition is a testament to the extremes of fascination, and what this fascination – and its manifestation through drawing – can make possible.”

The Gas Tank City exhibition is at The Architectural Association, London until 7 December 2024. The book is available from ACC Art Books

Dressed to kill

If you ever wondered where costumes such as Faye Dunaway’s outfits in Bonnie & Clyde , or Brad Pitt ’s jeans in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came from, the answer is Palace Costume. This collection – stored on Fairfax Avenue – consists of over half a million items of retro and period clothing, ordered by decade and style, and it’s the work of Melody Barnett. The rental business started as the The Crystal Palace boutique in the late 1960s, a store beloved by the stars of the time and the first vintage shop in West Hollywood. As Barnett’s curatorial skills were honed, it became rental-only in the 1970s and has served LA’s costume designers and stylists ever since.

This month the legend of Palace Costume receives the respect it deserves with a beautiful art book. Over 300 images, by photographer and stylist Mimi Haddon, illustrate this delightful book and Hollywood’s top costume designers explain what they love about the Palace costumes and props. The names singing Palace’s praises include Ruth E Carter – who costumed Black Panther and Malcolm X – Arianne Phillips, the designer for A Single Man and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , and Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza ’s Mark Bridges.

As Christine Wada, award winning costume designer on O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Loki , says: “[Palace Costume] is an incredible journey through t ime and culture. It’s a circus event of clothing where you get to time travel.”

Palace Costume: Inside Hollywood’s Best Kept Secret (Abrams & Chronicle) is out 10 October

Lifesaver

While most of us are lucky enough to only use trailers for camping and cargo, Polish trailer manufacturer Da Orffo has created a new vehicle which can cope with less hospitable conditions.T he Life Chariot MedEvac unit acts as a combat rescue unit and is designed to deal with off-road terrains as an alternative to a helicopter.

There’s room for three casualties in each unit, with a gurney as well as seats for evacuees. Medical supplies can be stored in airtight boxes as well as on a roof rack and it can withstand harsh weather conditions from rain to winter chill. The Life Chariot has now been tested in frontline conditions in the Ukraine war. Da Orffo’s design has won a James Dyson Award and it was shortlisted for a Dezeen Award this month. The Life Chariot was designed by Piotr Tluszcz, son of Da Orffo’s co-founder, Krzysztof Tluszcz. The family business’s expertise is high-tech, off-road trailers for expeditions but the Ukraine war made things personal.

“According to a proverb popular in Poland,” says Krzysztof Tluszcz, “‘necessity is the mother of invention’. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, many of our friends rushed to help. Some reached the front line directly with medical support. They reported to us, in particular, the lack of MedEvac-type evacuation vehicles. We are proud that at least, in this way, we were able to help those who were attacked.”

Tiuszcz is pleased the trailer is up for a Dezeen Award. “Our solution, which would also work well in natural disasters to evacuate the injured, is simple, yet quite innovative. We are ready to provide this and other, similar solutions for emergency units and services related to evacuation and specialised transport. Your move!”

The Dezeen Award winners are announced 26 November