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Architect Piers Taylor and actress Caroline Quentin explore unusual homes built in or near areas of forest. After trips to properties near Madrid and the Catskill Mountains in New York State, they arrive in Piha, New Zealand, to a house built within an indigenous forest of pohutukawa trees. Navigating very strict environmental laws, this wooden-cladded and glass-roofed property mimics the branches of the surrounding trees, while its huge sliding glass walls open up to allow the surrounding forest to become an intrinsic part of the house itself.
Trevor McIvor and his partners design buildings that take advantage of the innate heating and cooling characteristics of nature. From an off the grid “cottage” that requires no artificial cooling, to a green-roofed sound studio rising out of the earth, nature dictates the design flow.
2012 • Great Minds of Design • Design
Patty Johnson has worked in South America, The Philippines, and South Africa, collaborating with indigenous groups in the creation of high-end design products that are sustainable in communities with low employment. For her current project, Patty travels to the devastated country of Haiti.
2012 • Great Minds of Design • Design
The story of design enters the 50s and 60s, when a revolutionary new material called plastic combined with the miracles of electronic miniaturisation to allow designers to offer post-war consumers something new: liberation.
2010 • The Genius of Design • Design
In the crisis-stricken decades of the 1920s and 1930s, with the world at the tipping point between two global wars, design suggested dramatically different ideas about the shape of things to come, from the radical futurism of the Bauhaus to the British love affair with mock-Tudor architecture and the three-piece suite.
2010 • The Genius of Design • Design
Piers Taylor and Caroline Quentin visit an island in Norway, spending two days in a house built on a footprint of just 100 square metres. In Spain, the pair head to a home built into a steep cliff face overlooking the Mediterranean, featuring a cantilevered terrace offering maximum sea views and a swimming pool as well as an unusual tiled roof. After viewing a house in New Zealand crafted from two separate wooden cladded structures, the duo explore a home in Canada inspired by two ships in dry dock, designed to peer over the coast, allowing the sea to pass underneath.