The Kenyan design collective BellTower has been named the Grand Prix winner of the eighth annual Lexus Design Award, which helps foster innovative ideas from up-and-coming talents to shape a better, more equitable future. Selected as the winner from more than 2,000 international entries and six finalists, the firm’s proposal, called Open Source Communities, addresses the challenges found in developing countries by using open-source planning to design affordable communities with sustainable, clean water resources.

BellTower’s proposal features communal water resource centers that tackle the health, financial, and educational devastation currently caused by the costly and contaminated water supply in Nairobi’s Kibera neighborhood, home to 1.2 million people and Africa’s largest urban slum. Not only does the proposal encompass a nuanced approach to rainwater gathering, decontamination, storage, and dissemination, it also unpacks the required community financial investment and the overwhelming financial and health-related rewards that water resources would bring to Kibera. With their entire design shared on an open source platform, BellTower aims for the centers to be easily replicated across the entire African continent.

“With our world plagued by the issues of climate change and social inequality, there’s a design imperative for systemic design solutions,” says Studio Gang founder Jeanne Gang, who judged the competition with Paola Antonelli, John Maeda, and Simon Humphries. “The Grand-Prix winner expands our definition of design to include systems of finance for community projects and engages the critical role clean drinking water plays in citizens’ ability to thrive. By addressing the way that the project will be sustained economically, the designers broaden our thinking about what design is and could be.”

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When: Until Jan. 10, 2021

Where: Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin

What: “I painted my way out of the building,” says Katharina Grosse in reference to her latest artwork, It Wasn’t Us, in which a sea of kaleidoscopic hues seems to spill out of a former railway building in Berlin. By doing so, the German artist dissolves boundaries between inside and out, and creates entirely new spaces and sight lines as viewers navigate inward.

Having developed a lifelong affinity for fashion under her mother, a patternmaker for Chanel and Dior, Aude Jan spent her youth crafting clothing and accessories in Parisian ateliers. She soon met her partner, Charles Gout, and relocated to Mexico City to launch Audette, an up-and-coming label of sculptural leather handbags that blends the purity of French couture with the vibrance of Mexican design.

Blades on wind turbines often spin at more than 150 miles per hour, posing a lethal hazard to passing birds. “Because of this high speed, the rotor blades become blurred, both for humans as for birds,” says Roel May, a senior research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, describing an effect called “motion smear.”

It turns out that painting a single blade black on a white turbine, which dampens the motion smear effect, may reduce bird deaths by as much as 70 percent. Though any efforts to keep our avian friends out of harm’s way are welcome in our book, this intervention still doesn’t measure up to the threat posed by house cats, which kill up to 3.7 billion birds in North America each year—100 times more than wind farms.

Founded in 1817 in the heart of Germany’s Black Forest, Duravit is a leading manufacturer of designer bathrooms. Duravit operates in 130 countries and has been honored with numerous awards for its innovations at the nexus of design and technology. The company collaborates with leading designers including Philippe Starck, EOOS, Cecilie Manz, and Sieger Design.

Surface Says: With two centuries of experience under its belt, Duravit knows deeply what makes a top-tier washroom.

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