Every year we look forward to the month of February when our home city of Cape Town is filled with creative events. Top among these is the acclaimed annual Design Indaba Conference, which brings us the world’s top creative leaders for a three day feast of inspiration. Bespoke Bathrooms will be attending and we are particularly keen on hearing about the work of architects Sou Fujimoto and Alfredo Brillembourg and all-round creative Erik Kessels.

In the work of Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, there are no clear boundaries between the structure and the space surrounding it. ‘Arbre Blanc’, a project soon to be built in Montpellier, France, is a 17-storey mixed-use tower accommodating residential units, office space, an art gallery, restaurant and a panoramic bar. The 10,000 square meter structure grows organically out of the ground, with a natural form that appears to have been sculpted over time. Like a tree, the scheme’s various branches provide selected areas of shade for adjacent properties. Residents will be able to choose a preferred floor plan from a list of possible layouts, encouraging ‘free choice architecture’ with a series of modular spaces.

Rather than building roads to open up an informal settlement in Caracas, Venezuela, which would have displaced a third of the residents, architect Alfredo Brillembourg proposed an overhead cable car transport system. Metro Cable is a network of five stations connecting the hilltop ‘barrios’ with the city center and the metro system. But the network is far more than just convenient public transportation as it also incorporates sustainable design, renewable energy and smart urban planning. The carefully thought out system also preserves the pedestrian oriented nature of the area, and promotes safe and sustainable development for a better community in the long term.

A graphic designer, advertising manager, editor, collector, exhibition curator, and artist, Erik Kessels engages with the full range of creative activities of the digital age. Shown above is his exhibition in Amsterdam titled ’24 Hrs In Photos’ featuring the print outs of over a million images that had been uploaded to Flickr, Facebook and Google over a 24 hour period. Visitors were encouraged to walk over the mountain of photographs.