Hasta La Ideas

Spiral light made from multiple pink velvet coat hangers

The two storeys that London architects Project Orange have added to the roof of a redundant brick warehouse in Sheffield look like another building stacked on top.

The upward extension replaces a pitched roof, creating three duplex studio offices within a powder-coated steel volume that both overlaps and bites through the original brick structure.

A new restaurant and bar occupies the double-height warehouse space below, where it benefits from light through the original two-storey-high arched windows.

You can see more stories about extensions here.

Photography is by Jack Hobhouse.

The text below was written by the architects:

192 Shoreham Street is a Victorian industrial brick building sited at the edge of the Cultural Industries Quarter Conservation Area of Sheffield.

It is not listed but considered locally significant.

The completed development seeks to rehabilitate the once redundant building, celebrate its industrial heritage and make it relevant to its newly vibrant context.

The brief was to provide mixed use combining a desirable double height restaurant/bar within the original shell (capitalising on the raw industrial character of the existing building) with duplex studio office units above.

These are accommodated in an upward extension of the existing building in a contrasting but complementary volume, a replacement for the original pitched roof.

The new extension is contemporary yet laconic in form and an abstract evocation of the industrial roofscapes that used to dominate this part of the city.

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It is parasitical in nature, engaging with the host structure in a couple of locations, where windows bite into the existing building.

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The new roof profile creates dramatic sweeping ceiling profiles in the new accommodation, a sectional dynamism that is to be further enhanced by the use of double height volumes in the duplex units created.

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The proposal is intended to enhance the existing building and create a striking landmark on the inner ring road; a symbol both of the area’s past and its aspirations for the future.

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Artist: lunchbreath
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The sweet shop warms up with Hot Chocolate on a Stick

Churning out a flavorful variety of portable ice cream, yogurt and sorbet snacks from their NYC shop, popbar has us hooked on a warmer sweet.

The newest addition to the brand’s all-natural, kosher-certified lineup (including vegan sorbet varieties) is Hot Chocolate on a Stick, a treat as simple and sweet as the name implies. To whip up an instant mug, dip a chunk of dark, milk or vanilla-white chocolate into hot milk, stir for a minute and sip. Popbar’s chocolate-bar consistency seems to blend more easily than typical powder cocoas and, most importantly, does so quickly. Add more milk to temper the sweetness, or split one between two cups for just a hint of flavor.

Hot Chocolate on a Stick is available at popbar’s West Village shop and, for those outside New York, on Amazon for $3 a piece or in gift sets of six for $18 and 12 for $36.

Our friend Alberto Villarreal sent us details about their recent collaboration with Guadalajara’s EOS México, a firm founded by brothers Mauricio and Sebastian Lara. Like many a clever design, “EOSkate” started with a mistake: the latter firm was preparing a book to commemorate a decade of their work when a printing error yield “several hundreds of (somehow) useless books.”

Instead of merely recycling the flawed volumes, “the creative minds of the Lara brothers turned this ‘error’ into a design opportunity.”

They saw this as an excuse to recycle the books into art and design pieces and invited 11 designers/firms to create objects using the books as a raw material, and gave 6 to 10 books to each invitee.

Alberto Villarreal and his team at AGENT (the Mexico City-based firm he leads), started brainstorming about what to do with the books they got. [They] roughed out several ideas and ended up designing a skateboard made out of paper (from the book pages) mixed with resin.

Villarreal tells us,

I saw this as an opportunity to experiment with materials—the book itself has so much color in the pages and this encouraged us to play up the graphic content, but when we started experimenting with the paper new things came up.

We didn’t follow a logical A to B process. We didn’t know what was going to be the outcome, but while experimenting and analyzing the properties of the paper, new ideas started to come out.

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