Hasta La Ideas

Milan 2012: in response to the growing number of freelancers looking for workspaces outside of their homes, London studio Aberrant Architecture have created pub tables that can be adapted into desks by day and games tables by night.

Created for furniture brand Benchmark, the desks were presented at the Wallpaper* Handmade exhibition in Milan last week.

In rest mode each table provides a simple dining surface, but in work mode this tabletop folds open to reveal a bureau-style desk concealed beneath.

To transform the desk for play, a removable drawer can be placed on the surface and filled with skittles to recreate nineteenth century pub game Devil Amongst the Tailors.

These skittle also open up to become pen-pots.

The tables have been crafted both in cherry with a maple surface and in walnut with an ash surface.

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile took place from 17 to 22 April. See all our stories about Milan 2012 here, or see more projects by Aberrant Architecture here.

Here’s some more information from the American Hardwood Export Council:

A Handmade Highlight – ‘Devil Amongst the Tailors’

The American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) was invited to collaborate with Wallpaper*, aberrant architecture and Benchmark, bringing together the very best of materials, innovative design and craftsmanship. American ash and walnut and American maple and cherry are the principal materials of two pub tables named ‘Devil Amongst The Tailors’ designed by aberrant architecture and made by Benchmark.

AHEC has played an advisory role on timber suitability, aesthetics and sustainable design. There are over 20 commercial U.S. hardwoods species that offer a huge variety of colour, grain and character, and aberrant’s tables ‘Devil Amongst the Tailors’ showcase this palette of colours and textures. Black walnut and ash combines to suit a darker environment, such as a private members club or public houses, and a combination of cherry and maple allows the second table to happily work in brighter spaces such as hotel lobbies or boutique cafes. “We are really pleased to be taking part in Handmade again this year” says AHEC European Director David Venables. “The concept and design of ‘Devil Amongst the Tailors’ is excellent, the tables are beautifully made and demonstrate the versatility of U.S. hardwoods.”

aberrant has become known for insightful researched projects that challenge perception and introduce new and unexpected ways of experiencing the world. During their architecture residency at the Victoria and Albert museum they studied the original drawings of the now demolished ‘Elephant & Castle’ public house in Lambeth. The designs, by the architect Albert A. Webbe, reveal a mixed used building divided up into three main areas: a ‘public’ space for drinking; ‘private’ areas for the pub’s regular patrons, who used the watering hole as an extension of their home and office, and a large space that was used for group meetings and community events.

Combining historical precedent with research into how contemporary ‘work-styles’ are evolving, Wallpaper* magazine invited aberrant architecture to design a new pub table that in addition to supporting the typical pub activities of drinking and eating, is specially considered to provide the modern nomadic worker with enhanced productivity, a sense of belonging and opportunities to interact with their fellow workers.

The table represents the growing demand for temporary office space outside of the home. For many, office blocks are a thing of the past and an increasing number of nomadic workers roam London in search of welcoming workspaces. Named ‘Devil Amongst the Tailors’, after a traditional table-top skittles pub game, the table boasts a luxurious surface in ash or maple for entertaining, a brass foot rest for putting your feet up and combines a series of specific functions. Lifting up the lid reveals a private work surface, boasting skittle shaped office organisers for storing pens & paperclips and a task light that fixes to the table’s numberplate. Want to stop for lunch, have a meeting with a client or simply go for a cigarette? Simply close and lock the lid. Work and its associated mess are banished, safely stored, out of site and out of mind. If it’s time to relax, place the removable drawer onto the table surface, arrange the skittle shaped office organisers &hook the brass ball and chain onto the light. An impromptu game of ’Devil amongst the Tailors’ can now be enjoyed. For Kevin Haley of aberrant architecture “This unique commission allowed us to further our research into contemporary lifestyles and flexible working conditions at the challenging scale of a table. Working closely with Wallpaper*, Benchmark and AHEC during both the design development & production stages produced a creative collaboration, which we believe resulted in a far richer process and an unexpected & exciting end product.”

Using the very best of English craftsmanship and beautiful sustainable American hardwoods, the tables have been handmade by Benchmark using traditional cabinet making skills including dovetailing and mortice and tenon joints. Time and attention has been given to the sourcing of all materials which have been chosen for their origin and authenticity. The very best pieces of cherry, maple, walnut and ash were selected for their perfect grain and finish. The bespoke metalwork, made from silver patinated brass, including foot rails, handles, locks and brass drawer linings hand engraved to house the skittles has been sourced from Birmingham, home of traditional artisan metalworking skills. Sean Sutcliffe, Director of Benchmark says “The pub tables we made for the Handmade show curated by Wallpaper were a delight to make. We were able to select some really outstanding examples of all four species of hardwood we used. The walnut gave the piece an intense richness which worked very beautifully with the brass foot rail. The maple was beautifully consistent and almost paper white. The cherry wood was a joy to use again. We used to make so much of our furniture in cherry wood and over recent years it seems to have been less fashionable so I hope that we will now see the start of a return to this fabulous mid-coloured fruit wood. The tables were made by Sam Foster-Smith who is an outstanding craftsman of 35 years experience. He has handcut all the mortice tenon joints and dovetails and the end result are outstanding examples of craftsmanship.”

Perhaps the most innovative and exciting aspect of this project is that with Benchmark’s help, AHEC has documented all elements of the manufacturing process and will be putting this together with life cycle data recently collected from the American hardwood industry to produce a full ‘cradle-to-grave’ life cycle impact report for the tables. Says David Venables, “This will be a first for our industry and we believe that this kind of transparent and scientifically based information is essential to enable manufacturers and designers to make an informed decision when it comes to the question of sustainable design.”

Tony Chambers, Editor-in-Chief of Wallpaper*, says: “Handmade is a testimony to great design, talent and ideas, and the determination to achieve the extraordinary. We are once again celebrating beautiful new friendships and beautiful new things.”

‘Devil Amongst the Tailors’ is not only a cleverly researched and playful table, it is a demonstration of the very best teamwork, craftsmanship and sustainable design, and is a highlight of this year’s exhibition.

During Holon Design Week dozens of promising young designers made presentations to a panel of design week directors and global design leaders. We saw everything from jewelry, fashion, product, housewares, furniture and brand new materials. See five of the ten best designers emerging in Israel’s growing design community below, and be sure to check out the other five in Part One.

1. Lena Dubinsky
A gifted ceramicist and a Red Dot Design winner, Lena has a broad portfolio that includes a set of ceramic irrigation tiles as well as a collection of tools that pays homage to ancient measuring devices. She also might have been the only designer I met at Design Week who wasn’t interested in producing a large run of her work or even selling it at all. When I asked her if she had a sales plan for a line of porcelain rings she had just made, each a unique, miniature sculpture crafted by hand, she told me she didn’t feel right selling them, that it would be more honest to give them away to people to ensure they found a good home.

2. Lital Mendel
I saw several designers use materials in a surprising way, but none so surprising as Lital’s jewelry made from vacuum-formed PVC wrapped stones. Her ‘plastic-wrapped’ pieces are a result of a search for a replacement for diamonds. No, there is simply no replacement for diamonds, but her clear, shiny gem stones might be a start. I like her Folded collection best. Each piece is made entirely from a single piece of intricately folded paper.

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In the third of our series of extracts from new book, 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design, the authors look at ‘the vernacular’…

#92 The vernacular

The Italian Renaissance was prompted by a rediscovery of the art of Greek and Roman antiquity. Ever since, artists have been mining the past for sources of inspiration. One genre is often overlooked: ubiquitous artefacts, done by local artists, that are so modest they do not attract attention. Impervious to nostalgia, they remain practically invisible until someone begins to collect them.

In the early 1970s, architect Robert Venturi took his Yale University students to Las Vegas to study the urban forms of that typically American phenomenon, the strip mall. They discovered the ‘forgotten symbolism’ of the commercial structures along the main highway, and introduced in the process the idea that vernacular designs can be beautiful – even the marquees and signposts advertising cheap motels and gambling halls. His 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas, turned the study of vernacular forms into a trendy academic topic.

Spread from Learning from Las Vegas showing casinos, from the Contemporary Art Consortium @ the IFA website (not featured in 100 Ideas)

From then on, in the United States, vernacular designs were no longer safe from the scrutiny of graduate students, social anthropologists and collectors. Treasure hunters prowled flea markets looking for once-commonplace objects, from gas-station enamel signs to cardboard store mannequins. The distinctive typographical features and design particularities of these humble commercial articles eventually found their way into the mainstream visual vocabulary.

In New York, Tibor Kalman was their enlightened champion. In Minneapolis, Charles S. Anderson embraced the working-class aesthetic of naive industrial logotypes and made it his own. In the middle of Delaware, House Industries, a type foundry, has gathered an impressive collection of calligraphic fonts from labels, posters, cans, boxes and architectural renderings of yore.

Outside the United States, vernacular designs are just beginning to be exploited. Until now, innovations and new technologies, not cultural archaeology, were engines of creativity for young designers. But recently, avant-garde practitioners in France, Belgium and Germany have discovered homespun treasures, some hiding in plain sight. Police badges, artless crests, naive logos and industrial signs are favourite visual references of the award-winning Flanders team Randoald Sabbe and Jan W. Heespel. Their posters promoting cultural events make provocative use of forgotten graphic artefacts.

Also trendy today are two-colour posters and flyers in basic red and blue, their typographical signature reminiscent of cheap playbills from the 1940s. Florian Lamm in Leipzig, Germany, and Vincent Perrottet in Chaumont, France, are turning vernacular reproduction techniques, such as Ben-Day dots (enlarged screened patterns), blurry halftone reproductions, split fountain colour printing, and new artworks inked on top of recycled posters, into sophisticated aesthetic statements.

Infatuation with arcane forms of advertising art is no longer restricted to a few connoisseurs. But French cheese labels, Irish road signs, cigarette packs from the USSR, German candy wrappers, Greek restaurant menus and 
cigar boxes from Spain have yet to release the forgotten symbolism of their graphic codes.

This essay is taken from 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design, published by Laurence King; £19.95 and available from laurenceking.com. Two other extracts from the book have also been published on the CR blog – the chapter on the Big Book Look of the 1950s (here) and the use of ‘shadow play’ (here).

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CR in Print

Thanks for visiting the CR website, but if you are not also reading CR in print you’re missing out. Our April issue has a cover by Neville Brody and a fantastic ten-page feature on Fuse, Brody’s publication that did so much to foster typographic experimentation in the 90s and beyond. We also have features on charity advertising and new Pentagram partner Marina Willer. Rick Poynor reviews the Electric Information Age and Adrian Shaughnessy meets the CEO of controversial crowdsourcing site 99designs. All this plus the most beautiful train tickets you ever saw and a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Thunderbirds in our Monograph supplement

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In addition to “Objet Préféré” at the Triennale, Fabrica × Benetton presented a similarly geometric collection at Tom Dixon’s MOST:

How do people sit? There are those who flop down on a staircase or on a sawn-off tree trunk, those who prefer a stool with turned legs or a classic straw-bottomed chair. Then there are those who use a chair as a tool, to get hold of something that otherwise would be out of reach.

“Searching for Cassiopeia” is a collection of 12 chairs conceived by the young designers at Fabrica and manufactured by the Italian Chair District, the exhibition is inspired by the constellation, in which “the five brightest stars of Cassiopeia resemble the shape of a chair. (A quick refresher, for those of you who don’t know the tale by heart: “A vain Egyptian queen is tied to this chair, condemned to circle the pole star for all eternity.”)

To those who have always thought that sitting is a banal and ultimately repetitive gesture, the project shows that a throne is very different from a step, a chaise longue very different from a bench, a stool entirely the opposite of a small armchair. It shows that to relax after a day’s hard work, you need the right backrest, and that there is nothing better than falling into a soft padded mat with your loved one.

As for the Italian Chair District?

Located in the heart of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, this manufacturing cluster includes small, sub-contracting artisan firms and big industrial companies highly specialized in the wood/furniture sector and in each individual stage in the manufacturing process…

The Italian Chair District is synonymous with a collective, flexible and efficient system that absorbs contemporary sources of inspiration without betraying its roots, creates a dialogue with international trends, features cultural input by designers from a wide range of backgrounds and training, and grafts them onto well-established techniques and knowledge.

More after the jump…

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Slideshow: a wall of wooden scales folds through the glazed facade of this house and studio that Korean architects AND designed for an artist in South Korea.

As the panels emerge behind the glass they begin to separate from one another, creating a series of openings that permit views across from the double height studio to the living quarters behind.

The wall also curves upward to wrap and conceal a bedroom on the first floor.

The two-storey-high exterior walls are constructed from concrete and nestle against a hillside that climbs up behind the house.

See more stories about about studios for artists or designers here.

Photography is by Kim Yong Gwan.

Here’s some more text from AND:

Skinspace

Artist + Painting

An artist walks into the office, introducing himself with a pamphlet of his paintings. Vivid colors and forced brush strokes that densely filled the screens shows his sensibility and thoughts. His use of unfamiliar words to describe his works that he is “interested in ecological theology,” illustrates the naïve mind of the artist that he paints from himself, or he paints himself through the painting. Perhaps, that is why his recent works include a body of a person in a landscape. The body, rather than being separated as a distinctive object, is depicted as part of the aggregated elements of the surrounding landscape where the trees, bushes, and the sky respond to each other blurring the boundary. What he depicts here is not a moment’s phenomenal state; rather it is the deconstruction of the object as a monad, at the same time, it is about things become an integrated being united with the surroundings.

Studio + Nature

The artist has been working at home for more than ten years. The subjects of his paintings are nothing special but spaces of his daily life. He has been constantly projecting his gaze at the parks nearby, streets, a small village in a countryside where he often visits. As seen from his recent exhibition titles, ‘A Talk with a Tree,’ ‘Thinking Forest,’ there is no clear boundary between human and nature in his paintings. Furthermore, the distinction between a body and its surroundings, or interior and exterior is only allusive.

What is clearly revealed is the flow of continuous matter waves and powerful forces that fill the space. A quotation found from his note explains everything, “Molecules think, too.” As an alternative to the Modernist’s ontology that separates man and nature, body and reason, and that postulates a certain dominant structure, his studio explores the world of wholeness. His studio shall reflect his world view. Then the real question is how one constructs an ambiguous field that interior is blurred with exterior, nature permeates into the space, and the artist’s gaze spills out to the nature.

Skin + Space

To the north of the site is a 4 meter high sloped hill, and the site is open towards all three sides. First, a long façade stands on the south of the site and overlooks a stream. The skin of the façade is gently rolled inward as it breaks up the boundary between the interior and the exterior. The rolled in surfaces lift up as they enter the interior and they traverse the interior toward the opposite side of the wall. During the crossing, the panels of the skin are split and distorted, creating loose crevices.

The landscape permeates through the crevice, and so does light. The light colors the space with every moment in time. As a body moves, the space of the crevice changes sensitively. Skin becomes space, and space becomes skin. The boundary is blurred, and the flow that passes through the interior and the exterior becomes denser.

Site: Seohoori, Seojongmyun, Yangpyeonggun, Gyeonggido, Korea
Construction Area: 112.62m2
Gross Area: 130.60m2

Floors: 2
Structure: RC

Project Year: 2010
Designed and Constructed by AND