1. Design & Fiction: Panel Discussion Bringing together heavy hitters across numerous industries, the IDEO-hosted panel Design & Fiction explored the relationship between technology, design and fiction—all in the context of the past, future and present….
Laboratory for Architecture in Barcelona uncovered barrel-vaulted brick ceilings during the renovation of this apartment in the architects’ home city (+ slideshow).
For the renovation of Casa Tomás, Laboratory for Architecture in Barcelona separated the interior into areas that will be used most at night and those that will be active during the day, connected by a small intermediate room.
Architect Pepe Gascón told Dezeen they discovered the “lovely roof” when they demolished the existing plaster ceiling.
“We supposed there was this kind of roof in the apartment because most of the apartments and flats built in this period of time were built with this kind of construction,” Gascón said.
“In the Catalan language it’s called ‘volta catalana’ which means ‘Catalan arch’ and it was an easy way to build a roof with ceramic tiles, where the arch distributes the forces it receives to both sides,” he explained.
On one side of the apartment’s H-shaped plan, four rooms have been transformed into a single open-plan space for the living, dining and kitchen areas.
A bathroom on the opposite side of the apartment features green tiled walls that never meet the vaulted ceiling, but a row of glazed panels is slotted between to bring extra light into the space from above.
Two bedrooms are situated on either side of the bathroom, completing the side of the residence dedicated to night time.
The ceiling in the living area has been left exposed to show the red tones of the clay ceramic, while vaulted ceilings elsewhere are all painted white. A mixture of wooden boards and patterned Mallorcan tiles cover the floors.
Narrow terraces are positioned at each end of the apartment. The one at the bedroom end is screened by a steel trellis covered with climbing plants, while the second faces down onto the street.
Louis Kahn divided spaces into two types: served and servant (where ‘servant’ refers not to domestic staff but to spaces serving other spaces). Marcel Breuer structured a considerable number of his single-family homes into a bi-nuclear scheme. The pre-existing H-shape of the Tomás home already favoured its spatial organisation into two living areas, as in Breuer’s plan: one part to be used for daytime activities – the social area – and the other for night-time functions – the private area. The connecting room was to be a servant space but also given its own character so that, rather than being relegated for use as a mere passageway, it could also function as a living area. The other two rooms would be served spaces.
Although these two served spaces are almost similar in terms of dimension and geometry, both are defined in completely opposite ways. The public part is clear space while the private section is divided. The former is open to the street and the latter closed off by the inner courtyard of the block. The main space extends outwards via a balcony, while the other area is filtered and separated from outside by a uniform glassed-in veranda where climbing plants partly screen the glass slats that close it off. The balcony acts as a kind of solarium before the living room, dining room and kitchen area. The veranda, however, is like a shade house in front of the dormitories thanks to the plant filter provided by the creepers.
Dimorphism is the term used in biology for the phenomenon in which two different anatomical aspects appear in the same species. This principle was used to “furnish” the served spaces of the house. In the public zone, it is by means of the free-standing bench in the kitchen. In the bedroom area, the bathroom is set out like one more piece of furniture since it rises from the floor and does not reach up to the joists or the vaulted ceiling. The bathroom can be understood in Kahn’s language as a servant space since it serves both bedrooms.
The same applies to the transversal strip comprised by the vestibule, the toilet and the storage space for household appliances – paved and finished with decorative tiles – which also serves the living-room, dining room and kitchen. Even the servant space connecting the two parts of the house is multiplied by adding a dual-level or, better said, a bi-vertical loft space.
The spatial result of this project is therefore a contrivance whereby opposites, symmetries and balances mediate served and servant spaces. This is a house structured in a bi-nuclear fashion which repeats dualities again and again or, in other words, it brings together in one very small home twofold, different and contrasting spatial characteristics: clear-divided, open-closed, extended-separated, broken up-filtered, above-below. In short, it is a project based on dualism rather than on monism, with Kahn and Bauer as its double references.
Architecture: LAB, Laboratory for Architecture in Barcelona – Pepe Gascón & Víctor Sala (architects) Client: Miguel Gayoso Contractor: Constructora Montnegre (Tordera, Barcelona), Spain Dirección de obra: LAB, Laboratory for Architecture in Barcelona – Pepe Gascón & Víctor Sala (architects) Coordinación de seguridad y salud: LAB, Laboratory for Architecture in Barcelona – Pepe Gascón & Víctor Sala (architects) Project area: 8000 m2 Cost: €73.000, 00
Light projected through a soap bubble throws patterns generated by the tiny vibrations of a speaker onto the ceiling in this installation by Royal College of Art graduate Dagny Rewera (+ movie).
For the Invisible Acoustics project, Dagny Rewera set up three speakers with lights attached on brass armatures. To visualise the sound emitted, the designer developed an automated system that dips a hoop into a soap solution and holds it directly above the speaker.
When switched on, the sound waves cause the soap bubble to vibrate, but these tiny aberrations aren’t visible to the naked eye, so a lens is suspended above the soap to magnify the microscopic changes in the surface of the bubble. The results are then projected onto the ceiling to create kaleidoscopic images that change with the music.
“The aim of the project was to change the perception of the everyday,” explained Rewera. “The project tries to enhance the greater understanding of the world we are surrounded by and [suggests] there might be parallel worlds unnoticed in our mundane lives.”
As the water evaporates from the solution, the concentration of soap reveals a range of hues that intensify over time.
The soap film is designed to last up to an hour. If the bubble bursts, the automated system re-dips the hoop into the solution, starting the whole process again.
Each of the three speakers plays tones in a variety of different frequency ranges, meaning each visualisation is different.
“My role as a designer is choreographing these invisible worlds, revealing their beauty and importance and guiding the users from the mundane into the spectacle,” explained Rewera.
Rewara completed Invisible Acoustics for the Design Products course at the Royal College of Art in London. It was inspired by cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration first studied by English philosopher Robert Hooke in 1680.
Here’s some information from Dagny Rewera:
Invisible Acoustics
The project titled Invisible Acoustics is a project that slips suggestively into a different world – one that requires different means for its explorations as well as its interpretations.
The world of the invisible
The project is an audio-visual installation of three sound and light units, which visualise the normally invisible form of sound. Based on the scientific study of Cimatics, the units reveal the true, organic form of sound and vibration.
Using the surface tension of a soap film, the vibration created by the sounds source transforms the soap into a flexible three-dimensional sculpture, unseen with the naked eye. By bouncing light of the film through a lens, the microscopic transformations of the soap membrane are enlarged and projected on the ceiling, creating a hypnotising light performance.
The soap film , designed to last up to an hour, through time transforms the image into an explosion of hues, as the water in the soap lens evaporates. When it finally bursts, the automated mechanism re-dips the soap wand in the solution and starts the performance again.
Each designed device plays different tones in a frequency range. These differences in frequencies are translated real time into individual light projections. At the same time, creating a sound and light spectacle when experienced as a whole.
The aim of the project was to change the perception of the everyday. By choreographing a smaller detail, the project tries to enhance the greater understanding of the world we are surrounded by and put to light that there might be more parallel works unnoticed in our mundane lives.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I met Walter Gropius?” Joseph Rykwert is leaning across a table in Daquise, the Polish restaurant in South Kensington he has been frequenting for nearly 50 years, a sparkle in his eye. “I was at the Royal Academy, and on the landing halfway up the stairs I saw Jane Drew, who I knew quite well, and Gropius, who I knew from photographs,” he says. “I walked up to them, and Jane Drew said: ‘Professor Gropius, this is Joseph Rykwert. Joseph, go and find Professor Gropius a taxi.'”
Rykwert gave me this finely turned anecdote on Saturday, at dinner after a symposium about his work at the Victoria & Albert Museum. This week in London has been a festival dedicated to the venerable architectural historian, focussed around the Mardi Gras of Tuesday’s award of the Royal Gold Medal by the RIBA.
Rykwert for me, although I have met him many times and was his editor at the Architects’ Journal, is a legend, a different order of individual to most other writers and certainly to myself. The Gropius story shows how he links us with the first generation of modernist masters, but he is also someone whose work (and that of his prominent students like David Leatherbarrow, Mohsen Mostafavi and Alberto Perez-Gomez, not to mention legion younger protégés) has tangible and I think growing influence in contemporary architecture. He is one of the few historians whose works are routinely assigned by teachers in architecture schools and all of us, surely, aspire to his literate, balanced prose.
The Gropius story also shows Rykwert’s appetite for gossip, and for the almost implausibly perfect story. Despite some claims to the contrary that I’ve heard in the last few days, I think Rykwert would like Dezeen and the writing found around the web, and I’m positive he’d be writing in these forums if he were beginning his career today.
The thing about giving the gold Medal to any critic, and especially one as widely read and respected as Rykwert, is that his opinions are unmistakably available to the rest of the world. It’s not really a question of convenient interpretations allowing generic and polite appreciation. You either agree with Rykwert’s words, or you don’t. You either believe, for instance, the idea that the plan of a Roman city had mythic origins giving each citizen a sense of their place in the cosmos, or you think he’s wrong and it was all about troop movements. And you can either deal with the implications of that insight, or ignore them.
Norman Foster could plausibly say of an architect and fellow Gold Medal winner like Alvaro Siza that he has the deepest respect for his work etc, without really having to face the question of their diametrically opposed views of what architecture is and how human beings find a place in the world. Perhaps all buildings are themselves ambiguous enough that we can elide even fundamental differences (with the possible exception of work by the progeny of the Prince of Wales school of architecture, or narcissistic and vocal numbskulls like Wolf Prix). Flattening difference in architecture probably results from a profession keen to avoid conflict within: the idea that one shouldn’t criticise a fellow professional.
In the big, if-not-exactly-happy-then-mutually-uncritical family of the profession that the Royal Institute of British Architects tries to bring together, it would have been interesting to know, for instance, what Dominique Perrault might have thought of Rykwert winning the prize (Rykwert says of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in The Seduction of Place: “Demoralised by disaffection and labour problems, by inept book stack towers and disgraced by sterile, unhappy public spaces – both within and without – it seems a perfect candidate for a revised edition of Peter Hall’s Great Planning Disasters.”), or, say, any developer or architect involved in London’s Docklands (which Rykwert calls “socially confused” amongst other things in the book already cited).
A true critic is the unwelcome guest at a party of architects. Rykwert himself found that out the hard way when he began teaching architectural history at the University of Essex in 1967. What Eric Parry in the Gold Medal citation called the “architectural authorities” (in fact the RIBA itself) tried to close down this course because it stood outside their approved version of how architectural history should be taught and who might be permitted to learn it.
This is why Rykwert’s Gold Medal lecture on Monday night, which some found tortuous, was so important. He began by describing his work as a designer, and followed that with accounts of the three architects who turned down the RIBA Royal Gold Medal (Richard Norman Shaw, John Ruskin, who turned it down twice, and William Richard Lethaby) embroidering it with anecdotes so detailed that at one point I thought Rykwert was about to say no to it himself. His theme was the age-old problem of whether architecture was an art or a profession.
For Rykwert, this is a non problem – a false dichotomy. Some audience members at Monday’s lecture tried to ask him about where politics stands in relation to architecture, but Rykwert’s work stands for the idea that every act of design, or writing, is political. Design is a set of ethical commitments or reticences. We cannot absolve ourselves of responsibility for the full range of implications of a project – as Zaha Hadid tried to week – any more than we can choose just to breathe the oxygen in the atmosphere, but not the nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Rykwert has earned a place alongside Ruskin and others because of the clarity of his commitment to an adulterated but rich and meaningful view of architecture.
Kieran Long is senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC, and is currently the architecture critic for the Evening Standard newspaper.
Dezeen Guide: design events taking place in March include festivals in Iceland (pictured), Mexico and Costa Rica, plus thirteen more in our update this month.
Studios and exhibitions open across Munich to connect designers and brands, as well as showcase work to the public.
Design Indaba Cape Town, South Africa – until 2 March 2014
This annual conference in Cape Town draws both renowned international designers and newcomers to South Africa’s emerging design scene. See Dezeen’s coverage of Design Indaba 2014 »
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