Hasta La Ideas

Fraher & Findlay has built a wildflower-topped rear extension, a glass-walled courtyard and a loft extension for a 20th-century house in London.

Architecture studio Fraher & Findlay‘s design for The Courtyard House draws on the history of its south west London conservation area site.

In the 19th century it would have been occupied by orchards and gardens famous for their produce.

The rear extension reads as two distinct brick cubes, the higher housing the kitchen and the lower a garden-facing snug.

The wildflower gardens on top of The Courtyard House’s extension are designed to be another garden space to look out over from the first floor bedroom.

“To avoid a full-width rear extension, the design breaks up the rear massing of the building,” said the practice.

“Stepping the extension down into the garden to soften the level change that was problematic for the existing house.”

A wrap-around roof light in the kitchen block enhances the feeling of a connection to the garden, and new, high-level picture windows in the living space frame views of the lower extension’s wildflower roof.

A glazed courtyard has been built at the rear of the large ground-floor living space to maximise the connection between the garden and the interiors of the home.

The courtyard also brings light and natural ventilation deep into the plan, and creates a sheltered outdoor place to sit.

The loft extension houses two additional bedrooms and is accessed via an extension of the home’s original arts and crafts staircase.

All of the new areas reference the original finishes of the arts and crafts home, with timber finishes and brass detailing.

The Courtyard House’s extensions are distinct by their smooth concrete floors and black metal window frames.

Fraher Architects was founded in 2009 by Joe and Lizzie Webster, and in 2018 joined forces with Findlay construction to become Fraher & Findlay.

The practice have previously worked on numerous London home extensions, including the black metal-clad Signal House, and an extension built using zig-zagging courses of black bricks.

Photography us by Adam Scott.

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Central Saint Martins graduate Qiang Huang has created a range of unfinished furniture bases that need to be completed by adding components from discarded shared bikes.

Named Bike Scavengers, Huang‘s furniture is designed to be used by an association that would encourage participants to disassemble bikes left on the street and transform the salvaged parts into usable products.

The association would provide unfinished elements that would require different bike components to create items of furniture including a bench, a stool, a trolley and a lamp.

She developed the system to tackle the huge amount of waste that is likely to result from these discarded bikes by proposing a system for salvaging and reusing components to create statement furniture.

Huang’s project is a response to the explosion of cycle-sharing schemes in urban centres around the world. In China alone around 20 million shared bikes are currently operated by more than 60 companies.

“At the heart of the project is a critique of the environmental detriment caused by bike-sharing schemes in their operations and unregulated growth in China,” said Huang.

“Presenting what a bike-made product looks like gives an opportunity to our users to be upcycling practitioners and to take social responsibility.”

The collection includes a Bench of Saddles featuring a metal frame with rows of vertical fixings for attaching 36 discarded saddles. The interlocking saddles form a single seating surface with a repetitive pattern that the designer said “refers to the over-production of shared bikes”.

Other items include lamps made from salvaged mudguards, a stool featuring six saddles attached to a stem-like base, and a kitchen trolley created by fixing bike baskets to a simple frame with wheels.

“These products could not only be functional commodities but also provocative pieces reminding people how bike sharing affected us and in what way we could protect our living environment and future,” the designer suggested.

Huang added that an important part of the project would involve overcoming the negative connotations of the word “scavenger” and instead celebrating the work of people who perform the role of repurposing these overproduced and disused bikes.

Chinese bike-sharing company Mobike recently announced plans to withdraw its fleet of dockless bikes from Manchester, England, following unsustainable levels of theft and vandalism.

The same company has also developed an electric version of its signature orange bicycle, and French company Zoov has also developed a system of electric sharing bikes that lock together.

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Mottled grey walls meet black-brick partitions to form the monochromatic interiors of Yakusha Design’s self-designed office and showroom in Kiev, Ukraine.

Named Ya Vsesvit, the office accommodates Yakusha Design‘s own studio, a showroom and an 80-seat lecture room for events.

The studio is lead by Ukranian architect and designer Victoriya Yakusha, who wanted to create a space where different “design-minded” individuals within the company could work under one roof, encouraging the potential for collaboration.

“The space is created for architects, fashion designers, visualizers, stylists, photographers and copywriters – anyone who hunts for inspiration,” explained Yakusha.

“[Ya Vsesvit] also means ‘I’m the universe’ in Ukrainian, so the interior is built on the idea of combining.”

Yakusha herself comes from a multi-disciplinary background. As well as running her own design studio, she heads up Faina – a furniture brand that makes pieces out of traditional materials from her native country like clay, wood, willow and flax.

The brand will also be based out of Ya Vsesvit.

When it came to developing the interiors, Yakusha Design opted for a largely monochromatic colour scheme.

Several partitions made from jet-black bricks appear throughout the space, contrasting against the surrounding structural walls which have been roughly rendered with grey clay.

Black-framed panels of glazing close off the main meeting room and a couple of small offices. One of them is centred by a chunky desk crafted from a single block of sandstone.

Decorative ornaments and furnishings in Ya Vsesvit are largely designed by Faina, allowing the space to double-up as a showroom for Yakusha.

Items include the brand’s tapering Trembita vase, which takes its name from a traditional Ukranian wind instrument, and its organically-shaped Ztista chairs which are punctuated with holes.

Faina’s huge woven Strikha lamp has also been suspended over a work table, which takes cues from the straw roofs of Ukranian huts.

Shiny foil-effect seating poufs and large wall mirrors have also been dotted around. Metal shelving has then been integrated into the walls to keep work areas clutter-free.

“The biggest aim in this project was to stay honest, to create a design that’s able to live in the future and not only one or two years, as all trends do,” added the studio.

Ya Vsesvit is longlisted in this year’s Dezeen Awards in the Small Workspace Interior category. It will compete head-to-head against projects like The Wing Dumbo, which is decked out with colourful furnishings, and Space10’s head office, which has a flexible floor plan divided by mobile partitions.

Photography is by Mikey Estrada.

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Euphrates, un collectif d’artiste japonais dirigé par Masahiko Sato a créé un court métrage expérimental sur les mouvements d’une danseuse de ballet à l’aide de la méthode de rotoscopie. La rotoscopie est une méthode traditionnelle d’animation. Le processus consiste à tourner avec de vrais acteurs et d’en dessiner le contour image par image pour reproduire les mouvements des sujets avec réalisme. Dans cette vidéo hypnotisante, on suit les mouvements décomposés d’une ballerine sur un air de musique classique. Une oeuvre qui explore la beauté du mouvement au croisement entre l’homme et la machine, le geste intuitif et le mouvement calculé… captivant!

New York design studio The Very Many has built a white orbed pavilion in Charlotte, North Carolina with bulbs shaded soft blue and pink inside.

Pillar of Dreams is a 26-foot-high (eight-metre) structure made from two layers of thin aluminium, perforated and layered on top of each other to create a single bulbous form.

The Very Many designed the project as a “cloud-like formation” that hovers in a grassy plaza at the Valerie C Woodard Center in Charlotte.

Pillar of Dreams is made from nine hollow legs that support a mass of differently sized globes that merge together.

The orbs appear to be “filled with air,” but instead are created with a continuous structural skin of three-millimetre aluminium that is 36,089 feet (11,000 meters) long.

“They appear to float like balloons,” said the studio.

Visitors can access the structure from sidewalks that cut across the property and pass through the design, allowing people to walk up underneath the pale shell.

It is coloured white outside and features a gradient of sky blue and soft peach and pink hues inside.

“From a distance, the structure strikes a soft tone, but the viewer can still register the pulsing glow of the gradient within,” said The Very Many.

“The intensity of colour grows as one nears the pavilion and finally envelopes the viewer upon entry.”

Various computational patterns are punched across the two thin aluminium kins, which form an intricate design when layered on top of each other.

The skins become thinner and more open with its perforations, “like bubblegum blown just to the point of popping” as the volumes swell up top.

Where the orbs merge, the perforations become more densely packed, lending structural integrity.

“As they come together at seams and make their way to the ground, they find alignment as linear stripes,” the studio explained.

Inside, sunlight is filtered in geometric patterns and shadows are cast. The structure offers relief from the strong North Carolina sun in summer months.

Seating areas are incorporated within the legs of the volume, revealing contrasting hues of pink and blue.

Pillar of Dreams measures 23 feet (seven metres) wide and 43 feet (13 metres) deep, and is an original work commissioned by Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in partnership with the City of Charlotte/Mecklenburg Public Art Commission and Arts and Science Council.

Other projects in nearby include a grey two-storey home and a linear monochrome residence, both by In Situ Studio.

Founded in 2004 by New York architect Marc Fornes, The Very Many is an art and architecture studio specialising in digital fabrication and computational design.

Among its other projects are a similarly perforated aluminium structure in Texas coloured orange and blue and white coral-like installation in Orlando, Florida.

Photography is by NAARO.

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