Hasta La Ideas

In the first in a series of daily videos about London buildings and spaces during Open House London, architecture historian and skateboarding fan Iain Borden sheds light on the design of Crystal Palace Skatepark.

The short movie, made by Jim Stephenson of Stephenson/BishopFilms, is one of a series of movies about overlooked and unusual places in the city commissioned by the festival as part of its 2020 programme.

The films are part of the festival’s move to diversify its programme and make it more accessible in the light of the coronavirus pandemic, which has impacted the number of buildings able to throw their doors open to the public.

As media partner for Open House London, Dezeen is publishing a different movie every day during the festival, which runs from 19 to 27 September.

Located in south-east London, the concrete Crystal Palace Skatepark was designed by Canvas in 2018 as a free facility for the community.

It was the result of a petition raised by local skaters four years earlier, sparked by a flurry of open-access skateparks being built across the UK by local councils.

In the video, Borden sheds light on the design that comprises three unique sections. This includes a deep clover-shaped bowl, a central medium-depth L-shaped bowl and shallow “street course” with various flat and raised banks.

According to Borden, this layout is unique and makes the park a well-regarded venue within the UK.

Its most notable feature is the deepest bowl, which has stone coping and tiling. It is modelled on the curved swimming pools typical of suburban housing in California from the 1970s.

However, the design of these residential Californian pools is an evolution of the world’s first kidney-shaped swimming pool, which Finnish architect Alvar Aalto conceived for Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland. The skatepark is therefore in effect “a copy of an Aalto original”.

Crystal Palace had been a popular location for skateboarding since the 1970s when the sport boomed in the UK.

It was the location of the first UK National skateboard championships, held in 1977, and was home to a world-famous half-pipe in the 1980s.

While many advanced and commercialised skateparks were built around the UK, Crystal Palace maintained its reputation as a hub for the sport.

Borden, professor of architecture and urban culture at The Bartlett architecture school in London, is known for his academic writing about everyday activities. He has written two books about skateboarding: Skateboarding and the City: a Complete History; and Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body.

He explains in the video that it is important to understand that skateparks like in Crystal Palace are “not sports facilities” but instead are vital community spaces that can unite people of all ages and backgrounds.

“In my mind, they’re one of the world’s great kinds of public space,” he concluded.

Open House London takes place at venues across London and online from 19 to 27 September. Videos will be published on Dezeen each day during the festival. See Dezeen Events Guide for details of more architecture and design events.

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The Church of Pope John Paul II in Páty, Hungary, is a crescent-shaped building featuring skewed angles and whitewashed concrete that aims to turn “passive observers” into active participants of worship.

Local practice Robert Gutowski Architects filled the church in the village of Páty in Budapest with modern takes on traditional aspects of Medieval, ecclesiastical architecture.

The intention was to shift the emphasis towards the altar and the congregation to make the act of worship more engaging.

Traditional churches typically have a rectangular floor plan and are made up of a nave – the central part of the church – and an apse – the semicircular or polygonal area at the end of the aisle, usually located behind the altar.

The Church of Pope John Paul II, however, has an elliptical layout, made up of the crescent-shaped building of worship that wraps around an adjoining oval-shaped outdoor space.

Therefore what would typically be the nave of a conventional church functions as the churchyard or garden, while the liturgical space is situated where the apse would be.

As studio founder Robert Gutowski explains, this layout was designed to place more emphasis on the communal experience of the Eucharist and to “invite people closer to the holy act” at the altar.

“If you like, we invite people into the apse, surrounding the altar, forming a community,” the architect explained. “It is also similar to the liturgy of early times, when Paleochristians simply surrounded a table in their own home – what is known as Domus Ecclesiae.”

“The church clearly defines its purpose: while the Creator and the almighty God are at the centre of traditional liturgy, modern liturgical efforts have shifted emphasis to the recreator God, the image of a perpetually redeeming Christ,” Gutowski added.

“The Church of Pope John Paul II represents a conscious response to liturgical changes in recent decades, rendering it a model church experiment in contemporary church architecture,” he continued.

“Emphasis is shifted toward the active involvement of worshippers.The community is not a passive observer of events in a sanctuary, but rather actively experiences the holy act.”

Several rooms lead off of the central, liturgical space, including a communal room, a service room and an office on the ground floor, and an educational room, guest room, the priest’s living quarters, and access to the bell tower on the first floor.

Each of these rooms are enclosed in one, whole elliptical floor plan – a form chosen to symbolise “perpetuity” and to create a holistic space.

“The concept is that when we say ‘church’, this does not refer only to the part of the chapel, but rather to the whole community building in one singular form,” explained Gutowski.

The two ellipses formed by the crescent-shaped church and the adjoining yard have been set at different axes. This is following the historically “inaccurate” layout of traditional churches, wherein the nave and the apse tend to be slightly off-centre of each other.

“We cannot name one single church that sits on the same axis, because pretty much all of the historical churches in Europe have this tiny ‘mistake’, which actually became a symbol of the broken body of Christ,” added Gutowski.

This symbol of Christ’s broken body has been extended to the church interior, which features walls set at slanted, uneven angles.

The domed ceiling, made from reinforced concrete, is lined with spotlights that illuminate various sacral functions such as the area of the altar and surrounding alcoves filled with religious artworks.

A rectangular cutout in the ceiling also fills the room with natural light, which is directed particularly at the centre towards the altar.

While the majority of the interior has been painted white – bar the natural-wood pews – the altar is carved from a single block of deep green onyx stone, standing out from its surroundings to serve as the focal point of the space.

The structure itself is symmetrical but every detail is asymmetrical, such as the alcoves. The altar is the only element that sits on the main axis of the building.

Steps made of white Carrara marble lead up to the altar, which have trapezoid-shaped surfaces with rounded corners to allow gathering around the sanctuary space.

The design and construction of The Church of Pope John Paul II was carried out with the help of the local community. The church was built mainly using donations, and was consecrated in 2019.

The church has been shortlisted in the civic and cultural interior project category of this year’s Dezeen Awards.

Other projects in this category include a crematorium in Belgium designed by Rotterdam-based studio Kaan Architecten, which is made up of one rectilinear volume made from blocks of unfinished concrete.

A museum for children in Pittsburgh has also been shortlisted in the civic and cultural interior project category, which US firm KoningEizenberg Architecture renovated from the remains of a historic library that was struck by lightning.

Project credits:

Architect: Robert Gutowski
Design team: Ákos Boczkó, Gáspár Bollók, Barnabás Dely-Steindl, Hunor László Kovács, István Kövér, Attila Révai, Béla Ákos Szokolay
Artworks: Csaba Ozsvári, István Böjte Horváth
Landscape design: Attila Páll
Engineering: Zoltán Klopka, András Lantos, Gáspár Sándor, Gellért Mérő, János Mészáros
Photography: Tamás Bujnovszky

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This week on Dezeen, Habitat and Design Museum founder Terence Conran passed away and London Design Festival took place.

Conran died at the age of 88 at his home in London. Tributes to the designer were lead by former Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic who said: “No one has done more to create modern Britain than Terence Conran.”

Thomas Heatherwick was among the numerous designers to have paid their respects to Conran. “I feel so privileged to have had Sir Terence Conran as a mentor and lifelong friend and will miss him greatly,” he said. 

London Design Festival (LDF) began this week with a reduced schedule due to the coronavirus pandemic. As part of the event, Studio Weave created an arched greenhouse filled with tropical plants that could soon grow outdoors in the UK due to climate change.

During LDF Dezeen teamed up with Planted, a new design show dedicated to reconnecting cities with nature, to present a virtual showcase of sustainable design brands and products.

LDF also saw Sabine Marcelis design a work-from-home cubicle that hides its contents inside a pale wooden shell when they are not in use as part of the Design Museum’s Connected project.

London studio Boano Prišmontas also focused on the growing number of people working from home by creating a prefabricated timber home office that can be built in a garden within a day.

Also in London, this week saw the news that the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch will close permanently.

The Ace Hotel London Shoreditch, which was closed its doors temporarily in March, will not reopen under the Ace name as the building’s owners are planning to open a hotel under a different name.

In architecture news, the Tokyo Toilet continued with Tadao Ando being the latest high-profile architect to design a public toilet in the city.

Japanese architect Takenosuke Sakakura also unveiled his contribution to the project, a toilet block that lights up at night like a lantern.

As the global pandemic continues, French fashion house Louis Vuitton has become the latest brand to create a facemask.

Named the LV Sheild and complete with the signature LV monogram print, the face shield can be flipped up and used as a sun visor.

Popular projects on Dezeen this week include a cafe squeezed into a space less than 2.6 metres wide in Shenzhen, a hotel built in an 18th-century English mansion and a children’s hospital in Thailand with slides and a pool

This week on Dezeen is our regular roundup of the week’s top news stories. Subscribe to our newsletters to be sure you don’t miss anything.

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The idea behind the PixelBloc concept is pretty simple. Stack multiple power-banks together and make yourself a massive power-bank with a higher battery-capacity… or just separate them into smaller power-banks that you can use to charge multiple devices at the same time. The PixelBloc’s modular nature allows you to use it any way you see fit, and gives you a flexibility that wasn’t previously known in the external-charger industry.

The PixelBloc is comprised of multiple 2500mAh battery-units that connect together using a USB-C port system. The main bloc, which sits at its base, comes with a USB-C port and two USB-A ports, while subsequent blocs only house the USB-C ports. This means the modules need to be plugged into the main bloc to charge them, creating a foolproof system, and the charger is smart enough to recognize them when they’re plugged in together. The PixelBloc uses sequential charging and discharging, which means when the entire unit is assembled, the main bloc is always recharged first (so you always know which bloc to use when you’re low on power) after which subsequent bloc-units get recharged. When you’re using the entire power-bank to juice up your device, power is pulled from the last bloc first, discharging it from the back to the front and maintaining the system so you’re never left with arbitrarily charged individual bloc-units.

To ensure each bloc is plugged in correctly, the individual power-bricks come with a switch that helps lock the units in place, and an LED to let you know they’re all connected. Whether you’re charging a single device or multiple ones, the PixelBloc has you covered. You can share individual bloc-units with friends too, or carry just as many blocs as you need instead of carrying the entire brick with you. The power-bank has been a singular product in both form and function, with limited capabilities. By turning it modular, the Google PixelBloc gives it an innovative touch (a lot like Project Ara!) and frees it from its boring monolithic form!

Designer: Ratan Pande

Bamboo is a wonderful natural renewable resource that is capable of rapid growth and an alternative the designers can use to avoid deforestation. It’s tensile strength and flexibility makes it an ideal material for durable products as well as seismic-resistant constructions. It is incredibly lightweight and fire-resistant (it can withstand temperatures up to 4000°C). While it gets all points for being eco-friendly, we’ll give it a few more because it’s also cost-effective. Happy World Bamboo Day! Scroll down for our top 10 Bamboo designs!

The Everloop Toothbrush from NOS tackles this problem head-on by using a recycled plastic handle and disposable bamboo bristles. Taking on a unique cradle-to-cradle approach, the brush comes with a plastic handle that is, in fact, made from recycled toothbrushes. At the very end is a clamping mechanism that allows you to attach 100% natural bamboo bristles to the toothbrush’s head. The idea is to retain the plastic handle and periodically replace the bamboo bristles every few months. The bamboo bristles have absolutely no plastic in them, allowing them to easily be disposed of, or composted in a way that doesn’t harm the environment.

Ice Mouse by Aloic claims to be the only mouse designed with ventilation and breathability in mind. Now I don’t possess any data in front of me that says traditional mice tend to heat up, mine probably doesn’t, but I do like the idea of a mouse that is both unique looking and 100% plastic-free. The Ice Mouse comes with a bamboo upper that promotes breathability, making sure your palms don’t work up a sweat with hours of use. The bamboo component is CNC machined from a layered block of bamboo plies, doing a pretty remarkable job of showcasing the wood-grain while remaining entirely unique in its grain pattern. Some may say it almost reflects the uniqueness of the fingers and palm that rest on it! Sitting underneath it is the aluminum base, giving your fingers a metallic surface to hug and sort of complementing the feeling of typing on an aluminum-constructed MacBook.

Indian designer, Saksham Mahajan, who has come up with a sustainable version of an iron made from bamboo! The designer started the project as a challenge to explore bamboo as a material, “It’s sustainability can be exploited to make so many different things”, says Saksham – and we agree! Bamboo is structured, sturdy, easy to grow, and eco-friendly, in fact, it is used to make houses in Asia so why not use it to make household items too? The bamboo iron box was selected as one of the best entries in the Green Concept Award 2019 which furthers the conversation of using this versatile material in more products.

Teaming up with the renowned Japanese Architect Kengo Kuma, ASICS has unveiled the latest edition of the Metaride, an all-white running shoe with a pattern inspired by Japanese Yatara bamboo-weaving, on the shoe’s body. The fabric strips wrap themselves in a seemingly chaotic way, but in fact, are strategically placed to hold the foot steady by binding with the shoe’s innovative Flytefoam base that uses cellulose nanofiber, a strong and lightweight wood-pulp derived material currently being researched and explored in Japan. The shoe is described as ‘moving architecture’ by Kuma, who relied on the age-old technique of Yatara to provide aesthetic dynamism as well as a comfortable fit.

The Knot chair by Qiaolin Gong will check all your boxes when it comes to a stool-style seating solution. The structure is made almost entirely of beautiful, eco-friendly bamboo. The natural material is bent using a unique crisscross weave that reinforces its natural strength and creates an exquisite, sculptural aesthetic. Lightweight, long-lasting, and integrable into a variety of styles, it’s sure to be a timeless addition to any interior.

With an aesthetic that melds Japanese and French aesthetics together, the iFi Aurora by Julien Haziza is a hi-fi speaker that literally looks like it’s levitating off the surface of the table or mantelpiece it’s kept on. The audio unit is clad in a casing made of bamboo, with slatted strips around its periphery, adding contrast while also creating what one would perceive to be the grill for the speaker’s 8 drivers. The speaker is lifted using a pyramid-shaped aluminum frame that helps demarcate Aurora’s control unit and display on the front, as well as it’s series of input and output ports at the back.

Furniture design is moving towards a more flexible direction and CatYou in a Circle by Jack Dogson is a wonderful display of modular pieces that work for both humans and pets. The set includes a floor sofa and a coffee table that aims to create a relaxing space for cats and their owners to have some downtime. Urban homes are only getting smaller and cat owners are faced with challenges to keep their pets entertained without taking up too much space. During quarantine, it has become more of a lesson as we share our space with them 24/7. The designer administered a questionnaire and after 233 responses it was found one-third of the cat owners living under 50 square meters. The four main problems that the design needed to solve based on their feedback were – not enough hiding space, cat furniture occupies too much living space, renovation is often not an option, and people want to have enough room to bond with their cats during playtime.

Amidst Tulum’s rapidly-growing unchecked architectural development, the Luum is an eco-friendly bamboo structure located in a conserved area in a native jungle, within a conservation-minded residential development called Luum Zama. The temple’s design is highly influenced by parametric architecture and features five catenary arches made from Bamboo. Designed by CO-LAB Design Office, the temple’s design uses bamboo sustainably grown in the neighboring Chiapas state. Flat sections of bamboo were bent and cold-molded on site, before being shaped into the 5 catenary arches. For structural stability, the designers wove together multiple bamboo beams into a triangular mesh, with a dual-layered woven bamboo lattice on top for further cover. Sitting atop the grand bamboo structure is a canopy of local Zacate, or straw thatch, giving the structure protection from heat and even rain.

The Baubax shoes are designed to be everything you want from your footwear. They’re grippy, durable, water-resistant, come in a variety of styles with both laced and laceless variants, but most importantly, are extremely comfortable. Borrowing entirely from nature and natural materials, Baubax’s travel shoes are organic from top to bottom, carefully picking and choosing materials that best fit the shoe’s needs. The rubber outsole gives the shoes the friction it needs to firmly grip onto even the slipperiest of floors, while coconut coir and natural latex insole mimic the feeling of having a cushy mattress underneath your feet. Sitting between the insole and your feet is a layer of Australian merino wool, a breathable fabric that keeps your feet feeling ventilated while letting you commit the otherwise cardinal sin of wearing your shoes without socks. Merino wool, however, possesses anti-bacterial properties too, so your feet stay healthy and your shoes don’t end up developing an odor. Sitting above everything is the Travel Shoes’ bamboo-fabric upper, which keeps your feet cool at all times, just like open-toed sandals, but without being a fashion faux-pas.

KNORK Eco’s are designed to be cutlery you can dispose of after use, but you won’t want to. Created from Astrik, a biopolymer made from sugarcane starch and bamboo pulp, KNORK Eco feels like plastic but comes with a much thicker cross-section, making them solid and incredibly durable. They can be used, reused, and are dishwasher-friendly… and in the event that they do end up in a landfill, the KNORK Eco will biodegrade into compost in just two years. What sets the KNORK Eco apart is the fact that they aren’t designed like your single-use plastic spoons and forks. Marginally thicker cross-sections mean they’re as robust as stainless steel cutlery, while the ergonomic gripping handles are perfect for eating food with. The bio-polymer is heat-resistant, making it perfect for all sorts of meals, and its glossy finish makes it look top of the line.