Hasta La Ideas

Holly Lewis and Oliver Goodall of Hackney studio We Made That have been exploring architecture’s “soft side” by planting flowers in the Olympic Park, as they explain in the final talk filmed at our Designed in Hackney Day last year.

In the movie, the We Made That founders look at why they’ve been working on “things you never get taught in [architecture] school,” with projects like Fantasticology, a group of landscape interventions in the London 2012 Olympic Park.

Movie image: wildflower meadows in the Olympic Park
Above: Fantasticology facts on benches in the Olympic Park

Working with architect Tomas Klassnik and artist Riitta Ikonen, they planted wildflower meadows in the footprints of the buildings that previously occupied the site.

“Essentially it becomes a floral memorial to some of those things that were there before, and are no longer,” says Lewis. “We just love the idea that there’s some recognition of that past. The majority of the flowers are annuals, so next year they’ll fade and self-seed, disperse and become less distinct.”

Above: site of wildflower meadows in the Olympic Park

Plaques engraved with unusual facts were also inserted into benches around the Olympic Park as part of the same project.

They collected the facts through workshops with local people, finding out that sharks, for example, go into a trance if they’re flipped over. “There was a kid in the park debating with his dad how you turn a shark upside down,” says Lewis. “I love that people can have that kind of interaction with their surroundings, and see something different in their surroundings than this spick and span park.”

Above: copies of The Unlimited Edition newspaper

The duo also worked on a neighbourhood newspaper, The Unlimited Edition, which reported on local news from the High Street 2012 route stretching from Aldgate to Stratford.

“We’re interested in engaging people with tactics for making change,” says Goodall. “If you say to someone, ‘we’re interested in talking about urbanism and policy’, they glaze over. But if you hand out a newspaper on the high street for free and talk about someone’s neighbourhood, they’re interested in having that conversation.”

Above: proposal for The Wild Kingdom play area in Newham

Finally, they discuss a project to build an outdoor play area in Newham, east London. “With this, there’s a number of engagement activities and planned workshops and what we call ‘slow build’,” says Goodall. “That’s an important aspect – not just delivering something, finishing it and walking away. It’s a longer term involvement with these projects.”

Goodall and Lewis founded We Made That in 2006 as an architecture and design studio working within the public realm.

Dezeen’s Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

The post “A soft side to architecture is coming
to the fore” – We Made That appeared first on Dezeen.

Seed-dispersing robots and file-sharing drones are among proposals to fuse technology and the natural world by Liam Young of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, presented at our Designed in Hackney Day last summer (+ movie).

Above: Young’s Unknown Fields project with Kate Davies

In the movie, Liam Young looks back at his work with Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, the studio he runs with Darryl Chen, and Unknown Fields, an experimental project with designer and writer Kate Davies. Young explains his work is influenced by the history of futurology and how the “diverse visions of yesterday’s tomorrows” can explore the consequences of emerging technologies.

Above: deforestation reveals an ancient town in the rainforest

For one Unknown Fields project, Young travelled to the Amazon rainforest and discovered that an area we think of as an untouched wilderness was once a cultivated landscape.

Above: “CO2 scrubbers” for the Amazon

“Instead of a jungle, what we actually find is a large garden,” he says, explaining how deforestation has revealed ditches in the rainforest floor left behind by an ancient village whose residents cultivated the local flora.

Above: “migrating forests” for the Amazon

The studio then invented fantastical creatures that might find a home in the deforested areas of the Amazon, such as “CO2 scrubbers” that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen more efficiently than the trees that once stood there and “migrating forests” that can travel as the climate changes.

Above: rat poison spread across the Galapagos Islands

He also visited the Galapagos Islands where he encountered “an absurd fight for an idealised nature”, with rat poison dumped from helicopters and an “eco sniper” killing goats that destroy the habitats of endangered turtles.

Above: seed dispersal robot

Exploring this use of technology to maintain a “natural” environment, Young came up with a seed dispersal robot that floats like a plant spore in the wind, dropping native Galapagos seeds on the ground.

Above: poison cloud robot

He also designed a machine that sprays poisonous clouds to kill invasive rodent populations, guided by a “Judas rodent” that herds the rats into packs before the poison is released.

Above: “Judas rodent” to guide the poison cloud robot

In Australia, Young visited an enormous gold mine where he discovered that it takes 200 trucks of excavated rock to produce just one gold bar.

Above: Kalgoorlie Super Pit in Western Australia

A 3D computer image of the mine is connected to real-time information about the price of gold, dictating how much is excavated each day.

Above: computer image of Kalgoorlie Super Pit

He finishes with Electronic Countermeasures, a Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today project that saw a flock of flying robots create temporary file-sharing networks above the city.

Above: a gold bar being weighed

“It’s kind of like an aerial Napster, he says. “They perform this balletic aerial choreography, drifting through the sky, part nomadic infrastructure and part nomadic swarm.”

Above: Electronic Countermeasures

“What we’ve realised is that there’s no nature anymore – at least not in the sense that we culturally define it,” he concludes. “What there is, is technology. Engineered networks, augmented environments, invisible fields – infrastructure has exploded into bits, to roam the earth in an architecture of everywhere.”

Above: Electronic Countermeasures

Dezeen’s Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

The post “There is no nature anymore” – Liam Young
of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today appeared first on Dezeen.

Troika founding partner Eva Rucki explains the studio’s large-scale immersive light installations in this movie filmed by Dezeen at our Designed in Hackney Day.

Above: one of Troika’s Trixotrope pieces when spinning and illuminated

Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel founded Troika in 2003 after graduating from the Royal College of Art and have set up a flexible workshop space under a large railway arch in Hackney, east London.

Above: Trixotrope frame when still

The first of the studio’s installations she describes is Thixotropes, a series of rotating frames covered in LED strips. The light pieces hung in the atrium of London department store Selfridges for three months last year. “One of the most magic points for me in this installation is when the structure starts spinning and hits a point where it spins so fast that it becomes a solid volume,” says Rucki.

Above: detail of the LED strips used on the Trixotrope pieces

Four different designs were suspended in two columns and alternated on and off so shoppers on all five floors of the store could experience the way the pieces looked at different speeds from various vantage points.

Above: Trixotrope piece when spinning and illuminated

Rucki then describes Troika’s Light Rain project, first created for Thomas Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo then refined for crystal company Swarovski and displayed at the V&A museum as part of an exhibition of British design. “The way this device works is that you have a lens, a light and when the light comes closer to the lens and further apart and it has an animation written into the mechanism, which is a raindrop,” she says.

Above: Trixotrope pieces spinning and illuminated while hung in the atrium of Selfridges

“It contrasts technology, which is perceived as something often artificial and man made, with something like an innate memory of nature you has as a kid watching raindrops on the ground,” she says.

Above: The Weather Yesterday installation in Hoxton Square

Troika’s commission for Hoxton Square in east London was a light installation linked to yesterday’s weather forecast. “The slightly retro look wasn’t really a stylistic choice, but it’s based on the components the sign is built with: LED strips in modules of five,” Rucki says.

Above: LED strips used for The Weather Yesterday installation

“Quite a lot of our work uses software programming controls as well as typical physical design,” she summarises at the end of the talk.

Above: The Weather Yesterday assembled in Troika’s studio

Dezeen’s Designed in Hackney initiative was launched to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Above: the back of The Weather Yesterday showing the wires and circuitry

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney. See all our stories about design by Troika »

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as well as physical design” – Troika appeared first on Dezeen.

In the next movie we filmed at our Designed in Hackney Day, Gurmeet Sian of Office Sian explains how an emphasis on building relationships with his clients makes him more like a midwife than an architect.

Above: inside the Hackney Shed

In the movie, Gurmeet Sian introduces his projects by noting that his sister had made a comparison between his job and that of a midwife. “It wasn’t just because I go on about delivering projects and nurturing ideas,” he explains. “It was because she had noticed that when I spoke to her about design, I mentioned a lot about building relationships with other people and getting the best out of others.”

Above: an Office Sian client

“Before delivering any baby, the architect-midwife should be brilliant at listening,” he adds. “We should all be great at allowing the client space to express themselves.”

Above: a builder who regularly works with Office Sian

One slide shows one of Office Sian’s first clients. “The client-architect relationship is especially important to me,” says Sian. “This relationship is built on trust and needs to be nurtured.”

Above: a kitchen extension with irregular windows and brick patterns

“I ask all my clients to write a wishlist,” he continues. “Instead of a list of what they want in the space, I ask them how they see themselves using the space. I then take this list, reinterpret it into a set of goals and formulate this into a concept.”

Above: Thai restaurant Kin in Clerkenwell, London

Another slide shows a builder Sian has worked with a number of times. “I enjoy how a design can change after chatting to builders, who’ve pretty much seen it all before,” he says.

Above: the new staircase at Kin crosses over the pattern left by the previous staircase

He then introduces the Hackney Shed, a low-budget garden office for a filmmaker and artist. “The design was developed to use many standard sizes of panels and timber as possible, in order to reduce cutting and wastage of materials,” he explains.

Above: the “singing wall” of the Jack Hobbs Community Centre in London

Next he shows a Thai canteen in Clerkenwell created in collaboration with Kai Design. Original architectural elements can be seen in the space’s industrial aesthetic, such as the line of the previous staircase, which travels in the opposite direction to the new steps.

Above: Jack Hobbs Community Centre

He also introduces a home refurbishment where the client needed to separate meat and milk dishes in the kitchen. “The concept of static and movement was developed, which resulted in this irregular window arrangement and brick pattern,” he explains.

Above: a workshop with children at Jack Hobbs Community Centre

A community centre project saw the architect design a zig-zagging wall for children to paint on. “This wall is split into segments [so] a whole linear wall mural can be composed out of children’s paintings and joined together.”

Above: model for a gazebo on a roof terrace

Finally he introduces two small projects currently underway: a steel gazebo for a roof terrace in south London and the renovation of an end-of-terrace house belonging to an artist. “The image describes perhaps the world’s smallest art gallery running along the boundary wall, with square windows popping up,” says Sian.

Above: the existing facade of the artist’s end-of-terrace house

“It’s very satisfying to complete projects but at the end I certainly don’t want to be the one holding the baby – it’s not really my baby,” he concludes. “I’m not trying to produce spaces that reveal me. Instead I’m trying to produce spaces in which the client reveals not just themselves, but the best of themselves.”

Above: drawing for the renovated artist’s house

Sian was speaking as part of Designed in Hackney Day’s Pecha Kucha talks, a format that invites speakers to show 20 slides for 20 seconds each.

Designed in Hackney is a Dezeen initiative to highlight the best design and architecture produced in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

The post “The architect-midwife should be brilliant
at listening” – Gurmeet Sian appeared first on Dezeen.

A wall of digital animals that distract children on their way to surgery is one of the interactive installations presented by designer Jason Bruges in this movie we filmed at our Designed in Hackney Day.

Above: digital wallpaper at Great Ormond Street Hospital

In the movie, Jason Bruges shows 20 short movie clips of his studio’s installations and experiments as part of the Pecha Kucha event during our Designed in Hackney Day last summer.

Above: a hotel lobby with colour-changing walls

Among them is a project for Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, which saw the studio install a digital wallpaper along a corridor.

“The whole rationale behind the piece is to distract children on their way to surgery,” explains Bruges. “We’ve created this sort of half-tone forest in which digital animals appear and disappear as you’re wheeled through en route to surgery.”

Above: light installation at Tate Britain

“We’re a studio that crosses the boundaries of art, architecture and interaction design,” he adds.

Above: kinetic installation for More4 ident

He then introduces a hotel lobby in Madrid with interactive walls of dots that change colour with every visit, and an installation of thin, wobbly lights in the Tate Britain art gallery in London.

The studio has also worked on projects with television companies, creating imaginary radio studios for a BBC ident and installations of flapping squares for TV channel More4.

Above: micro wind turbines on London’s South Bank

A project about “energy-scavenging” on the roof of Queen Elizabeth Hall saw hundreds of tiny turbines converting wind energy into a field of light.

The studio installed a track in the Olympic Park where visitors can race 100 metres against a light representing sprinter Usain Bolt, while elsewhere in the park the studio created mechatronic bubbles for Coca-Cola.

Above: mechatronic bubbles for Coca-Cola

There’s also a piece for a Richard Rogers-designed building in Soho. “It’s a lift that remembers all the movements it’s made during the day and plays them back at night as a performance,” explains Bruges, “so it fills the time from dusk to midnight with this symphony of light, which is hacked into the lift’s control system.”

“None of these pieces would be anything without the people who actually interact with them,” he concludes.

Above: lights on a Soho building show the movements of the lift inside

We’ve featured a few projects by Jason Bruges on Dezeen, including a lighting mobile that moves around to map its surroundings and an installation of light panels that open and close like flowers – see all our stories about Jason Bruges Studio.

Designed in Hackney is a project by Dezeen to highlight the best architecture and design made in the borough, which was one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices.

Watch more movies from our Designed in Hackney Day or see more stories about design and architecture from Hackney.

The post “The pieces wouldn’t be anything without the
people who interact with them” – Jason Bruges appeared first on Dezeen.