Hasta La Ideas

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.

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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.

In this movie filmed at our Designed in Hackney Day, Chris Hatherill from Hackney company Super/Collider speaks about how his team handcrafted a particle accelerator from hand-blown glass and the beauty of the Large Hadron Collider (above).

Above: photograph of a nebula

He explains how the imagery that science generates can influence design, referencing “some of the beautiful colour palettes that designers, creatives, artists can take from the scientific world”.

Above: the Large Hadron Collider at Swiss research facility CERN

Hatherill also speaks about the design of scientific equipment and picks out the Large Hadron Collider, a machine built at Swiss facility CERN to answer questions about the universe, as one of his biggest sources of inspiration – see David Collard’s photographs of the machine here. ”Just every aspect of the design is so inspirational and beautiful, the fact that it is so scientific and so designed for purpose,” Hatherill says.

Above: the Large Hadron Collider at Swiss research facility CERN

The Super/Collider team and designer Patrick Stevenson Keating built a miniature particle accelerator from hand-blown glass during Salone de Mobile in Milan last year. ”It was very organic and natural, exactly not what you’d expect a particle accelerator to look like,” Hatherill says.

Above: the handmade particle accelerator being assembled

Founded in 2006, Super/Collider is a not-for-profit collective which promotes science through the creative industries.

Above: the handmade particle accelerator on show at Salone de Mobile in Milan last April

Designed in Hackney is a Dezeen initiative to showcase world-class architecture and design created 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.

To find out more about the other discussions from Designed in Hackney Day, see our highlights reported here. See more stories about design and architecture from Hackney here.

The post “It’s not what you’d expect a particle accelerator
to look like” – Chris Hatherill of Super/Collider appeared first on Dezeen.

In the latest movie from our Designed in Hackney Day, designer Dominic Wilcox speaks about Sounds of Making in East London, a vinyl recording of atmospheric urban noises.

Above: vinyl cutting machine that engraves music onto discs

Dominic Wilcox recorded the sounds of 21 craft and manufacturing processes in east London onto a 10-inch vinyl record to be sold as an alternative Olympic souvenir. The designer spoke about the project at the Pecha Kucha event at our Designed in Hackney Day on 1 August, explaining his surprise at hearing excerpts of his project on a Japanese radio station.

Above: tuning a bell at Whitechapel Bell Foundry

“I thought about what’s unique about east London: so we don’t have the big buildings like the west do but we have lots of makers,” said Wilcox.

Above: illustrations by Clare Mallison

The sounds he recorded include the tuning of a bell at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the oldest manufacturer in Britain and makers of the bells at St. Mary-le-Bow church and Big Ben.

Above: cooking at a Vietnamese restaurant on Kingsland Road, Dalston

Audio clips of illustrator Clare Mallison drawing “rosemary and chicken with sweet potato” and the cooking and eating of Vietnamese food at a restaurant on Kingsland Road in Dalston also feature on the vinyl.

Above: London’s only maker of press knives for cutting leather

Wilcox struggled to his explain his intentions at the restaurant, and says that “after much confusion and me not leaving the restaurant, they let me in and I had fried frogs legs and fried goat”.

Above: a factory that makes bespoke spectacles

Wilcox illustrated the front of the sleeve with pictures of the items he recorded and hand wrote descriptions about them on the back, which he explained “took nearly as long as the whole project” to scribe without mistakes.

Above: pie-making on Broadway Market

The record was one of five souvenirs for the London 2012 Olympics by east London designers, commissioned by arts organisation Create and curated and produced by Thorsten van Elten.

Above: packaging of air-curing rubber Sugru

Designed in Hackney is a Dezeen initiative to showcase world-class architecture and design created 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.

To find out more about the other discussions from Designed in Hackney Day, see our highlights reported here. See more stories about design and architecture from Hackney here.

The post “It was nice to hear the sounds of east
London on Tokyo radio” – Dominic Wilcox appeared first on Dezeen.

This timber-clad cafe by architect Tony Fretton was designed as an upside-down interpretation of the neighbouring Tower of London (+ slideshow).

“I wanted to design a building that engages directly with the architecture of the tower,” Fretton told Dezeen, after explaining how the central section of the cafe is like the castellated walls of the historic building that was used as a prison for centuries.

The battlements that line the upper edge of the tower reappear as windows along the base of the cafe, while the chestnut panels that cover the facade have been painted grey to match the old stone walls.

Fretton explained how other new buildings around the tower fall into two categories. While the recently constructed entrance to the tower has a “high-tech” appearance that relates more closely to the office buildings nearby, the “anonymous” refreshment counters look more like ”wooden garden buildings”, but Fretton said he “didn’t want to do either.”

One end of the building stretches out beneath the arches of Tower Bridge, while the other finishes in a zig-zagging canopy that shelters an outdoor dining area.

“If you’re sitting on the terrace you see the metalwork of the awnings in relation to Tower Bridge,” said Fretton. “From some angles they look like little sketches of buildings.”

A dining room that seats 100 occupies the majority of the building and a separate bar is positioned beneath the bridge. Visitors enter through a glazed lobby, while an original oak door leads into the bar, offering access in the evenings when the rest of the wharf is closed.

See more projects by Tony Fretton, including a museum of fine art in Denmark. Photography is by Peter Cook.

Here’s some text from the architects:

Tower Wharf Café London, UK

Tony Fretton Architects has completed a new-build café and restaurant in one of London’s and the world’s most historically significant locations, the Tower of London.

The site forms the intersection between Tower Bridge and the UNESCO world heritage site of the Tower of London on the historic Tower Wharf to the Thames overlooking the Greater London Assembly building and HMS Belfast. The new development has been commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces – the independent charity that looks after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace.

Tower Wharf Café provides indoor and alfresco dining on the wharf, serving the 2.5 million tourists that visit the Tower of London each year. It adds to an assembly of pavilions, including a ticket office and river frontage kiosks. Positioned closer to the Tower and further from the main tourist entrance than these kiosks the new building demanded a design that is visibly striking and fanciful. It takes its cue from the Tower itself instead of the hi-tech architecture of the neighbouring City district or generic garden pavilion architecture.

The new building responds playfully to the Tower’s outer wall, an assembly of towers and curtain walls of differing height and form. It is made up of four linked volumes, housed in two discrete forms: one is like the castellated wall turned upside down with the space between the battlements becoming glazed recesses. The other is a long low-rise form joining the arch under Tower Bridge. Both are clad in rough sawn English Sweet Chestnut timber in a vertical formation. The timber is painted grey to match the hues and tones of the Kentish Ragstone rubble with limestone dressing of the Tower Walls and the Cornish granite blocks with Portland Stone dressing of the bridge. The use of rough timber continues the tradition of using the material in the utilitarian buildings that have historically occupied this site on the wharf.

The entrance is via a glazed lobby at the centre of the wharf elevation into a tall dining room and bar accommodating 100 covers. The dining hall opens out at the eastern end into an expansive glass-walled terrace serving an additional 60 covers. The terrace is paved with smooth sawn Yorkstone with elongated slabs demarking the remains of a historic wall on the site dating from the seventeenth century. A pitched roof of motorized retractable blinds and sophisticated guttering system ensures that the terrace can be used in all weather, providing alfresco dining against the backdrop of the Tower day and night throughout the seasons.

The dining hall is a light-filled space characterised by a central oculus skylight. A narrow band of glazing at the western end provides a light-of-touch interface between the new building and the arches, giving diners an unexpected view upwards to Tower Bridge. All of the windows are fixed with opening wooden side panels providing natural ventilation. The south elevation facing onto the wharf is fitted with electric blinds, which are perforated to allow ventilation during hot weather.

The arch under the Tower Bridge provides a setting for a more intimate cavernous oak lined bar and accommodates back of house kitchen and support functions beyond. The original solid oak door under the arches, which dates from the construction of the bridge in the 1880’s, provides a dramatic entrance through the bar to the restaurant when the wharf gates are closed at night.

At night, Erco ceiling lighting provides focused pools of light on each dining table. The building itself will be in shadow as diners inside and on the terrace will look out onto illuminated landmarks on every side.

Tower Wharf Café is a significant addition to London’s cultural and historical riverside. The design demonstrates sensitivity to the heritage of the Tower whilst acknowledging the popular culture of the wharf.

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Tony Fretton Architects appeared first on Dezeen.