Hasta La Ideas

Swedish architects Claesson Koivisto Rune will present a kit-of-parts for a prefabricated Scandinavian house in Milan this April (+ slideshow).

“The prefab/kit house market generally prefers fake historical over contemporary,” says Claesson Koivisto Rune, “and it is more than common that an architect has not been involved at all.” The team was keen to avoid this conservative approach and wanted to come up with a modern design that reflected current Swedish architecture.

With Tind House, they developed distinctive contemporary details for the roof shape, windows and doors of the flexible system, which can be constructed as a single-storey residence for a couple or a family home with two or three floors.

Each house features a roof with a gentle incline to match the housing vernacular in Sweden. The peak of the roof is flat, which the designers compare to the profiles of the Scandinavian Mountains.

Windows or skylights are generously sized to offer the best possible views and their frames are bevelled on the outside to create a rhythm with the rest of the facade, but each one sits flush with the interior walls.

“The greatest challenge was to meet the demands for a client-flexible house with maintained architectural integrity,” architect Mårten Claesson told Dezeen. “We had to establish a couple of strong feature principles – the roof shape, the full cut-out of windows and doors, and their side alignment between different floor and roof levels – that would define a house that could vary in size, colour and number of floors.”

Tind House is designed to sit on a level plan, but can easily be adapted to negotiate a sloping site. The layout can also be altered to suit different occupants and locations.

Ordinarily, the entrance and staircase are positioned at the front of the building and lead through to living and dining rooms at the back. Utility rooms, bathrooms and bedrooms are placed at the sides, plus extra bedrooms and bathrooms occupy the upstairs floors on the two- and three-storey buildings.

The house is manufactured by Swedish house builder Fiskarhedenvillan and will be presented at the Globo Art Space in Milan.

Claesson Koivisto Rune comprises a team of designers and architects, whose projects includes lighting and furniture, as well as architecture. They recently presented a collection of colourful pendant lamps and a set of solid brass coat hooks as part of Stockholm Design Week. See more design by Claesson Koivisto Rune, including a house on the Baltic island of Öland.

Other prefabricated houses we’ve featured include one in Portugal that costs the same as a family car and another home that’s lifted into place by a helicopter. See more prefabricated buildings on Dezeen.

Images are by Peter Guthrie.

Here’s a project decription from Claesson Koivisto Rune:

Claesson Koivisto Rune at Globo Art Space – Tind house

Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects is showing for the first time to an international audience their new house called Tind. Tind is a prefab house and represents a brand new typology for this particular field.

Globo being a manufacturer of sanitary porcelain, it is perhaps peculiar to show architecture during the Salone del Mobile. But Globo Art Space is not a commercial scene but a new gallery space offered by Globo to promote art, architecture and related culture in general.

Claesson Koivisto Rune is also a product and furniture design practice, but is during this event proud to present their architecture, by showing their most recent project. It will also be an example of the Scandinavian approach to living, not in the usual historic, modernistic context, but right now, right here.

The Tind* house is a new prefab house by Swedish Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects. Manufactured by Fiskarhedenvillan and provided to clients as a complete building kit.

The prefab/kit house market is traditionally conservative and generally prefers fake historical over contemporary. And it is more than common that an architect has not been involved at all. If this is from neglect on the manufacturers’ side or arrogance from the architects’ is difficult to know. What we do know, is that it is time for change.

We have built a house built on a concept built on a set of features. The prefab house needs to be flexible in size and configuration to accomodate individual families’ needs and individual locations. So in order to maintain the houses’ architectural integrity it is some strong features rather than exact dimensions that are important.

The first feature is the roof:

The traditional Swedish one-family house has a single-pitch roof. With its pitch angle not as steep as in Germany and not as gentle as in Italy, but in between. The Tind house’s roof starts with this typical Swedish pitch. But then the peak is cut off. So that the roof becomes somewhat of a hybrid between single-pitch and flat.

The second feature is the window niches:

First, windows are few, but big, and allocated to the most important walls, rather than many, small and on every wall. Second, every opening, window or door, is flush with the interior. Furthermore the thicknesses of the joists are disguised by bevelling the niche. This allows the house to become a rhythmic composition of wall and void, wall and void. Rather than the usual volume with punched holes.

The third feature is alignment:

The division between roof and walls is clear and sharp; like a waistline. Sharp is also the one-side alignment between windows on overlying floors. Every line and every cut aligns with another; with the next.

The interior layout is generous in spatial flow and efficient in actual flow. The entrance and staircase is at the core. Directly onward lies the communal living, dining and kitchen area. A second, side entranceway goes through a combined storage and wash room. For brushing off your shoes or dog from a muddy walk in the forest before entering the living areas. Bedrooms and bathrooms are either upstairs, downstairs or to the side end of the house. The general ambience is that of outdoor and indoor being connected.

* Tind is Norwegian for Mountain Peak. One difference between the Scandian mountain range and most other mountain ranges, such as the Alps, is the lack of sharp pointed peaks. This because the last big ice age shaved them off when retracting. In Scandinavia we find our mountains particularly beautiful because of this feature.

Above: Tind house one – ground floor plan

Above: Tind house one – facades

Above: Tind house two – ground floor plan

Above: Tind house two – first floor plan

Above: Tind house two – facades

Above: Tind house three – ground floor plan

Above: Tind house three – first floor plan

Above: Tind house three – second floor plan

Above: Tind house three – facades

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Claesson Koivisto Rune appeared first on Dezeen.

Product news: items in this furniture range by Paris-based designer Arik Levy have wooden bases inspired by traditional Japanese footwear.

Arik Levy modelled the elevated solid oak bases of the sideboards and sofas on geta sandals, which are made of flat planks raised on wooden teeth.

Modular sideboards come in different configurations of cupboards, shelves and drawers and can be customised with a range of timbers, veneers and painted lacquers.

Geta seating systems are also modular, available as an armchair or sofa with foam and fibre cushions plus optional storage arms or tables.

The furniture range is currently in production with British brand Modus and will be shown at Edit by designjunction in Milan next month.

Other designs to be released in Milan include twisting auditorium seats by Zaha Hadid and PearsonLloyd’s stacking chairs with colourful legs.

Arik Levy has also designed an installation that uses body movements to mutate computer-generated crystals and a pebble-shaped device for opening water bottles.

See all our stories about furniture design »
See all our stories about design by Arik Levy »

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for Modus appeared first on Dezeen.

News: French architect Jean Nouvel will curate an exhibition of office spaces in Milan in April, presenting a range of scenarios to replace the “grey cultural world” of purpose-built offices (+ interview).

“Very often now, our apartments make better places to work,” Nouvel told Dezeen at the preview of the exhibition in Milan yesterday. “The opposite is right too: often it is better to live in the space designed to be an office.”

The installation, called Project: Office for Living, will present eight alternative working environments, with the first three representing a Milanese apartment, a loft and an industrial hangar repurposed as work spaces.

“All of these are new conditions to create space for offices,” said Nouvel. “We don’t have to repeat and to clone exactly the same organisation and the same furniture for everyone.”

At the centre of the installation, a violently ripped-apart system of standard workstations will represent his rejection of bland corporate environments. “The office today is a repetition of the same space for everyone,” he says. “General solutions are bad solutions for everyone.”

The Project: office for living installation will be on show in pavilion 24 of SaloneUfficio at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan from 9 to 14 April 2013.

Above: visualisation of layout for Project: office for living

For skyscrapers, Nouvel advocates flexible spaces that can be reconfigured to suit individual workers: one section of the installation will feature pools of illumination that can be individually altered rather than generic overhead lighting, another will showcase furniture that can be reconfigured like Lego building blocks and a third is partitioned by mobile screens.

Classic furniture by designers Nouvel admires including Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand will be showcased alongside contemporary examples from elsewhere in the furniture fair and Nouvel suggests that furniture companies should make less distinction between domestic and commercial products: “I want people to imagine that furniture for offices is also for the home.”

Portrait is by Barbara Chandler.

Here’s an edited transcript of the interview with Jean Nouvel:

Rose Etherington: You’ve called the project Office for Living. What do you mean by that?

Jean Nouvel: We spend more and more of our lives in work places than at home and it shows a kind of contradiction because for a lot of people, to work is not to live.

Very often now, our apartments make better places to work. And the opposite is right too: often it is better to live in the space designed to be an office. I want people to imagine that furniture for offices is also for the home.

Rose Etherington: What’s wrong with office design?

Jean Nouvel: The office today is a repetition of the same space for everyone. You have a frame and you have the right to a number of squares in this frame, so it’s only a functional and rational approach. General solutions are bad solutions for everyone. This arrived at a very grey cultural world and what I want to show is that now we will have new adaptations of the cities.

It’s possible now to work in other places than the traditional office buildings with glass. It’s right to reuse buildings: all these [traditional] buildings at the entrance of the city or corrugated metal structures at the edge; all of these are new conditions to create space for offices. What is important now is to show that we will probably work in different conditions.

You can imagine different buildings are empty and they could become your office and we don’t have to repeat and to clone exactly the same organisation and the same furniture for everyone.

Rose Etherington: I’m told that you prefer to work at home or in a restaurant. What do you get from those environments that you don’t get from the office in Paris?

Jean Nouvel: It’s quieter and if I have to think with a team in a seminar or something I don’t have to have so many people around and all the noises of the city. So I do it in a quieter place, a more agreeable place. But it depends on the nature of your work.

We’ve talked about “tele-travail” since a long time. You can work at home but you can also work in every place, so every person has to invent his natural office. We will see one of the offices of Philippe Starck in the installation and he works by the sea.

When we do an exhibition like this, it is to talk to people who want to think about the question of offices: the companies designing all the material but also people researching their needs and which kind of furniture they will take.

So the idea is to show that now we do not have to stay in this frame and it’s possible to think in another way in relation to the natural world and empty spaces in the city. I just want to open these new conditions.

Rose Etherington: How have you put this into practice in offices you designed?

Jean Nouvel: The CLMBBDO [advertising agency in Paris] was such a special commission because I was commissioned by Philippe Michel, one of the most famous creatives of advertising in the ’80s and ’90s and he wanted to create this new office.

He said to me: “I want to put out the traditions of the stupid office like I had all my life. We are free and I want a building without an edge.” He said: “Okay, I don’t want a building for the future. I don’t want a building of yesterday. I want to do what is the most agreeable and the most fulfilling for a sense of wellbeing.”

And we arrived at this building along the Seine with balconies. You can open all the façades, you can work outside or you can work inside. When the weather was good, you could open the roof.

You could put the offices in different spaces and you can have flexibilities on each floor. With the furniture, you could walk on every seat and you could sit on the backs. Sometimes the central space was for work, sometimes that was a space to have meetings or to do sport. All of that was completely free.

Rose Etherington: Lots of creative and technology companies have offices with places for play as well as work, almost like playgrounds.

Jean Nouvel: The programme is very important, of course, and you have to imagine spaces for the expressions of the people. We design offices now with one wall where you can do what you want and it becomes a big screen with music or with your preferred image. In my office, for example, nobody controls if you are here or not here, how long you stay and so on. So it’s also one possible way to work.

When someone can have a break, it’s not only to drink a coffee but it could be to do exercise or to meet people. When you work for five or six hours, sometimes you need to find contrast and then you work in a better condition and you are more efficient.

But like in all my work since the beginning, I don’t think we research one ideal solution. We don’t want to have standard conditions and impose these conditions in every city in the world. We just show some examples.

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work than offices” – Jean Nouvel appeared first on Dezeen.