Design studio Weiss-Heiten used emerald-coloured tiles to cover the walls, floors and surfaces of the new Berlin store for skincare brand Aesop (+ slideshow).
Aesop Mitte is the brand’s first flagship store in Germany and was designed by Weiss-Heiten to marry Berlin’s industrial history with references to the Bauhaus art school.
Handmade concrete tiles in different shades of green cover most of the surfaces, intended to reference the monochromatic canvasses of German artist Gerhard Richter.
“Our aim was to create a space that combines the clarity of industrial grids with the strength of historical materials and their individual patina,” said architect Alberto Franco Flores.
Shelves made from both German oak and steel display the range of products, while a 1950s sink salvaged from an old farm was added as a nod to the building’s former use as a dairy shop.
The back of the building provides a meeting space to host events and extra room for running Aesop’s German online store.
Aesop’s first German signature store recently opened on Alte Schönhauser Strasse in the capital’s central borough of Mitte. Crafted in collaboration with local architects Weiss-Heiten Design, it marries elements of historical Berlin with Bauhaus and contemporary influences. Inspired by Gerhard Richter’s abstract, monochromatic canvases, and by the city’s industrial history and everyday charm, the interior assumes a palette of sea-green and a quietly clinical aesthetic. Handmade raw concrete tiles cover the walls and floor creating a sense of having wandered into Berlin Alexanderplatz station or a hidden glade in the forest. A countertop of oiled German oak and near-invisible steel shelves provide subtle contrasting accents.
An aged sink salvaged from a 1950s farm tethers the heritage-listed building to its previous life as an early twentieth-century dairy store. Beyond the retail area, which occupies approximately half the store’s 80 square metres, a concept room provides the opportunity to host events; an additional space will service Aesop’s German online store.
Portuguese studio Belém Lima Arquitectos has perched a pair of gabled cabins on the edge of a dam in northern Portugal to provide a public boathouse and cafe (+ slideshow).
Belém Lima Arquitectos positioned the cabins at opposite ends of a wooden jetty alongside Bagaúste Dam in Lamago.
The new facilities serve the increasing number of tourists travelling past the dam on their way to wineries in the nearby Douro Valley.
“The location was already used in the summer but the facilities were very poor,” the architects told Dezeen.
“The Mayor of Lamego suggested building a new wharf, a bar area and a warehouse for canoes as well as the entire surrounding area,” they added.
The single-storey cabins have sharply pointed rooftops and their exteriors are clad with aluminium panels.
The combined cafe and bar is filled with tables and chairs for customers, which spill out onto a covered terrace.
Glass windows along one side of the cafe offer views out across the dam, while ramps outside lead down to the water’s edge.
The new boathouse sits at the other end of the jetty. Exposed diagonal braces support the walls, interspersed with metal hooks for storing public rowing boats and canoes.
Dutch Design Week 2013: architecture studio Onix has inserted a wooden staircase inside a medieval Dutch church to provide access to the apex of the bell tower (+ slideshow).
Onix created the route to allow visitors to explore a previously inaccessible part of Uitwierde church, which is located in the Dutch province of Groningen.
Visitors are led past original building features, such as the clock and bells, while information boards tell the story of the tower’s history.
The angular bannister of the staircase changes height as it ascends, framing different views of the thirteenth-century building, and interior windows reveal details of the historic stonework.
The architects slotted the modern structure around the wooden beams that frame the tower, allowing them to jut through in some places.
A seating area is located on the uppermost section of the route and leads out a balcony offering views of the surrounding countryside.
Toren van Uitwierde, which translates as Tower of Uitwierde, won the Spatial category at last week’s Dutch Design Awards, where the selection committee said: “The design directs the gaze of the visitor in a surprising way. You move and you are guided by the design.”
On the northern edge of Delfzijl stands the tower of Uitwierde. For this tower, we have made a design so that the tower can be used as a viewpoint. The path to the viewpoint is designed as an experience path that shows the specific characteristics of the tower.
Concept diagram
The tower consists of three distinctive areas: the dark basement (entrance), the vertical tower space and the space under the hood. These spaces are connected by the experience path in the form of a staircase. The closed railing of the stairs constantly changes height and thus leads the sight of the visitor. The path leads the visitor along specific points, such as the clock, the bells and the old construction, but also along information points that tell something about the history of the tower and its location. At the end of the route the path is also visible on the outside of the tower. Here is the viewpoint overlooking the surrounding countryside and in the distance, behind the dike, the water of the Ems.
Dutch Design Week 2013:Dutch firm Bierman Henket architecten has added an extension shaped like a rugby ball on top of a neo-classical museum in the city of Zwolle (+ slideshow).
Bierman Henket architecten created the extension for The Museum De Fundatie, which is housed in a former courthouse designed in 1838 that now contains a collection of international art, sculpture and curiosities.
Located on the edge of a market square that links the medieval city centre to an area of nineteenth-century parkland, a shortage of space around the museum and the technical complexity of extending underground led the architects to propose placing the extension on top of the existing building.
The architects explained that their design “couples the classical, static building with the fluid dynamics of a contemporary extension in a vertical direction.”
Eight steel columns pierce the original building and support the two-storey extension, making it structurally independent.
The extension’s exterior is covered in 55,000 three-dimensional tiles produced by Royal Tichelaar Makkum with a blue and white glaze that helps the structure match the colour of the sky.
The curving, open spaces inside the extension contrast with the typical arrangement of adjoining exhibition halls found in the old building.
A large window on the northern side fills the interior with daylight and provides visitors with a panoramic view of the city.
The project won the Spatial Exterior category at the Dutch Design Awards last week, with the selection committee commenting that: “the project generates a huge impact in the city” and “has an incredible presence”. The top prize at the awards went to fashion designer Iris van Herpen’s collection featuring 3D-printed garments.
The architects sent us this project description:
Museum De Fundatie, Zwolle Extension: 2010-2013
Museum De Fundatie in Zwolle, situated on the border between the mediaeval city centre and the open 19th century parkland with its canals, has been extended with a spectacular volume on the roof of the former Palace of Justice.
The courthouse on Blijmarkt was designed by the architect Eduard Louis de Coninck in 1938 in the neo-classical style. De Coninck intended this style of architecture to symbolise the unity in the legislation of the new kingdom. The building has a double symmetry with a monumental entrance and a central entrance hall extending over two floors.
On the city side the free-standing building is slightly recessed in relation to the unbroken, mediaeval façade of Blijmarkt. Together with the classical façade structure of a tympanum on Corinthian columns, this gives the building a solitary character.
The building is also free-standing on the canal side, in the green zone of Potgietersingel. The canals were laid out as a public park in the English landscape style in the second half of the 19th century, following the demolition of the city walls.
Due to its location the building became a link between two distinct worlds: one an inward-orientated, mediaeval, fortified city with a compact and static character and the other a 19th century park with an outward-orientated, dynamic character.
In 1977 the building ceased to function as a Palace of Justice and it was converted into offices for the Rijksplanologische Dienst, the government planning department. A mezzanine was constructed in the two high court rooms. Since 2005, following internal renovation by architect Gunnar Daan, the building has been the home of Museum De Fundatie.
The museum has an extraordinary collection including works by Rembrandt, Saenredam, Turner, Monet, Rodin, Van Gogh, Mondrian and Van der Leck. In addition, the museum organises modest, but much discussed exhibitions. Under Ralph Keuning’s directorship these temporary exhibitions became so successful that extension of the museum became unavoidable. Despite the inherent problems of extending the palace in the historical city centre, the museum resisted the temptation to abandon this national monument and opted to extend it.
Bierman Henket architecten designed the extension of the former courthouse in 2010. Architect Hubert-Jan Henket succeeded in persuading the client not to add an extension next to the existing building: this would have destroyed its solitary and symmetrical character. An underground extension proved spatially too complicated. Instead Henket designed an extension with an autonomous volume on top of the monumental building.
In the same way that the Palace of Justice links two worlds in a horizontal direction, Henket couples the classical, static building with the fluid dynamics of a contemporary extension in a vertical direction.
The superstructure, just like the substructure, is symmetrical in two directions, but the shape rather resembles a rugby ball. Together, the two totally-different volumes form a new urban entity. There are also two contrasting interpretations in the interior: the classical succession of rectangular museum halls below versus the fluid, open spaces in the elliptical volume above.
Right from the outset, both the Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed, the department responsible for the preservation of monuments and historical buildings, and local conservation societies were enthusiastic about the radical concept for the expansion. Under the motto preservation through development the customary debates and public inquiry procedures were considerably shortened. Planning permission was granted in record time.
Straight through the existing building, eight steel columns stand on eight individual foundations. The columns support the new extension – with two exhibition floors that total 1,000 m2. So, structurally and architecturally, the extension is independent of the old building.
The extension – also called the Art Cloud – is clad with 55,000 three-dimensional ceramic elements produced by Koninklijke Tichelaar in Makkum. Together, the mixed blue-and-white glazed tiles measuring 20×20 cm and 10×10 cm, form a subtle surface which, depending on the weather, merges into the heavens. On the northern side daylight floods into the two, new exhibition floors through a large, glazed pane in the tiled superstructure. Inside, visitors have a panoramic view of the city.
With the extension, the original central entrance hall has been carried through as an atrium where the two museological worlds converge. A glass lift in the atrium conveys visitors to the various floors. The stairways are located on the outer part of the floors. In the old building they are stately and straight, in the new development they are flowingly curved.
A glass passageway runs between the existing building and the extension − where new and old meet. On the one side visitors look into the atrium and on the other they have a view of the city and the underside of the tiled extension. With its aim of presenting contemporary and old art in one building – Museum De Fundatie now has a new, truly-unique identity.
Dutch Design Week 2013: designer Christien Meindertsma has compiled photographs of hundreds of jumpers knitted by an elderly woman into a book and organised a flashmob in her honour (+ movie).
Christien Meindertsma‘s book celebrates the creations of Rotterdam resident Loes Veenstra, who has knitted more than 500 jumpers since 1955.
Museum Rotterdam and visual arts studio Wandschappen asked Meindertsma to create “something new” with the jumpers that Loes Veenstra had knitted, mostly using yarns donated to her over the years.
“In the book I tried to categorise the sweaters so that you can see the same yarn or pattern return in different pieces,” said Meindertsma. “What is quite special is that almost all pieces were knitted without a pre-made pattern; she just improvised and used what she had at the time.”
The jumpers are photographed against a neutral backdrop that enhances the patterns and the use of different yarns and threads that have become available since the 1950s.
When Meindertsma discovered that the jumpers had never been worn she organised a surprise flashmob of people wearing them on Mrs Veenstra’s street.
Groups of dancers, a marching band, a choir, baton twirlers and hundreds of volunteers wearing the sweaters appeared on the street, where Mrs Veenstra was able to view her entire output for the first time.
The project won Best Autonomous Design in the Product category at last week’s Dutch Design Awards, whose selection committee described it as “a good translation of a special story into a carefully designed book,” adding: “the flashmob puts a smile on your face.”
London College of Fashion graduate Barbora Veselá has layered-up leftover scraps of leather to create striations based on rock formations on the surface of these shoes (+ movie).
Barbora Veselá looked to the patterns of eroded sedimentary rocks at the Prokopské údolí nature reserve in the Czech Republic when creating her Geology of Shoes footwear.
“The project takes inspiration from sediment layers and from effects of erosive processes in nature as well as from traditional shoe making techniques,” said Veselá.
By overlapping spare strips of leather suede-side-up around a traditional last, she built up the shape of the shoes piece by piece.
Veselá then sanded down the scraps to create the final forms and reveal the rippled layers. As the odds and ends of material are always different shapes, each shoe is unique.
The colours of the stripes were influenced by shaded contours found on old geological maps. The footwear formed Veselá’s final project at Cordwainers College, part of the London College of Fashion.
“The apartment is in a nineteenth-century apartment block on a very cute corner, but it was in a pretty poor state of repair,” Kohn explains.
“It was subdivided into many small rooms so there was no gathering space, nor was there any sense of this rather unusual triangular plan and it’s relationship to the city.”
“There was all this potential, but it was all held back by the architecture.”
To rectify this, Kohn’s studio stripped away most of the apartment’s internal partitions, creating an open-plan living space to make the most of the large windows and high ceilings.
“We wanted to change the apartment to focus on the pleasure of gathering,” explains Kohn. “The architecture of the apartment now is about creating the right setting for that kind of social encounter.”
Two of the bedrooms are contained within a wooden tower at one end of the apartment, which Kohn describes as “a kind of scale replica” of a 1950s apartment block by Spanish architect Josep Antoni Coderch in the La Barceloneta neighbourhood of the city.
“The bedrooms in this tower block have louvred windows so when you want to go to bed you can close the building,” he says.
The apartment’s most striking feature is its tiled floor, which is made up of 25 different triangular designs.
“We basically did research on how we can make a tiled floor using traditional technologies that would be affordable for this project, but introduced something new,” says Kohn.
“We asked Mosaics Martí, who made all the tiles, to use varying amounts of green and red pigment. Now you see it laid, the apartment has a graded floor that goes from green at one end to red.”
Kohn says that the transformation has been received well by the clients, two brothers who grew up in Barcelona but now live in London and Hong Kong.
“The clients love it because because their lives were very pragmatic in the way they used the flat,” he says.
“What we were able to reintroduce into their lives was a pleasure of being in this interior, celebrating their time in Barcelona.”
David Kohn
Inside Festival 2013 took place at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore from 2-4 October. The next Inside Festival will take place at the same venue from 1-3 October 2014. Award entries are open February to June 2013.
Wire-encased lights are suspended above oak-topped counters at this bakery in Poland by designer Maciej Kurkowski (+ slideshow).
Situated in Piaseczno, a town south of Warsaw, Kurkowski’s Przystanek Piekarnia Bakery features a custom-designed shelving unit for storing and displaying bread.
The unit occupies one wall and is made from 626 plywood modules stained in four different hues.
A large blackboard covers the adjoining wall for advertising the day’s menu.
Black electrical cables run up the walls and across the ceiling, powering light bulbs surrounded by intricate wire shades.
Oak counter tops sit on plinths covered in matte white tiles and with bevelled edges.
One tile on each plinth is replaced with a plywood module engraved with the company logo.
Krzosek Bakery is a family company established few generations ago in 1959. Its values combine respect for the tradition and a need for constant development. Interiors of their shops are an embodiment of this approach.
The commission was to create a coherent interior designs for a whole chain of their shops. Individual look of each interior is achieved by use of a stained birch plywood 450x70x20mm module, that can be used to create almost infinite parametric design variations, while the rest of the interior components remain the same. Depending on the interior the modules can form a built-in display rack or a sculptural suspended ceiling that folds over the wall morphing into display shelves.
The first realisation of the project is in Piaseczno. Key feature of the shop is a custom display shelving unit behind the counter made from 626 plywood modules stained in four warm hues. This allows to keep the rest of the elements used in the interior monochromatic, achieving a balanced look with lightly coloured manually applied coarse plaster, epoxy resin flooring and electrical cables laid on walls in black encasement.
Oak counters sit on white tiled plinths. Matte tiles with beveled edges, resembling those used for tile stoves delicately diffuse the light. In each plinth one tile is replaced with a plywood module with new logo of the company engraved in it.
Subtle lightning was created using Thomas Edison’s design inspired light bulbs with an intricate luminescent rod encased in wire fixtures allowing the glow to delicately seep through the gaps which creates elegant overall effect.
Other two main features used in all interiors are a blackboard wall for announcing special offers and stainless steel furnace for baking fresh buns and delicious cookies on site.
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