Hasta La Ideas

This north London house extension by Lipton Plant Architects features a walk-on glass roof that can be accessed by climbing through a window (+ slideshow).

Local studio Lipton Plant Architects added a two-storey extension to the rear of the Victorian townhouse, transforming the kitchen into an open-plan living space and adding a small office and utility room.

The architects used blue slate bricks to build the new structure, contrasting against the original brown brickwork of the existing house.

“The extension has provided a wonderfully modern addition to a beautiful Victorian property and through the dark brick and subtle refined detail, has helped maintain much of the original character of this historic Islington building,” said Lipton Plant Architects.

“We decided to present our client with the blue brick as it was an appropriate material to use in relation to the host building and provided a contrasting natural colour match to the weathered yellow stock,” they added.

The upper and lower levels are separated into two distinct halves by a band of horizontal brickwork, usually referred to as a soldier course.

A small glazed office is positioned above the utility room and can be accessed from the house’s main staircase.

The roof terrace sits above the living room and can be accessed via a window leading out from one of two existing living rooms.

“Providing an abundance of light, the glass roof creates the connection between the upper and ground floor formal living room, and then a less formal dining and lounge space below,” said the architects.

Other London house extensions we’ve featured include an addition to a Chelsea townhouse, a narrow studio with a sloping roof, and a space where a wall of books folds around a staircase.

See more residential extensions »
See more architecture and design in London »

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Alwyne Place, Islington

Alwyne Place lies within the Canonbury Conservation Area in the heart of Islington, London. The property is a large semi detached, locally listed Victorian villa. The house is of an impressive scale located on a quiet tree-lined street.

Our clients fell in love with the building’s proportions and location. The building did however require extensive modernisation including the addition of a full width lower ground and part width upper ground floor extension.
The brief was simple, to bring light into the building and restore some of its former historic elegance.

Sitting a little wider than the average similar-sized property in Islington provided the opportunity to introduce large format, thin framed sliding doors across part of the new rear extension elevation. Located above the doors is a large walk-on glass roof with access from the upper ground floor. Providing an abundance of light, the glass roof creates the connection between the upper ground floor formal living room and the less formal dining and lounge space below.

The rear extension works for a number of reasons, the most visually obvious being the choice of material, the Staffordshire Slate Blue Smooth brick. We looked at a number of choices including render, which all too often stains and marks and timber, which would require regular maintenance and is prone to fade with time.

We decided to present our client with the blue brick as it was an appropriate material to use in relation to the host building and providing a contrasting natural colour match to the weathered yellow stock. The slate blue brick was chosen for its colour, crisp straight edges and smooth elevation, creating a strikingly beautiful addition to the property.

The elevation has been broken into distinct halves, the lower and the upper ground separated by a deep soldier course band. The upper floor office comprises a wrap of frameless glass to the wall and roof flanked by two monolithic brick walls framing the view to the landscaped garden beyond.

To the side, overlooking the roof terrace, sits a long thin window providing natural ventilation to the office. The continuous soldier course above the doors is formed from brick slips fixed to a GRP board fixed back to the structural steel. The underside of the lintel has been clad in the same brick concealing the lintel and reinforcing the overall affect. The brickwork has been sealed with linseed oil to provide further protection and lustre.

The extension has provided a wonderfully modern addition to a beautiful Victorian property and through the dark brick and subtle refined detail has helped retain much of the original character of this historic Islington building.

The post Alwyne Place by
Lipton Plant Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the next stop on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour is our home town of London. In our first report, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs takes a trip through the east of the city and explains why the area has become such a hotbed for design and technology.

Starting off in Stoke Newington, a former village in the north-east of the city where Dezeen is based, Fairs follows the route of an old Roman road called Ermine Street to the city centre, passing through Dalston, Shoreditch and the City of London before ending up at the River Thames.

“These areas have come to symbolise the new creative economy of London,” says Fairs as he passes through Shoreditch, a former industrial district bordering the City of London where a proliferation of architects, designers and, increasingly, technology companies are based.

“They’re stuffed full of digital companies, technology companies, design companies; [there’s] a real focus of new types of creativity.”

Last year, Dezeen celebrated the rich diversity of design talent in the area as part of our Designed in Hackney initiative, which culminated in a day of talks and workshops with many of the borough’s upcoming creative companies.

“We plotted on a map all of the design studios in the area,” Fairs explains. “We found that the pins on the map were so dense you couldn’t see the map behind. It really felt that we’d discovered a critical mass of design talent that is unrivalled anywhere else in the world.”

There are a number of reasons why so many designers set up in London, says Fairs, despite the city being “really expensive, really competitive, really unfriendly to newcomers.”

“London is full of really amazing design schools, I think that’s a really important point,” he explains. “People from all around the world come to London to get their design qualifications; they make friends, they enjoy the culture and they stay and set up studios.”

Another major factor is money, Fairs claims: “There’s lots of money in London. That’s created problems – the property market has been going up non-stop – but it also creates wealth and wealth is the thing that turns the gears of creativity in many ways.”

The wealth of the city is most visible in the new skyscrapers being built to the south of Shoreditch in the City of London, where projects like Richard Rogers’ Leadenhall Building and Raphael Viñoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street, dubbed “The Cheesegrater” and “The Walkie-Talkie” respectively, are transforming London’s skyline.

“London used to be a place where world-class architects didn’t really feel like they could get any decent work” Fairs says. “But now London is really coming into its own.”

Of course, one of the main attractions of Shoreditch for the creative industries was that rents were comparatively cheap. Fairs says it is inevitable that young designers are now being priced out of the area, but is optimistic for the future of designers in the city.

“London is a big city,” he says. “People are already moving further to the east, to the south, crossing the river. London, I think, will always be able to regenerate itself.”

We travelled through east London in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music featured in the movie is a track called Temple by London band Dead Red Sun.

See all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2013 »
See Dezeen’s map and guide to London Design Festival 2013 »

The post “Shoreditch symbolises the new
creative economy of London” appeared first on Dezeen.

News: British architect David Chipperfield has been named as the architecture laureate for the 2013 Praemium Imperiale arts prize, awarded annually by the Japan Art Association.

The Praemium Imperiale is awarded in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, music and theatre/film, and David Chipperfield will recieve the accolade alongside British sculptor Antony Gormley, producer and screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola, Italian painter Michelangelo Pistoletto and Spanish tenor and conductor Plácido Domingo.

Chipperfield’s best-known projects include the Stirling Prize-winning Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, America’s Cup Building in Valencia and the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. His latest works in the UK include two art galleries – The Hepworth Wakefield and Turner Contemporary – and he is currently working on a photography museum in Morocco and a museum of fine arts in Reims, France.

He was also the director of the most recent Venice Architecture Biennale and received the Royal Gold Medal from the RIBA in 2010.

Each of the five Praemium Imperiale laureates receives £100,000, a diploma and a medal, which will be presented by the Japan Art Association at a ceremony taking place in Japan this October.

The late Danish architect Henning Larsen was last year’s architecture laureate, while past winners include Richard Rogers, Tadao Ando, Alvaro Siza and Zaha Hadid.

See more stories about David Chipperfield on Dezeen »

Photograph by Bruno Cordioli.

The post David Chipperfield awarded
Praemium Imperiale appeared first on Dezeen.

This seaside studio apartment in Barcelona by Spanish studio Colombo and Serboli Architecture has an all-white interior that includes a tiled kitchen and bathroom that can be hidden away (+ slideshow).

Colombo and Serboli Architecture designed the apartment for an art historian and curator who asked for a plain space where he could display his art, music and books.

“The client envisioned a peaceful, open and essential space, furnished with a few carefully selected objects,” said the studio. “In sum, [it is] a peaceful place for introspection, flooded with light.”

The space contains a combined living room and bedroom, with a small kitchenette and bathroom on one side that can be hidden away behind a sliding door and folding panel.

Lighting fixtures are tucked out of sight in the kitchen shelves and around the bathroom, while a light suspended above the window frame illuminates the outdoor space.

The tiled walls are set against dark grey grouting, while other details include white furniture and a resin floor.

A glazed wall comprising a door and several windows leads out onto a shaded outdoor terrace.

Other apartments we’ve featured include a Sao Paulo renovation with cupboards and drawers resembling slices of Swiss cheese, a Ukrainian apartment with a combined bookshelf and stairs and a Barcelona apartment converted from an old laundry space.

See more apartment interiors »
See more Spanish architecture and interiors »

Here’s a project description from the architects:

The White Retreat, Stiges, Spain

The renovation of this 36 square metre apartment came with a defined brief. The client, a French Art historian and curator, professor at the Sorbonne University, came to us with very clear ideas for his small property.

The apartment, located in the city centre of the coast town of Sitges (a few steps from the beach) is completely introverted, facing only an interior courtyard. The lack of views is compensated by silence and light.

The client envisioned a peaceful, open and essential space, furnished with a few carefully selected objects; contemporary artworks, some books, and his records. In sum, a peaceful place for introspection, flooded with light.

An extremely reduced budget asked for simple, inexpensive solutions. The space is conceived through three different blocks: the bathroom/kitchen block, the living/bedroom one and the third, external, the terrace. The last two are extremely permeable, only divided by a large window and a long, oversized louvers one on the bedroom side, both existing elements that were preserved.

The big opening connects a small terrace (11 square meters), unified with the interiors through the use of the continuous white resin flooring and a blank parasol that provides privacy while diffusing the daylight. Indoor and outdoor are therefore connected as a continuous living space.

The Quaderna table (Superstudio 1970), a piece our client desired to incorporate since the project started, inspired the tiles that clad bathroom/kitchen block. The white matte 3x3cm tiles reproduce the table’s grid and are the only texture allowed in the whole project. This block is connected with the living/bedroom area through an opening that reveals the tiles used inside the bathroom.

The same texture was also used inside the kitchen unit, creating a continuous spatial sequence through the consistency of texture, which appears once opened its horizontal book- door. The tiles also disguise the sliding door that leads to the toilet. All containers, such as in the kitchen unit and the closet in the bedroom area, are carefully hidden through the use of white doors.

We took our client’s desire of an all-white space quite literally, to the extreme of choosing this colour for the kitchen sink and all the streamlined taps of kitchen, wash hand basin and shower are matt white (Via Manzoni series by Gessi). All the lighting has been solved through the use of florescent tubes, hidden into the kitchen shelves or displayed like in the bathroom. A line of florescent light suspended on the window frame dividing living and terrace illuminates the indoor and the outdoor space, unifying them. On the outer face of the terrace balustrade, a bright, evergreen, large climber plant covers the wall, defining the threshold of the white space of the project.

The apartment is brought to life through the pieces the client chose. French artist Fabrice Hiber, of which our client is curator, is to perform a graphic piece on one of the walls of the living. A Daniel Riera photo is upon the bed head. Two prints by Cuban artist Félix González-Torres (with the writings “Somewhere Better Then This Place” e “Nowhere Better Then This Place”) are on the bathroom wall. A Hedi Slimane photo, sandwiched in plexiglass became the music table. Next to it, a Muji sofa, futon-like, rigorously white. A military camp table that collapse to form a briefcase and two interweaved raffia wooden chairs from the ’60 furnish the terrace.

The post The White Retreat by Colombo
and Serboli Architecture appeared first on Dezeen.

News: graphic designer Peter Saville is working on a visual identity for musician Kanye West.

Saville (pictured) revealed details of the collaboration at the Global Design Forum in London tonight, where he was in conversation with journalist Paul Morley.

“We’re looking at ways of writing ‘Kanye West’,” Saville told Dezeen after the talk, held at the V&A museum as part of the London Design Festival. “What does ‘Kanye’ and ‘Kanye West’ look like written down?”

The designer added the collaboration was open-ended, rather than a commission to design a logo or a specific artwork. “It’s very casual,” he said.

During the talk Saville, who is best-known for his 1980s record covers for bands including New Order and Joy Division, explained how he had discussed the project earlier that day with West, who is in London rehearsing for a performance.

The two talked about Adolphe Mouron Cassandre’s iconic 1961 logo for Yves Saint Laurent, featuring the overlapping letters YSL, Saville said. “He said to me: ‘You’re Cassandre’,” he told Dezeen. “He wants a YSL”.

Kanye West is an avid follower of architecture and design. In 2006 he commissioned minimalist architect Claudio Silvestrin to design his Manhattan apartment, and ordered pieces by designers including the Campana Brothers, Yves Behar and Maarten Baas to furnish it.

“He loves architecture and design, he loves Le Corbusier,” Saville said. “He’d get Le Corbusier to do a building for him if he could.”

Last year, West commissioned architects OMA to build a temporary, seven-screen cinema to host the preview of his first short film.

Saville is the recipient of this year’s London Design Medal. He will receive the award at a ceremony on Wednesday. Read our earlier story for more about the award, and for more details of the conversation with Morley.

See all our stories about London Design Festival 2013 »
See Dezeen’s map and guide to London Design Festival 2013 »

The post Peter Saville to design identity for Kanye West appeared first on Dezeen.