Hasta La Ideas

London architect Dingle Price has revamped a warehouse in Hackney to create a bright spacious home and studio for a painter and his family.

Dingle Price began by stripping the interior of the old Victorian warehouse where the artist and his wife had already been living for several years. Making use of an existing mezzanine, the architect divided the space in half to create two-storey living quarters on one side and a double-height studio on the other.

“This idea of subdividing the space into equal parts led to a concept of inserting a house within the studio,” Price told Dezeen. “The position of the existing mezzanine decided which half would be which.”

North-facing skylights allow daylight to flood the inside of the studio, where high ceilings offer enough room for several large canvases.

Windows puncture the partition wall so residents can look into the studio from their two upstairs bedrooms.

“It’s quite an internalised world,” said Price. “When you’re in there you don’t really look out. It’s a kind of internal landscape where, instead of looking at a landscape, you’re looking across a sequence of spaces.”

Walls and ceilings are plastered white throughout and there are a mixture of both painted and exposed pine floorboards.

Other artists’ studios to feature on Dezeen include a series of buildings on a Canadian island and a faceted house and studio for an artist in Spain.

Photography is by Ioana Marinescu.

Here’s a project description from Dingle Price:

House for a Painter

Attracted by the large volume and excellent natural light, the artist and his wife lived and worked in this warehouse building in an ad hoc manner for some years, before the arrival of their first child necessitated a more formal inhabitation.

Dingle Price Architects proposed the insertion of a two storey house with a front facade overlooking and animating the studio space which attains the character of a small piazza or garden, a feeling further enhanced by the large landscape paintings in progress.

The design draws on the symmetrical character of the existing building to provide a series of interconnected rooms of varied scale and proportion. The existing interior consisted principally of white plastered walls, and both unfinished and white painted pine floorboards. Rather than introducing new materials, we chose to adopt and extend the use of this palette – staircase and cabinetry are constructed from southern yellow pine planks, and the elevation of the residence if partially clad in painted pine boards of a matching width to the floorboards.

Whilst the residence can be entirely or partially closed off from the studio when necessary, opening the doors and shutters reveals scenic views across the internal landscape.

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Dingle Price Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Product news: London studio Industrial Facility has designed an office furniture system for American manufacturer Herman Miller that promotes interaction in the workplace (+ slideshow).

Industrial Facility created cantilevered tables with rounded edges to encourage movement and provide space for users to gather round work stations as they would around a meeting table.

Low, linear units covered in vertical planking combine to create a unifying spine along which modules acting as desks, social areas, meeting tables and a library can be arranged.

Screens wrap around the desks to provide privacy, while the height of tables, screens, easels and storage can be adjusted to create a more personal and less rigid arrangement.

“One could argue that collaboration is a buzzword right now, that somehow it might go away, but we think this is unimaginable,” says Sam Hecht of Industrial Facility. “People are collaborating globally, empowered by digital networks, but the most ambitious businesses still need productive, collaborative physical environments.”

The system was presented as part of Herman Miller’s Living Office project at the Neocon trade fair in Chicago last week, alongside modular office furniture by Yves Behar’s San Francisco studio Fuseproject.

Sam Hecht and Kim Colin of Industrial Facility previously collaborated with Herman Miller on a two-tier work table with a sliding surface, and launched new products in Milan this year including a lamp that projects light onto the tabletop and a three-legged wooden stool.

More design by Industrial Facility »
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Here’s some more information from Industrial Facility:

Locale Office Furniture

What is work today? It is as much about the individual as it is about the company. It is the individual who brings an organization to life. An organisation benefits from creating an office environment that connects people in a more natural way. The reason to come to work is to work together, to collaborate. Herman Miller, Living Office.

Locale is an intelligent office furniture system that previewed at NeoCon 2013 as part of Herman Miller’s Living Office. Locale promotes collaboration at work by creating dynamic, high-performance neighborhoods that allow for free movement, variety and adjustability. Locale makes working together simpler and more pleasurable by promoting interaction around large, adjustable tables, and by fostering easy transition between focussed work and collaboration. Cantilevered, rounded work surfaces give individuals more space to change position throughout the day and can easily accommodate multiple colleagues to sit or stand together without the clutter of legs at floor level. Locale simplifies the usual chaos of collaborative work and cleverly balances individual and group needs within an open plan office.

Background

Locale has been in development for more than two years. During this time, the conditions of work in terms of atmosphere and attitude have shifted, so it was important that Industrial Facility leapfrog any old preconceptions of the modern office and propose a new place based on deeper social and cultural changes. Herman Miller research noted early in the project that the office now should become ‘a place you want to be’ rather than ‘a place you need to be’. However, Hecht and Colin remained suspicious of recent efforts to evoke a kind of forced playfulness in the office to achieve this. Locale addresses a significant paradigm shift that sees in-person communication as increasingly relevant to productivity, effectiveness and enjoyment at work.

Design

“We often talk about how social networks behave given current technology, where close relationships are not based on physical proximity, but instead on similarity of purpose or interest. You might make an alliance in a social network with someone who is very far away but very close to you in other ways. They are great spatial condensers in this respect. Locale is a physical manifestation of this principle, where the most relevant participants are kept close and communication is fast and frequent.” Kim Colin

Locale organizes the office into clusters of activity along a Workbase, a linear, low, architectonic element that helps give definition and organisation to the open-plan office. Distinct clusters are composed out of different functional modules; the result is that seemingly disparate functions of the office reside comfortably together along one line of the Workbase, which organizes the plan orthogonally. The library, the social setting, the working desk, and the meeting table are all close by and visually coherent along the Workbase. Useful mobile pieces (height-adjustable tables, screens, easels, storage, a refreshment unit) can be ‘pulled up’ to customize the group and individual settings off the Workbase, making an even richer neighborhood. Clusters can be wider or narrower, with adjacencies nearer or further, depending on need.

Spontaneous interaction or unplanned communication increases productivity at work and Locale encourages this in the open plan office without relying on broader architectural-scale social devices like open stairs and community eating areas. Screens attached to the Workbase or parallel and perpendicular desks allow a balance of visual separation and porisity in the cluster. A lot of engineering effort was spent getting rid of legs on the desks and in creating a mobile table and accessories program so that work can occur easily, sitting or standing in a variety of settings.

Locale brings different parts of the office together in proximity so you shouldn’t have to go away to talk to a colleague in a more conducive manner. Instead, you can raise a table, stand, and discuss. You don’t have to move to completely separate spaces to accommodate varied work styles. Locale is planned for availability in the Winter of 2013.

Facts

A third of working people are now mobile, up from a quarter since 2006. The world’s top companies spend 40% of their time collaborating, compared with 21% on focussed work. A healthy work life is one that lets you adjust. To sit, to stand and to walk will let you work better and live longer.

Kim Colin – “We find a lot of value in our own office, which is small, highly productive and considerate. We are all from different parts of the world, which says a lot about how the free movement of people has created a multi-dimensional condition. We collaborate constantly about ideas, methods and opinions. We travel a lot. Our work is never created in cultural isolation, and therefore our office itself behaves like a good, condensed international neighborhood, which is efficient, energetic and pleasurable.”

Sam Hecht – “One could argue that collaboration is a buzzword right now, that somehow it might go away, but we think this is unimaginable. People are collaborating globally, empowered by digital networks, but the most ambitious businesses still need productive, collaborative physical environments. The offices we visited during our research—places where people want to work—are open-plan, transparent, and energetic.”

Client: Herman Miller Inc.
Design: Sam Hecht & Kim Colin, Industrial Facility
Award: NeoCon 2013 Silver Award

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for Herman Miller appeared first on Dezeen.

Following our story on a wooden skyscraper proposed for Stockholm this week, here’s a series of timber architecture from Dezeen’s archive. See all wooden buildings »

See all our archive stories »

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wooden buildings appeared first on Dezeen.

News: New York design studio Atopia has moved to defuse the row over the authorship of the 2012 Olympic cauldron, saying: “we have never accused Thomas Heatherwick of plagiarism”.

Atopia, which presented a concept for a pavilion (top image and below) at the London games to organisers LOCOG in 2007, has published a statement on its website distancing itself from media reports that UK designer Heatherwick copied its design.

“We have never accused Thomas Heatherwick of plagiarism,” says the statement. “We have never claimed to be designers of the cauldron in spite of claims in the press.”

Instead, Atopia says it believes its “narrative scenario” for the pavilion inspired LOCOG. “All we have sought from LOCOG since July 2012 is a formal acknowledgement of this.”

“We are entirely focused on the issue of how ideas transmit through large organizations, often organically and unconsciously,” the statement says.

The firm adds: “The issue for us is not about the object nor is it about Heatherwick’s design. It does bear a striking resemblance to our project work and sketchbook from 2008 and as such this has been the point of focus of the press.”

Atopia has also published its sketchbook of ideas for the London 2012 Olympics, showing how the proposed One Planet pavilion would be constructed from “umbrellas” that would be carried into the stadium by representatives of the competing nations as part of the opening ceremony and assembled into “a lightweight canopy for events”. This canopy would be made from “a large number of umbrellas like flowers”. The images shown in this story come from Atopia’s sketchbook.

The presentation continues: “After the games the umbrellas are removed in another ceremony launching a new journey for each of them… returning to the participating nations.”

The row over the design of the cauldron emerged earlier this week when UK newspaper the Guardian published a story highlighting the similarities between Atopia’s proposal and the Heatherwick’s cauldron (above and below), which became one of the most enduring and popular symbols of the games.

Heatherwick’s design featured 204 copper “petals”, each representing one of the competing nations. The petals were carried into the stadium by representatives of each team during the opening ceremony and then assembled into a flaming cluster. At the end of the games the petals were sent as gifts to each nation.

Heatherwick, who was awarded a CBE earlier this month for his work on the cauldron, has emphatically rejected claims of plagiarism, saying; “This claim is spurious nonsense. The ludicrous accusation that LOCOG briefed us to work with, develop or implement a pre-existing idea and that we acted in accordance with this briefing is completely and entirely untrue.”

See a movie about the design and testing of Heatherwick’s Cauldron. See all our stories about Thomas Heatherwick.

Below is the full statement from Atopia’s website:

Atopia London 2012 Press Statement

“We have never accused Thomas Heatherwick of plagiarism. We have never claimed to be designers of the cauldron in spite of claims in the press. We are entirely focused on the issue of how ideas transmit through large organizations, often organically and unconsciously. This becomes an even more complex issue when work and material submitted by small organizations is subject to stringent Confidentiality Agreements.

The issue for us is not about the object nor is it about Heatherwick’s design. It does bear a striking resemblance to our project work and sketchbook from 2008 and as such this has been the point of focus of the press. But for us this is not the point. It is the written narrative that we are concerned with as this is key component in the way we work, developing scenarios for clients that allow them to imagine possibilities years ahead of time and catalyze thinking within their organizations to deliver socially engaged innovation­­­­. It is the narrative scenario along with our other tender content that we believe proved inspirational at LOCOG and this is what it was intended to do. All we have sought from LOCOG since July 2012 is a formal acknowledgement of this.”

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of the cauldron” says Atopia appeared first on Dezeen.

Designers Jack Beveridge and Lizzie Reid have adapted the flocking process to make a hairbrush that’s coated in human hair.

Flocking involves depositing small fibrous particles onto a surface to make it fuzzy, and Beveridge and Reid cut-up discarded hair to coat the brush.

“Using the off-cuts of human hair from our local hairdresser, we cut the hair down to a length that could be put through an electromagnetic flocking gun,” says Beveridge.

The back and handle were smeared with adhesive, then the hair particles were negatively charged in the gun so they stuck to the earthed brush when fired.

We’ve featured a few stories about strange uses of hair, including clumps utilised as the stuffing for plastic pouffes and strands bound in resin to form spectacle frames.

Recently we published a pair of tweezers made from a single loop of metal and we’ve previously written about shaving brushes with long locks of hair instead of bristles.

See more stories about design and hair »
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and Lizzie Reid appeared first on Dezeen.