Spiralling stone walls will be carved with images of extinct species – with space reserved for future extinctions – at this observatory and education centre designed by Adjaye Associates for the Isle of Portland, England.
The Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory (MEMO) will function as an information and exhibition centre dedicated to the 860 species of animals, birds, insects and sea life that have been identified as extinct since the demise of the dodo in the seventeenth century.
Positioned on the edge of a cliff, the 30 metre-high structure will also house an observatory overlooking Bowers Quarry, one of the main producers of Portland Stone since the late eighteenth century.
Adjaye Associates based the spiralling form of the building on the gastropod fossils commonly found in the quarry. The structure will be built from Portland Stone, with a rough surface intended to echo the rugged cliffside.
The plan is to add more carved stones in the future, if and when more creatures become extinct. These occasions will also be marked by a toll from a bell at the centre of the building.
Floors inside the MEMO building will follow the corkscrew shape. Stone models of extinct species will be displayed around the circular route, leading up to the observatory on the uppermost floor.
Here’s some more information from Adjaye Associates:
Memo Portland, UK
The Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory (MEMO) will comprise a monument to the world’s extinct species and an adjacent biodiversity education centre. Conceived as a continuous spiral of stone, it will be carved with images of the 860 species assessed as extinct since the dodo. It will be an on-going monument, with more stones added into the future if more species become extinct. The bell of biodiversity, placed in the centre of the monument, will be rung annually on the international day of biodiversity and to mark further species becoming extinct. Sited on the Isle of Portland on the south coast of Britain, each creature will be immortalised in stone along the circular ramp that leads to the top of the 100 foot-high Bowers Quarry observatory. Visitors will then walk down the outside of the ramp to ground level.
A fitting insertion into the landscape, the project presents an opportunity to revitalise the old Bowers Quarry and to draw attention back to the natural beauty and craftsmanship of Portland. Rather than a building or shelter, MEMO is devised as a journey, exploring the relationship between interior and exterior, landscape and enclosure. The circular form resonates with Portland’s three lighthouses near Portland Bill as well as the remains of the windmills at Perryfields to the south east of Weston. The spiralling arrangement is inspired by a turreted gastropod fossil, found in particular abundance in Bower’s Quarry, the ‘Portland Screw’ (Aptyxiella portlandica). The material palette is predominantly Portland Stone to reinforce a sense of the landscape, echoing the character of part of the cliff with its exposed stone strata. The sizes of the blocks and the rhythm of the joints are alternating with an accent on the horizontal joints, while the surface of the stones is rough – like the face of a Quarry Block. The development will promote the use of local and recycled material.
Opinion: in the second of two columns exploring the impact of digital culture on design, Sam Jacob looks at how Google Maps is reshaping cities while Apple, Facebook and Amazon are reshaping the natural landscape by building their own headquarters as self-contained ecosystems.
The real shape of digital culture does not reveal itself to us in plain sight. In designer and urbanist Dan Hill’s recent essay for the Strelka Press, he neatly describes the substance of what he calls strategic design, which – if you’ll excuse my use of a gigantically broad brush – might be thought of as a welfare-tinged European cousin of North American corporate design thinking.
He calls it dark matter: the stuff that you can’t see that has enormous impact on the way things work and how things happen. For Hill, the dark matter of strategic design might be the complex machinations of healthcare, education and the environment, but for the American National Security Agency it’s something far more wide-ranging. How much darker is the matter that the Prism surveillance program deals in?
Prism highlights the very real nature of this digital-system dark matter that’s usually hidden from us, though we might feel its vague outline bump against us at moments or see its shadow cast fleetingly across our field of view.
It’s there, for example, in the way Google Maps redraws the city in relation to its own way of seeing. Maps, as we know, are a form of information that not only shows us the terrain in question but also reveals the concerns of its author. Maps are not neutral windows onto the world: they colour, frame and distort the world they describe.
Think, for example, of the way alternative forms of mapping projection alter the image of the world and how, seeing the size and balance of continents shift, one’s own understanding of the world also shifts. Think too of how a map’s point of view is itself a cultural expression – literally a world view. Maps describe the culture that creates them as much as they describe their ostensible subject.
As Slate magazine’s Evgeny Morozov explains, Google’s business model of targeted advertising is soon to merge with its description of the physical fabric of the city. Using the data that Google already knows about you through your email, your searches and so on, it will generate personalised maps of the city. As Morozov writes, “Space, for Google, is just one more type of information that ought to be organised.” And monetised too, we can add. The city, through the map, is remade according to the data held by Google, and according to Google’s idea of what a city is and what it thinks you will do there.
Imagine how the experience of Google Glass might alter your experience of the city as it overlays information onto your view, with the city literally becoming framed by Google. This Googleopic way of seeing transforms space and the urban environment through how and what it reveals and excludes. Its ways of seeing, as John Berger’s 1970s book of that title explored, contain hidden ideologies in its visual depiction of landscape. What’s relevant here is the way an ideology is made invisible through the manufacturing of images. Increasingly, this frame is used not only to show the world, but to make the world. The map and the territory, in other words, converge.
Over the last year or so, many of the key digital behemoths have unveiled plans for new headquarters: the grand edifices that they choose to erect for themselves. These are the physical ecosystems inhabited by our digital ecosystems, and in these habitats we can read technology companies’ own ambitions and their own self images, and perhaps glimpse something of the distortions that digital culture brings to the world around us.
Apple, for example, has long been arrayed in a set of buildings arranged around a road called Infinite Loop. Even here an idea is embedded of how the physical world might be spatially distorted by digital culture: the suburban cul de sac re-read as an endlessly looping piece of computer code.
But having peaked – for the moment at least – as the worlds most valuable company, something more fitting is in store: the Norman Foster-designed Apple City, Cupertino. Arranged as a giant circular plan, the project’s renders read like a non-slip, smooth Pentagon, set both in and around a forest. Just like digital space, it’s a form that has no front or back and whose interior is the same as its exterior, resisting traditional urban hierarchies.
Its plan reads as symbolically as anything by nineteenth-century architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux. Its expression is one long zero as though it imagined, despite its 260,100 square metres, that it almost wasn’t there. Apple workers stroll dappled by endless autumn sunlight. This is a particular version of a digital community, accelerated into a perfect hallucinatory cocktail of hyper-tech building and idealised nature.
Facebook’s new headquarters in Menlo Park, designed by Frank Gehry, suggests a different relationship to nature. Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as saying: “From the outside it will appear as if you’re looking at a hill in nature,” but what the hill will actually contain is the largest open-plan office space in the world.
“The idea is to make the perfect engineering space: one giant room that fits thousands of people, all close enough to collaborate together,” Zuckerberg said. Perhaps, just like the image of the cloud, the intention is for Facebook to disappear into the landscape, to become invisible and indistinguishable from things as natural as trees, grass and hills.
In designs for both the Apple and Facebook headquarters, the idea of nature is at once highly present and highly synthetic. It’s a level constructed above vast parking garages, quoted as experience and presented as mission statement. In both, there are echoes of the hippy pastoral techno-utopias of the 1960s, washed together with management theory and marketing. These are ideologies made glass and grass.
Google’s Bay View campus for California, designed by NBBJ, will be its first North American new-build. Though its appearance is closer to an average business park, it too has its roofs littered with green stuff.
The generic building forms, though, are distorted by what Google knows about: the acquisition of data about human behavior. The buildings are thus twisted and bent by patterns of work, desires and adjacencies, as though the data harvesting of Google Maps were able to warp the world into other organisations. They claim that employees across the 102,200 square-metre development will never be more than two-and-a-half-minutes from one another, creating a kind of hyperlinked organisation.
Proximity and loss of hierarchy are, in this headquarters, core issues. These reflect both the nature of digital work culture and the nature of the digital too. The absence of distance and constant adjacency is at once both the liberation that digital culture brings and the springboard for loss of liberty that Prism suggests. In architectural terms, we might understand this problem in terms of openness: the open plan and the curtain wall are simultaneously things that give us spatial transparency and a condition of panoptic surveillance.
Amazon’s proposed Seattle headquarters by NBBJ
Plans have just been unveiled for Amazon’s new Seattle headquarters, also by NBBJ, that includes a trio of 6039 square-metre biospeheres. Each sphere is conceived as “a plant-rich environment that has many positive qualities that are not often found in a typical office setting.” Within these bubble micro-climates will be floors of offices, shops, lounges and canteens – essentially total environments.
Of course Amazon itself is named for an environment, a habitat with geographic scale and significance in arguments of climate change. That the company should actually become a habitat itself, a technologically induced artificial ecosystem, is perhaps a fulfillment of this baby boom radical-to-corporate digital trajectory.
We might trace the roots of these places just as we might trace the origins of the Californian ideology. In part, they are university campuses, the sites of innovation research out of which some of these corporations and their culture spring. In part, too, they emerge out of the hybrid offshoot of architectural design that spliced management consultancy with spatial design.
They also owe much to those intentional communities that bloomed in the 1960s and 1970s: the communes pioneered by hippy culture. Places like Drop City struck out as techno-rural settlements, abandoning the city in favour of Buckminster Fuller-esque geodesic inhabitation of the wilderness. They were ideologically driven as spaces apart from the rest of society where alternatives for ownership, family, energy use, materials and so on could be explored.
They created their own ecosystems, if you will: self-sufficient as sci-fi space ships, supplied by the Whole Earth Catalogue, the hippy version of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue that architectural critic Reyner Banham argued had made the west habitable through mail-order delivery of gadgets and devices in his 1965 essay The Great Gizmo. It’s worth bearing Banham’s thesis in mind: if, as he argued, the colonisation of the West was made possible by the gadget, then maybe the gadgets the West now produces are not only a product of some kind of fatalism written into its own origin myths, but the gadgets they now produce are devices of colonisation themselves.
Biosphere 2 was perhaps the largest and most ambitious offshoots of these colonies. Conceived as an ecological experiment, it was a closed system housed in a giant pyramidal greenhouse. Its mission was in part determined by a hippy-science group called the Institute of Ecotechnics, whose mission remains “to establish and develop the new discipline of Ecotechnics, which deals with the relationships between ethnosphere, technosphere and the biosphere” and “which intends to harmonise ecology and technology.” It was named Biosphere 2, of course, because Earth is conceived in this way of thinking as Biosphere 1.
The gigantic corporatised versions of these idealised hippy communities also separate themselves from society. These too are idealised spaces, techno-utopias that turn their back on the world that surrounds them in order to manufacture spaces that can sustain their own ideologies. Just as the biosphere is an introverted ecosystem, we see a similar kind of disconnection, a resistance to the idea of the urban. Each becomes its own world, a place that operates according to its own set of rules and ideas, each wrapped up in its own vision of nature.
These are the citadels of the Californian ideology, places where the digital distortions of traditional urban, architectural and environmental space are manifested, places manufactured by processes of design thinking, holistic and totalised within their own limits.
Perfected and protected as these digital epicentres are, it is the rest of the world that feels the effects of the digital reorganisation of space far more profoundly. Outside the limits of these palaces is where the darkest machinations of digitality really work. Even nature itself, its clouds, hills, forests and rivers, traditionally figured as a place of escape and solitude, has long colonised by the digital. To escape its presence might now be almost impossible and might involve the most extreme schemes.
Think, for example, of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in west London, or of Edward Snowden, the Prism whistleblower currently in his Hong Kong hotel. Both are now in exceptional spaces, holes in the continuum of globalised digital space. These strange anomalies are perhaps the only escapes from the ever-present digital backdoor, the only respite from the colonisation of earth by digital culture.
In his previous column, Jacob argued that the American National Security Agency’s Prism surveillance program was something born not only out of the networked world we now inhabit, not only out of our reliance on a small group of Californian companies who may well have cooperated with the intelligence services, but out of a way of thinking that characterises those very same companies: design thinking.
News: London architecture firm Grimshaw has unveiled a masterplan for the home of the annual Wimbledon Championships tennis tournament.
Grimshaw‘s proposal for All England Lawn Tennis club includes building a new retractable roof on No.1 Court so play can continue in all weather conditions, and creating three new grass courts on the edge of the site to free up more space in the busy central and south areas.
“Our proposals strive to improve the quality of the experience for all, and provide innovative and high-quality solutions to meet the challenges posed by this beautiful but constrained site,” says Grimshaw partner Kirsten Lees.
A new retractable roof will be added to Court No.1
Landscaping of the public areas has been designed to reinforce the “spirit of tennis in an English garden”, with improved approaches to the stadiums and vistas of the outside courts from new hospitality areas.
Landscape architecture firm Grant Associates has created a landscape framework for the plan, which will “include enhanced landscape walkways and promenades, the use of topiary, green walls and planted pergolas, creative paving, display areas, enhanced tree planting and themed garden spaces.”
Plan of Wimbledon masterplan
The plans will be used as a framework for redevelopment that will take place over the next 10-20 years and have been announced ahead of the start of the Wimbledon Championships on Monday.
Wimbledon and Grimshaw’s new vision for championships
The All England Lawn Tennis Club has unveiled its design proposals for the Wimbledon Master Plan. Marking the first step in a consultation process, the plan sets out a vision for the future of the site and creates a framework which will guide the continuing development and enhancement of the Club over the next 10-20 years. Developed by Grimshaw, the vision reflects and reinforces the long history of The Championships while further enhancing Wimbledon’s position as the premier Grand Slam tennis event.
Building on the Club’s previous Long Term Plan, the proposed Master Plan is influenced by the much loved traditional qualities and character of the grounds. It will draw on these existing assets whilst simultaneously resolving some of the challenges that this beautiful but constrained site poses. The vision has been determined by a radical rethink and strategic re-configuration of the grounds to optimise the use of the site. Three new grass courts have been located to the north of No.1 Court to release space and ease congestion in the central area and the south.
No.1 Court will be remodelled to receive a new fixed and retractable roof, which will allow for uninterrupted play irrespective of the weather. It will also provide new hospitality areas, replacing the temporary facilities currently situated at the south of the Grounds, which will benefit from spectacular views over the outside courts.
A new landscape framework will enhance and define the public areas and reinforce the spirit of tennis in an English garden. Enhanced approaches to the grounds are created with improved setting of stadia, main buildings and entrance spaces. A series of distinctive character areas are defined which connect and choreograph the various spaces that enrich the visitors’ experience.
Speaking about Grimshaw’s aspirations for the site, Partner Kirsten Lees said: “Maintaining The Championships’ status as the premier tennis tournament in the world underpins the Wimbledon Master Plan. Our proposals strive to improve the quality of the experience for all and provide innovative and high quality solutions to meet the challenges posed by this beautiful but constrained site.”
Grimshaw’s proposals will now be brought forward in a phased development by a process of detailed study, refinement and consultation. The publication of the Wimbledon Master Plan is the first exciting step in the consultation process with a wide range of stakeholders that will take place in the coming months.
Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with Domaine de Boisbuchet in south-west France to offer the chance to win a place on an architecture and design workshop this summer (+ slideshow).
Taking place in the extensive grounds of a historic French chateau, Domaine de Boisbuchet Summer Workshops offer students and professionals the chance to work on week-long projects with experts in a range of architecture and design disciplines.
Started by Alexander von Vegesack, founding director of the Vitra Design Museum, the workshops have been running for 22 years, producing pavilions by architects including Simon Velez, Jorg Schlaich and Shigeru Ban that are now scattered around the chateau’s grounds.
During the courses, participants will be involved in practical activities experimenting with tools, materials and technologies, and evening activities will include shared meals, plus talks and presentations by course leaders.
The courses will conclude with the presentation of models and proposals, which sometimes lead to construction or production.
Workshops with Matteo Zorzenoni, Paul Haigh and Patricia Urquiola are no longer available, but the winner can chose from any of the other one-week programmes.
The value of a one week workshop is €795,00 for students, €1025,00 for professionals. The prize does not cover the cost of travel or additional costs.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Domaine de Boisbuchet” in the subject line, specifying which workshop you would like to attend. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.
Competition closes 4 July 2013. The winner will be selected at random and notified by email. The winner’s name will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
Here’s some more information from the organisers:
Domaine de Boisbuchet – Summer Workshops 2013
This summer the idyllic country estate, Domaine de Boisbuchet in southwest France, is once again the destination for a renowned series of architecture and design workshops. Over seventeen years, internationally established artists, designers and architects have taught courses on current themes.
For four months, participants from around the world arrive every week for the unique experience of a workshop at Boisbuchet – always a memorable time as, far removed from the demands and pressures of daily life, they enjoy living and working with fellow colleagues and experts from a wide range of disciplines.
A glance at our teachers names – Oliviero Toscani, Patricia Urquiola, Maarten Baas, DesignMarketo, Tomas Alonso, Benjamin Hubert, Pierre Favresse, Jordi Enrich Jorba, Shin Azumi, Pedrita, Snarkitecture, Paul Haigh, Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, FREITAG, Sandra Piesik, Cristian Zuzunaga, Amina Agueznay, Mischer’Traxler, GroenlandBasel, Marcelo Rosenbaum, Maria Blaisse, Katja Gruijters, Anna Heringer, Tomas Kral, Daniel Michalik, Andrew Ondrejcak, Peter Marigold, Matteo Zorzenoni, Sigga Heimis, Ron Gilad, Nikolay Polissky – makes the ultimate choice of a course quite challenging!
The daily schedule of exploration, experimentation and practical activity with tools, materials and technology is complemented by talks on design theory and presentations by course leaders in the evenings. Each day ends in a convivial atmosphere with shared meals around long dining tables while the courses conclude with the presentation of models and proposals, sometimes leading to construction or production in industry.
The 150-hectare estate with its lake, river and woodland, features an Architectural Park with a guided tour for visitors to discover the wide range of traditional, experimental and international buildings and structures (from an authentic Japanese Guest House, donated by the Prefecture of Shimane, Japan, to several bamboo pavilions) and the site is located in the triangle between Poitiers, Limoges and Angouleme. In previous years, workshop projects have produced pavilions by internationally prominent architects such as Simon Velez, Jorg Schlaich and Shigeru Ban, which provide an inspiring backdrop and remain in place as a fascinating contrast to the historic buildings on site. The most recent installation at Boisbuchet is “Le Manege”, the largest in a series of bamboo pavilions designed by German artist and architect, Markus Heinsdorff and is a gift of the Goethe Institute and the People’s Republic of China. This striking building will become a venue for meetings, performances and various events.
Alexander von Vegesack, founding director of the Vitra Design Museum and originator of Boisbuchet, first had the idea for the workshops twenty-two years ago and has developed Boisbuchet as one of the most renowned international sites of experimentation in design and architecture. The 2013 program is a measure of his connections with those at the leading edge of design and industry as well as education internationally.
The non-profit organization CIRECA co-ordinates all cultural activities including education, exhibitions, events and publications and since 2011, Boisbuchet has been designated by the French government as a “pole d’excellence rurale”, indicating its notable role as a non-urban center of excellence for culture and education.
The Summer Workshop Program and a new Advanced Design Course vividly demonstrate the full potential of the creative industries. In recognition of this, prominent institutions have lent their support and cooperation to Boisbuchet over the years such as Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Art, Limoges (ENSA) Charente Developpement, Conseil General de la Charente, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG) USA, Xue Xue Institute Taiwan, Artconsulting Korea as well as the Vitra Design Museum.
Students are sent by universities from around the world such as; Parsons the New School for Design New York, the School of Visual Design New York, the Pratt Institute New York, Pasadena Art Center College of Design US, Instituto Europeo di Design Spain, Fabrica Italy, Keio University Tokyo and the UNAM and UAM universities in Mexico City.
Companies and producers like Hermes, IKEA, Vitra, 3M, Kvadrat, Bosch, Jablonex, Kaupo, Fiskars, Ansorg, Papier Direkt, Belux, Modular, Power Film Solar, Pocko, Legrand, Bernardaud, Corticeira Amorim and many others also value the international summer academy and the close collaboration with participants.
In response to the unique character of this forward-looking project, they have served as regular partners and provided both materials and workshop leaders.
Neri&Hu, founded by Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, is a design and research practice whose work includes The Waterhouse at South Bund (pictured), which transformed a disused Japanese army headquarters in Shanghai into a hotel and won World Interior of the Year in 2011.
Australian architect Raffaello Rosselli has repurposed a corroding tin shed in Sydney to create a small office and studio apartment (+ slideshow).
Photograph by Richard Carr
Rather than replace the crumbling structure, Raffaello Rosselli chose to retain the rusty corrugated cladding of the two-storey building so that from the outside it looks mostly unchanged.
“The humble tin shed is an iconic Australian structure,” he explains. “As the only remaining shed in the area it is a unique reminder of the suburb’s industrial past.”
The architect began by taking the building apart and replacing its old skeleton with a modern timber frame. He then reattached the cladding over three facades, allowing room for three new windows.
The frames of the windows are made from sheets of Corten steel that display the same orange tones as the retained facade. “The materials have been left raw and honest, in the spirit of its industrial economy,” adds Rosselli.
In contrast with the exterior, the inside of the building has a clean finish with white walls and plywood floors in both the ground-floor living space and the first-floor office.
Photography is by Mark Syke, apart from where otherwise indicated.
Here’s a project description from Raffaello Rosselli:
Tinshed
The humble tin shed is an iconic Australian structure. The project was to repurpose an existing tin shed at the rear of a residential lot, in the inner-city suburb of Redfern, Sydney.
Photograph by Richard Carr
Located on a corner the existing shed was a distinctive building, a windowless, narrow double-storey structure on a single-storey residential street. As the only remaining shed in the area it is a unique reminder of the suburb’s industrial past.
Original building
The project brief was to create a new use for the building as an office space and studio. The shed in its current state was dilapidated and structurally unsound. The original tin shed was disassembled and set aside while a new timber frame was erected. The layers of corrugated iron accumulated over generations of repair were reassembled on three facades.
Corten steel window boxes cut through the form and extend out over the lane and street, opening up the once windowless space. The materials have been left raw and honest, in the spirit of its industrial economy. The west face was clad in expressed joint fibre-cement panels, while plywood floors and joinery add warmth to the interior.
A group of Royal College of Art graduates has used the pulp from mulched newspapers to form helmets for London’s cycle hire scheme (+ movie).
Tom Gottelier, Bobby Petersen and Ed Thomas took discarded free newspapers strewn around the city’s public transport system and used them to make paper mache.
The pulp was mixed with adhesive and pigment then vacuum-formed into shape, before being heated to dry it out.
Straps slot into grooves that criss-cross the top of the helmet, clipping together under the chin like the standard design.
The surface inside the helmet is also bevelled so air can flow through and keep the head cool.
Each helmet would cost around £1 and could be sold in a vending machine or nearby shops, offering low-cost safety equipment for London’s Barclays “Boris Bike” cycle sharing scheme.
A bulky concrete first floor balances above pale brick walls and tall grasses at this family house in Brazil by São Paulo architect Guilherme Torres (+ slideshow).
The two-storey house in Maringá has a square ground floor plan, while its upper floor is an offset rectangular volume that gently cantilevers over the edge of one wall.
Unlike the opaque brick walls of the lower level, this top floor is clad with latticed mashrabiya screens that bring light and ventilation into the family’s bedrooms, but also maintain privacy.
Guilherme Torres explains: “As soon as I saw the gently sloped plot surrounded by other houses, the idea of this large panel came to me, to ensure privacy for both the residents and their neighbours.”
The ground floor is split into two parts, with a large courtyard and swimming pool between. One half contains living and dining rooms, while the other functions as a pool house with a pair of changing rooms and an additional dining area.
Various furniture pieces by Torres are dotted through the building, alongside a selection of items by other Brazilian designers. “The decoration follows a jovial and Brazilian style,” explains the studio.
Landscape architect Alex Hanazaki designed the setting for the building, adding the Texan pampas grass that brushes against the outer walls.
Here’s a project description from Studio Guilherme Torres:
BT House
São Paulo-based architect Guilherme Torres has developed ideas which fuse the modern and the traditional. Guilherme’s own house, designed by the architect himself, bears a chequered wood design, a kind of brise soleil called mashrabiya, which is a classic feature in Eastern architecture.
It was later assimilated by the Portuguese, who brought it to Brazil. This element, with its powerful aesthetic appeal, was adapted to this residence in the south of the country, and acts as a wooden ‘curtain’, allowing air flow, dimming light and also serving as a security feature.
“As soon as I saw the gently sloped plot surrounded by other houses, the idea of this large panel came to me, to ensure privacy for both the residents and their neighbours.” This monumental house stands out as a huge rectangular monolith with two large brickwork blocks in contrast with the upper volume in concrete. A few columns, huge spans and strategic walls create exquisite fine gardens that make up a refuge for this young couple and their two small children.
The decoration follows a jovial and Brazilian style with an alliance of Guilherme Torres’ design, including sofas and tables, and other great names of Brazilian design such as furniture designed by Sérgio Rodrigues and Carlos Motta. The composition of overlapping these Brazilian styles with international design is balanced by pieces from Tom Dixon and Iranian carpets, all sourced by the architect.
The garden, designed by Alex Hanazaki has given the house an ethereal atmosphere due to the movement of Texan plume grass.
News: UK furniture retailer Dwell has become the latest high-street design brand to go into administration, ceasing trading with immediate effect and closing all 23 of its stores.
Dwell‘s staff have been asked to stay at home while administrators are appointed. The company’s website has been taken offline and customers who have already placed orders have been advised to contact their card issuer.
Dwell, which specialises in contemporary furniture, lighting and accessories, opened its first store in Balham, south London in 2003.
Of the 23 existing stores, the majority are located in London and the south east of England, with others in Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Nottingham, Solihull, Cheltenham and Glasgow. It operates a concession at the House of Fraser department store in London, which has also closed. The announcement means that around 300 jobs are at risk.
A spokesperson for Dwell said: “The business had been working with its advisers, to secure further working capital for the business and was actively in the process of talking to a number of interested parties. However, despite this interest, it did not progress. As a result we have been left with no option but to close the business with immediate effect.”
In a movie filmed at last year’s Clerkenwell Design Week, producer Thorsten van Elten told Dezeen that online shopping is a “better model” because “the rents and rates on the high street are outrageous,” but added that people still love physical stores.
In an opposing move though, online homeware retailer Made.com opened a physical showroom in London last year, with CEO and founder Ning Li saying that a physical space was a good way to supplement the online shopping experience.
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