Hasta La Ideas

Emerging Dutch firm Unknown Architects has renovated a 200-year-old house in Leiden by stripping back its interior, and inserting built-in furniture and a twisting white staircase (+ slideshow).

Daan Vulkers and Keimpke Zigterman of Unknown Architects were careful to restore some of the house’s character and spatial simplicity by removing non-original partitioned walls and suspended ceilings to create open-plan spaces on all three floors.

Wooden furniture elements were built on each level to accommodate seating areas, work surfaces and screens, while timber ceiling beams overhead were purposefully left uncovered to provide a contrast to the modern additions.

Keeping to their client’s preference that the kitchen was the hub of the home, the architects allowed it take over the entire middle floor.

Bleached nutwood was used here to build worktops and cupboards along the side wall, as well as a dining table with banquette seating and an adjoining dresser.

The ground floor can be used as an office, dining room or guest bedroom. Vulkers and Zigterman built a wooden platform at one end of the space, creating a raised seating and storage area that incorporates a fold-out guest bed.

A screen wall separates the staircase from a desk that cantilevers off one wall. It also contains recesses to provide extra storage.

The main bedroom occupies the loft and includes a new bamboo dresser.

Photography is by Raoul Kramer.

Read on for more text from Unknown Architects:

Unknown Architects completed the renovation of a 17th century house in the historic city centre of Leiden

Unknown Architects is established by two students, studying at the Technical University in Delft. During their studies they became curious about working with clients. As a part of the honours programme they started this project, where they tried to translate the ambitions and wishes of a client in a design proposal. This cooperation turned out so well that this client decided to commission Unknown Architects for their first project, which was completed in November 2012.

All the non-authentic parts of this monument, like partition walls and suspended ceilings, were removed to bring back the authentic character and spatial clarity. In this relatively small house three fixed multifunctional furniture elements were added.

The ground floor functions as office and second bedroom. One bamboo furniture element incorporates storage space and a platform, covering a guest bed which can be pulled out.

An important wish of the client was to make the kitchen “the heart of the house” where all activities could come together. This was translated in two kitchen elements, made out of bleached nutwood. The central element includes a table, kitchen dresser and a fixed bench that shields the stairwell andprovides the best sightlines to the outside.

On the second floor we added one small dresser made of bamboo shielding the stairwell and providing a place to sit under the dormer.

In this project, we worked with different carpenters who specialised in working with different materials. In order to create a varied experience when ascending through the apartment, we opted for a different choice of wood for the ground floor and the first floor. All the floors – rubber – and walls – fine clay stucco finish – have the same finish.

The uncovered ceilings are intentionally kept as we found them and form a contrast with the new.

Client: DoorZigt B.V.
Location: Leiden, The Netherlands
Program: renovation of house and office
Gross floor area: 75 m2
Project architects: Daan Vulkers, Keimpke Zigterman
Interior design: Unknown Architects
Contractor: Bouwbedrijf Degewij
Interior fit-out: Klaas Olthoff Keukenmakerij, Intopmaat

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We’ve featured a few projects that utilise bricks in interesting ways recently, so we’ve collected some of our favourite brick-built projects from the pages of Dezeen onto a new Pinterest board. See our bricks Pinterest board »

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Mexican architect Frida Escobedo has transformed the former home and studio of painter David Alfaro Siqueiros into a public gallery and encased the entire complex behind a triangulated concrete lattice (+ slideshow).

Young architect Frida Escobeda reworked the complex built in the 1960s by late artist and political activist Siqueiros as a mural painting workshop, creating an art gallery and artists’ residence in the small Mexican city of Cuernavaca.

A wall of perforated concrete blocks was build around the perimeter of the La Tallera de Siqueiros complex, forming an enclosure around the buildings that groups them together but also allows light to filter through.

Two large murals painted by Siqueiros were moved from their original positions around a private courtyard to frame a new entranceway – a move that Escobeda says was key in opening the complex up to the public.

“Rotating the murals ignites the symbolic elements of the facade’s architectural syntax, altering the typical relationship between gallery and visitor,” she said.

In their new positions, the murals provide a framework for the cafe and bookshop, but also help to separate the gallery building from the old house, which now functions as a base for artists in residence.

Siqueiros’s former workshop remains largely unchanged but had been coated with white paint to create a neutral gallery space. Extensions have been built from concrete, with an exposed surface that reveals the markings of its timber formwork.

La Tallera de Siqueiros was one of 14 architecture projects shortlisted for Designs of the Year 2014 earlier this week.

Photography is by Rafael Gamo.

Here’s a project description from Frida Escobedo:

La Tallera

La Tallera Siqueiros generates a relationship that reconciles a museum and a muralist’s workshop with the surrounding area by way of two simple strokes: opening the museum courtyard onto an adjacent plaza and rotating a series of murals from their original position. The space itself was built in 1965 and became the house and studio of the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros during the final years of his life.

La Tallera is “an idea Diego Rivera and I came up with in the 1920s to create a real muralist workshop where new techniques in paint, materials, geometry, perspective and so on would be taught”. This is how Siqueiros himself defined this workplace, now a museum, workshop and artist’s residency program focused on art production and criticism. By opening up the courtyard, the museum yields a space for shared activity, while also appropriating the plaza.

The murals, originally intended for the outside area, now have a dual role: firstly, as a visual and programmatic link with the plaza by encompassing the public areas of the museum (café, bookshop and store) and secondly as a wall/program that separates the artist’s residence from the museum and workshop.

Rotating the murals ignites the symbolic elements of the facade’s architectural syntax, altering the typical relationship between gallery and visitor. Like the exterior, the gallery space, from both an exhibition design and artistic perspective, though unfolding, generates new relationships and spatial connections.

The distribution of these spaces and the interplay of planes – in murals and walls among others – is revealed in crossing a perimeter lattice that demarcates the urban surroundings – a single horizontal sculptural piece that contains and displays Siqueiros’ work.

Architect: Frida Escobedo
Design team: Frida Escobedo, Rodolfo Díaz Cervantes, Adrian Moreau, Adiranne Montemayor, Daniela Barrera, Fernando Cabrera, Luis Arturo García Castro
Client: Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros – La Tallera
Type: Public building / Museum Adaptation

Consulting: BulAu (Carlos Coronel / Hector de la Peña)
Building contractor: Francisco Alvarez Uribe (1st phase), Grupo Mexicano (2nd phase)
Construction Supervision: Fernando Cabrera, Javier Arreola, Frida Escobedo
Furniture design: Frida Escobedo
Total Floor Area: 2,890sqm
Budget: $2,240,000 USD
Invited competition, 1st. Place
Cuernavaca, Morelos
Mexico, 2012

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New York-based designers Barbara Busatta and Dario Buzzini have created a range of tableware that can be printed out at home on a desktop 3D-printer and used straight away.

The Machine Series is made on a MakerBot Replicator printer, a machine aimed at the consumer market that melts plastic filament and extrudes it layer-on-layer to build up objects in a process called fused deposition modelling (FDM).

The set by Italian designers Busatta and Buzzini of ICOSAEDRO is specifically designed so there is no scaffolding, seams or flash to remove in order to finish the objects, and they become fully-finished products the very moment they are removed from the 3D printer.

“Normally, in order to hide imperfections and seams, objects created with this classic FDM technique require an extra treatment,” explained the designers. “These products have been designed to minimise the finishing touches needed to make a 3D-printed product look acceptable.”

The geometry and cross-sections of the vessels reduce the risk of flaws and deformations while giving the collection a distinctive aesthetic.

Busatta and Buzzini wanted to challenge an assumption that 3D printing only produced poor results and had little application in the home.

“The focus of this exploration has been to elevate 3D printing – a technology that is very much talked about but is relegated to either cumbersome amateurish results or overly expensive artistic applications,” they said.

The range features 12-by-8-centimetre containers in straight or tapered versions, available in black, red or yellow, with a variety of different colour combinations for the lid and base.

The designs for the Machine Series are all open source and available to download online. Busatta and Buzzini want anyone to be able to modify, improve and alter the designs using different materials or other types of additive printing.

Alternatively, the entire collection can be purchased from the Machine Series website, and will be presented at the Makerbot store in New York.

Photography is by Alberto Parise.

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to be printed out at home appeared first on Dezeen.

Stockholm 2014: Swedish studio Folkform has designed a lamp based on the Stockholm skyline.

The Skyline lamp series was designed by Folkform for Swedish lighting brand Örsjö Belysning, with blocky forms based on the concrete buildings of a Stockholm suburb.

“Many of our products are inspired by architecture and the graphic expression in buildings,” Folkholm cofounder Anna Holmquist told Dezeen. “The particular skyline lamp was inspired by the raw concrete suburb where I grew up, called Vällingby.”

The series comes in black and white, made from powder-coated aluminium, as well as brass. “When we chose the brass material we were inspired by the time spent in metal workshops in the south of Sweden,” said Holmquist.

Different models of the lamp can be suspended from the ceiling, attached to the wall or bought as a floor lamp with four legs in two sizes.

The Skyline lamp was launched during this year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair and Northern Light Fair, and was also presented to the Swedish consort Her Majesty Queen Silvia for her seventieth birthday.

Other designs by Folkform featured in Dezeen include brass bookends and a cabinet that is made from 80-year-old samples.

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for Örsjö Belysning appeared first on Dezeen.