Czech studio A1 Architects covered the walls of this cafe in Prague with a tactile mixture of black plaster, coal and pieces of straw, in a modern take on the clay plasters used inside traditional Japanese tea houses (+ slideshow).
A1 Architects converted a nineteenth-century apartment with vaulted ceilings to create the Tea Mountain cafe, reinforcing the concept of a Japanese tea house by filling the space with charred log columns, each with an illuminated gilt section in its middle.
“We’ve already designed three tea houses and we are very much inspired and fascinated by Japanese architecture and its details,” architect Lenka Kremenova told Dezeen.
“We used even pieces of coal to emphasise the blackness so it feels like you want to touch not just look at the plaster,” she added, referring to the walls. “We always search for a certain kind of quality of materials which could be called ‘touchableness’.”
A gold-plated arch divides the tea house into two halves, creating a light side for service and a dark side for sitting down with a drink.
The first is painted in a shade of pale yellow, and accommodates a serving counter and wooden shelves stacked with tea. The opposite side features dark plastered walls and is filled with tables and stools made from ash wood.
“The seating is in the black part because it is supposed to be a more calm and relaxed place with an ambient atmosphere to enjoy drinking the tea,” Kremenova explained.
A row of globe lights are suspended at different levels above the serving counter, while wooden shelving around the edges of the shop are covered with teapots and other tea-related paraphernalia.
The shop sells a range of tea imported from Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan and China.
Photography is by the architects.
Here’s a project description from A1 Architects:
TEA MOUNTAIN, the teashop a new concept of drinking tea
The shop called Tea Mountain, recently opened in Prague, brings a new experience how to enjoy the tea, next to contemporary style of serving it is also traditional gustation of high quality tea imported from Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan or China. One of the main issues of a1architects and the owners discussion was how to present the tea in its best to wider audience in a delicate yet friendly manner.
Shop interior
Two worlds, two atmospheres… The seating and drinking happens under the dark vault with its calm appearance and just next to it in bright earthy colours one could buy or watch the presentation of tea. The space of two original 19th century vaults is divided by gold-plated arch line situated almost in the centre of the shop.
The black plaster with added pieces of coal and straw creates an ambient atmosphere and it gets out the customer in his first step into another atmosphere out of the busy street. The following part of the shop is rather light to unable one to focus on details of the tea presentation.
The seating at the table in the black part is accompanied with charred columns with inbuilt gilt cavity which serves as a spot light and brings beautiful warm yellow light on the table. The counter and display shelves are made out of ash wood with exceptional details like inbuilt limestone tea tray, rope handles or charred cover of the scale, all these small unique pieces could be rather seen in a second glance and await patient visitors. Refined details and simple work of layering are the main features of the Tea Mountain shop design.
Client: Martin Špimr Authors: A1Architects( MgA. Lenka Křemenová, MgA. David Maštálka) Project: A1Architects SUPPLIER: Ateliér Mánes – Jakub Vávra Noren fabric: Vít Svoboda a Alžběta Graphics: Toman design Area: 55 m2 Completion: November 2013 Design: Autumn 2013
Part of the table’s circular top is folded upward so it rests flush against a vertical surface. This means that the Yeh Wall Table only requires two legs to stand up.
“The inspiration came from a cheerleader practice I passed by one day on my way to work,” said Yeh. “Two students were rehearsing strength and balance.”
“The male student was in sitting position up against a wall – but without a chair – and the female student was standing on his thighs,” he explained. “The table mimics the position of the male student, back resting on the wall and two legs angled away from the wall for stability.”
Powder-coated steel is used for the surface and thin tubular steel forms the legs.
Kenyon Yeh released the prototype for the side table in 2013, when it was called Kaki.
French visual artist Benoit Challand has combined the visual language of Le Corbusier‘s houses and Santiago Calatrava‘s sculptures to form a vision for a futuristic self-sustaining house on stilts (+ slideshow).
Named Roost House, the conceptual residence is depicted in a set of photo-realistic renderings in a remote location in Scotland. It would be raised several storeys above the ground on an angular scaffolding structure.
Benoit Challand designed the building to reference Villa Savoye and Cabanon, two of the most famous houses by modernist architect Le Corbusier, as well as a series of artistic sculptures by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
According to the artist, the house would generate all of its own heating and electricity. “Using a bunch of new technologies, in terms of building engineering and environmental resources, this house is intended to be fully autonomous,” he said.
Walls both inside and outside the house are pictured clad with timber. Protruding floor plates form balconies around the perimeter, while a vernacular pitched roof is topped with solar panels.
Residents could access the building by climbing a vertiginous ladder (not shown). There would also be a wind turbine attached to the undersides of the lowest floor.
Spaces inside the house are visualised containing a selection of iconic furniture designs, including the LC4 chaise lounge by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand, and the LCW chair by Charles and Ray Eames.
The pieces were created by Osko+Deichmann with the same techniques used for the studio’s previous Kink chairs and the colourful Straw chairs, which now come in a smaller size plus a bar stool and lounge chair.
Straw chair, lounge chair and bar stool by Osko+Deichmann
They are made of lacquered, galvanised steel so are suitable for indoor and outdoor use. The designers have also added a three-legged table to the collection.
The surrounding trees and sky will be reflected in a wide, shallow pool of water in this installation by Spanish architecture group Citylaboratory for a garden festival in Quebec, Canada.
A large black basin will be filled with water to reflect the surrounding forest then left to be used by local wildlife.
“Conceived as a device capturing the beauty of nature, the intention is to transform the surrounding landscape into the garden itself by capturing what is outside its boundaries,” said the designers, who are based in Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain.
“Water is used as a raw material to create a reflecting surface,” they continued. “The container is simply a frame that suspends water above the ground; a homogenous black object, assembled in a direct way, minimising the expression of assembly joints and the contact with the ground.”
Once the dish is filled with water, the idea is to leave it to evolve over time as a source of water for birds and other garden life. Like a regular pond, it will be subject to falling leaves and fluctuations in heat, light and weather.
The project is one of six winners in a competition to design an installation for the festival, which will take place from 28 June to 28 September 2014. The design was selected from nearly 300 proposals for contemporary gardens submitted by over 700 architects, landscape architects, designers and artists.
This black wooden house in Austria by Hammerschmid Pachl Seebacher Architekten is raised off the ground on wonky metal stilts to frame views of the landscape and allow room underneath for a sheltered garden (+ slideshow).
Austrian firm Hammerschmid Pachl Seebacher Architekten designed S House for a pair of school teachers in Vorderweissenbach, northern Austria, who asked for a floor area of 130 square metres arranged on a single storey.
There was no requirement for a basement floor, so the architects were able to position the building at the highest point of the sloping site. The front of the structure meets ground level, while the rear is lifted several metres into the air.
Rooms are arranged on a U-shaped plan that wraps around an elevated terrace. Bedrooms and a study run along one side and the other half contains a large living, dining and kitchen space.
“We tried to combine the requirements and the qualities of the plot in a very cost-effective design. The U-shape of the house made a very familiar and protected terrace with stunning views,” architect Dietmar Hammerschmid told Dezeen.
The architects gave the building a timber structure, meaning construction could be completed in just four months.
Exterior walls are clad with roughly sawn spruce and were painted matte black using traditional Swedish Falu Rödfarg paint.
“We chose the black paint because the U-shaped building has a very large surface and a dark building integrates better into the surrounding landscape,” added Hammerschmid.
The owners required a cost-efficient house with a maximum of 130 square metres of living space. A basement was not necessary. These requirements led to the decision, to base the whole building on pillars.
The U-shaped floor plan responds to the neighbouring settlement. Living rooms and bedrooms are oriented to a terrace that offers great views of the surrounding hills.
Stockholm 2014: architecture studio TAF has designed a light that resembles a poster tube for Swedish brand Zero.
Revealed at this year’s Stockholm Furniture and Northern Light Fair, TAF‘s Poster light is designed to look like the kind of ordinary cardboard tube used to protect posters and other documents. The LED strip light even includes the ridges and cap found on a poster tube.
“For a long time we have been interested in transforming universal and general products into something new and unique,” said TAF designer and co-founder Mattias Ståhlbom.
“For us, keeping the aesthetic reference to something that we all can relate to is a way of making the objects more easily adopted,” he added. “We also found it interesting to work with the pipes concept because these kind of lamps are often hung from ceilings which have lots of existing pipes, like drainage and ventilation and so on.”
The Poster light is made from extruded aluminium and comes in black, white and the colour of cardboard.
Opinion: in this week’s column, Sam Jacob investigates how flip flops from a street market have taken their place alongside placards and banners as objects of protest in the recent Bangkok election demonstrations.
On a Bangkok street corner late on a Sunday night, there’s a guy with a stall catering to a very particular market. Spread over a section of pavement and hung from the front of a roller shutter are exclusively Bob Marley branded goods. It’s good to know that even late on the sabbath evening, even on the night of the Thai elections, there’s somewhere catering for such a specific demand: Bob Marley beach towels, hats, shorts, even toothbrushes. A whole universe of Marley-ware. All your essential products striped red, gold and green, splattered with the silhouette of marijuana leaves or a high contrast three-quarter portrait of Bob himself.
In these images, Bob’s head is always thrown back, a real-life gesture captured at its most expressive but now mechanically transferred through God-knows-how-many mechanical processes into a stylised frozen image.
The aesthetic is pure cartoon Rastafarianism, like that episode of the Simpsons where, in an effort to boost The Itchy & Scratchy Show’s ratings, the network introduces a new focus-grouped dog-with-attitude character (“a dog who gets ‘biz-ay!’. Consistently and thoroughly… a totally outrageous paradigm”).
Cartooned like this, Bob’s gesture becomes at once purer and more debased. It’s shorn of all its contextual political and ideological meaning, but at the same time becomes a direct shorthand for what that all stood for: emancipation.
Emancipation from what, exactly? Here, on a Thai street corner not far from the epicentre of backpacking-gap-year-opolis, Marley’s ghost is all shape and no fleshy body. His image and the colourways and symbols that accessorise it have become just another figure in the Pantheon of global pop culture.
Of which, down the road in a night market, there’s plenty of other evidence. There’s a stall selling Beatles gear for example, which includes a Hawaiian shirt with cartoon Fab Fours interspersed with Linda and Yoko as if it were a rockumentary transcribed into leisurewear. Lives, bodies of work, principles and ideologies are frozen into instantly recognisable, instantly consumable global symbols which are then in turn tumbled with other references, chronologies, contexts and media, forming an international pidgin language.
This is nothing new, of course. French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard told us this was the fundamentally postmodern condition of modern life:
“Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong.”
But like that other French connoisseur of postmodernity, Baudrillard, there’s a haughtiness to this kind of cultural analysis that means – despite its sharpness – it doesn’t quite cut like it should. Baudrillard, for God’s sake, went all the way to Disneyland to encounter the dark heart of the simulacrum and never even went on Space Mountain. No wonder he thought nothing was real!
That Italian backpacker pulling on his brand new Rasta hat might be an idiot, but he’s at least a real idiot with a 24 carat, bona fide, 100 percent, really idiotic hat.
One of the reasons why people like to think that these kinds of things aren’t real is because of the relationship of the applied image to the object. Of course, all those Bob Marley products most likely come from a factory producing the very same items branded with other perennial naive youth culture favourites: the same beach towel with John Lennon’s face reminding us to imagine no possessions. It’s all appliqué, surface not depth, image not authenticity. Just like the factory I once visited in Shenzhen that produced souvenirs: souvenirs of anywhere, any place on the planet, all sculpted by their master craftsman. Who, of course, had never left Shenzhen himself. There’s something completely magical – a modern day fairy story – about a master souvenir maker who had never traveled anywhere. I could see Tom Hanks being Oscar-nominated for his sympathetic portrayal of this bittersweet character-of-our-time.
In another market, a hop, skip and two-hour traffic jam across town, in one of the gatherings of anti-government protestors trying to shut down Bangkok and force electoral and governmental reform, something broke through this supposedly flat veneer of shallow culture. Not because it was any more real, but because it was equally inauthentic, just in a different way.
Like anywhere in Thailand where two or three have gathered, a market has sprung up. Amongst the street food, opposition-branded whistles and T-shirts was a stall set out with flip flops. The upper side of the soles are printed with portraits of the opposition’s main targets in the kind of high-contrast graphics we associate with hip young ideological politics (think Che T-shirts, think Banksy, think that godawful graphic hack Shepard Fairey of Obama Hope fame).
On your left foot is an image of the current Thai prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, with the legend “Get Out”. On the right is her brother and ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, with “Wanted” in a wild western font in reference to his conviction in absentia for corruption while in office.
Here was something churned no doubt out of the very same production lines as Bob Marley beach balls and Joe Strummer strimmers in the light industrial units where generic objects are batch-laminated with cultural symbolism. But here was something that flipped (and flopped) all that poststructuralist ennui on its head. Here, in the shape of a dumb generic product was something that split the night with its sharpness and intelligence. Not least in its own ironic self-awareness, given the protest’s reputation for producing as many selfies as proclamations.
These flip flops are politics disguised as leisurewear, a way to seriously yet nonchalantly register your opposition in a city declared a state of emergency. Every step you take disrespects the image of government with the sole of your foot. And if that wasn’t enough, it enacts the old Situationist International slogan from Paris ’68 with a new life. If the beach really is beneath the pavement, then here’s the perfect footwear!
Even more than this, the flip flop as political symbol embodies a far more positive idea of politics, footwear and the future than Orwell imagined. Instead of the jackboot stamping on the face of humanity here we have a flip flop, flapping on the face of government.
The Thai protests partially brand themselves as Occupy Bangkok and there’s something entirely appropriate in the street market flip flop ascending to the status of political tool, along side the placard and banner. Occupy itself is a product of the very same rag-bag eclectic urge, an assemblage of fragments of ideology. It’s a politics of sensation perhaps, too, rather than of argument.
Occupy might even wear a Rasta hat, possibly has white dreadlocks, maybe bangs a drum and blows a whistle, five parts Lennon to one part Lenin, a quart of Marley and a dash of Marx. In other words, it imagines no possessions in a government yard in Trench Town. Its aesthetics, its ideology even, might be a half-formed shape in the cultural surf but that’s exactly what makes it the politics of now. Yours for just 100 Bhat outside the MBK shopping centre now.
Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with publishers Summit to give readers the chance to win a book full of projects by design duo GamFratesi.
This is GamFratesi offers an insight into the design and creation of furniture, products and installations by the studio set up in Copenhagen by Danish designer Stine Gam and Italian designer Enrico Fratesi.
Written by authors Daniel Golling and Gustaf Kjellin, the book provides a detailed account of the pair’s designs, projects and processes since their debut at the Greenhouse emerging talent section of Stockholm Furniture Fair in 2007.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “This is GamFratesi” in the subject line. 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.
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Competition closes 10 March 2014. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names 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.
A lone computer-generated figure marches forward whilst morphing through an array of architectural structures that include geodesic domes pixellated blocks and complex lattices, in this animation by multimedia studio Universal Everything (+ movie).
Matt Pyke of Universal Everything based Walking Architecture on the futuristic imaginings of 1960s architecture group Archigram, creating a vision of a city as a living organism that strides on despite its changing size and form.
As the movie starts, the figure’s proportions resemble those of a human body. It gradually becomes abstracted as time goes on, transforming into different shapes that include a cluster of pixellated cubes and a striated mound.
“The language of materials and patterns seen in radical architecture transform as the nomadic city walks endlessly, adapting to the environments she encounters,” said Pyke.
The title, Walking Architecture, is a reference to an Archigram project called Walking City – a concept by British architect Ron Herron for a system of nomadic robot buildings that could walk freely to wherever their resources or manufacturing capabilities were needed.
At the end of the movie the figure returns to its original form, ready to begin the transformation again.
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