Hasta La Ideas

Competition: we’ve teamed up with the American Hardwood Export Council to give away ten copies of Timber Wave, a book documenting the installation of the same name by architects AL_A and engineers Arup at the V&A museum in London. 

The three-storey-high red oak sculpture was erected for the London Design Festival and remained in place for a month.

Watch an interview with architect Amanda Levete and festival director Ben Evans here and a movie about its manufacture here.

The project is a collaboration between AL_A, The London Design Festival, AHEC, Cowley Timber and engineers Arup.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Timber Wave” 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.

Competition closes 29 November 2011. Ten winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions.

More competitions »
Back to Dezeen »

This writer has returned from vacation and though we apologize for not bringing you back trinkets and souvenirs from our travels, we come baring the gift of news. First, a couple of pieces about museum openings. This Friday marks the greatly anticipated first days the public will have to enter the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, home to the massive museum’s founder and heir to the Walmart fortune, Alice Walton. On Friday, Walton will be leading the dedication, along with the museum’s executive director, Don Bacigalupi and the designer behind the project, the renowned starchtect Moshe Safdie. Former President Clinton will also be appearing by video to say hello and kick off the opening. However, unless you acted quickly, even though the museum is miles away from what we city folk would call “civilization,” the museum’s first day is already booked solid.

In other starchitect-designed museum news, the Lansing State Journal has received word that the Zaha Hadid-designed Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum on the campus of Michigan State University is nearing competition with its construction. As of now, the paper reports that it should all be wrapped and largely completed by February, with an official opening now scheduled for some time in late April. Certainly good news for a museum that, like many across the country over the past few years, was struggling to pull in those last few million to finish everything up.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Home to the Temple of Dendur, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Sackler Wing was added as part of Kevin Roche’s masterplan for the museum.

Don’t miss “Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment.” On view through January 22 at the Museum of the City of New York (following its debut earlier this year at the Yale School of Architecture), it’s the first retrospective exhibition of the Pritzker Prize winner’s work, which includes the Ford Foundation Building, the master plan and extension of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum in California, and the Union Carbide World Corporate Headquarters in Danbury, Connecticut. The museum is also offering three unique opportunities to get up close and personal with the Dublin-born principal of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.

The architectural fun begins next Tuesday evening, as speakers Todd DeGarmo (CEO STUDIOS Architecture), Belmont Freeman (Belmont Freeman Architects), and critic Alexandra Lange consider Roche’s work from the inside out, by focusing on his innovative corporate office interiors for the likes of John Deere and Company. On December 6, Roche himself will be on hand to chat with Morrison Heckscher, chairman of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about the design, realization, and reception of Roche’s plan for the museum. The architect returns on January 10 to tackle the topic of “The Limitations of Modernism: Classical Forms in the Buildings of Kevin Roche” in the company of curators Donald Albrecht and Kyle Johnson as well as Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, an associate professor at the Yale School of Architecture. UnBeige readers can save 50% off the regular ticket price of $12: use code Roche2011 when ordering here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Japanese architect Jo Nagasaka of Schemata Architecture Office has completed another Tokyo store for skincare brand Aesop, this time in an old shoe shop.

Aesop Ginza has a red brick interior, which references the brick-tiled facade that was previously painted over by the upstairs tenants.

Brick courses infill the spaces between wooden shelves where products are displayed, while brick units with wooden surfaces house sinks.

You can see more Aesop stores here, including the other Tokyo store by Jo Nagasaka made from materials of a demolished house and a kiosk in New York made of 1000 newspapers.

Other projects by Schemata Architecture Office include an office with a slide and a house in a three metre cube – see all the projects here.

Photography is by Alessio Guarino.

Here’s a few sentences from Jo Nagasaka:

We renovated the 35 year shoe shop “Milano Shoes” into new Aesop Shop in Ginza.

The owner of MIlano Shoes put the brick tiles on the facade of the shop to create a “high-quality mood.”.

But when other tenats of upstair moved into the space they hate the bricks and painted them. Then we designed brick interior in honor of “Milano Shoes”.

Address: Ginza, Chuoku, Tokyo
Usage: Shop
Structure: Steel construction
Completion: 09/2011
Floor space: 38.04m2
Construction: Zest

London designer Thomas Heatherwick has embedded curved threads of ash into dark walnut pews for an abbey in England’s South Downs.

Located beneath the vaulted dome of Worth Abbey, the wooden benches fan around a stone altar to provide more than enough seating for the 700-strong congregation.

The new furniture also includes choir stalls, monastery seats, desks and confession rooms, all of which were fabricated from the solid hardwood.

Thomas Heatherwick received a lot of press last year when his UK pavilion opened in Shanghai and he redesigned London’s iconic Routemaster bus, but he’s also designed furniture including a metal chair shaped like a spinning top – see more projects by Heatherwick Studio here.

Photography is by Edmund Sumner.

Here’s some text about the project from the American Hardwood Export Council:

Heatherwick Brings New Life in Black Walnut to Worth Abbey

Nestled on a crest overlooking the South Downs, Worth Abbey Church has a striking aspect. Its remarkable conical sloping roof sets off the extensive, peaceful grounds and the rolling landscape below. The 25 English Benedictine monks who reside at the Abbey run a school, a parish and a place of retreat.

The Abbey Church was designed by the architect Francis Pollen, and is considered by many to be the best example of his style. Since its opening in 1974, the Abbey’s furniture comprised freestanding chairs which impinged on the ambiance, creating a cluttered, temporary feel. The Monks decided that it was time to undertake some refurbishment work and took the opportunity to have a more cohesive, relevant and purposefully designed congregational and clergy furniture. They commissioned Heatherwick Studio to design and develop a furniture strategy as part of wider renovations to the Abbey Church. The furniture package included pew benches, choir stalls with misericord seats and desks, benches, credence tables, server seats and reconciliation (confessional) rooms.

Heatherwick Studio is headed by Thomas Heatherwick who trained at Manchester Polytechnic and the RCA. Since its founding in 1994, the studio has earned a reputation for coming up with artistically exciting solutions to clients’ design briefs ranging from product design to major architectural and large scale design projects. The studio consists of team with a wide range of disciplines including architecture, product design, model making, fabrication, landscape design, fine art and curation, and they are used to working in a sensitive historic context, which was vital for the refurbishment work undertaken at Worth Abbey. They also have a very strong making ethos, and a workshop within the practice allows them to make prototypes and models, giving them a very valuable ‘makers eye view’ of all the commissions they undertake.

The original auditorium space of the Abbey has a tangible spiritual feel to it; a difficult thing to achieve with modern materials without the obvious historical and religious architectural references. Natural stone and neutral colouring make the space light and airy. Heatherwick wanted to complement the materials used by Pollen and decided to use solid wood throughout for the new furniture. In a space that uses natural and neutral tones, a more traditional choice might have been oak or a more modern option could have been a pale species like maple. Heatherwick took a braver move and chose American black walnut to give a colourful aspect to the chapel, the darker heartwood creating a distinctive, defined line to the design, and the creamy sapwood adding a touch of warmth without over powering the celebrants and congregation who are the main focus of any service. According to Thomas Heatherwick, “Walnut was chosen for its darkness and subtlety and for the way that when it would be used in quantity on our project, its dusky colour would not become overbearing.”

As you enter the main nave you are struck by the presence of the furniture but it does not overwhelm the space, nor is it too small in scale. It is a big area serving congregations of 700 people, and with capacity for double that number. The design approach has kept the circular nature of the space with a stone altar in the middle. The original furniture did not have kneelers for the congregation so these were designed as an integral part of the seating.

Furniture fabrication was undertaken by Artezan, a specialist joinery division within Swift Horsman, a UK-based company chosen for their flexible and experienced approach to the complex method of construction. Swift were up for the challenge and have delivered it successfully. Thomas Heatherwick said he was “immensely impressed with the quality of the work of the craftsmen and the phenomenal determination and commitment of the firm to a very challenging commission.”

The way the furniture is constructed is central to the whole theme of the Heatherwick design. Having decided on solid wood and a clean lined approach, Thomas and the team at Heatherwick came up with a striking laminated design which complements the square walls of the church and the radial nature of its layout.
Due to movement issues inherent in working with all-solid wood construction, an interior metal frame allows the natural characteristics of the timber to come through and be strong enough to easily manage everyday use. This frame links the kneelers to the seating, making each pew a standalone piece. Working with the team at Swift Horsman, complex jigs were designed and developed to cope with the complicated glue-ups that were part and parcel of the design.

The most intriguing and subtle aspect is a 0.6mm line of ash which is laminated into the layers of black walnut. This adds a sense of detail that gives it an historical link to the traditions of inlay within the craft but with a very contemporary and sculptural feel. At a distance it is barely there, but the closer you get to the furniture the more apparent and thus more effective it becomes, giving a gentle element of understated surprise to the overall effect. This is the most artistic aspect of the whole concept and it runs throughout the whole collection of furniture; the central monks seat shows it most dramatically, where the angle of the laminating meets the curve of the back, creating a wave effect in the ash veneer. This helps give a central focus to the lead preacher of the day.

The overall impression is that the furniture definitely adds a cohesive feel to Pollen’s concept while allowing the practical considerations of running and attending a service to actually work. Thomas Heatherwick, his team and Swift Horsman are to be congratulated on a distinctive and extremely high quality solution both in terms of its ideas and its craftsmanship.

See also:

.

St Hilaire church in Melle by Mathieu Lehanneur	Chapel of the Assumption Interior by John Doe	Infinity Chapel by hanrahanMeyers