Hasta La Ideas

New York studio HWKN has resurrected the nightclub of New York’s popular gay resort Fire Island Pines inside an asymmetric pavilion with criss-crossing timber braces (+ slideshow).

The Fire Island Pines Pavilion had been the main attraction of the Pines community since the 1980s, so when the building was destroyed by fire in 2011 HWKN was asked to rebuild it with an improved design.

The new building is a two-storey timber construction with a bar and terrace at ground floor level, plus a dance club and outdoor lounge on the first floor. There’s also a retractable roof so the club can be opened to the sky on warm summer evenings.

The corner of the structure appears to have been sliced away, angling the building’s terraces to face the nearby harbour and directing views towards new arrivals.

HWKN’s Marc Kushner explains: “When it is empty, [the new pavilion] is a muscular icon for the energy and vitality of the Pines – it visually welcomes every ferry that arrives to the island. As it fills with an afternoon crowd, the architecture fades in importance. The building becomes an armature to display the social spectacle of a weekend in the Pines.”

Bars on both floors feature zig-zagging outlines, intended to encourage more social encounters. Inside the nightclub, bleacher-style seating areas create viewing platforms and a rectangular skylight offers a window to the stars.

“We infused every space with a social engine, including the triangular bars that encourage casual meetings, the arena-like bleachers in the nightclub that put the ‘see and be seen’ opportunity into the third dimension and the inviting openness of the triangular facade frames,” comments HWKN’s Matthias Hollwich.

Hollwich and Kushner are the founding partners of HWKN. The studio’s most well-known project to date is Wendy, the giant spiky air-cleaning sculpture installed outside the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre last summer.

See more bars and nightclubs on Dezeen, including one with copper pipes stretching across its walls and one with chunky black trees inside.

Here’s some more information from HWKN:

Hollwich Kushner (HWKN) and Blesso Properties announce the near completion of the New Fire Island Pines Pavilion.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, so goes the Pavilion. The Fire Island Pines Pavilion, destroyed in 2011 by a devastating fire, is now near completion, once again giving the Pines community a central hub for culture and nightlife. The reincarnation of the legendary dance club is designed by New York-based Hollwich Kushner (HWKN) and developed by Blesso Properties.

“The building, located at the intersection of all traffic to and from the island, is shaped to become a part of the everyday way of life for the community by fitting in comfortably with the open, beachy, and modern feel of the Pines,” says Matthias Hollwich, co-founder of HWKN. “Going beyond that, we infused every space with a social engine, including the triangular bars that encourage casual meetings, the arena-like bleachers in the nightclub that put the “see and be seen” opportunity into the 3rd dimension, and the inviting openness of the triangular facade frames.”

The building’s form is sheared towards the harbour to visually welcome the over 800,000 visitors who arrive via ferry to Fire Island Pines every summer. The first floor offers a Welcome Bar to serve as a meeting place for all residents and visitors. The dance club encompasses the building’s second level, with a 2,400 square-foot dance floor and a 2,600 square-foot outdoor terrace which will host High Tea in the evenings, and double as an additional lounge at night. The Welcome Bar, the High Tea deck, and the Pavilion club space are all connected by an internal loop of stairs. Inside the club, stadium steps cascade out from one wall, creating an elevated view of the dance floor, with a skylight overhead providing a constant view of the starry night skies.

“The new pavilion is an architectural chameleon,” says Marc Kushner, co-founder of HWKN. “When it is empty, it is a muscular icon for the energy and vitality of the Pines – it visually welcomes every ferry that arrives to the island. As it fills with an afternoon crowd, the architecture fades in importance. The building becomes an armature to display the social spectacle of a weekend in the Pines.”

The building is an exercise in sustainability. Many of the design elements that make the space fun, like the massive retractable roof over the dance floor, serve a double purpose by providing passive cooling on hot summer nights. The decision to open half of the building to the outdoors vastly reduces the need for air conditioning, while also re-connecting people to the beauty of the natural environment in Fire Island. Additionally, the choice of finishes on the exterior and interior is calibrated to minimise material usage by exposing the Pavilion’s raw construction.

Hollwich adds, “When we started designing the Pavilion, we came to realise that we were not just reporting to Blesso Properties, but that there are also all of the Fire Island Pines homeowners and visitors who are our clients as well. We knew we needed to listen to all of them – and we believe we did, integrating everything we learned into the design of the new building.”

Throughout the entire rebuilding process, the team received hundreds of letters, emails and Facebook messages from Pavilion devotees offering ideas, critiques, and support for the new complex.

“In most of our projects, if I can achieve 90% of our design goals we view it as a triumph. In this case we got 100% as HWKN designed a flawless building,” says Matthew Blesso, Founder & CEO of Blesso Properties. “The design is incredibly bold, appropriately masculine and modern yet rustic. And they achieved this while meeting our diverse and demanding functional goals. The building will be a timeless icon for generations to come and I couldn’t be happier with the end result.”

The Pavilion’s reopening is perfectly timed with the 60th anniversary of the Pines, as the club has a long-standing heritage in the community. Originally built in 1985, it instantly changed the social landscape, imbuing it with the type of heartbeat only a nightclub can provide. The legacy of the Pines has been lovingly interwoven into every part of the new Pavilion, from the architecture to the programming.

The post New Fire Island Pines Pavilion
by HWKN appeared first on Dezeen.

Swedish designer Richard Lindvall has converted a car park near Stockholm into a restaurant and nightclub with copper pipes stretching across its walls and ceiling.

The restaurant serves Polish food, so Richard Lindvall visited a few factories in Poland to find inspiration for the project and came with a concept for an industrial interior filled with raw materials rather than soft furnishings.

The designer left many of the concrete surfaces exposed inside the old car park, while others he lined with plain white ceramic tiles. “The natural raw atmosphere of the space was kept and used as a base for the concept,” he says.

Some of the copper pipes snake across walls to function as radiators, while others create a lighting framework overhead and more can be found as plumbing for sinks in the toilets. Copper is also used for the facade of a large fireplace.

The bar is made from concrete, as are the shelves that span the walls behind it. Industrial lights hang from the ceiling, which the designer sourced from an old factory in the Czech Republic, and a hunting trophy is mounted to the wall.

Metal stools surround concrete tables in the dining room. Other details in this space include framed photographs by Mattias Lindbäck of the construction workers who installed the interior.

Other recently completed restaurant and bar interiors on Dezeen include a penthouse bar and nightclub in Paris with black trees inside and a bar in Vienna with a faceted ceiling of upside-down peaks.

See more restaurants and bars »

The post Restaurang & Bar Nazdrowje
by Richard Lindvall appeared first on Dezeen.

Lighting projectors and cables hang from the spindly branches of chunky black trees inside this penthouse bar and nightclub in Paris by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur (+ slideshow).

Named Electric, the music venue features soundproofed music rooms, an outdoor terrace and a dance floor facing out over the city skyline.

Mathieu Lehanneur collaborated with architect Ana Moussinet to design the interior and added split levels to define different zones.

By day, sofas and trunk-shaped stools can be dotted around the space to form lounge seating areas. By night, these are stored away to open up a ballroom with a rippled DJ booth.

Faceted windows and diagonal panels give texture to the walls in one of the spaces. Others can be used as screens for lighting and video projections.

Mathieu Lehanneur launched his industrial design and interiors studio in 2001. Other interiors he’s designed include a renovation of a Romanesque church in France and an office filled with pulped paper caves. See more design by Mathieu Lehanneur.

Trees have featured in a few interiors recently. See a few more in our recent feature all about indoor forests.

Daytime photography is by Felipe Ribon and night photography is by Fred Fiol.

Here’s some more information from the design team:

Electric by Mathieu Lehanneur

“If Alice in Wonderland had liked rock this is where she would have spent her days and nights…” summarised Mathieu Lehanneur. Electric, the new cultural platform in Paris, is already an event in itself: a 1,000 m2 penthouse in which the designer has devised a canopy of sound suspended between heaven and earth, monumental electrical braids emerging like pitch black trees.

Impressive by day, magical by night, Electric is a venue which never sleeps. A lounge interspersed with soundproofed modules and an 80m2 terrace, Electric is a space equipped with a mixing console whose ballroom floor provides a new perspective over Paris, integrating the ring road as a perpetually moving graphic foreground facing the metal mesh of the Eiffel Tower.

An ephemeral restaurant at lunchtime, a lounge or a club from dusk ’til dawn, Lehanneur and Ana Moussinet have designed a space which can also be freely customised through video projections and an infinite number of layouts available to its customers.

A huge trompe l’œil window onto the city, surrounded by streams of LED lights, is an ultimate nod to a new Versailles, Electric has already been chosen by We Love Art, and Kavinski for the global launch of his next album, and Ducasse… Meanwhile there are already rumours about the installation of an enormous open-air swimming-pool on the site of the car park this summer.

A result of the high creative demands of the management ensured by curator John Michael Ramirez whose range of artists contributes to the cultural distinction of the venue: Greater Paris has found its centre of gravity.

The post Electric by
Mathieu Lehanneur appeared first on Dezeen.

This cocktail bar in Vienna by Tzou Lubroth Architekten features a faceted ceiling of upside-down peaks inspired by the mountain landscapes of traditional Chinese paintings.

Local architects Gregorio S. Lubroth and Chieh-shu Tzou teamed up with three friends to design, build and launch the bar themselves, before adding the spiky ceiling as the first in a series of installations by different artists and designers.

“We want the bar to be a place where a larger conversation about design and art can occur,” Lubroth told Dezeen. “As it is, ceilings are generally under-utilised, under-explored surfaces. Periodically changing the ceiling installation not only brings new life to the bar but sparks conversations about space.”

The architects gave the ceiling the theme Mensch und Natur, or Man and Nature, which was intended to inspire a “fantasy” view of the natural world. “Our installation is a translation, or rather, geometric simplification of natural forms,” added Lubroth.

Above: photograph is by Jochen Fil

Lighting is affixed to the walls and pointed towards the ceiling, while mirrors behind the bar reflect a selection of spirit bottles used for making cocktails.

Above: photograph is by Jochen Fil

“Vienna has a long, rich history of wine, beer, and schnapps drinking, not to mention a vibrant bar scene,” said Lubroth. “However, with a few exceptions, cocktail culture is relegated to fancy hotel bars or loud clubs. We wanted to introduce a small cocktail menu with old and classic drinks at affordable prices.”

The rest of the bar has a simple layout with steel and oak furniture, plastered walls and an asphalt floor.

See more bars on Dezeen, including one with tables made of drawers and a bar made of doors.

Photography is by Stefan Zenzmaier, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

If dogs run free is a bar on the Gumpendorfer Straße in Vienna’s 6th district co-owned by an actress, a restaurateur, a graphic designer, and two architects. The bar was conceived as a neighborhood watering hole; a place where students, neighbors, and the after-work crowd get together to enjoy a good drink.

The name, like the space itself, is meant to invite fantasy. The generously proportioned 82m2 space is modelled after a black box theater with the main focus on the ceiling plane rather than on an actual stage.

In addition to its function as a bar, the owners wanted to provide a space where people have access to new ideas in art and design outside the traditional context of a gallery or the academy. The ceiling plane is reserved for artists and designers to create site specific installations intended as annual fixtures revolving around the theme Mensch und Natur.

The first installation was designed and built by the owners. It describes an inverted mountain landscape through the manipulation of a single geometric tile. The patchwork of tiles shift in tone creating two interwoven color gradients. The landscape is multiplied by mirrors attached to the wall behind the bar counter.

Below the ceiling, dark, unadorned surfaces are used to emphasize the presence of the ceiling installation. The walls are spackled with a blend of plaster and black house paint. The floor is poured asphalt. All furnishings are a mixture of steel, black MDF boards, and dark, stained oak. The lighting is a flexible system of stage spots and construction strobes.

Project Name: If dogs run free
Project Type: Bar
Location: Vienna, Austria
Architects: Tzou Lubroth Architekten
Design Team: Gregorio S. Lubroth, Chieh-shu Tzou
Graphic Design: Maria Prieto Barea
Total Floor Area: 82 m2

The post If Dogs Run Free by
Tzou Lubroth Architekten appeared first on Dezeen.

London Design Festival: designer-makers East London Furniture have temporarily fitted out the interior of London bar DreamBags-JaguarShoes using nothing but scrap materials found on the local streets.

The fit-out is the latest in a string of installations at the venue by artists and designers. ”Normally it involves mostly the walls and perhaps some lighting,” East London Furniture’s Christian Dillon told Dezeen. ”We wanted to take over the whole bar.”

The team removed all the furniture and replaced it with tables made from pallets and ceiling joists, plus benches inspired by nineteenth century Shaker furniture.

“We created all of the free-standing seating, tables and lighting in our workshop, but left the inbuilt elements to be created in situ,” said Dillon. “So much of the inbuilt seating, especially the booth or ‘pulpit’, were conceived in the space from materials we had to hand.”

The team have lined the walls and front of the counter with wooden panels, while the throne-like seating booth is made from old skirting boards and fills the recess beside a staircase.

The cube-shaped lights hanging above the bar were created from the offcuts of other furniture made by the team and the wall-mounted lighting was produced from recycled wooden blocks.

Friend and regular collaborator Alessandro Mistrulli has decorated many of the surfaces with illustrations showing severed arms and wood-working tools. “I think I saw him reading a book on Russian prison tattoos the night before he delivered the main graphic,” said Dillon.

The installation will remain in place for two months, but was completed to coincide with the London Design Festival last week.

“For us to have a show in the festival, where people are actually using the furniture to have a nice meal, a nice beer or chatting to a nice girl or guy is so much more interesting than a static display of our furniture,” explained Dillon.

Dillon and team mates Ben Green and Reuben Le Prevost founded the Hackney-based furniture company in 2011 – see our earlier story about them here.

A past installation we’ve featured at DreamBags-JaguarShoes featured wallpaper that changes under different lighting conditions.

See more stories about the London Design Festival »

Photography is by Jeff Metal, courtesy of JaguarShoes Collective.

The post East London Furniture
at DreamBags JaguarShoes appeared first on Dezeen.