Hasta La Ideas

London architects Grimshaw have completed the restoration of historic tea clipper the Cutty Sark, which reopened to the public today in Greenwich.

The architects have completely repaired the vessel’s deck and rigging, which were severely damaged in a fire in 2006, and have raised the entire ship three metres above its dry dock to create an underground exhibition hall below.

A glazed structure surrounding the ship forms a roof canopy over this hall, bridging the space between the ground and the hull.

This structure also integrates an entrance, where a bridge leads across into the ship and stairs climb down into the space beneath.

If you’re interested in boats, check out all our stories about them.

Photography is by Jim Stephenson, apart from where otherwise stated.

Above: photograph is by Grimshaw

Here’s some more information from Grimshaw:

Her Majesty The Queen Reopens Cutty Sark on 25 April 2012

On Wednesday 25 April, Her Majesty The Queen, accompanied by His Royal Highness, The Duke of Edinburgh, officially reopens Cutty Sark, the world’s last surviving tea clipper and one of Britain’s greatest maritime treasures, following an extensive conservation project, with major support totalling £25 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). The following day (26 April) the ship opens to visitors for the first time since 2006.

Above: photograph is by Grimshaw

Also, today (13 April 2012) the Trustees of Cutty Sark and the Trustees of Royal Museums Greenwich are pleased to announce that following her completion, the ship will come under the operational management of Royal Museums Greenwich.

Above: photograph is by Grimshaw

Lord Sterling, Chairman of both Royal Museums Greenwich and the Cutty Sark Trust, said “Cutty Sark holds a unique place in the heart for the people of Greenwich, Great Britain and indeed the rest of the world, and it is splendid that she is re-joining the London skyline once again. Cutty Sark is set in the newly landscaped Cutty Sark Gardens, created by Greenwich Council, one of our strongest supporters. We are indebted to those members of the public, from all over the world, who have generously contributed to the preservation of this much loved national treasure. We are also deeply appreciative of the many other major institutions, government bodies and foundations that have played a key role in providing the funds. In particular, our deep thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund who have supported the project and stood by Cutty Sark through its difficult times, particularly following the fire, and allocating £25 million of public money raised through the National Lottery.

Above: photograph is by Grimshaw

Cutty Sark’s re-launch comes in an exceptional year for Greenwich, which was granted the status of Royal Borough in February, and will have the eyes of the world upon it during The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London 2012 Olympic Games this summer. On 25 June 1957 Her Majesty opened Cutty Sark to the public for the first time and we are delighted that on 25 April, this year, The Queen and HRH Duke of Edinburgh, who has been President of the Cutty Sark Trust since 1951, will return to re-open the ship.”

Above: photograph is by Grimshaw

Richard Doughty, Director of the Cutty Sark Trust, said: “We have been privileged to be involved in conserving Cutty Sark and restoring her to her key position in the Greenwich World Heritage Site. Our solution, a world first, will secure Cutty Sark’s future so that she can continue to inspire many new generations of adventurers at the heart of the Royal Borough of Greenwich.”

Above: photograph is by Grimshaw

Kevin Fewster, Director of Royal Museums Greenwich, said: “Cutty Sark is an iconic London landmark and a much loved part of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. Bringing Cutty Sark into the Royal Museums Greenwich family strengthens the links between some of the key attraction of this unique World Heritage Site and helps us to explore the extraordinary maritime stories we have to tell.”

The re-launch marks the start of an exciting new chapter in the extraordinary life of the world famous, three-masted clipper. It is the culmination of six years’ work and one of the most complex conservation projects ever undertaken on a historic ship. The project has succeeded in rescuing Cutty Sark and preventing her collapse, whilst preserving as much of the ship’s original fabric from the period of her working life as possible. Moreover, the innovative scheme also provides generations to come with a new way to engage with the ship and explore her history.

Above: photograph is by Grimshaw

In a brilliant feat of engineering, Cutty Sark has been raised 11 feet (3.3 meters) into the air, relieving the keel of the weight of the ship and preserving her unique shape. For the first time, visitors can walk underneath the ship and view the elegant lines of her hull, revealing the innovative design which was the secret to her success – enabling her to reach the record-breaking speed of 17 ½ knots (20 mph/32kmph) from Sydney to London. The space also showcases Cutty Sark’s extensive collection of over 80 ships’ figureheads, never before displayed in its entirety on the site.

The ship’s weather deck and rigging have been painstakingly restored to their original specification, with 11 miles (17.5 km) of rigging supporting the masts. Below deck visitors can explore Cutty Sark’s rich and varied history through new interactive exhibitions.

Above: photograph is by Grimshaw

Launched in 1869 from Dumbarton, Scotland, Cutty Sark visited most major ports around the world. She carried cargo ranging from the finest teas to gunpowder, and from whisky to buffalo horns. Cutty Sark made her name as the fastest ship of her era during her time in the wool trade. Many of the tea clippers that sailed the China Seas during the nineteenth century lasted for only a few years and only seven saw the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s Cutty Sark was the only one still afloat and from 1938 became a training ship for the Incorporated Thames Training College at Greenhithe.

Above: photograph is by Grimshaw

In December 1954, due to the great efforts of The Duke of Edinburgh, Cutty Sark came to Greenwich where she became, and remains, a memorial to the great days of sail and to all those who served in the merchant service.

Competition: Dezeen and toy company Papafoxtrot have teamed up to offer readers the chance to win one of six hand crafted wooden boats, each worth more than £100.

Papafoxtrot was founded by Ian Ferguson and Martin Postler of London design consultancy Postlerferguson.

The toy boats are designed in the shape of the most famous cargo ships in the world. A three-colour boat with container blocks stacked on top is in shape of the longest cargo ship, Emma Maersk.

The flat single-colour one is in the shape of the TI Asia cargo ship that used to carry 3 million barrels of oil.

The four half-spheres on the third product represent the gas containers on the largest gas cargo ship, Arctic Princess, which use to carry nearly 150,000 cubic meters of liquified natural gas.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Papafoxtrot” 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 7 February 2012. Six 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.

The information that follows is from Papafoxtrot:

Papafoxtrot

Papa Foxtrot plays with today!

Our wooden toys bring the amazing machines and global systems driving today’s world into the home. Hand-crafted wood and a colourful, reduced aesthetic imbue Papa Foxtrot products with an engaging tactility and playful optimism.

Papa Foxtrot is an international organisation, working with a network of designers and manufacturers around the world. The same global systems that inspire our toys allow us to utilize the best craftsmen and sustainable material suppliers in order to create products of the highest quality.

For everyone who ever sighed at the site of a container ship, swooned over a satellite or wondered where electricity comes from: we make our toys for you.

Papafoxtrot is a wooden toy and lifestyle brand founded by Ian Ferguson and Martin Postler of London based design consultancy Postlerferguson. We think that wooden toys are great so is the world we are living in. Our wooden toys bring the amazing machines and global systems driving today’s world into the home. Hand-crafted wood and a colourful, reduced aesthetic imbue Papa Foxtrot products with an engaging tactility and playful optimism. Our products are manufactured in small exclusive series and we work with our customers on bespoke uniquely designed special editions and seasonal collections.

More competitions »
Back to Dezeen »

What if plastic polluting the seas could be harvested by a retired fishing trawler, then transformed into chairs by an onboard factory?

The Sea Chair project by Royal College of Art graduates Alexander Groves, Azusa Murakami and Kieren Jones proposes just that – sorting through the plastic debris for tiny pellets used in injection moulding machines.

The designers claim that 13,000 of these pieces of virgin material are floating in every square mile of ocean, spilled in transit or leaked from factory storage.

They’ve built a machine to scoop along the shoreline and sort the debris by size, using a floatation tank to separate out other, denser materials, and trialled it on the beach at Porthtowan, England.

Their work has been nominated for the Victorinox Time To Care Award and you can vote for it here. “If the project gets enough votes to take us into their top three, we would secure enough money to see our project fully funded,” says Kieren Jones. If successful the designers intend to show a set of chairs made by the trawler in Milan next April.

They presented the project at Show RCA earlier this summer and it will be on show at Sustain RCA during the London Design Festival next month.

This isn’t the first project on Dezeen to tackle plastic pollution: last summer the Plastiki boat made of plastic bottles sailed from across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney to raise awareness of the problem and at DMY Berlin this year Dirk Vander Kooij presented a robot that prints plastic chairs made of recycled refrigerators.

The information that follows is from the designers:

London designers Alexander Groves, Kieren Jones and Azusa Murakami are proposing to turn a retired fishing trawler into a plastic chair factory, fishing plastic from the polluted seas and beaches around the South West of the UK. Their ‘Sea Chair’ project has been shortlisted for the Victorinox Time To Care Award, -to support the project, please cast your vote by visiting and help make the project a reality.

The Sea Chair project proposes to turn a retired fishing trawler into a plastic chair factory, fishing the plastic from the polluted seas and beaches around the South West coast of the UK.

The Sea Chair project looks to address the problem of accumulating plastic in our oceans by raising awareness and removing plastic that will continue to circulate for thousands of years.

With increasing EU quotas, competition from large commercial trawlers and not to mention depleting fish stocks, Britain’s fishing industry really is in crisis.

Further afield, a ‘plastic soup’ of waste floats in the Pacific Ocean. Growing at an alarming rate it is already double the area of the United States. The ‘Pacific Garbage Patch’ as it’s known, stretches from the coastlines of California to the shores of Japan.

Since the discovery of ‘The Pacific Garbage Patch’ 5 more have been found across the World’s Oceans with the Atlantic gyre predicted by many scientist to be even larger. This plastic waste doesn’t sink and takes thousands of years to degrade, remaining in the environment to be broken up into ever-smaller fragments by ocean currents. As our society’s consumption grows the concentration of this plastic soup increases.

These fragments include a large amount of nurdles or ‘mermaids tears’, which are the plastic pellets that are the virgin raw material for injection moulding. These nurdles can be found littered on almost every shoreline in the world.

During our research trip to Porthtowan beach we discovered the most prevalent marine litter was plastic pellets, known in the plastics industry as ‘nurdles’. These pellets are around 2mm in diameter & represent an estimated 10% of all marine litter worldwide, their small size means they aren’t picked up by waste systems and being buoyant they will float on the sea surface taking over a thousand years to biodegrade.

These Nurdles haven’t been injection molded yet, but rather have been lost through spillage in transit and poor storage at factories.

The nurdles act as a sponge for harmful chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in concentrations up to a million times greater than the surrounding seawater. Resembling fish eggs they enter the food chain raising the toxicity of our fish.

More than 250 quadrillion nurdles will be made this year and The United Nations (UN) states 13,000 nurdles are floating in every square mile of the ocean, however the concentration of these varies greatly according to currents and weather conditions.

Porthtowen Beach has been identified as one of the most polluted beaches in the UK for micro plastic due to it being a deposit shoreline that through its unique topography collects great amounts of sea plastic and makes it an ideal place to pan for nurdles.

Currently beach cleaning tractors remove the large plastic debris from the beach but micro plastic remains quite elusive. We have been developing methods and tools for collecting and separating the micro plastic from the other debris to be used again.

During the early part of the century, Britain’s coastline was a flourish of industrial activity, and beaches like Porthtowan were not just trawled for fish but also mined for precious metals.

Much like the early miners, we have taken inspiration from this rich heritage and produced a sluice-like contraption that has allowed us to sort vast quantities of marine debris quickly and efficiently.

The Nurdler consists of a hand powered water pump, and sorts the micro plastic from the stradline grading the particulates by size and using a floatation tank to separate the denser materials from plastic.

Alongside this contraption, and with the help of the local fisherman, we would like to fabricate plastic chairs that support their community and make use of their rich and diverse skill sets. With the E.U unveiling plans to pay fisherman for plastic by-catch, advances in the development of nets for collecting plastics with minimal damage to marine wildlife and by collecting washed up plastic on shore we have designed a floating factory ship that recycles this marine waste into sea chairs.

Please support this on-going project and help make the ‘Sea Chair’ a reality by voting for it here.

See also:

.

Recycled plastic chairs made by a robot	Plastiki boat made of plastic bottles	Chairs made of injection moulding remnants

Milan 2011: here’s another project from Lausanne studio Big-Game (see their furniture in  our earlier story) this time a series of cork toy boats for Portugese company Materia.

The toys, titled Bote, have a cork base with an interchangeable plastic mast or cabin.

The series will be on show at Via San Marco 38, Milan, April 12–17.

Photographs are by Julien Chavaillaz.

More stories on Big-Game on Dezeen »

More toy stories on Dezeen »

See all our stories on Milan 2011 »

Here’s a tiny bit of text from the designer:

BIG-GAME exhibit the BOTE for Materia.

BIG-GAME has made a series of floating boats in cork and plastic for the new Portuguese company Materia.

It will be launched in Milan during the design week April 12–17 at Via San Marco 38.

See also:

.

Atelier Book Chair by Kana Nakanishi	Arche Toys by Floris Hovers	WOOD by Ten

“Swoon,” the new eponymous book by the artist (aka Caledonia Curry and one of the best known female street artists in the world), finally came out this month. Tracing her process and showing some of her installations in galleries and streets around the world, as well as her larger scale community projects, including the street art collective Toyshop, the monograph includes essays by Curry herself, critic Carlo McCormick and others explaining her role as an instigator in the art world.

Callie recently talked to CH about her experience making the book, “it was amazing and sort of did my head in to try and encapsulate my whole life in art making over the last ten years—and this is me giving it my best shot. And almost none of that book would exist without the constant and beautiful vision of Tod Seelie.”

In as much as Swoon is an artist, she’s also an organizer, a hub and conduit for making things—wild things—happen. The book shows how Swoon goes about making her prints and ethereal cut-outs, as well as her Flotillas projects, like The Miss Rockaway Armada. For the project, handmade rafts sailed down the Mississippi, “Swimming Cities of Serenissima” took place in 2006 and 2007, and the rafts crossed the Adriatic and appeared in Venice for the biennale in 2009.

The book also highlights some of her other projects, including “Portrait of Silvia Elena” memorializing one of the first victims of the widespread killings of young women in Juárez, Mexico, where she researched the grisly phenomenon. A brief film describes her approach to making the work.

One essay mentions that Swoon doesn’t sleep much, a fact that makes sense given her cohesively broad and prolific output over the past few years.

“Swoon” sells from Abrams Books or Amazon.