Hasta La Ideas

This cabin covered in hand-painted patterns by Hackney architects Studio Weave provides a colourful art studio, bird-watching hide and rain shelter in a woodland park in Kent, England (+ slideshow).

Above: photograph is by Bryony Henderson

Named Ecology of Colour, the two-storey building has a gabled timber structure with walls and windows that hinge open on three different sides.

An indoor space is contained within the cantilevered first floor, designed to accommodate different activities. Birdwatchers hide behind the shutters during quiet periods to spy on the wildlife, while at other times dying workshops will take place to promote the use of natural dyes found in native planting.

A sheltered outdoor area is positioned directly beneath at ground floor level, providing additional workshop space for messy activities or protecting visitors to the park in wet weather.

Studio Weave collaborated with graphic designers Nous Vous to design the cabin’s colourful facade. The gridded pattern, entitled Joy, covers 144 timber cladding panels and was painted by local residents using organic paints.

“The pattern was a very intuitive response to a grid and it was this spontaneity with regard to form and colour that I hoped would bring across a sense of joy,” says Will Edmonds from Nous Vous.

Esme Fieldhouse from Studio Weave added: “The wood will be left to weather. The colours will stay bright for two to four years and then gradually fade as the timber silvers, allowing the building to age gracefully as it nestles into its surroundings.”

The architects have also teamed up with a horticulturist, who is installing a garden around the building that will yield natural dyes.

Studio Weave was founded by architects Je Ahn and Maria Smith. The studio’s past projects include Paleys upon Pilers, a timber-framed structure that marked a route to the Olympic Park, and the Lullaby Factory, a network of listening pipes at a children’s hospital.

Dezeen interviewed Ahn and Smith at our Designed in Hackney Day last summer. Watch the movie or see all our stories about Studio Weave.

Above: photograph by Benedict Johnson

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

Here’s some more information by the architects:

Multi-award winning, art and architecture practice Studio Weave celebrate the possibilities offered by natural dyes through the creation of The Ecology of Colour – a beautiful timber, hand-painted building located on the Ecology Island in Dartford’s Central Park.

The Ecology of Colour is the third Artlands public realm commission for North Kent and responds to the charming site known as Ecology Island, a magical, wild, wooded peninsula hidden at the very heart of Dartford’s Central Park and is dedicated to the study of the natural environment within an urban context.

In response to this unique context, Studio Weave have designed a small versatile building with a semi-outdoor space at ground level and an enclosed area on the first floor with shutters of various sizes to allow for hidden bird watching. As well as a bird hide and art studio the building will be used as an outdoor classroom, a dyeing workshop and simply as a rain shelter within the Ecology Island.

The building unashamedly celebrates colour and Studio Weave have collaborated with designers Nous Vous who have created a bold, cohesive graphic visual language for the exterior of the structure. Prior to its installation, a team of local residents and artists worked together in a painting workshop to produce each of the 144 panels, which form the external cladding.

In tandem with the design of The Ecology of Colour, Studio Weave have worked in collaboration with a horticulturalist to design a garden that will yield natural dyes. The planting scheme, which will be installed next spring, predominantly includes traditional plants native to the south of England such as Golden Rod which produces a magnificent yellow, Alder known for its vibrant red and Bugloss whose roots produce a mesmerizing blue.

The post Ecology of Colour
by Studio Weave appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2012: Dutch designers Scholten & Baijings showed a varied service based on the archives of hand-painted porcelain company 1616 Arita Japan at Spazio Rossana Orlandi in Milan last week.

The Colour Porcelain collection is decorated with three different levels of intensity, selecting traditional colours from the company’s archives on the the pale grey background of natural porcelain.

Each set includes plates, cups, bowls, serving platters, candleholders, vases and a tea set.

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile took place from 17 to 22 April. See all our stories about Milan 2012 here and see more images in our Facebook album and on our Pinterest board.

You can see all our stories about ceramics here.

Here’s some more information from Scholten & Baijings:

At the request of 1616 Arita, one of the oldest (1616) Japanese porcelain manufacturers, Scholten & Baijings designed a very comprehensive porcelain service. The collection consists of three series: Minimal, Colourful and Extraordinary. In addition to exclusive plates, cups and bowls, each series also comprises serving platters, candleholders, vases and a tea set.

The distinctive Japanese Arita porcelain is renowned for its superb quality, where fine hand-painted decorations play a central role. The tradition of porcelain painting dates back to 1616, when the abducted Korean potter Yi Sam-Sam-Pyeong discovered a superior quality clay in Arita.

For the collection of 1616 Arita, Scholten & Baijings prepared a colour analysis involving historical masterpieces. Typical Japanese colours, such as aquarelle blue, light green, red-orange and yellow ochre, were the ones that played a prominent role.

These colours have been used individually in the new designs, but together they form the specific Arita colour spectrum. The results are layered colour compositions, executed in different shades of glaze, in combination with the natural porcelain colour. The latter has a special delicate grey-white hue, which makes it unique in the world.

The names of the series refer to the amount of colour, details and patterns used. ‘Colour Porcelain – Extraordinary’ is the most elaborately finished version.

By applying the compositions to an extremely functional service, a splendid dialogue has been created between applied art and everyday use. The combination of this traditional craftsmanship and Scholten & Baijings’ recognizable signature style has resulted in a unique mix of Asian and European culture.

A windowless yellow facade shrouds the interior of this concrete gymnasium in southern France by architects Heams et Michel.

Located beside a secondary school in the town of Tourrette Levens, the building is used by students for gymnastics and as a general hall.

The textured concrete exterior is separated into rows of vertical stripes that the architects hoped would resemble the folding fabric of a stage curtain.

Daylight permeates the concrete walls through high-level windows on the rear elevation, as well as through a pyramidal roof light.

A colourful rock-climbing wall is located at the back of the hall, while panels of oriented strand board line the lower levels of the three remaining walls.

We’ve recently featured another building in France with a rock-climbing wall inside – see our earlier story here.

Photography is by Serge Demailly and Heams et Michel

Here’s some text from architect Benjamin Michel:

Gymnastics building

The building of the gym in Tourrette Levens is part of a plot where is erected a secondary school, and a gymnasium. This new building reserved for students and associations is intended for gymnastics and circus.

The program simplicity led us to reflect on the plastic side of the project. In fact, the area of study of the circus, put out the physical and moral development, includes a cultural, artistic, and social. The transience of the circus that is assembled and disassembled in cities remains in the collective unconscious. Our project is an allegory of the circus tent.

The idea is simple ” a concrete box that was covered with a cloth “. Concealment becomes mystery, and make us perceive differently what was commonplace before. We wanted to create a sculptural object concealed and packed in a skin of concrete, corrugated as a wavy stage curtain.

The yellow ocher color gives the blind walls an expression of lightness heightened by the fact that the stamped concrete does not touch the ground. Because of this, the object, which could have been a simple gym, takes an artistic dimension.

The volume chosen is voluntary simple : a rectangular parallelepiped of 14 meters wide and 8 meters in height in continuity of the existing gymnasium and detached from it by the volume of the entrance hall and deposits, which is less high.

By its presence, the project aims to complete the overall design of the existing sports facilities, by standing as a new south gable.

A single material wraps all the facades of the object. It walls are made of a stamped and painted concrete called “draped concrete” with a texture reminiscent of stage curtains.

The texture of the drapery is obtained by using two alternating matrices of slightly different patterns, but the same height as the concrete shells, specially designed for the project. Those walls have been casted all the way up, and the self-placing concrete has been poured in a single process so as not to reveal a horizontal joint. The vertical ones disappear in the pattern of the drapery.

Inside the room, a natural light is achieved by the presence of two major openings, not noticeable from the outside, a glass square on the roof, centered on the room, and a horizontal window in the north facade.

In this volume, the human scale is found by the calpinage at the bottom (2m50), a bounding of impact resistant OSB panels. And at the top we used acoustic wood wool insulation panels. The ceiling is made of raw concrete.

A direct connection to the existing gymnasium was constructed to promote exchanges between the various sports.

By this project, the idea of a building disappears in favor of an object carved in relation to its context and program. The rationale for the staging of such an object lies in the definition of the close relationship between sports, circus, entertainment, art, and social.

Project name: Gymnastics building Programme : Sport.
Location: Tourrette Levens, France

Architects: Heams et Michel
Engineer: GL Ingénierie
Client: Conseil Général des Alpes Maritimes

Project area: 240 m2 SHON.
Project year: 2011.

Entreprises:
Dévoiement réseaux: La Nouvelle SIROLAISE
Gros Œuvre: TRIMARCO Construction
Etanchéité: GALINELLI
Menuiseries métalliques – Serrurerie: SARL DEGIVRY
Sols Sportifs: MS DECO
É quipements sportifs: ENTRE PRISES
Electricité: EUROPELEC
Plomberie – Chauffage – Ventilation: AQUALIA
Finitions: SILENCE CONORT

Afin de faire la promotion de la chaîne Tiji, cette splendide vidéo en animation illustre l’imagination d’un petit garçon. Montrant la distribution de la couleur dans la nature avec un pinceau, cette création du studio Akama avec l’agence DDB Paris joue avec les couleurs des animaux.

Previously on Fubiz

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• Jeremy Young
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Dutch designer Hella Jongerius presents 300 porcelain vases coloured with layers of mineral and chemical glazes at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Produced in collaboration with porcelain brand Royal Tichelaar Makkum, the series uses historical recipes for glazes using materials like copper, cobalt, cadmium and iron, layered up with modern chemical glazes.

Update: forty of the vases were damaged when a visitor to the museum became ill and fell over.

The remaining vases in the series are shown as part of a retrospective exhibition of Jongerius’ work, entitled Hella Jongerius – Misfit, which continues until 13 February 2011.

See all our stories about Hella Jongerius »

Product photographs are by Gerrit Schreurs Fotografie.
Exhibition photographs are by Lotte Stekelenburg.

Here are some more details from Jongerius:

300 Coloured Vases by Hella Jongerius
On display in the exhibition ‘Hella Jongerius – Misfit’ (13 November 2010 – 13 February 2011)

This autumn Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is presenting the first Dutch retrospective exhibition of the designer Hella Jongerius. The exhibition is a unique survey of her work and provides an insight into her working method, experiments and innovative products. One of the most recent is a group of three hundred Coloured Vases (series 3), which will be exhibited for the first time in Rotterdam.

The three series of Coloured Vases are experiments in colour, in which an existing vase is used as a ‘canvas’. The first two series consisted of forty and forty-two different porcelain vases, partially coated with paint from the industrial colour ranges RAL (2003) and NCS (2007). The third series is currently being produced in close collaboration with the glaze experts at Royal Tichelaar Makkum.

Minerals

Whereas the first two series employed industrial paints, this series uses a combination of a hundred historical mineral recipes and a hundred modern chemical glaze recipes. Jongerius refers to the latter as the ‘fast-food’ colours of the modern ceramics industry. The mineral recipes contain ingredients such as cadmium (red), iron (brown), selenium (yellow), copper (green), cobalt (blue) and manganese (purple). The historical and modern colours are applied in layers in a variety of patterns resulting in optical blending: a kind of Pointillism on porcelain. The combinations of colours and patterns and experiments with the firing temperature result in new colours. These are not flat like industrial colours but are irregular, layered and lively like the colours we know from paintings.

Jongerius believes that industry has focused too much on quantity and standardisation over the past few decades. Industry has created thousands of colours that are designed to look the same in all circumstances. These colours lack the irregularities that can provide a more beautiful visual experience such as those found in this series of Coloured Vases (series 3).Imperfection

Hella Jongerius (1963) is one of the most important designers of her generation. In the 1990s she introduced imperfections and individuality into the industrial manufacturing process. Jongerius believes that the quality of craftsmanship is not legible in perfect products but only in the ‘misfits’ that betray the process and the hand of the maker. Many of her works, such as the Nymphenburg plates and the Frog Table, indicate the potential to contemporary design of historical motifs and repeat decorations.

Misfit

The exhibition Misfit at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen includes industrial products, unique experiments and numerous sketch models. All the objects are arranged by colour because this plays such an important role in Jongerius’s work. The combinations of objects, including well- known designs such as B-set, Long Neck & Groove Bottles, Repeat fabrics, the Polder Sofa and IKEA vases, explore the themes inherent in Hella Jongerius’s work.

The exhibition has been made possible by a contribution from the Ahrend Fonds, administered by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. ‘Hella Jongerius – Misfit’ is part of the official programme of Holland Art Cities 2009-2010.

See also:

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Rotterdam Chair by Hella Jongerius	Office Pets by Hella Jongerius	Artificial flowers by Hella Jongerius