Hasta La Ideas

Industrial designer Konstantin Grcic has furnished an apartment in Le Corbusier’s iconic Cité Radieuse housing block with his own products and blown-up pages from a punk fanzine (+ slideshow).

Appartement N°50 is a privately owned home in the Modernist apartment block in Marseille, France, which retains the original layout and features designed by Le Corbusier in 1952.

Konstantin Grcic chose to furnish the apartment with pieces including his 360° stools for Magis, Pro chair for Flötotto, chair_ONE for Magis, and Mayday lamps for Flos.

He also scanned pages of a punk fanzine, expanded them and hung them on the walls of the apartment, creating a deliberately enigmatic contrast with the sparsely decorated interior.

“The punk motifs are tempting a slightly devious link between two completely unrelated worlds: Le Corbusier’s architecture and punk rock,” says Grcic.

“Without forcing the idea of common grounds, I find that both have a rawness and uncompromising spirit which I have always found compellingly beautiful. Bringing both cultures together in this project felt most inspiring and, in the end, surprisingly fitting.”

Appartement N°50 has previously hosted temporary installations by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec in 2010 and Jasper Morrison in 2008. Grcic’s edition will be open to the public from 15 July to 15 August 2013.

The Cité Radieuse was damaged last August when a fire broke out in a first floor apartment, while French designer Ora-Ïto has overseen the creation of a contemporary art space on the building’s roof that opened this month.

Marseille is the European Capital of Culture 2013 and has seen significant architectural projects completed this year, including a reflective steel canopy by Foster + Partners, an archive and research centre featuring a cantilevered exhibition floor and an underwater conference suite and a museum clad in lacy concrete.

An exhibition of Le Corbusier’s work is currently on show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

In Milan earlier this year, Grcic launched a collection of furniture designed for Herzog & de Meuron’s Parrish Art Museum in Long Island with American brand Emeco, and a flat LED light inspired by Achille Castiglioni’s Parentesi lamp.

See more stories about Konstantin Grcic »
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Photography is © Philippe Savoir & Fondation Le Corbusier/ADAGP

Here’s a short text about the installation:

APPT.N50 installation by Konstantin Grcic 2013

There is an apartment in Le Corbusier’s famous Cité Radieuse (radiant city) in Marseille, which is almost completely preserved in its original 1952 condition.

Appt.N°50 is privately owned and it is thanks to the generosity and passion of its owner/occupant that the place is made accessible to a wider public during the summer months of each year.

As proof that Le Corbusier’s visionary Unité d’Habitation has the same vibrancy today as when it was originally conceived the apartment is turned into a temporary stage for the ideas and works of contemporary designers.

A short series of scenographic installations has been realized over the years; my project is the third in line following Jasper Morrison (2008) and Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec (2010).

Apart from placing a selection of my favorite furniture and objects I decided to tag the walls of the apartment with four blown up scans from an original punk fanzine. The punk motifs are tempting a slightly devious link between two completely unrelated worlds: Le Corbusier’s architecture and punk rock. Without forcing the idea of common grounds, I find that both have a rawness and uncompromising spirit which I have always found compellingly beautiful. Bringing both cultures together in this project felt most inspiring and, in the end, surprisingly fitting.

The objects in use are: 360° chairs (by Magis), Topkapi marble table (by Marsotto), Miura bar stool (by Plank), 2-Hands laundry basket (by Authentics), Pro chair (by Flötotto), Jerry stools (by Magis), Mayday lamps (by Flos), Medici chairs, side table and foot stool (all by Mattiazzi), 360° container (by Magis), Venice armchair (by Magis), Pallas table and Diana side tables (by ClassiCon), Myto chair (by Plank), Tip bin and H2O buckets (by Authentics), chair_ONE (by Magis).

In contrast to Le Corbusier ́s enigmatic color scheme of the interior, the intervention is kept in iconic red, black and white.

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Appartement N° 50 appeared first on Dezeen.

This little restaurant in Milan was designed by Italian architect Francesco Faccin and built by inmates from a local prison (+ slideshow).

Named 28Posti, the restaurant occupies a former karaoke bar in Milan’s Navigli neighbourhood and opened in April to coincide with the Salone Internazionale del Mobile.

Francesco Faccin designed the interior, retaining the peeling plaster and exposed brickwork of the existing walls and adding wooden seating and fixtures as well as a concrete floor.

Working alongside Maria Luisa Daglia and Gaetano Berni of charity organisation Live in Slums, Faccin enlisted a team of prisoners from the nearby Bollate Penitentiary to build all the furniture for the restaurant, tutored by carpenter Giuseppe Filippini.

The Bollate inmates used recycled timber offcuts to build tables, sideboards, doors and wall panelling. Three members of the team also helped to strip and clean the structure, pour the concrete floor and fit the windows and furniture.

“[One of] the restaurant’s objectives is to become a showcase of these furnishings in order to create a direct sales network with the Bollate’s penitentiary workshop,” explains the 28Posti team.

To complete the space, pendant lights made from recycled plastic bottles are suspended over each of the tables, while Kenyan objects and sculptures are placed within recesses in the walls.

See more eateries on Dezeen, including a restaurant filled with a weave of colourful strings and a pizza bar lined with ceramic tiles.

Photography is by Filippo Romano.

Here’s a project description from the restaurant’s website:

28Posti

The restaurant room is cosy and intimate, only 28 covers. It is located in a quiet street in the core of Navigli’s neighbourhood, precisely where in the past was located the historical club “Karaoke Canta Milano”. The architectural project is designed according to the original spatial characteristics and it is supplied with furniture entirely produced with waste materials.

The kitchen is the soul of the project: the guests can have access to it through a quick passage at the entrance and though a loophole in the main room which reveals the preparation of foods. Our cuisine is oriented toward ethical values, attentive to the quality of food, the respect for the environment and the fairness of the production processes.

The convicts of the penitentiary who have been able to benefit from the Art.21 could participate to the construction process. After this important experience, the restaurant will continue to be devoted with diligence to the reinstatement of disadvantaged groups.

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by Francesco Faccin appeared first on Dezeen.

Atmos is a must-have desk for those who prefer their own personal space in a crowded office or dorm. The design takes inspiration from Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic structures and Do Ho Suh’s fabric cladding sculptures. What I love about the desk is the cozy enclosure and private space that it creates. It works better than cubicles and monolithic room dividers. Researchers too agree that a personal haven reduces stress and anxiety amongst workers and students.

To keep it enterprising, the Atmos uses translucent fabric and geometric science of triangles create an organic sphere of diffused light that spreads illumination evenly on top of the work surface. This even makes it look more spacious. Atmos can be designed using different fabrics to customize according to user’s specific needs as well as LED color lighting for establishing mood-setting environments.

Designer: Jeremy Lee

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Yanko Design
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(Only My Personal Space was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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1. Personal Space
2. Need More Cabinet Space
3. The Third Space

Colourful strings are threaded around looms to envelop this Barcelona restaurant headed by Catalan chef Ferran Adrià (+ slideshow).

Local studio El Equipo Creativo reinterpreted traditional wooden Peruvian cloth-weaving equipment to create angled panels from thick threads stretched across wooden frames. Some of the frames are twined with white cords to contrast with the colourful sections.

The panels pass over the heads of diners who are served a fusion of Peruvian and Japanese cuisine at Patka, which means “union” in Peru.

A grid of wooden batons creates shelves above a bar at the front of the space, which serves sake and pisco – local tipples in Japan and Peru respectively.

This grid sits against the window at the front of the long narrow building, allowing bottles and crockery to be displayed.

In the main restaurant, a sushi bar separated into chunky units is surrounded by wooden dining surfaces lit with spotlights, while light bulbs dangle above more tables flanked by red seats.

Located just off the Avinguda Parallel, close to Montjuic Park, the restaurant opened as joint venture between chefs Ferran Adrià and his brother Albert, and owners the Iglesias brothers.

Dezeen published a travelling pavilion designed for Adrià’s gastronomic research initiative elBulli Foundation last year.

We’ve featured a couple of restaurant interiors recently, such as a London pizza bar decorated with colourful tiles and an eatery in a converted car park near Stockholm.

More designs in the Catalan capital include a renovated apartment with restored mosaic floors and a laundrette that looks like a nightclub.

See more restaurant interiors »
See more architecture and design in Barcelona »

El Equipo Creativo sent us the following information:

Design of Pakta Restaurant, Calle Lleida, Barcelona

After the success of the restaurant Tickets and the cocktail lounge 41º, the tandem formed by Albert and Ferran Adria and the Iglesias bothers has once again counted on El Equipo Creativo to design their latest gastronomic project: Pakta Restaurant. A small locale was chosen in the same area close to the Avenida Paralelo in Barcelona, on the slope going up towards the Mercat de la Flors and Montjuic Park. The novelty is in the gastronomic offer, based on the nikkei Peruvian – Japanese cuisine and, of course, the design of the space, which, as in previous projects by Oliver Franz Schmidt and Natali Canas del Pozo, is a reflection of the gastronomic concept.

Concept

In the Quechua language of Peru Pakta means “union”; in this case the union of two cultures and their respective cuisines . The interior design created by El Equipo Creativo emerges from this same idea, considering that Japanese cuisine is the basis of the nikkei gastronomy but wrapped in Peruvian tastes, colours, traditions and ingredients. With this in mind, the basic elements of the restaurant such as the bars, the kitchen and the furniture are designed with a clear reference to the architecture of the traditional Japanese taverns.
An explosion of colours evocative of Peru envelopes the space. This chromatic “second skin” is achieved by use of a direct reference to the Peruvian loom, offering a surprising combination of colours which contrast with the austere Japanese design, and underlining the deep-rootedness of this artefact in Peruvian arts and crafts.

However, the re-interpretation of the Peruvian loom goes further, sequencing its own elaboration process on the walls of Pakta, transforming this flat surface to offer a tridimensional character to the space, adding vitality and movement and blurring the limits which mark the locale. The traditional Peruvian weaving looms are wooden mechanisms where colored threads intertwine in various directions, forming a suggestive tridimensional space which generates an attractive atmosphere transformed and reinterpreted in Pakta.
The final result unites the re-interpretation of these two cultures–Peruvian and Japanese– by means of some of their most emblematic traditional elements, creating a visually potent but balanced solution, at once spontaneous and rational, hilarious and silent, surprising but strangely familiar, as is the nikkei cuisine itself.

Space and Distribution

As the small locale is long and narrow with a tiny facade, from the beginning of the project it is clear that maximum advantage must be taken of the space. The work areas are divided into three zones:

In the entrance, the sake and pisco bar also acts as a filter between the interior and exterior of the locale. It is a three dimensional framework which serves as a shelf, visual filter and product display stand. Facing outside, the bar becomes the facade and welcomes guests with a composition of faded colours, Japanese lamps, graphics elements and a small selection of products on display. In order to enter the restaurant, the guest passes through the wooden framework, as an introduction to the dining space.

Presiding the dining area is the sushi bar. Structurally speaking, it is completely antagonistic to the sake and pisco bar as it is composed of three heavy, luminous stone pieces, upon which the sushimen work slowly but surely serving directly to the clients who sit around them. The idea of dividing the bar into three separate and elevated “stones” helps to contain the reduced scale of the locale and create a sense of strange levity among the heavy pieces.

Closing the space at the end of the dining area is the kitchen, conceived as a luminous box which allows the cooks inside to be observed through a layer of glass panels with different degrees of transparency.

Technical details

Lighting

The lighting is achieved in collaboration with the BMLD Lighting Design. The main objective is to create an atmosphere which will put the focus on the served dish and the food. The cultural impact of the Peruvian – Japanese restaurant is what determines the lighting concept: fusion of light and dark, simplicity and colour.

The concept is evident by using dim light in some of the looms, thereby creating rhythm and dynamism. It is a game of rationalism, shine and transparency, important concepts in the Japanese culture, as reflected in the sensual lamps on each table and the lanterns which mingle with the three dimensional framework at the entrance. The result reveals a balance between light and atmosphere, where the client is submerged in a new gastronomic experience.

The Looms

The looms envelope the entire dining area by means of three different transversal sections which repeat themselves, varying their tonality and creating a rhythm of variable colour. A few longitudinal pieces placed in different positions and at varying heights help to weave the space and create a sense of enclosure.

The colored looms are designed one by one, intercalating full spaces and empty ones, areas of great chromatic intensity with other more neutral shades, warm colores (reds, golds) with cooler tones (greens and browns). The cloth used on the looms is cotton of hand-made appearance, rough touch and dull finish. In contrast to the profusion of colour, the loom is white and is constructed in a fine, shiny material, thereby becoming a light-reflector.

The structure of the looms is a double wooden frame. The woven cloth revolves around the interior frame, which is joined to the exterior frame by a tensor which permits the threads on the loom to be tensed whenever necessary.

The Finishes

For Pakta, El Equipo Creativo considered it essential to maintain the purity of nature so present in both the Japanese and Peruvian cultures. Therefore, only natural finishes with a minimal transformation from their original state were used.

The wood used in the bars and tables is American oak in which small imperfections and knots are left untouched converting them in differentiating elements which add personality to the pieces. Likewise, the sushi bars built in marble from Novelda, intentionally have a crude, unpolished finish with cracks and streaks that are reminiscent of those pieces taken from a quarry.

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El Equipo Creativo appeared first on Dezeen.

The London store of Swedish denim brand Nudie Jeans has been fitted out as a repair station to mend old jeans (+ slideshow).

Original architectural features in the shop such as crumbling mouldings have been kept along with rough plastering to give a vintage appearance.

On the ground floor clothing and accessories are displayed on metal shelves, while more garments are hung on rods suspended from the ceiling.

Sewing machines threaded with orange cotton are lined up ready to fix customers’ ripped attire.

One wall, painted petrol blue to match the exterior, has a grid of white hooks to hang jeans from their belt loops.

Curtains made from patches of old fabric form circular changing booths against a tiled wall in the basement.

More clothes are set on a metal cabinet topped with wood, additional shelving and rails against the white and plywood surfaces downstairs.

Wooden blocks laid on the floor like bricks are covered with rugs made from recycled denim, reinforcing the repair and reuse concept.

Nudie Jeans creative director Maria Erixon Levin used a Gothenburg food market as a reference when designing the shop.

Other related stories include a pavilion built by G-Star Raw to display their clothes at Tokyo Designer’s Week 2007 and an installation of lightbulb arches in a Diesel gallery.

We spoke to Miguel Fluxá, head of shoe brand Camper, at the opening of the brand’s lastest New York boutique where he explained why all their shop interiors are different – read the interview here.

See more retail interiors »

Read on for the press release:

Swedish organic denim house, Nudie Jeans, this month debuted their first UK concept store, and officially their first Repair Station in the world, in the Soho district of London, UK. The 15th concept store for the brand, London follows Stockholm, Tokyo, Los Angeles,Zurich, Barcelona, Sydney and Nudie’s own backyard Gothenburg.

“We are very excited to be opening our first UK store, which will give us the opportunity to really tell our unique concept. The UK is one of our biggest profile markets and our store will meet the demands we have seen for our brand globally,” says Andreas Åhrman, Sales & Marketing Director.

Standing in a prominent location on the corner of Berwick and D’Arblay Street, the 100-square-metre store is presented over ground and basement floors, with a 40-square-metre showroom housed above. The interior concept is designed by creative director Maria Erixon and inspired by a Gothenburg food market, featuring raw and rustic vintage fixtures juxtaposed against a stark bright backdrop, while carefully preserving the beautiful architectural features.

The London store houses the first official Repair Station globally, and offers customers a complimentary repairs and alterations service by one of the experienced Denim Specialists.

The repair and reuse initiative reinforces Nudie’s ardent strive to set a new standard in sustainable production. With Nudie’s extensive range of unisex fits and washes, the store will be the faultless place for London and international visitors alike to find a perfect pair of jeans guided by seasoned denim experts.

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by Maria Erixon Levin appeared first on Dezeen.