Hasta La Ideas

Belgian design studio Pinkeye has combined a laundrette, a cafe and a hairdressing salon to create a place where customers can get a drink or a haircut while waiting for their washing.

Located in Ghent, Wasbar is the first in a chain of stores proposed in different Belgian cities. Washing machines line the edge of the room, while pastel-coloured cafe furniture fills the centre and two hairdressing stations are located at the back.

Pinkeye developed the concept searching for a better solution to the “garish strip-lighting” and “soundcloud din” of everyday laundrettes. At Wasbar, visitors are free to relax while they wait for the end of the washing cycle.

Each washing machine has a name inscribed on the wall above it and all the pipes are tucked away out of sight. “There’s nothing about a washing machine which says it has to stand in an unpleasant space,” explains Pinkeye’s Ruud Belmans.

Before the renovation, the building was used as a bookshop. The architects restored the original parquet flooring and added a coat of lacquer.

An assortment of mismatched drawers are mounted onto the walls, displaying price lists and acting as shelving for plants.

A graphic logo emblazoned with a clothes peg and a bottle opener is also printed onto the walls. “For us it was important to create a solid identity,” said Belmans, explaining how this is integral to rolling the project out in other cities. “A couple of pieces of vintage furniture doesn’t cut it,” he added.

Another recently completed laundrette is Splash in Barcelona, where neon lights create the impression of a nightclub. We also recently featured a laundry building converted into a house.

See more architecture and interiors in Belgium »

Photography by Arne Jennard.

Here’s a project description from Pinkeye:

Sometimes a solution is so obvious that it makes you wonder how on earth nobody came up with it before. Wasbar, a brand-new launderette/meeting place, is a fine example: while their dirty laundry spins, the people of Ghent can enjoy a drink with friends or get a new hairdo in one of the two hairdresser’s chairs. The all-in-one concept was elaborated by Pinkeye.

The property that Wasbar occupies was formerly a bookshop. Its worn-out parquet floor was given a fresh coat of lacquer, while the ceiling with its decorative mouldings was left intact. The technical aspect presented the biggest challenge. “A launderette primarily requires plenty of brainwork and preparatory work: you need extra power to keep everything running and we wanted to hide the pipes and wiring from view,” Pinkeye’s creative director Ruud Belmans explains. The pipes and wiring are ensconced in the cellar, leaving just the rows of sleek machines in the space above. “There’s nothing about a washing machine which says it has to stand in an unpleasant space.”

Wasbar is perfectly suited to the student or young professional who is cramped for space – something that is not unknown in this Flemish city of students. ‘What does the student want?’ wondered the young, ambitious proprietors, Dries Henau and Yuri Vandenbogaerde. To spend their time more usefully, I mean more enjoyably, than sitting in a cheerless, bare space with garish strip-lighting in the midst of a ‘soundcloud’ din of whirring machines.

So Wasbar is quite the opposite: cosy and convivial. The washing theme plays the lead role in the elongated interior. The 18 ‘grand old ladies’, the washing machines that bear the names of a grandma, are lined up proudly along the wall. The tumble dryers take the names of grandpas, all crowdsurfed via Facebook.

Opposite the washing machines stands the colourfully tiled bar, with a collage of wooden drawers in various types of wood mounted on the wall, all recycled from discarded furniture from grandma’s day. The contents of the drawers serve as a display for the food menu, the washing prices and washing possibilities, the haircut options and so on. Some of the drawers have been reborn as alternative planters.

Besides employing this kind of upcycling, Pinkeye conceived a palette of toned-down salmon pink, pistachio, cornflower and royal blue, as well as a graphic identity in the form of a two-fold logo: a clothes-peg crossed with a bottle-opener. They created lampshades from coat-hangers and colourful clotheslines playfully break up the space. Second-hand chairs were given a lick of green or blue paint. Fashion designers Black Balloon created dapper laundry bags so that you don’t have to trawl through the city with a transparent plastic bag full of personal wares.

“For us it was important to create a solid identity,” says Belmans. “The concept will probably be rolled out in other cities in Belgium, which makes a distinctive image important. Then a couple of pieces of vintage furniture doesn’t cut it.” The designers have even thought about the potential laundry errors of the inexperienced washer: as a warning there are examples of what happens if you throw a red sock in with a white T-shirt or give your woollen sweater a hot wash.

Wasbar taps into the social trend of people wanting to commune again, to meet face-to-face instead of whiling away an hour with ‘wassups?’ on an iPhone. You can even practice your riffs on the Wasbar piano. And if you really want to, then you can stay in touch with the virtual world via wifi.

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by Pinkeye appeared first on Dezeen.

Internet shoppers in San Sebastian can now pick up their purchases from a shop that appears to be furnished with nothing but cardboard boxes (+ slideshow).

Spanish architects VAUMM designed the store for group discount voucher website Deskontalia as a place where customers can pick up their deliveries and find out about the latest offers.

Unlike most shops, the space has no products to display, so the architects were challenged with filling an empty room. Inspired by the cardboard boxes used to transport purchases, they developed a concept to cover the floor and walls with boxy wooden furniture and shelving.

“Cartons are converted into the measurement unit of the architectural proposal,” explain the architects. “Small cartons are elements to generate a kind of sculpture that envelops the walls and roof to create different environments which users can interact with.”

Most of the boxes are used as shelves that can be reconfigured to suit different displays. Others are made from wood and provide tables and stools where customers can sit and browse the website.

A reception counter lines the edge of the room and also resembles a pile of boxes.

Aside from the boxes, the shop’s interior is kept simple, with existing walls and columns painted white and plants positioned beside the windows.

Other cardboard interiors include a cardboard meeting room for Bloomberg, a cardboard bank and a fold-out cardboard shop.

Spanish architects VAUMM are based in San Sebastian. Past projects by the firm include a golden culinary centre and an outdoor elevator.

Photography is by Aitor Ortiz.

Here’s a project description from VAUMM:

Deskontalia store in Donostia – San Sebastian, Gipuzkoa, Spain.

When somebody thinks about a shop, he can hardly avoid thinking about the products sold inside, and therefore those products are those which give sense of the need for a space. What would it happen if that object of desire was any? What if no one?

For Deskontalia store, located in a urban downtown street, the sale has occurred even before one reaches the local. The space should be a pick up point for any product that one could imagine buying over the Internet, but even something else.

From that point of view the space should become not only a space to sell, but a space to be a meeting point between brand and people, an open space, a place of the city where an online business becomes a physical reality.

The store activity is linked to package traffic, cardboard containers in which travel purchased products, which are collected in this new architectural space. A small counter where to exchange these packages of hands, solves all the functional requirements of the trade.

The space has been treated as a white empty space where old items such as masonry walls or casting pillars are bathed in this colour, as well as more contemporary new resin pavement, in an attempt to transform the store not in a shop but in a store where different transformations may occur.

Cartons are converted into the measurement unit of the architectural proposal. Small cartons are elements to generate a kind of sculpture that envelops the walls and roof to create different environments which users can interact with.

Above: floor plan – click above for larger image

These packaging boxes incorporate the graphic image of the brand, a d-, like a strip on both sides, 90 degrees in space. Thus, the store gets a sculptural object at its scale by stacking the cartons with multiplications of their shapes and cubic components, qualified by the impression of the brand. Somehow it has been generated a kind of recycled space, in which low cost boxes transcend the value and meaning we could give to them individually, to become artistic and modulate the space when considered together.

The walls are not only boxes bookshelf but also part of the shell, the roof parts are not only sculptures but also shapes that break the echo sound of the store which also modulate the sound.

Above: ceiling plan – click above for larger image

Cartons are organized this way in which the white container has become the store, which can be moved at any time, changed or simply replaced by other objects. The cartons composition will be transformed as easily as the other part of the store, which is the Deskontalia web site, which is also shown in the store through two digital projections which interact with users.

Furniture is also involved in this changing condition, so its module-based design lets multiple configurations of the store, so you can have a lecture, read a newspaper, show a new product, or just hang out in internet.

Above: shelving concept – click above for larger image

The counter, stools and tables, somehow show the same packaging language, that besides also incorporates to the design other meanings such as low cost, the ephemeral, the changing and the casual, all of them concepts that underlie also the Internet purchase which serves to this commercial space.

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by VAUMM appeared first on Dezeen.

News: French architect Jean Nouvel will curate an exhibition of office spaces in Milan in April, presenting a range of scenarios to replace the “grey cultural world” of purpose-built offices (+ interview).

“Very often now, our apartments make better places to work,” Nouvel told Dezeen at the preview of the exhibition in Milan yesterday. “The opposite is right too: often it is better to live in the space designed to be an office.”

The installation, called Project: Office for Living, will present eight alternative working environments, with the first three representing a Milanese apartment, a loft and an industrial hangar repurposed as work spaces.

“All of these are new conditions to create space for offices,” said Nouvel. “We don’t have to repeat and to clone exactly the same organisation and the same furniture for everyone.”

At the centre of the installation, a violently ripped-apart system of standard workstations will represent his rejection of bland corporate environments. “The office today is a repetition of the same space for everyone,” he says. “General solutions are bad solutions for everyone.”

The Project: office for living installation will be on show in pavilion 24 of SaloneUfficio at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan from 9 to 14 April 2013.

Above: visualisation of layout for Project: office for living

For skyscrapers, Nouvel advocates flexible spaces that can be reconfigured to suit individual workers: one section of the installation will feature pools of illumination that can be individually altered rather than generic overhead lighting, another will showcase furniture that can be reconfigured like Lego building blocks and a third is partitioned by mobile screens.

Classic furniture by designers Nouvel admires including Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand will be showcased alongside contemporary examples from elsewhere in the furniture fair and Nouvel suggests that furniture companies should make less distinction between domestic and commercial products: “I want people to imagine that furniture for offices is also for the home.”

Portrait is by Barbara Chandler.

Here’s an edited transcript of the interview with Jean Nouvel:

Rose Etherington: You’ve called the project Office for Living. What do you mean by that?

Jean Nouvel: We spend more and more of our lives in work places than at home and it shows a kind of contradiction because for a lot of people, to work is not to live.

Very often now, our apartments make better places to work. And the opposite is right too: often it is better to live in the space designed to be an office. I want people to imagine that furniture for offices is also for the home.

Rose Etherington: What’s wrong with office design?

Jean Nouvel: The office today is a repetition of the same space for everyone. You have a frame and you have the right to a number of squares in this frame, so it’s only a functional and rational approach. General solutions are bad solutions for everyone. This arrived at a very grey cultural world and what I want to show is that now we will have new adaptations of the cities.

It’s possible now to work in other places than the traditional office buildings with glass. It’s right to reuse buildings: all these [traditional] buildings at the entrance of the city or corrugated metal structures at the edge; all of these are new conditions to create space for offices. What is important now is to show that we will probably work in different conditions.

You can imagine different buildings are empty and they could become your office and we don’t have to repeat and to clone exactly the same organisation and the same furniture for everyone.

Rose Etherington: I’m told that you prefer to work at home or in a restaurant. What do you get from those environments that you don’t get from the office in Paris?

Jean Nouvel: It’s quieter and if I have to think with a team in a seminar or something I don’t have to have so many people around and all the noises of the city. So I do it in a quieter place, a more agreeable place. But it depends on the nature of your work.

We’ve talked about “tele-travail” since a long time. You can work at home but you can also work in every place, so every person has to invent his natural office. We will see one of the offices of Philippe Starck in the installation and he works by the sea.

When we do an exhibition like this, it is to talk to people who want to think about the question of offices: the companies designing all the material but also people researching their needs and which kind of furniture they will take.

So the idea is to show that now we do not have to stay in this frame and it’s possible to think in another way in relation to the natural world and empty spaces in the city. I just want to open these new conditions.

Rose Etherington: How have you put this into practice in offices you designed?

Jean Nouvel: The CLMBBDO [advertising agency in Paris] was such a special commission because I was commissioned by Philippe Michel, one of the most famous creatives of advertising in the ’80s and ’90s and he wanted to create this new office.

He said to me: “I want to put out the traditions of the stupid office like I had all my life. We are free and I want a building without an edge.” He said: “Okay, I don’t want a building for the future. I don’t want a building of yesterday. I want to do what is the most agreeable and the most fulfilling for a sense of wellbeing.”

And we arrived at this building along the Seine with balconies. You can open all the façades, you can work outside or you can work inside. When the weather was good, you could open the roof.

You could put the offices in different spaces and you can have flexibilities on each floor. With the furniture, you could walk on every seat and you could sit on the backs. Sometimes the central space was for work, sometimes that was a space to have meetings or to do sport. All of that was completely free.

Rose Etherington: Lots of creative and technology companies have offices with places for play as well as work, almost like playgrounds.

Jean Nouvel: The programme is very important, of course, and you have to imagine spaces for the expressions of the people. We design offices now with one wall where you can do what you want and it becomes a big screen with music or with your preferred image. In my office, for example, nobody controls if you are here or not here, how long you stay and so on. So it’s also one possible way to work.

When someone can have a break, it’s not only to drink a coffee but it could be to do exercise or to meet people. When you work for five or six hours, sometimes you need to find contrast and then you work in a better condition and you are more efficient.

But like in all my work since the beginning, I don’t think we research one ideal solution. We don’t want to have standard conditions and impose these conditions in every city in the world. We just show some examples.

The post “Apartments make better places to
work than offices” – Jean Nouvel appeared first on Dezeen.

This modern studio is all about openness and transparency from one section to the next- so much so that anyone with privacy issues might find themselves feeling vulnerable. Corner to corner, the viewer’s perspective shifts from light to dark, inside to out. The minimal aesthetic is contrasted by dark grey tones and raw textures of concrete, wood, marble and steel. A single colorful object, designer Igor Sirotov’s signature rubber duck, is hiding somewhere – see if you can find it.

Designer: Igor Sirotov

–
Yanko Design
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(Stunning Achromatic Studio was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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Dutch architecture firm Groosman Partners has suspended an office complex beneath the eight-metre-high ceiling of a former industrial machine hall in Rotterdam (+ slideshow).

The inserted floor adds 1000 square metres of offices and meeting rooms to the building, which was formally home to the Rotterdam Dry Dock Company but is now used as an education and technology centre called The Innovation Dock.

Groosman Partners wanted to take advantage of the hall’s high ceilings and was inspired by the industrial crane structures that form the building’s framework. The architects hung the new storey from the structure, then added an external staircase and elevator for access.

Dubbed the Innovation Deck, the extra floor is made up of a series of sub-dividable units, as well as a neon yellow social area for informal meetings or lunch breaks.

An enormous aerial photograph of Rotterdam’s port covers the base of the structure, which the architects describe as a reference to the concept of “a city inside a hall”.

The entire storey was designed to be dismountable if necessary and can also be extended to add more units.

The project is one of a handful of recent warehouse renovations in Rotterdam. Others include a steel plant converted into the headquarters of an engineering firm.

Photography is by Theo Peekstok.

See more architecture in Rotterdam »

Here’s a project description from Groosman Partners:

DM Innovation Deck Rotterdam

In the heart of the ports of Rotterdam, Groosman Partners Architecten used a crane track in a former machine hall to suspend 1000 m2 of office space. The hall is situated on the terrain of RDM (Rotterdam Dry-dock Company), a former shipyard recently rebuilt into a campus for education and innovation. The Innovation Dock is in use by schools and small-scale and innovative companies operating in the markets “building, moving & powering”.

Above: floor plan – click above for larger image

An urban shelving unit

In order to achieve a logical system on the ground floor Groosman and Partners used an urban design-like grid painted on the floor. Because of the enormous height a large part of the inner volume of the halls remained unused. Groosman Partners Architecten launched the idea to add a second grid system on the level of 8 meters high, to double the usable surface of the halls. Several ways of use can be implemented within this technical framework and change of use can be easily realised. The plug-in system is extendable as well as dismountable. The floor underneath the added structure is used for production as well as events. Referring to the concept of a city inside a hall, a large photograph of a detailed satellite image of the port of Rotterdam was placed on the underside of the office.

The intermediate floor

The idea of the shelving unit derived from the unused crane tracks, which demonstrated their carrying capacity before. The extra loading capacity is used to “hang” the new functions in the structure. The first unit, the intermediate floor with 1000 m² floor space, is accessed by an external staircase and elevator. These are connected to a system of gangways which lead to the several additional units.

The units, designed as steel structures with light and flexible fill-ins, are attached to supporting beams in between the crane tracks. The suspended level coinciding with the existing construction is kept open, whereby voids are created. In doing so the structure is maximally exhibited and a reference to the former industrial use is assured.

Above: section – click above for larger image

Function: education and offices
Area: 1000sqm
Design: 2011
Constructed: 2012
Site: RDM-kade, Rotterdam

Architecture: Groosman Partners I architecten, Rotterdam
Interior design: Groosman Partners I interieur, Rotterdam
Project Architect: Gert de Graaf
Photographs: Theo Peekstok

Client: Het Havenbedrijf N.V., Rotterdam
Contractor: Era Contour, Zoetermeer
Consultant building physics and installations: DWA, Bodegraven
Structural engineering: Pieters Bouwtechniek B.V., Delft

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by Groosman Partners appeared first on Dezeen.