Hasta La Ideas

Designer Morag Myerscough used the tweets of a poet to create the bold graphics surrounding this temporary cafe in London.

Located close to the Olympic Park in Greenwich, the cafe was constructed in just 16 days to coincide with the start of the games.

The brightly painted words on the facade spell out phrases such as ‘this is the gate’ and ‘this is eye contact’, which originate from one of many creatively written tweets by poet Lemn Sissay.

“I had worked with Lemn Sissay on a previous project and wanted to collaborate with him on this project,” Myerscough told Dezeen. “So we met up, and he mentioned these tweets he does everyday and I liked the idea of somehow incorporating them into this project.”

The structure of the building is made from plywood, scaffolding and shipping containers. ”I have used containers before for projects,” she said, “but this time it was important to me that the containers were used only as a base and not as the main feature.” She also explained how her studio will re-use most of the materials when the building is deconstructed in a few months time.

Myerscough collaborated with artist Luke Morgan to design the colourfully painted furniture, which includes stools and tables made from reclaimed wood.

Amphitheatre-style wooden steps climb up around the edge of the cafe’s outdoor seating area and are covered with cushions made from kite fabric.

Morag Myerscough previously created another cafe in south-east London, inside a 1960s commuter train carriage in Deptford.

See more stories about cafes on Dezeen »

Here’s a longer description from the organisers:

New Temporary Café in Greenwich is a Triumph of Design and Speed

The Movement Café is a new temporary café and performance space next to the DLR station in Greenwich, South East London, designed by British designer and artist Morag Myerscough. It sits in a corner of the site of the former Greenwich Industrial Estate that is currently being regenerated by developers, Cathedral Group.

Built from scratch in just sixteen days to coincide with the opening of The Olympics (the developers thought it important that the gateway to the Olympic borough was not an unattractive construction site), The Movement Café is an explosion of colour and type and sits at the centre of an amphitheatre-like space created from the natural level of the site, post-demolition, being 2m below street level. It’s the result of a public art collaboration between Myerscough and Olympic Poet and prolific tweeter Lemn Sissay. Sissay has been commissioned by Cathedral to write a poem about Greenwich, which will eventually be set permanently into the road that cuts through the site when it is completed. In the short term, the poem, Shipping Good, is painted on the hoarding that wraps the site.

Myerscough’s design for The Movement Café was inspired by one of Sissay’s tweets:

This is the House.
This is the Path.
This is the Gate.
This is the Opening.
This is the Morning.
This is a Person Passing. This is Eye Contact.
Lemn Sissay, June 27th 2012

The designer has used words and phrases from this tweet and painted them by hand on large wooden panels, positioned over the core structure of the building which is covered in an original hand-painted Myerscough multi-coloured geometric pattern. Sissay’s tweets will be written daily on a blackboard in the cafe.

The outdoor amphitheatre seating area provides a lovely, contemplative, sheltered place of respite for commuters and visitors to Greenwich and several times a week plays host to storytelling, poetry reading and acoustic performances. All furniture is made by Morag Myerscough and Luke Morgan from reclaimed laboratory tops. Cushions are hand sewn from kite fabric.

The cafe’s prominent position at the gateway to one of the most important sites during the Olympic games, presented a unique opportunity to showcase the best of British design talent and creative collaboration.

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Morag Myerscough appeared first on Dezeen.

Planks of translucent glass provide the walls for this house in south London designed by architect Carl Turner for himself and his partner (+ slideshow).

Positioned amongst a row of traditional Victorian houses, Slip House is a three-storey residence with staggered upper floors that cantilever towards the street.

“We set out with a simple sculptural form of three cantilevered, or slipped, boxes,” explained Turner. “The upper box houses our living space, the middle box houses sleeping and bathing, and the ground box is given over to a multi-purpose space, currently housing our studio.”

The translucent glass walls extend up to form a parapet around a terrace on the roof, and also surround a set of photovoltaic panels that generate electricity.

Other sustainable features include a wildflower roof above the ground floor, a rain-water-harvesting system and a ground-sourced heat pump that generates energy.

Inside the house, the ground floor studio features a moveable study area, comprising a combined desk and shelving unit attached to wheels.

On the first and second floors, rooms are equipped with inbuilt storage walls, so residents can hide their belongings away behind plywood screens.

Floors throughout the house are concrete and sit flush against all the walls and fittings.

Another project we’ve featured by Carl Turner Architects is the extension to the couple’s former home in Norfolk – see it here.

See more houses on Dezeen »

Photography is by Tim Crocker.

Here’s a project description from Carl Turner Architects:

Slip House, Brixton.

Occupying one of four plots forming a gap in a typical Brixton terrace, Slip House constitutes a new prototype for adaptable terraced housing.

Three simple ‘slipped’ orthogonal box forms break up the bulk of the building and give it its striking sculptural quality. The top floor is clad in milky, translucent glass planks, which continue past the roof deck to create a high level ‘sky garden’.

Designed to Code for Sustainable Homes Level 5, it features ‘energy piles’ utilising a solar assisted ground source heat pump creating a thermal store beneath the building. PV’s, a wildflower roof, rain water harvesting, reduced water consumption, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery within an airtight envelope with massive levels of insulation make this one of the most energy efficient houses built in the UK.

A prototype brownfield development offering dense, flexible, urban living – the house is a vehicle for in-house research into sustainable design, seamlessly integrating the often conflicting aesthetic requirements of architecture and alternative low energy systems. We are working to develop this model for multiple developments and as affordable housing.

Living and working (‘Living over the shop’) is something that really interests us. We see a prototype new ‘terraced’ house, squeezed into under-utilised city (Brownfield) sites. This flexible type of home can allow for the artisan or home-worker to sub-let or downsize. This can enliven local communities and produce ‘homes’ which create opportunities rather than be dormitories or financial assets. Slip House is flexible and can be used as a single home, studio workspace and apartment, or two apartments.

The perimeter walls are load bearing, freeing up the internal areas of supporting columns or additional load bearing walls. The house’s open-plan layout ensures that walls / dividers are simple to erect and require minimal construction effort. This aspect of Slip House is not only financially sustainable but also environmentally so, as it helps to ensure the permanence of the overall structure, as minimal modifications can allow the house to adapt to changing lives and living situations indefinitely.

Our approach was to model the building as a series of simple orthogonal box forms that use the full width of the site. This allows future buildings to simply adjoin the flank walls.

The house takes the idea of three slipped boxes. The boxes are carefully placed to maximise light and outlook from inside while not intruding on neighbour’s outlook. The shifting planes also break up the bulk of the building and give it its sculptural quality.

Axonometric diagram

Ground floor plan

First floor plan

Second floor plan

Roof plan

Section – click above for larger image

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Carl Turner Architects 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.

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at DreamBags JaguarShoes appeared first on Dezeen.

London Design Festival: the first project by MAP, the new studio of designers BarberOsgerby, is a digital laboratory at London’s Science Museum where visitors can interact with internet-users around the world using musical instruments and robots (+ slideshow).

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have founded MAP as an industrial design consultancy that will operate alongside their interior design company Universal Design Studio and their design studio BarberOsgerby.

The Google Web Lab was designed in collaboration with Universal Design Studio and comprises a series of physical devices that can either be operated in person at the museum, or online at chromeweblab.com.

“Web Lab offers the opportunity for visitors to be more than just spectators,” Universal Design Studio director  Jason Holley told Dezeen. “Online and in-museum visitors are equally able to enjoy a dialogue with the museum; engaging, interacting and affecting the exhibition content.”

One device is a electronically-controlled orchestra (above), where different instruments are controlled by different users, while another is a data tracer that maps the sources of images and information and shows where they’ve travelled to (below).

The Sketchbots (below) are robots that photograph the faces of users and draws them on a plate of sand.

Above: photograph is by Andrew Brennan

Other devices include a virtual teleporter (below), which functions as a set of windows to locations around the world, and a computer that charts the locations of everyone who has taken part in the experiments.

“Museums worldwide struggle with trying to understand how the digital can expand their reach to engage a wider and more diverse audience,” said Holley. “Web Lab offers the possibility of making the online experience integral, not secondary. It offers new opportunities for richer experiences online and physical spaces that expand beyond the walls of the museum”

Cameras are positioned around the exhibition, so users can continue to operate the devices when the museum is closed.

The project was also completed with interactive design and engineering group Tellart and graphic designers Bibliothéque.

See all our stories about London Design Festival »

See all our stories about Universal Design Studio »

Photography is by Lee Mawdsley, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s a lengthier description from Universal Design Studio and MAP:

Universal Design Studio and MAP collaborate with Google on exhibition that merges physical and virtual

Universal Design Studio and sister company MAP are responsible for the 3D design and architecture of a dramatic new Google exhibition. Web Lab brings the extraordinary workings of the Internet to life through a series of interactive, web-connected physical experiments, aiming to inspire the world about the Web’s possibilities and to explain its complex technological processes. Exhibition visitors can make music with people across the world and trace the physical route taken by a simple web search. The exhibition at London’s Science Museum is open to the world online at chromeweblab.com, with online visitors experiencing the exhibition day and night through 24-hour web cams installed at the museum.

Above: photograph is by Andrew Brennan

Partnering with interactive design and engineering group Tellart, Universal Design Studio and MAP together designed the exhibition environment, creating innovative architectural and design archetypes for this new kind of physical/ digital collaboration. The design approach focuses equally on the experience of the space physically and the experience of it online via web cams. Architecture and design tools help to deconstruct technology and tell the story of how digital and physical realms are connected. New archetypes were created to separate users from their familiarity with objects, reinforcing the experimental nature of the exhibition, and to ensure each experiment could be appreciated both in the museum and online.

Universal Design Studio and MAP have created an immersive lab setting in the basement of the Science Museum, a scheme that foregrounds the idea of Web Lab as an interactive place of testing and continuous experimentation.

An industrial, functional aesthetic forms the backdrop to the series of playful experiments. At the exhibition’s entrance, a centrally positioned glass and wire mesh workshop provides a highly visible ‘curated lab’ space for events, simple repairs and displays. A key feature conceptually, it represents the ‘living lab’ nature of the exhibition, where visitors are not spectators but are engaged in and part of a working space.

Above: photograph is by Andrew Brennan

Universal Design Studio and MAP were challenged to design a space that would be experienced both physically and online through ‘the eyes of the web’. In order for online visitors to easily interpret the space, architectural planes are clearly and directly articulated. The ground plane maps out the territory as a graphic surface. Bibliothèque created graphics for the rubber floor which, as well as providing an additional narrative layer to the exhibition, creates zoning and flow of movement, and adds a supportive description of each experiment’s function.

The ceiling plane consists of a bright yellow steel grid delivering the network of cables that service the experiments. Rather than be concealed, the grid articulates the physicality of the web, illustrating its data flow – the ‘life source’ of the experiments. Throughout the exhibition, cabling to experiments is intentionally exposed, emphasising this physicality.

A secondary skin of semi-transparent wire mesh lines the walls of the museum gallery, blurring the distinction between the existing building and the new installation. The space is acoustically controlled creating an optimal environment for the Universal Orchestra experiment, which provides the soundtrack to the exhibition experience.

Above: photograph is by Andrew Brennan

Working with Tellart (who prototyped the experiments) and Universal Design Studio, MAP oversaw the industrial design, look and feel of the exhibition’s five Chrome Experiments:

Universal Orchestra: An Internet-powered eight-piece robotic orchestra creating harmonious music
Sketchbots: Custom-built robots able to take photographs and then sketch them in sand
Data Tracer: A map that traces where the world’s online information is physically stored
Teleporter: A series of web-enabled periscopes through which you can instantly access the world (including a 24 hour US bakery)
Lab Tag Explorer: A real-time visualisation of all Web Lab visitors from around the world that groups and categorises participants in incredible ways

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and MAP appeared first on Dezeen.

News: “There may be architects that can design better than me but the important thing is making it happen,” architect John Pawson told Dezeen today, at the ground breaking for the new London Design Museum that he’s designed.

Due to open in 2015, the museum will be housed inside the former Commonwealth Institute building and will retain the building’s hyperbolic paraboloid roof structure.

“Architecture isn’t just about creating new buildings, sometimes its about retuning what’s already there,” said Pawson. “Both are important as architecture.”

The Commonwealth Institute building was first completed by architects RMJM in 1962, but has been dormant for over ten years. Once renovated, the building will provide three times the exhibition space of the museum’s current home at Shad Thames on the Southbank.

Talking about his design, Pawson explained how the atrium will be central to the interior space. “When you walk in you’ll be able to see all the way up to the roof,” he said. “Now we just need to make sure what was drawn is what gets built.”

We published images of the proposals earlier this year – take a look here.

See all our stories about John Pawson »

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