Hasta La Ideas

LEDs and dandelions star in a stunning chandelier vision of our environmental fate

Among stunning 20th-century artworks from European galleries, there’s always a contemporary design gem or two to be found at London’s Art + Design Pavilion. In 2008 we came across rAndom International’s Temporary Printing Machine at
The Carpenters Workshop, which this year features a giant landscape version of the machine producing temporary scanned images of the whole room. Trumping that spectacle 2010’s show-stopping LED chandelier by Dutch designers
Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn, also showing at The Carpenters Workshop.

Awarded the
Moet Hennessy Prize 2010 for best in show at the fair, the designers describe their work as “the story about the amalgamation of nature and technology. In the distant future these two extremes have made a pact to survive. Fragile Future III combines an electrical system with real dandelions in a light sculpture that is predestined to overgrow a surface.”

The contrast between the heavy concrete block among the incredibly fragile dandelion heads creates a particularly visually striking ambiance. The discordant image suggests the imminent damage and destruction of these delicate forms, as well as a rather beautiful visual analogy of environmental destruction.

The tiny LED lights placed at the center of the delicate dandelion heads look nothing short of magical. Seemingly a sort of visual trick, the mind boggles imagining the intricacies involved in making the genuine structure.

Now in its third iteration (I saw an earlier edition at the excellent “In Praise of Shadows” exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum during the London Design Festival last year), it’s exciting to see these innovative designers developing the Fragile Futures design, with the latest version introducing newly-developed modules for 3D constructions.

English architect John Glew has introduced new fenestration and a zinc-clad extension to this mock-Georgian house in north London, squeezing the new structure into a wedge of land between the house and its neighbour.

The tapered extension comprises a sitting room and pantry on the ground floor, and bedroom with a bath on the first.

51A Gloucester Crescent’s existing windows have been replaced with frames to match those of the new extension, while the existing facade will eventually be rendered a milky grey.

The extension’s interior has white plaster walls with brass light fittings, and oak skirting boards, picture rails and window reveals.

All photographs are by John Glew & Iris Argyropoulou.

Here’s some more from the architect:

51a Gloucester Cresecent London Nw1
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This addition and remodelling to a 1950s developer’s cottage comprises a two-storey timber-framed extension clad in silver-blue anodised zinc and new, vertically emphasised timber fenestration to the existing house.

We have sought to replace the pretence of a mock-Georgian building with a more credible plainness in order to create a new whole, in the process posing questions above and beyond the client brief; when adjusting or adding to a house of this kind how does one design and address what is appropriate to the ambition and discipline of architecture?

On the cladding of the extension, vertically banded standing seams rising 25mm beyond the building’s face create a secondary, fragile plane, effecting a thin, drawing-like tautness, as though the façade had been traced rather than constructed.

On the existing building –its new windows with their retained stucco frames close to the external brick face– the wall reads more as a surface than a solid mass, rhyming with the fenestration of the extension and reinforcing the effect of one impossibly thin surface over two very separate buildings.

Combined with the blue zinc cladding, the cinnamon-like ginger-brown paint on the new windows evokes a changing illusion of space through the optics of colour –either a flatness or a depth depending on lighting conditions and place of viewing.

An oversized window to the small new downstairs sitting room sits in a thin wall, while above, the smaller scaled-down window sits in a thick wall, forming an asymmetric bay –or bookend– which visually props up the old house. The brickwork of the existing house will eventually be washed with a milky Danish limestone render, intended, like the new fenestration, to complete the effect of a seamless new whole.

Inside, the reconfigured plan has created three additional rooms –a sitting room, a pantry and a bedroom with a bath. The plan form of the new extension has been determined by party wall negotiations and the need to accommodate the length of a double bed, the irregular site geometry creating a distorted and exaggerated horizontal and vertical internal perspective, acknowledged in the design.

The existing interior is transformed by restrained additions and seemingly simple interventions to the existing fabric: new vertically emphasised windows allow more light into the previously dark interior, opening up views to the front and back gardens and beyond, while throughout, brass light fittings and grey zinc-plated ironmongery provide a series of faint dotted elements placed strategically on the plain wall surfaces.

In the new sitting room and bedroom, powdery white plaster walls are bound by oak tri-ply window reveals and tall oak skirting and picture rails which project a mere 3mm beyond the walls. Like the zinc seams on the outside, the end grain of the oak tri-ply looks almost drawn on, a secondary two-dimensional frame around the windows and doors. The insubstantial colour of the plaster enhances the overall impression of fragility.

Click above for larger image

While materials and detailing are consistent throughout, each new room has its own very particular qualities. In the sitting room the low-cilled, over-scaled window frames a view which resembles a traditional Japanese raked garden. In the bedroom, the base of a white enamel bath is sunk into a timber box while its curved rim rests on the lift-up top whose thin, rounded, articulated edges bely its weight and bulk.

Click above for larger image

An unlined rooflight appears to hover just below the curved ridge of the sheet-like ceiling. The sparse aesthetic of the new rooms aims to achieve a calm but intense simplicity. Tempering the facade’s deliberate artifice, restraint is exercised throughout to calibrate the perception of spaces and to ensure that detail is always in support of the whole. Another potent characteristic of this project is the way in which the spaces described cannot be absorbed at once. The transformed exterior is unashamedly new but at the same time the building is a background, its composure and the ambition of its sophistication alluding to but never aping the crescent whose elegant characteristics surround it.

See also:

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Gallery extension by 6A Architects	Matilde House by Ailtireacht Architects	Key projects by Peter Zumthor

Bring your own combustible material to an installation recreating the origin of life

A scientific art installation involving high-powered lasers and combustive materials, Miller-Urey Bong is a BYOW (Bring Your Own Whatever) exhibition based on the 1952 Miller-Urey experiments that attempted to prove the genesis of life on Earth.

“We really don’t know what the Earth was like three or four billion years ago,” the late scientist Stanley L. Miller said more than forty years later. “So there are all sorts of theories and speculations.”

Theories and speculation aside, the famous experiment remains a fascinating spectacle when recreated, which the artistic team of Paul B. Davis (of the geek collective/record label Beige) and Aids-3D have rather cheekily done. Visitors to London’s Seventeen Gallery will have their chance to interact with the experiment that uses a searing-hot Class IV laser, injecting energy into the system to simulate “lightning” and “rainfall” and the other theoretical conditions that the Almighty presumably used during his own ill-conceived experiment to create life. Guests can take part by vaporizing their “Whatever” in the device, orally sampling the contents as long—as they also contribute “user provided suction.”

The playfully titled Miller-Urey Bong installation runs from 7 October 2010 through 13 November 2010 at Seventeen Gallery in Shoreditch.

Emerging photographers take on death and tourism in a London show

Exploring the paradoxical mix of fear and seduction that travel increasingly presents, “Dead On Holiday” is a series of seven striking images depicting dead girls shot by budding photographers Tess Thackara and Andrea DiCenzo on a recent trip to Turkey.

The project underscores the mismatched emotions of exploring new places, playing off the artificiality of typical vacation photos by using anonymous models in locations that could be almost anywhere. The saturated Kodachrome-esque hues work similarly in contrast to the dark subject matter, suggesting that when removed from the familiar, a “traveler dies a small death of identity,” as Thackara explains.

While shooting the series on the tranquil island in the Sea of Marmara, Thackara and DiCenzo found that the locals weren’t at all interested in the false deaths they were creating, allowing them to fully immerse themselves in each location and truly speak to their imagined experience of the space.

Their first collaborative show, “Dead On Holiday” opens at The City Arts and Music Project, London’s multi-functional cafe, bar and gallery space in Shoreditch on 7 October 2010 and runs through 21 October 2010.

Emerging London talent Richie Culver’s poignant collage work

Master of manipulation Richie Culver, with his arsenal of old photos and sharp-witted text, creates artwork with the one-two punch of a compelling soundbite that probes into both famous and more intimate historical moments. While the works function as pop homages too, his piece “Have You Ever Really Loved Anyone?”—an iconic image of Jesse Owens with those words plastered across—was the highlight of the May 2010 group show at the Tate Modern and suggests the dual forces at play.

Culver, who had rockstar dreams of his own, turns his song titles and lyrics into paintings and collage, a selection of which is currently on view in his debut solo show “Borstal Spots & Polka Dots.”

Also included in the exhibit are a smattering of Culver’s own photographs he’s taken over the years. The black-and-white collection is not too different from his textual works though, with each perfectly composed image functioning as one sentence from a much larger conversation.

A majority of his work seemingly revolves around love and relationships—a concept clearly demonstrated in the painting “I Loved You, You Just Couldn’t See It” but also in collage form. An image of a nun states “One fuck and she was anybody’s,” while the picture of a bride reads “aware of the ways of men.” Culver titles an alarming photo of a pouty-lipped woman with scars up her arm simply, “A love story.”

With a show dedicated solely to his personal photos planned for late 2010 and a cover shot for the forthcoming I Blame Coco album Constant hitting shelves soon, Culver continues to explore concepts that speak to his roots.

Reviewed on Le Cool as “A small, but moving show,” Culver’s “Borstal Spots & Polka Dots” runs through 26 September at London’s West 11 Gallery.