Hasta La Ideas

Microscopic views of flower petals informed the rippled timber facade of this flower kiosk in west London by British firm Buchanan Partnership (+ slideshow).

Buchanan Partnership used a combination of digital and handmade fabrication techniques to build the St Helen’s Gardens flower stall in Ladbroke Grove.

Horizontal timber slats were CNC-cut with wavy profiles to create a rippling effect around the facade. These were then layered up and bolted to a galvanised steel structure that sits on the lozenge-shaped concrete base.

The studio wanted to look beyond conventional floral motifs for the small commission. “We took inspiration from electron scanning microscopic images of flower petals, which reveal tiny three-dimensional ridge patterns across the petal surface,” said architect Kyle Buchanan.

The kiosk doors rotate open during the day, creating space to prepare and wrap the flowers on the Accoya timber countertop.

Stainless steel letters spelling out “THE KIOSK” sit on the roof of the structure.

The flowers are displayed on shelves that are placed on the surrounding pavement, and are stored and locked in the kiosk at night.

This project came about as part of a change of use application for a neighbouring shop, which had previously been a florist. Initially turned down by planners, the project won approval after gaining huge local support.

In researching the proposal, the practice looked at Thomas Heatherwick’s Paperhouse, a set of newspaper kiosks also in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, CZWG’s nearby public lavatories at Westbourne Grove as well as other kiosks throughout London, says Buchanan.

“London has an interesting history of kiosk buildings, including the ornate ironwork public toilet on Foley Street and the police station in Trafalgar Square, which is in the base of a lamp post and was the smallest police station in the world when it was manned,” he said.

The project is one of the first completed by the practice’s recently opened London office.

Photography is by Charles Hosea.

Here’s a project description from Buchanan Partnership:

Flower Kiosk

A new permanent flower kiosk in Ladbroke Grove, built using digital and handcrafted fabrication techniques.

This project, for a permanent flower kiosk in Ladbroke Grove, came about as part of a change of use application for the neighbouring retail unit, which had previously been used as a florist.

The concept for the rippling CNC-cut timber layers of the facade resulted from an ambition to reinvent the conventional idea of a floral motif.

We took inspiration from electron scanning microscopic images of flower petals, which reveal tiny three-dimensional ridge patterns across the petal surface. These ridges intensify the colour of the flower and act as a graspable surface for bees and other insects.

Using both digital and traditional fabrication techniques, the ridges are referenced in the external form of the kiosk, so that the nano-condition of the petal is translated into a contemporary interpretation of the floral motif in the architecture.

The lozenge shape of the kiosk rotates to be open during the day, creating space to prepare and wrap the flowers. The flowers are displayed on shelves that are placed on the surrounding pavement, and are stored and locked in the kiosk at night.

Contract value: £47,000
Location: St Helen’s Gardens, London
Client: Mountgrange Heritage and The Cundall Partnership
Fabrication: William Hardie Design
Planning Consultant: Ian Fergusson of Turley Associates
Structural Engineers: Tall Engineers

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London studio Scott Architects has added a curvy timber extension to a terraced house in Hackney, featuring a bowed wall that cuts through the centre of a green roof.

De Beauvoir House is a nineteenth-century brick building that was originally the home of Scott Architects‘ directors Jez and Tonya Scott. The architects decided to renovate the house and add a larger kitchen and dining room, and an extra bedroom.

The residence is located within a conservation area, so the architects designed an extension with smooth oak surfaces and plant-covered rooftops to allow it to sit comfortably with its surroundings.

“The forms at the back of the building were designed to connect with the garden as much as possible,” Jez Scott told Dezeen.

The new ground-floor kitchen and dining room curves out around a decked terrace. Its sloping roof angles down to meet the garden and is blanketed by a surface of plants and wildflowers.

Inside, the kitchen is positioned beneath a long skylight, revealing how an internal partition is also an exterior wall.

“When you’re in the kitchen you can look up at the double-height timber and get a real feel for these gestural shapes,” said Scott.

Limestone was used as a flooring material, contrasting with the restored pine floorboards elsewhere in the house, and a stretch of glazing defines the junction between the new and old structures.

An added doorway leads through to the new bedroom from the house’s main staircase. The room also opens out to the rooftop garden.

Existing walls were stripped back to the brickwork in various rooms. The architects also reinstated decorative ceiling mouldings and added a new fireplace.

Photography is by Craig Sheppard .

Here’s a project description from Scott Architects:

De Beauvoir House

De Beauvoir House is a four-bedroom Victorian terraced house that has been sensitively refurbished and boldly extended as a sculptural form that draws in light from the sky and embraces views of its garden and surrounding trees.

Set within a Hackney conservation area, original period features have been reinstated using traditional methods while a rear extension of sweeping spaces gives new life to a house that was slowly being outgrown by its family’s modern requirements.

The form of the new extension has evolved from the language of the site: its gardens, its brickwork and its neighbouring buildings. Its curved forms are clad in solid oak boarding to add to a carefully selected palette of natural materials – limestone flooring, exposed brickwork walls and restored Baltic pine floorboards. The interiors are expressed as a series of fluid surfaces and flowing spaces that weave through the home, leading one towards a rear garden that gently extends over the dining room as a green roof of wildflowers.

Generously lit indoor family rooms open up and connect with west-facing outdoor spaces. Contemporary forms reveal and celebrate the character of the original house, allowing vertical pools of natural light to wash over exposed brickwork and cleanly composed surfaces. Oak boarding extends through to internal spaces to add texture and visual warmth.

The original building has been fully thermally insulated and includes low energy lighting, under floor heating from a highly efficient boiler and a sloping green roof.

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An events space designed by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA has opened in the basement of London department store Selfridges, featuring a circular amphitheatre, vivid green columns and a stripy monochrome floor (+ slideshow).

The Imaginarium was designed by OMA as “a school of imagination” and will be used to host a series of lectures, debates and activities as part of the Festival of Imagination taking place over the next six weeks.

The space centres around the semi-circular sections of the main amphitheatre, which were built on wheels so that they can be moved into different configurations. Pushed together, they form an intimate enclosure for up to 72 people, but can also be separated to surround a mobile stage.

The hollow structure of the seating is clad with translucent polycarbonate, allowing light to shine through from dozens of fluorescent lighting tubes installed within.

Elsewhere, cube-shaped stools are laid out in a grid to create another seating area, but can be moved into different layouts to suit various events and activities.

The floor of the space is painted with an Op Art-style pattern of black and white stripes that were applied using a road-painting machine.

Surrounding columns are painted in a shade of green often used to overlay a background in televised news and weather reports.

The perimeter walls are covered with mirrors that disguise the boundaries of the room.

The Koolhaas-designed auditorium is one of three Imaginariums installed at Selfridges‘ department stores across the UK. All three will host daily events during the Festival of Imagination, which is intended to “explore the power of the mind”.

The Oxford Street Selfridges also features the Imagine Shop, a pop-up store curated by Dezeen that contains an augmented reality watch store and a walk-around digital model model of a yacht designed by Zaha Hadid.

Photography is by Andrew Meredith.

Read on for more information from Selfridges:

Selfridges launches the Festival of Imagination, with the unveiling of the Imaginarium – the first school of imagination of its kind

Selfridges London previews its Festival of Imagination with novelist Lucy Hawking (daughter of scientist Stephen Hawking) and Selfridges’ Creative Director Alannah Weston in the Imaginarium, ahead of the official launch to the public, tomorrow, Friday 17 January.

Based on Harry Gordon Selfridge’s belief that imagination is the antidote to routine and the mother of originality, The Festival of Imagination is Selfridges’ new campaign to encourage people to explore the power of their own imagination with the help of some renowned personalities (the festival’s bright imagineers) who are helping to shape and inspire our future.

Following on from the resounding success of No Noise in 2013, Selfridges’ first wellbeing campaign, the Festival of Imagination continues to explore the power of the mind. This time, instead of celebrating silence, meditation and all things ‘less is more’, Selfridges focuses on what happens when our creativity is stimulated and imagination takes flight.

The line up of imagineers giving one of the 100-plus talks, lectures and discussions in Imaginariums in Selfridges stores in London, Manchester and Birmingham include Lucy Hawking, Jeanette Winterson, Carol Ann Duffy, and Nicola Formichetti.

The stunning London Imaginarium was designed by iconic Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, under whom Zaha Hadid, the world’s most famous female architect once studied and trained.

The Festival of Imagination officially launches on Friday 17 January and runs until 2 March. The Imaginariums’ schedules and all details about the festival are available at selfridges.com.

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in Selfridges’ basement appeared first on Dezeen.

There is a tangibly refined and almost childlike simplicity about Cyprus-born, London-based set designer Aliki Kirmitsi’s images. Her goal—when approaching any project—is to, “create a space that is balanced and carries an element of surprise, weaving…

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Narrow slices of glazing break up the plain white facade of this residential extension in west London by Guard Tillman Pollock Architects, helping to visually separate it from the existing house.

Guard Tillman Pollock Architects added the two-storey extension to an Italian-influenced residence from the nineteenth century, which previously received little natural light as a result of small windows.

Rather than placing an extension at the north-facing rear of the building, where it would have spent most of the day in shadow, the architects designed a structure to sit alongside the original house and added large expanses of glazing to bring daylight through.

Two strips of glazing wrap over the top of the extension to create combined windows and skylights. One also forms a junction between the new and old structures.

“The arrangement of windows and rooflights allows sunlight to be reflected off the flank wall of the existing house and into the kitchen and dining room of the new extension,” architect Steven Pollock told Dezeen.

A change of level between the front and back of the site gives the extension two ground-level storeys. A pair of new doorways provide a link to the main house on the lower ground-floor level, while a glass bridge makes a connection on the floor above.

A kitchen and double-height dining area occupy the lower floor and feature sliding doors that open the space out to the garden. The floor above contains a study, as well as a small entrance lobby and cloakroom.

Photography is by Gareth Gardner.

Read on for a project description from Guard Tillman Pollock Architects:

Extension to Grade II Listed House, West London

The owners of this elegant semi-detached villa in west London wanted to extend the accommodation to create a better connection to the garden.

The original house is a listed structure that was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a number of similar Italianate detached and semi-detached villas. These Italianate villas have a small window to wall ratio compared to normal London houses. While this creates an elegant facade, the interiors of the houses are quite dark with minimal visual connection to the outside.

The rear of this house is north facing so much of the back garden is in shadow during the day. An extension at the rear of the house would receive little or no sunlight. The new extension is therefore built to the side of the house and separated from the original house by a glazed slot, preserving the original footprint of the villa and delineating the new from the old.

The early morning mid-winter sun rising over the neighbouring buildings is in alignment with the glass slot. Throughout the year the glass slot provides morning sun to the dining room. As the extension is positioned on the south-west side of the house, afternoon and evening sunlight is bounced off the flank wall of the original building through the glass slot to enliven the living space below.

The new extension is connected to the entrance hall by a glass bridge at ground floor level and linked to the main staircase at lower ground level. The lower floor of the extension provides a new light-filled kitchen and double-height dining area, opening onto the rear garden. Above the dining area, a galleried study overlooks the rear gardens and exploits the longer diagonal views. A small reception area and cloakroom is provided on the ground floor at the front of the new extension.

External sliding glass doors in the dining area are arranged to slide back into the walls so that the double height space can be opened up to the garden. The chimney breast acts as the focal point of the room and also helps to control overlooking from rear windows of adjoining properties.

At certain times of the day shafts of sunlight on the chimney breast in the double-height dining space contrast with the shafts of reflected light from the flank wall of the original house, the paths of these shafts of sunlight changing with the seasons.

Architects: Guard Tillman Pollock Architects
Location: London, U.K.
Structural design: Michael Biagent, Orla Kelly
Contractor: Chalk Hill Construction
Project Area: Original house: 264m2 Extension: 96m2

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features vertical slices of glazing appeared first on Dezeen.