Hasta La Ideas

Tiled surfaces, scientific apparatus and plastic curtains turn this Paris cafe into a coffee laboratory.

French studio Cut Architectures tore down a suspended ceiling and stripped away wallpaper from the former shop to reveal bare walls and original mouldings.

Visitors to Café Coutume are served drinks from conical flasks and can choose pastries from a white tiled display cabinet.

Flowering plants grow inside stainless steel sinks and an industrial coffee grinder is kept behind a clear plastic curtain.

Flooring and tables in the cafe are made from oak.

Fluorescent tubes hang vertically from the ceiling behind low-energy Plumen bulbs, which won the Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award 2011 earlier this year – see the story here.

Other recently featured cafes on Dezeen include one flanked by woven steel wire and another overlapping a car park – see all our stories about restaurant and bar interiors here.

Here is some more text from the architects:

Coutume is a new coffee roastery in Paris offering a cut edge selection of pure origin roasted coffees.

CUT architectures designed the first Coutume café in the centre of Paris combining a roastery and a café offering the best coffees in Paris and a neat selection of fresh and organic food and delicacies.

In the spirit of speciality coffee, the experts at Coutume give the opportunity to rediscover the coffee culture with high end tools and machines.

The blend of tradition, alchemy and technique inspired CUT architectures design.

Tearing down the walls and ceilings brought back a typical Parisian interior with high ceilings, mouldings, columns and an old shop door. A new oak flooring adds up to the Parisian atmosphere.

CUT architectures set in this decor a laboratory of coffee using square white tiles, grid lighting, stainless steel, industrial plastic curtains, laboratory glassware.

The plain oak tables were designed for Coutume as the fusion of this Parisian interior and the laboratory.

Coutume café’s design has been selected along wih Rem Koolhaas le Dauphin and Patrick Bouchain’s la Grenouillère by the restaurant critics of lefooding.com

See also:

.

Grand Cafe Usine by Bearandbunny	Hatched by Outofstock	Federal Café by Barbara Appolloni

Exploring undiscovered art scenes in small towns around the globe

The first in a series of shows exposing smaller towns as undiscovered creative hubs, “My Winnipeg” highlights noteworthy artists inhabiting the world’s coldest city. Put on by Paris’ Maison Rouge Gallery, each exhibit is twofold, serving as both broad studies of the selected city’s overall culture and as work relevant to the international contemporary art scene.

My Winnipeg raises questions about how Winnipeg, Canada may have influenced each artist, in terms of climate, geography and history. Could its impossible weather— comprised of harsh, long winters, floods and mosquito-invaded summers—be behind the sleepy state-of-mind imprinting some of the work? Is its location in the middle of an Indian territory the key to many of the artists’ relationships with mythical spirits? Does the city’s former post as a cosmopolitan trading center influence its current surge of dynamic creativity?

Challenged with how to turn this ethnological approach into an art show, the gallery supplys meaningful background information while allowing the works to speak for themselves, devoid of local particularities. In the end, the artists appear to share similar concerns about society as their peers do in bigger metropolises.

Works by artists like Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Wanda Koop, Kent Monkman, Bonnie Marin and Diana Thorneycroft span all mediums—from painting to performance art—to create a definitive visual statement about their native town. Standing out among them is Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin’s 2007 documentary, also dubbed “My Winnipeg.” The film taps Winnipeg’s folkloric history, featuring beautifully hallucinatory images, speaking to Maddin’s sentiment that cinema is a haunted media since it shows people and things which are not really present.

“My Winnipeg” is currently on view at Maison Rouge and runs through 25 September 2011.

This disco-cum-caravan is one of five timber-clad cabins installed by Swiss architects 1/100 in the garden of the Quai Branly Museum, Paris.

Each mobile pavilion folds open to reveal a different function, offering a sheltered information point, an ice cream vendor, a sound-system, a kindergarten and a stage.

Scattered across the site, the Nomad caravans are decorated with disco lights and surrounded by carpets, stools and chairs to encourage social gatherings.

At the end of the summer each caravan will be folded up and towed to a new location.

More stories about pavilions on Dezeen »

Photography is by Thomas Mailaender.

Here are some more details from the architects:

NOMAD
Museum Quai Branly, Paris

The installation NOMAD squats the garden of the Museum Quai Branly for the summer months. It inhabits the site from the 4th of June to the 4th of September, before continuing its journey.

The installation NOMAD chooses to inject programm into a hyperarchitectural environment. This programmatic occupation of the site will last the summer months, taking advantage of the highly frequented garden. Caravans, tents, carpets and stools: informal architecture, assemblage of recycled and transformed objects, the installation enables the domestication and the appropriation of a garden originally thought to be admired. Lightweight and mobile, five informal settlements provide spaces for events, refreshments and subsistence. Spread along the paths, in the glades and under the museum ship, they trigger interactions and create a new field of relationships. In the heart of the city, the dense vegetation is the set of a temporary occupation. Without fences nore measurements, this territory is redefined, held, inhabited for a time.

Second-hand caravans, transformed and tuned, build the heart of those mobile units. They offer shelter to an info point, a sound-system, an ice cream van, a kindergarden and a stage, programs chosen for they capacity to generate interactions. Agricultural canvas, tight to the caravans, offer shade to an inviting floor of colorful carpets. Lightweight foldable wood furniture, inspired from the museum collections, can be spread according to needs. Detached from their context and aesthetized by the museography, many domestic objects presented in the musem exhibitions have lost any relation with their original function. Inspired by the collections, the furniture created for NOMAD desacralizes and reintegrates those objects to where they belong, everyday life. The whole deployement can be removed in no time and leave the site without any marks. An architecture without bonds, but not without history or territory: the caravans and their inhabitants, removed for a while from the national landscape, are integral part of the European culture – and way before this summer of 2010, when France hunted them down.

Museum of Arts and Civilisations, museum of Primal Arts, museum of Africa, Asia, Oceania and Americas? Let’s call it Museum of Quai Branly, this would avoid any ambiguity and misunderstanding. Beyond a polemic of designation, this is an institution which chooses to focus on extra-european cultures, however defining itself as a place where cultures are in dialogue. But the monologue is not a variant of the dialogue. This fixation on the exotic risks to block any parallels, any cultural exchanges and, above all, to impede any reflexion on occidental practices and cultures. The project chooses then to fight against an euro-centrist vision of culture and its bigoted evolutionism. Indeed, if it is far from being absurd to expose those fascinating objects coming from cultures that we definitively know too less, their display should jeopardize our position – otherwise it is purely aesthetics.

At a time when a billion humans are migrating throughout the world, often involuntary, nomadism becomes the horizon of art and society. It is about not looking away, about doing an humble autocritic, as from now on we recognize nomadism as part of our own culture, integrated in globalization.

NOMAD stops in the garden of the Museum Quai Branly to affirm contextualization against esthetization, diffusion against centralization, emancipation against homogeneization.

See also:

.

Opera by Axel Enthoven	Rolling Huts by Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen	Vostok Cabin by Atelier Van Lieshout

Dorian Gourg is a graphic designer and photographer based in Paris. His project ‘ADAHY’ is the outcome of two trips he took: one to New York and one to South America. These works are an exploration of the two very polar landscapes, which, in their opposing density and starkness, end up instilling the same state of torpidity. More after the jump.

Following our previous story about a labia-like staircase, these images by French photographer Stefan Tuchila illustrate the womb-like orbs created by artist Anish Kapoor in the Grand Palais, Paris.

Formed of three 35 metre-high interconnected balloons, the Leviathan sculpture has a dark purple skin and a translucent red interior.

From inside, the silhouette of the palace ceiling is visible through the bulbous red rubber.

The sculpture was designed for the fourth Monumenta exhibition, which closes imminently.

See our earlier story on the ArcelorMittal Orbit by Anish Kapoor »

See more images of this project on the photographer’s website.

The following information is from the press release:

MONUMENTA 2011
Anish Kapoor at the Grand Palais
Leviathan from 11th May to 23rd June 2011

Each year MONUMENTA invites an internationally-renowned artist to turn their vision to the vast Nave of Paris’ Grand Palais and to create a new artwork especially for this space. MONUMENTA is an artistic interaction on an unparalleled scale, filling 13,500m2 and a height of 35m.

The first three MONUMENTA exhibitions were hugely successful, drawing in 150,000 visitors over five weeks. In 2007, the first challenge was met by German artist Anselm Kiefer, who resides in France, followed by American artist Richard Serra in 2008 and French artist Christian Boltanski in 2010.

For its fourth incarnation, the French Ministry for Culture and Communication has invited Anish Kapoor, one of his generation’s greatest artists, to produce a new work for the Nave’s monumental space, from 11th May to 23rd June 2011.

Thirty years after his first exhibition in Paris, MONUMENTA marks Anish Kapoor’s return to the French capital. He is considered as one of the most important sculptors of our time. His work has profoundly enlarged the scope of contemporary sculpture, as much by his mastery of monumental scale as by the colourful sensuality and apparent simplicity emanating from his works. All this contributes to the fascination they hold for the public at large, as demonstrated, for example, by the popular success of Cloud Gate in Chicago.

Born in Bombay in 1954, he has lived in London since the 1970s. His work rapidly gained international recognition and has been awarded numerous prizes, including the famous Turner Prize, which he won in 1991. His career has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions at the world’s most prestigious museums, including the Louvre, the Royal Academy, Tate Modern, etc. Recently, he has been commissioned to design the key landmark for the forthcoming Olympic Games in London: a 116-metre-high sculpture entitled « Orbit ».

The artist describes the work he is creating for MONUMENTA as follows: “A single object, a single form, a single colour.” “My ambition”, he adds, “is to create a space within a space that responds to the height and luminosity of the Nave at the Grand Palais.

Visitors will be invited to walk inside the work, to immerse themselves in colour, and it will, I hope, be a contemplative and poetic experience.”

Designed using the most advanced technologies, the work will not merely speak to us visually, but will lead the visitor on a journey of total sensorial and mental discovery.

A technical, poetic challenge unparalleled in the history of sculpture, this work questions what we think we know about art, our body, our most intimate experiences and our origins.

Spectacular and profound, it responds to what the artist considers to be the crux of his work: namely, “To manage, through strictly physical means, to offer a completely new emotional and philosophical experience.”

The awe-inspiring strength of Anish Kapoor’s work is a fertile ground that favours the democratization of the access to contemporary art.

Through this series and subsequent exhibitions, the French Ministry for Culture and Communication hopes to appeal to the widest possible audiences.

To exceed the visitor’s expectations, artistic educators, whose knowledge and teaching abilities multiply the possibilities to access and understand the artwork, will be on hand throughout the exhibition to talk to visitors, widening their understanding of contemporary art at no extra cost.

School groups will have their own special programme developed in collaboration with the French Ministry for National Education.

Multidisciplinary and fun, the programme is designed for young visitors, ranging from nursery school to high school, one highlight being dance workshops in partnership with the Théâtre National de Chaillot.

There will be learning activities on the internet, making it possible to link the artist’s work to school programmes.

Themed cross-generational tours will also create a link with Anish Kapoor’s creation.

In addition, tours for the disabled will be available, in order to facilitate access to today’s heritage.

Finally, throughout the exhibition, an events programme will propose a dialogue between word, music, dance and Anish Kapoor’s work and the creations it shelters, in order to uncover new aspects of his creation.

Jean de Loisy is curator of Monumenta 2011. Independent exhibition curator, he has held among other positions that of creation inspector for the French Ministry for Culture and Communication, Cartier Foundation curator and curator at the Georges Pompidou Centre. He has directed and co-directed a variety of art centres in France. He has organized numerous solo artist exhibitions and memorable exhibitions such as “La Beauté” in Avignon in 2000, or “Traces du sacré” in 2008 at the Pompidou Centre. He has been working for 30 years with Anish Kapoor, for whom he organized numerous exhibitions including the 2009 retrospective at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.

The MONUMENTA admission price is 5 Euros, with concessions 2.50 Euros. The cultural programme (free with admission) proposes concerts, performances, readings and ‘encounters’ in connection with Anish Kapoor’s artwork. A bi-lingual highly documented website will help visitors to prepare their visit.

A fully illustrated album, co-published by the CNAP and the Rmn-GP publishing services, Paris 2011, and monograph, co-published by Flammarion and the CNAP, will be published in connection with this event.

Organised by the French Ministry for Culture and Communication, the exhibition is co-produced by the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) and the Etablissement public de la Réunion des musées nationaux et du Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées (Rmn-GP).

See also:

.

Queens Museum of Art by Elliot White	Metropol Parasol by J. Mayer H.	Nissan Y150 Dream Front by Torafu Architects