Hasta La Ideas

Je Ahn of London-based Studio Weave discusses how a series of design and build workshops are reintroducing architects to working on site in this movie by Stephenson/Bishop and Andy Matthews.

Studio Weave co-founder Ahn led this year’s Studio in the Woods summer workshop programme for students, architects and designers, first initiated by architect Piers Taylor of Invisible Studio to encourage a more hands-on approach to design.

“It started when a collective of architects came together as friends with the desire to make things with their own hands in the landscape,” says Ahn.

Participants use teamwork and communication to design and build as they go rather than drawing and planning off site.

“As architects we are getting pushed further away from what’s happening on site and the real world,” Ahn says. “You imagine things through your drawings and students are exactly the same, doing hypothetical projects that look beautiful… but how they’re actually built and realised is another matter.”

Sixty students, practising architects, furniture designers and sculptors spent five days creating timber structures amongst the woodland while camping on site last month.

Designers led five teams to build small shelters hidden in the trees, weave planks between tree trunks and create seating that skirts the edge of the woods.

The workshops take place in a different rural location each year. This year’s site was in Stanton Park, near Swindon in Wiltshire.

Swindon Borough Council acted like a client for the permanent structures, the first occasion this has happened in the programme’s seven-year history.

“This is the first time that we have a lifespan of these structures, which changed the dynamic of the design quite considerably,” says Ahn.

The designs were responses to a narrative about an imaginary community of industrious folk living around the site, created as part of a wider project that Studio Weave has been working on with the council.

“The Studio in the Woods workshop changed the way we practice and how we see things,” Ahn concludes.

Studio Weave’s previous rural projects include a hand-painted bird-watching cabin in Kent and a series of giant horns for listening to countryside sounds in Derbyshire.

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Photos are by Jim Stephenson and Andy Matthews.

Studio Weave sent us the information below:

Now in its seventh year, the people behind Studio in the Woods have taken the summer building workshop to public land for the first time. Located within ancient woodland just outside Swindon, the design and construction of five large timber structures was led by a group of award-winning architects, engineers, and furniture makers, with 60 participants who camp on-site for five days.

Studio in the Woods is an ongoing educational programme promoting the exchange of architectural knowledge and skills through experimentation and direct building experience. It was initiated by Piers Taylor in 2006 and continues to offer the opportunity to “learn by doing” in a reaction against the seeming disparity between designing a building and how it is realised; increasingly architects must imagine the making process through drawing. Studio in the Woods offers the chance to learn from the makers and work collectively.

Evening talks by invited speakers are organised for each evening once tools are put down for the day and before a group dinner. Participants include architecture students, practicing architects and a wider audience with an interest in sculpture, landscape and building with materials to hand.

This year’s workshop forms part of a wider project at Stanton Park and the adjacent Stratton Woods, to the north-east of Swindon. Over the last eight months, architecture practice Studio Weave has been working with Swindon Borough Council and the Woodland Trust on reinterpreting the two neighbouring woodlands and how the public perceives, uses and navigates them.

Set with the challenge to tie the sites together through one engaging narrative, Studio Weave have written a story surrounding a community of industrious woodland folk called the Indlekith, who live at a much slower pace to humans – a pace more akin to that of nature. The Indlekith are difficult to spot but clues of their existence lie in the smells, sounds, and textures of the woods. All five structures illustrate this narrative in a different way by responding to various characteristics of the woodland and how our senses interact with these.

Studio in the Woods 2013 was made possible by the generous support of Swindon Borough Council – the landowner of Stanton Park – making it the first time the workshop has had a client. This meant that health and safety has played an important role in designing for construction and lifetime use with the structures required to have a life span of five years, which has changed the dynamic of the designs from previous years.

Je Ahn, director at Studio Weave, says “Studio in the Woods provides an interesting solution to this problem of how to experience the parks. This is a design and build workshop where participants turn up without a design or knowing the site. They spend only a few days designing and building at the same time, responding very closely to the immediate context. There is minimal drawing but lots of communication and a strong emphasis on building the team.”

The post “Architects are pushed away from what’s
happening on site” – Studio Weave appeared first on Dezeen.

Hackney-based Studio Weave has constructed a network of listening pipes in a back courtyard of London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital to create a secret factory of lullabies for children (+ slideshow).

The enclosed space was created by the construction of a new building at the historic children’s hospital and will remain until its neighbour is eventually demolished. Studio Weave designed the installation to occupy the space in the interim and has named it the Lullaby Factory.

The architects were inspired by the messy pipes and drainage systems that already cover the surface of the brick walls. Instead of covering them up, they chose to add to them with a wide-spanning framework of pipes and horns.

“We have designed a fantasy landscape reaching 10 storeys in height and 32 metres in length, which can engage the imagination of everyone, from patients and parents to hospital staff, by providing an interesting and curious world to peer out onto,” explain architects Je Ahn and Maria Smith.

Different types of metal create pipes of silver, gold and bronze, and some of the taps and gauges were recycled from a decommissioned hospital boilerhouse.

Sound artist Jessica Curry composed the soundtrack of lullabies, which are played out through each of the pipes. To listen in, patients and staff can place an ear over one of the listening pipes beside the canteen.

The music is also transmitted via a radio frequency, so patients on the wards can tune in too.

Studio Weave previously designed a set of pipes to amplify the sounds of the countryside. Other projects by the architects include a latticed timber hut on stilts and a 324-metre-long bench.

See more architecture by Studio Weave, including an interview we filmed with the architects at our Designed in Hackney day.

Here’s a project description from Studio Weave:

Lullaby Factory, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children
Studio Weave with Structure Workshop, AB3 Workshops and Jessica Curry

Studio Weave has transformed an awkward exterior space landlocked by buildings into the Lullaby Factory – a secret world that cannot be seen except from inside the hospital and cannot be heard by the naked ear, only by tuning in to its radio frequency or from a few special listening pipes.

The multi-phased redevelopment of Great Ormond Street Hospital, in London’s Bloomsbury area, means that the recently completed Morgan Stanley Clinical Building and the 1930s Southwood Building currently sit very close together. The latter is due to be demolished in 15 years, but in the intervening period large windows in the west elevation of the MSCB look directly onto a pipe-ridden brickwork facade, with the gap between the two less than one metre in places.

In our competition entry we proposed that the Southwood Building, with its oodles of mysterious pipes and plant is not really the Southwood Building, but the Lullaby Factory, manufacturing and releasing gentle, beautiful lullabies to create a calming and uplifting environment for the young patients to recover in.

Our aim for this project was to re-imagine the Southwood façade as the best version of itself, accepting and celebrating its qualities and oddities; and rather than hiding what is difficult, creating something unique and site specific.

We have designed a fantasy landscape reaching 10 storeys in height and 32 metres in length, which can engage the imagination of everyone, from patients and parents to hospital staff, by providing an interesting and curious world to peer out onto. Aesthetically the Lullaby Factory is a mix of an exciting and romantic vision of industry, and the highly crafted beauty and complexity of musical instruments.

The Lullaby Factory consists of two complimentary elements: the physical factory that appears to carry out the processes of making lullabies and the soundscape. Composer and sound artist Jessica Curry has composed a brand new lullaby especially for the project, which children can engage with through listening pipes next to the canteen or from the wards by tuning into a special radio station.

Our design is mindful of the fact that the space between the two buildings is very tight and any attempt to tidy it up too much would have resulted in significantly reducing the sense of space and the amount of daylight reaching inside the surrounding buildings.

Above: concept sketch

We hope the project will inspire engagement in a variety of ways from children’s paintings to a resource for play specialists to a generator for future commissions.

Our design incorporates old tap and gauges reclaimed from a hospital boilerhouse that was in the process of being decommissioned.

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Studio Weave appeared first on Dezeen.

The sounds of the countryside are amplified when you place your ear towards one of these four enormous trumpets built by architects Studio Weave (+ slideshow).

Named The Hear Heres, the horns are dotted along a walk through the grounds of Kedleston Hall, a stately home in Derbyshire, England.

One horn is pointed down towards the surface of a lake (above), while another angles up towards the sky (below).

The third trumpet winds around the the trunk of a tree, so listeners can hear the movements of the branches (below).

When describing the fourth and largest of the trumpets (below), Studio Weave’s Maria Smith told Dezeen how “it’s fun for two people to sing to each other from opposite ends.” She explained how the sound is loud on one side, but “sounds distant” from the other.

“We thought people would play and experiment with them,” she said.

Each trumpet is made from fibreglass and coated with zinc, and a set of metal struts holds each one in place.

“The struts have metal plates welded to their bottoms and are staked into the ground, said Smith. “When The Hear Heres are removed, the ground will be left untouched.”

Other unusual projects by the Hackney-based architects include a floating cinema, a latticed timber hut on stilts and a 324 metre-long bench.

We’ve also featured a couple of other listening installations on Dezeen, including a room in a shipping container and two riverside pavilions.

See more installations on Dezeen »

See all our stories about Studio Weave »

Masterplan sketch

Water horn sketch

Sky horn sketch sketch

Tree horn sketch

Woodland horn sketch

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by Studio Weave appeared first on Dezeen.

Designed in Hackney: last summer Hackney architects Studio Weave turned an old narrow boat into a floating cinema that toured the canals of east London.

The cinema screen is located inside the largest of two enclosed quarters aboard the vessel and is surrounded by dark curtains that were specially embroidered into triangular pleats.

Twelve wooden seats made from recycled oak tabletops fold into different positions in front of the screen and can be tucked away when not in use.

A quilted canopy decorated with art deco-style illustrations shelters an open deck outside the cinema, which forms an informal foyer for visitors.

The Floating Cinema travelled to various locations around the boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets during its three month season of screening, including a short mooring at Folly For A Flyover, another temporary cinema that was constructed beneath a motorway flyover in Hackney Wick. It is currently located at Bow Locks and is used for private trips.

Studio Weave are located on Saint John’s Church Road in Lower Clapton. You can see more of their projects here.

Key:

Blue = designers
Red = architects
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Designed in Hackney is a Dezeen initiative to showcase world-class architecture and design created in the borough, which is one of the five host boroughs for the London 2012 Olympic Games as well as being home to Dezeen’s offices. We’ll publish buildings, interiors and objects that have been designed in Hackney each day until the games this summer.

More information and details of how to get involved can be found at www.designedinhackney.com.