Hasta La Ideas

More from architect Hironaka Ogawa: the two trees felled to make way for this house extension in Kagawa, Japan, were reinstalled inside the living room (+ slideshow).

The two-storey extension branches out into the garden of the 35-year-old family house to provide a residence for the client’s daughter and her husband.

The two trees stood in the way of construction and had to be removed beforehand, but Hironaka Ogawa was concerned about the connection they had to the family’s history. “These trees looked over the family for 35 years,” he explains.

The architect decided to keep the trees intact, dry them out and insert them into a double-height living and dining room. The floor was sunken just below ground level to ensure enough height to fit them in.

“Utilising these trees and creating a new place for the client became the main theme for the design,” says Ogawa, and explains that the family asked a Shinto priest to perform an exorcism on the trees as they were cut down.

Entitled Garden Tree House, the residence also contains a mezzanine loft that squeezes in alongside the trees. Bathrooms are tucked away below it.

Walls and ceilings are painted white, allowing the yellow and brown shades of the trees to stand out.

Trees were also the centrepiece of a wedding chapel that Hironaka Ogawa designed, which we featured on Dezeen this week. See more architecture from Japan on Dezeen.

Photography is by Daici Ano.

Here’s a full project description from Hironaka Ogawa:

Garden Tree House

This is an extension project on a thirty-five year-old house for a daughter and her husband. A Zelkova tree and a Camphor tree stood on the site since the time the main house was build thirty-five years ago.

Removing these trees was one of the design requirements because the new additional building could not be built if these trees remained. When I received the offer for the project, I thought of various designs before I visited the site for the first time. However, all my thoughts were blown away as soon as I saw the site in person. The two trees stood there quite strongly.

I listen to the stories in detail; the daughter has memories of climbing these trees when she was little. These trees looked over the family for thirty-five years. They coloured the garden and grew up with the family. Therefore, utilising these trees and creating a new place for the client became the main theme for the design.

In detail, I cut the two trees with their branches intact. Then I reduced the water content by smoking and drying them for two weeks. Thereafter, I placed the trees where they used to stand and used them as main structural columns in the center of the living room, dining room, and kitchen.

In order to mimic the way the trees used to stand, I sunk the building an additional 70 centimetres down in the ground. I kept the height of the addition lower than the main house while still maintaining 4 metre ceiling height.

By the way, the smoking and drying process was done at a kiln within Kagawa prefecture. These two trees returned to the site without ever leaving the prefecture.

The client asked a Shinto priest at the nearby shrine to remove evil when the trees were cut. Nobody would go that far without a love and attachment to these trees.

When this house is demolished and another new building constructed by a descendant of the client hundreds of years from now, surely these two trees will be reused in some kind of form.

Above: site plan – click for larger image

Above: floor plan – click for larger image

Above: cross section – click for larger image

Above: long section – click for larger image

Above: exploded isometric – click for larger image

The post Garden Tree House
by Hironaka Ogawa appeared first on Dezeen.

Japanese architects Ninkipen! have planted a tree at the centre of this hair salon in Kadoma and surrounded it with mirrored A-frames.

Half of these mirrors are arranged at right angles to the other half so that customers don’t have to look one another in the eye when having a haircut.

More plants are scattered around the salon, while a spotty dog statue greets customers at the door.

Small splashes of colour also crop up around the space on chairs, ornaments and electrical cable surrounds.

See more projects by Ninkipen! here, including an office with a bubbly facade.

Photography is by Hiroki Kawata.

Here’s some more text from the architects:

This is an interior design for a hair salon in Osaka, Japan.

First of all, we plant a pachira is 3m in height, and put mirrors around it like a swirl. Next, we set more mirrors and plants around them.

By this, you can relax in front of a mirror because your eyes don’t meet other costumers, and you can look increased images of plants reflected in mirrors.

We try to create a new scenery of hair salon by an original placement of mirrors.

Project name: LE CINQ

Architect: YASUO IMAZU / ninkipen!
Use: hair salon

Location: Kadoma city, Osaka, Japan

Design: 2010.10〜2012.2
Construction: 2012.2〜2012.3

Scale: 219.5m2

British designer Tom Price has made an enchanted grove of cherry trees out of plastic tubes and cable ties. 

The slender cherry trees occupied an entire room at Industry Gallery in Washington D.C last month, casting delicate shadows on the surrounding walls.

Price was inspired to make the installation when he visited the US capital last spring during the National Cherry Blossom Festival.

He used special tools to heat the plastic tubing so that he could then bend and twist it into the desired shape.

Cable ties hold the bundles of tubing together, forming trunks and branches.

The designer fused small cross-sections of the tubing together to form a canopy that creates a dappled light underneath.

We recently published an interview with Tom Price on Dezeen Screen – watch the video here.

Here is some more information from the gallery:

WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 27, 2011) — INDUSTRY will be launching its Fall 2011 design season with the first U.S. solo exhibition of work by innovative British artist and designer, Tom Price. Specializing in modern furniture products, sculpture and lighting design, process plays a key role in Price’s work which has been bought by international museums, galleries and private collectors. Much of Price’s work is made using unconventional materials. In fact, he often finds it necessary to invent new tools and techniques in order to get the required results from certain fabrications. But Price sees this as an intrinsic part of the overall design and narrative.

“I like to think of myself as working in collaboration with materials, processes and phenomena and that the final physical outcome is a product of mutual consent.”

About Tom Price

A London native, Price attended several renowned schools including the Royal College of Art. That background in Fine Art informs his approach to design, which is typically very sculptural in both appearance and concept. The vast majority of Tom Price’s furniture and collections are anything but conventional. Represented in collections around the world, recently two of Price’s pieces were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco.

Included in this exhibition will be Price’s coveted Meltdown Chairs—a series of unique furniture pieces made by melting a seat shape into a sculpted assembly of commonplace plastic products using a specially designed heated former. Original to this exhibit is an homage to DC. When he visited last spring, Price fell in love with the area’s iconic cherry trees. Inspired by them, he has constructed a series of sweeping sculptures out of plastic tubing, referencing the shapes of the trees and their blossoms. They will combine to create a unique immersive and site-specific installation, taking over an entire room of the gallery.

Price’s public commissions include a large-scale sculpture for a new square in the centre of Gloucester (UK) and a sculptural installation for a restored Victorian grotto at the foot of the Royal Terrace Gardens, in Torquay (UK). As an enduring tribute, Price’s talent and techniques are referenced in many respected design books including Desire by Elizabeth Honerla; Contemporary Furniture by Martin Wellner and Andrea Mehlhose; New Talents –The State of the Arts by Hans Maier-Aichen and Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary by the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.

Dezeen archive: this week we showcased a ring of trees that’s forced to grow into a building (top left) and a movie featuring people dressed as trees, so our latest archive compiles all our stories about things that are made of or disguised as trees. See all the stories »

See all our archive stories »

A circle of trees will frame an hourglass-shaped hut for Milan that won’t be complete for 100 years.

Swedish architects Visiondivision and a group of students designed the two-storey study retreat, which is currently growing on the Politecnico di Milano campus.

Aptly titled The Patient Gardener, the garden structure will be shaped from a circle of ten Japanese cherry trees that will be bent, pruned and woven as they grow.

The trees will be tied to a central wooden scaffold to frame the dome-shaped ground floor, whilst branches above will be directed outwards as first-floor walls.

Two of the trees will be woven together as a staircase.

Plum tree stumps will provide chairs and an armchair will be fabricated from cardboard and grass.

Visiondivision previously designed another landscape project, this time an underwater concrete habitat for crayfish – see this project here.

Here’s a description of the project from Visiondivision:

Visiondivision was invited as guest professors by Politecnico di Milano for their week-long workshop MIAW2.

The workshop, playing with the metaphor of forests, aimed to generate new visions to explain the contemporary and immediate future ways of being in the spirit of green design, resilience, recycling, and ethical consciousness.

Our intention with our project was to construct a study retreat at the campus with patience as the main key for the design. If we can be patient with the building time we can reduce the need for transportation, waste of material and different manufacturing processes, simply by helping nature grow in a more architectonic and useful way. The final result can be enjoyed at Politecnico di Milano in about 60 years from now.

During the workshop we gave nature all the guidance and directions to help it grow into useful structures and objects. There are different methods and tools to guide and control the growth of trees and plants; bending, twisting, pruning, grafting, braiding, weaving and to control the amount of water and light the trees get are just some examples of these. We used almost all of these techniques in our creation, which involved creating a structural system for the building and also stairs and furniture, all made out of trees, plants or grass.

Our structural frame for this project became ten Japanese cherry trees that was planted in a circle with a diameter of eight meters with a six meter high temporary wood structure in the center that is acting as a guidance tower for the growing structure. The trees were planted with an equal spacing from each other, except for four of them that became two pairs of stairs to the future upper level.

The cherry trees were ideal to plant at that time of year and also had great features for achieving the desired structure. Thin ropes were tied around the plants and were slightly bent towards the temporary tower.

As time passes the trees will form a dome when they reach the tower, and then designated by to change its direction so the final form will be an hourglass, a suiting shape for the project and also a very practical form as we now have two rooms with different modes in the building.

The small branches on the plants that will grow into stairs are guided with wires to each other and will hopefully be useful later on. The rest of the stairs can later be grafted in the stair trees.

On the ground level we designed furniture out of grass, trees and plants. There are a dining group consisting of a table with four chairs. The chairs are plum trees where one sit at the lowest fork and the branches are guided into canopies so the future visitor can sit in the chair while at the same time eating delicious fruits. The table is made out of slender wooden pieces with strings in the structure, which forms a skeleton where hedras can grow and later take over the structure completely. A comfortable chair made out of grass are located on the other side of the ground floor. The grass chair is put together with the use of a custom made cardboard structure, shaped for maximal relaxation and that is painted with a protection coating and that is later filled with soil on site and draped with grass.

A grass puff is also made and placed in the tower where the floor of the upper level will be. The puff is a big potato bag filled with straw, soil, fertilizer and grass seed. An organic rope is placed with a third of its length inside the bag, and the bag is later sewn together. The rest of the rope is placed in water so the puff gets water and will later be covered in grass, so when the trees finally reaches this level and becomes the floor, it will already be furnished.

Together with the students we worked out a maintenance plan and instructions to future gardeners that is simple enough to actually work. On the structure, we instructed that a pattern of wood will be grafted in, leaving two spaces between the trees as entries/exits and the rest is closed in ornamental patterns with branches. On the upper level which is reached by the two staircases with exquisite handrails, is different fruit trees grafted into the cherry trees so the visitor can have a variety of fruits while relaxing in the canopy. Branches are also grafted in for security reasons between the tree trunks.

In about 80 years from now the Politecnico di Milano campus will have a fully grown building and the students will hopefully have proud grandchildren that can tell the story of the project for their friends and family.

Partners in charge: Anders Berensson & Ulf Mejergren
Curators: Laura Daglio & Oscar Bellini
Students/Architects/Builders: Rachele Albini, Giada Albonico, Jacopo Biasio, Sara Caramaschi, Elisa Carraro, Desislava Dimitrova, Cristina Gatti, Elisa Gulino, Mariya Hasamova, Nina Mikhailova, Ottavia Molatore, Joao Molinar, Azadeh Moradiasr, Mohyedin Navabzadeh Navabi, Giuseppe Maria Palermo, Riccardo Somaini, Bogdan Stojanovic
Organizers: Luca Maria Francesco & Fabris Efisia Cipolloni
Location: Politecnico di Milano
Project area: 50 sqm
Project year: 2011-2090

See also:

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South Pond by Studio Gang	KAPKAR/TO-RXD by Frank Havermans	Pavillion by Wing Yi Hui and Lap Ming Wong