It might look like these people are scaling the walls of a London townhouse but they’re actually lying on the ground, reflected in a huge mirror as part of an installation by Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich (+ slideshow).
Located in Hackney, Dalston House by Leandro Erlich is a temporary installation comprising a reconstructed house facade lying face-up and a mirror positioned over it at a 45-degree angle.
As a person walks over the surface of the house, the mirror reflects their image and creates the illusion that they are walking up the walls. Similarly, visitors can make it look like they are balancing over the cornices or dangling from the windows.
The brick walls and decorative window mouldings of the three-storey facade are designed to mimic the nineteenth-century Victorian terraces that line many of London’s streets, particularly a row of houses that once occupied this site on Ashwin Street.
Commissioned by the Barbican gallery, the installation opened to the public yesterday as part of the London Festival of Architecture 2013 and will remain on show until 4 August.
Internationally known for captivating, three-dimensional visual illusions, Argentine artist Leandro Erlich has been commissioned by the Barbican to create Dalston House, an installation in Hackney. The work resembles a movie set, featuring the façade of a late nineteenth-century Victorian terraced house. The life-size façade lies on the ground with a mirrored surface positioned overhead at a 45-degree angle. By sitting, standing or lying on the horizontal surface, visitors appear to be scaling or hanging off the side of the building. Sited at 1–7 Ashwin Street, near Dalston Junction, Erlich has designed and decorated the façade – complete with a door, windows, mouldings and other architectural details – to evoke the houses that previously stood on the block. Leandro Erlich: Dalston House opens on 26 June 2013 and is presented on Ashwin Street in association with OTO Projects. It is also part of the 2013 London Festival of Architecture.
Leandro Erlich: Dalston House is installed on a disused lot that has largely remained vacant since it was bombed during the Second World War. The installation extends the Barbican’s programme of Curve commissions to east London and is part of Beyond Barbican, a summer of events outside the walls of the Centre that includes pop-up performances, commissions and collaborations across east London. Beyond Barbican builds on the Barbican’s long history of programming work in east London that connects communities in the boroughs surrounding the Centre with some of the best art from around the world. The commission follows the success and legacy of Dalston Mill by EXYZT, a temporary installation and participatory project staged by the Barbican in Hackney in 2009, which reopened in 2010 as the Eastern Curve Garden.
Dalston House is presented on Ashwin Street in association with OTO Projects. The Barbican is an official partner of the London Festival of Architecture 2013. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Additional support from the Embassy of the Argentine Republic.
Students from London’s Architectural Association have suspended a giant wooden cocoon between the trees of Hooke Park in Dorset, England (+ slideshow).
The wooden structure, designed and built by four students on the AA Design & Make programme, was envisioned as a quiet woodland retreat where an inhabitant can sit and watch the sun set beneath the surrounding tree canopy.
“The Cocoon represents a journey through the forest, inviting and challenging the visitor to anticipate, imagine, explore and discover the natural beauty of the forest from a completely different perspective,” says the design team.
Using four untreated sheets of plywood and one locally milled cedar tree, the students constructed a temporary frame and then used a bandaging technique to build up a facade of thin and flexible layers inside it.
Once the structure was stiff enough, it was suspended around three trees so that it appears to weave between them.
To enter the structure, a step ladder leads in through a hole at one end, while a smaller hole on the opposite side forms the window. Light also penetrates the interior though small gaps in the walls.
Photographs are by Hugo G. Urrutia, one of the design students.
Here’s some extra information from the design team:
AA Hooke Park – Cocoon
Shelter was prefabricated, transported and successfully installed, hanging and weaving over three selected trees in Hooke Park, Dorset, UK.
The Cocoon is a design derived from the experience of walking through the forest of Hooke Park in Dorset. Its design explores the relationship between natural light, material and occupational space. The Cocoon represents a journey through the forest, inviting and challenging the visitor to anticipate, imagine, explore and discover the natural beauty of the forest from a completely different perspective. Even though it uses the trees as vertical support, the design is site specific as it weaves through 3 selected trees in the forest.
The structure emerged through a process of ‘bandaging’ until it was stiff enough to hang it from the trees. This process provided a unique spatial transformation of the interior spaces through articulation and penetration of natural light, and a strong tectonic language, achieved by the imperfection but novel materials and form.
An inhabitable suspended ‘cocoon’, that takes its form from a precise weaving through three trees at the fringe of a forest clearing, becomes Hooke Park’s premiere vantage spot to view the winter sunset.
The Cocoon, provides a unique visual and tactile experience through its undulated canyon-like forms created by the form-finding cladding.
The selection of materials for the project was based on the team’s design ambition to maximise the use of material from Hooke Park. Four sheets of plywood and one western red wood cedar tree was milled to create this unique ergonomically design shelter with interior spaces that provide areas for relaxation and enjoyment of the amazing framed views of the winter sunset. An important characteristic and advantage of the green and untreated timber is the high flexibility achieved after milling into thin strips, permitting the cladding strips to bend and take new form.
The interior spaces of The Cocoon enable the visitor to have a unique visual and tactile experience through its undulated canyon-like forms created with the cedar cladding, the fresh smell of the wood and the articulation of the light, bringing the visitor closer to the canopy of the trees and surrounding environment. Architecturally, the team’s ambition was accomplished thanks to the unique material characteristics, the spatial transformation of the interior spaces through articulation and penetration of the natural light, and a strong tectonic language, achieved by the imperfection but novel materials and form.
Designed and made by: Hugo G. Urrutia, Abdullah Omar, Ashgar Khan, Karjvit Rirermvanich Designed for: Architectural Association/ M.Arch Design & Make programme 2013
London architect Dingle Price has revamped a warehouse in Hackney to create a bright spacious home and studio for a painter and his family.
Dingle Price began by stripping the interior of the old Victorian warehouse where the artist and his wife had already been living for several years. Making use of an existing mezzanine, the architect divided the space in half to create two-storey living quarters on one side and a double-height studio on the other.
“This idea of subdividing the space into equal parts led to a concept of inserting a house within the studio,” Price told Dezeen. “The position of the existing mezzanine decided which half would be which.”
North-facing skylights allow daylight to flood the inside of the studio, where high ceilings offer enough room for several large canvases.
Windows puncture the partition wall so residents can look into the studio from their two upstairs bedrooms.
“It’s quite an internalised world,” said Price. “When you’re in there you don’t really look out. It’s a kind of internal landscape where, instead of looking at a landscape, you’re looking across a sequence of spaces.”
Walls and ceilings are plastered white throughout and there are a mixture of both painted and exposed pine floorboards.
Attracted by the large volume and excellent natural light, the artist and his wife lived and worked in this warehouse building in an ad hoc manner for some years, before the arrival of their first child necessitated a more formal inhabitation.
Dingle Price Architects proposed the insertion of a two storey house with a front facade overlooking and animating the studio space which attains the character of a small piazza or garden, a feeling further enhanced by the large landscape paintings in progress.
The design draws on the symmetrical character of the existing building to provide a series of interconnected rooms of varied scale and proportion. The existing interior consisted principally of white plastered walls, and both unfinished and white painted pine floorboards. Rather than introducing new materials, we chose to adopt and extend the use of this palette – staircase and cabinetry are constructed from southern yellow pine planks, and the elevation of the residence if partially clad in painted pine boards of a matching width to the floorboards.
Whilst the residence can be entirely or partially closed off from the studio when necessary, opening the doors and shutters reveals scenic views across the internal landscape.
Spiralling stone walls will be carved with images of extinct species – with space reserved for future extinctions – at this observatory and education centre designed by Adjaye Associates for the Isle of Portland, England.
The Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory (MEMO) will function as an information and exhibition centre dedicated to the 860 species of animals, birds, insects and sea life that have been identified as extinct since the demise of the dodo in the seventeenth century.
Positioned on the edge of a cliff, the 30 metre-high structure will also house an observatory overlooking Bowers Quarry, one of the main producers of Portland Stone since the late eighteenth century.
Adjaye Associates based the spiralling form of the building on the gastropod fossils commonly found in the quarry. The structure will be built from Portland Stone, with a rough surface intended to echo the rugged cliffside.
The plan is to add more carved stones in the future, if and when more creatures become extinct. These occasions will also be marked by a toll from a bell at the centre of the building.
Floors inside the MEMO building will follow the corkscrew shape. Stone models of extinct species will be displayed around the circular route, leading up to the observatory on the uppermost floor.
Here’s some more information from Adjaye Associates:
Memo Portland, UK
The Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory (MEMO) will comprise a monument to the world’s extinct species and an adjacent biodiversity education centre. Conceived as a continuous spiral of stone, it will be carved with images of the 860 species assessed as extinct since the dodo. It will be an on-going monument, with more stones added into the future if more species become extinct. The bell of biodiversity, placed in the centre of the monument, will be rung annually on the international day of biodiversity and to mark further species becoming extinct. Sited on the Isle of Portland on the south coast of Britain, each creature will be immortalised in stone along the circular ramp that leads to the top of the 100 foot-high Bowers Quarry observatory. Visitors will then walk down the outside of the ramp to ground level.
A fitting insertion into the landscape, the project presents an opportunity to revitalise the old Bowers Quarry and to draw attention back to the natural beauty and craftsmanship of Portland. Rather than a building or shelter, MEMO is devised as a journey, exploring the relationship between interior and exterior, landscape and enclosure. The circular form resonates with Portland’s three lighthouses near Portland Bill as well as the remains of the windmills at Perryfields to the south east of Weston. The spiralling arrangement is inspired by a turreted gastropod fossil, found in particular abundance in Bower’s Quarry, the ‘Portland Screw’ (Aptyxiella portlandica). The material palette is predominantly Portland Stone to reinforce a sense of the landscape, echoing the character of part of the cliff with its exposed stone strata. The sizes of the blocks and the rhythm of the joints are alternating with an accent on the horizontal joints, while the surface of the stones is rough – like the face of a Quarry Block. The development will promote the use of local and recycled material.
This time-lapse movie by photographer Paul Raftery and producer Dan Lowe documents the construction of “the Cheesegrater”, a 225-metre skyscraper by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners that topped out today in the City of London.
Positioned opposite Richard Rogers‘ famous Lloyds Building, the 50-storey Leadenhall Building will feature a glazed body that is tapered to respect views towards St Paul’s Cathedral. It was this angular shape that inspired its popular nickname.
Set to open in 2014, the tower will predominantly contain offices but its base will house a seven-storey public space filled with shops, restaurants and exhibition areas.
The movie by Raftery and Lowe frames the first six months of a year-long project to record the final stages of construction. Work on the building previously stalled for over two years when developer British Land experienced financial difficulties but has been progressing steadily since the start of 2011.
This elliptical chapel near Oxford by London studio Niall McLaughlin Architects contains a group of arching timber columns behind its textured stone facade (+ slideshow).
The Bishop Edward King Chapel replaces another smaller chapel at the Ripon Theological College campus and accommodates both students of the college and the local nuns of a small religious order.
Niall McLaughlin Architects was asked to create a building that respects the historic architecture of the campus, which includes a nineteenth century college building and vicarage, and also fits comfortably amongst a grove of mature trees.
For the exterior, the architects sourced a sandy-coloured stone, similar to the limestone walls of the existing college, and used small blocks to create a zigzagging texture around the outside of the ellipse. A wooden roof crowns the structure and integrates a row of clerestory windows that bring light across the ceiling.
Inside, the tree-like timber columns form a second layer behind the walls, enclosing the nave of the chapel and creating an ambulatory around the perimeter. Each column comprises at least three branches, which form a latticed canopy overhead.
Niall McLaughlin told Dezeen: “If you get up very early, at sunrise, the horizontal sun casts a maze of moving shadows of branches, leaves, window mullions and structure onto the ceiling. It is like looking up into trees in a wood.”
A projecting window offers a small seating area on one side of the chapel, where McLaughlin says you can “watch the sunlit fields on the other side of the valley”.
A small rectilinear block accompanies the structure and houses the entrance lobby, a sacristy, storage areas and toilets.
Photography is by the architects, apart from where otherwise stated.
Here’s a detailed project description from Niall McLaughlin Architects:
Bishop Edward King Chapel
The client brief sought a new chapel for Ripon Theological College, to serve the two interconnected groups resident on the campus in Oxfordshire, the college community and the nuns of a small religious order, the Sisters of Begbroke. The chapel replaces the existing one, designed by George Edmund Street in the late nineteenth century, which had since proved to be too small for the current needs of the college.
The brief asked for a chapel that would accommodate the range of worshipping needs of the two communities in a collegiate seating arrangement, and would be suitable for both communal gatherings and personal prayer. In addition the brief envisioned a separate space for the Sisters to recite their offices, a spacious sacristy, and the necessary ancillary accommodation. Over and above these outline requirements, the brief set out the clients’ aspirations for the chapel, foremost as ‘a place of personal encounter with the numinous’ that would enable the occupants to think creatively about the relationship between space and liturgy. The client summarised their aspirations for the project with Philip Larkin’s words from his poem Church Going, ‘A serious house on serious earth it is… which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in…’.
On the site is an enormous beech tree on the brow of the hill. Facing away from the beech and the college buildings behind, there is ring of mature trees on high ground overlooking the valley that stretches away towards Garsington. This clearing has its own particular character, full of wind and light and the rustling of leaves.
These strengths of the site also presented significant planning constraints. The college’s existing buildings are of considerable historical importance. G.E. Street was a prominent architect of the Victorian Age and both the main college building and vicarage to its south are Grade II* listed.
The site is designated within the Green Belt in the South Oxfordshire Local Plan and is also visible from a considerable distance across the valley to the west. The immediate vicinity of the site is populated with mature trees and has a Tree Preservation Order applied to a group at the eastern boundary. The design needed to integrate with the character of the panorama and preserve the setting of the college campus and the surrounding trees.
The mediation of these interlocked planning sensitivities required extensive consultation with South Oxfordshire District Council, English Heritage and local residents.
The starting point for this project was the hidden word ‘nave’ at the centre of Seamus Heaney poem Lightenings viii. The word describes the central space of a church, but shares the same origin as ‘navis’, a ship, and can also mean the still centre of a turning wheel. From these words, two architectural images emerged. The first is the hollow in the ground as the meeting place of the community, the still centre. The second is the delicate ship-like timber structure that floats above in the tree canopy, the gathering place for light and sound. We enjoyed the geometry of the ellipse.
To construct an ellipse the stable circle is played against the line, which is about movement back and forth. For us this reflected the idea of exchange between perfect and imperfect at the centre of Christian thought. The movement inherent in the geometry is expressed in the chapel through the perimeter ambulatory. It is possible to walk around the chapel, looking into the brighter space in the centre. The sense of looking into an illuminated clearing goes back to the earliest churches. We made a clearing to gather in the light.
The chapel, seen from the outside, is a single stone enclosure. We have used Clipsham stone which is sympathetic, both in terms of texture and colouration, to the limestone of the existing college. The external walls are of insulated cavity construction, comprising of a curved reinforced blockwork internal leaf and dressed stone outer leaf.
The base of the chapel and the ancillary structures are clad in ashlar stone laid in regular courses. The upper section of the main chapel is dressed in cropped walling stone, laid in a dog-tooth bond to regular courses. The chapel wall is surmounted by a halo of natural stone fins. The fins sit in front of high-performance double glazed units, mounted in concealed metal frames.
The roof of the main chapel and the ancillary block are both of warm deck construction. The chapel roof drains to concealed rainwater pipes running through the cavity of the external wall. Where exposed at clerestory level, the rainwater pipes are clad in aluminium sleeves with a bronze anodised finish and recessed into the stone fins. The roof and the internal frame are self-supporting and act independently from the external walls.
A minimal junction between the roof and the walls expresses this. Externally the roof parapet steps back to diminish its presence above the clerestorey; inside the underside of the roof structure rises up to the outer walls to form the shape of a keel, expressing the floating ‘navis’ of Heaney’s poem.
The internal timber structure is constructed of prefabricated Glulam sections with steel fixings and fully concealed steel base plate connections. The Glulam sections are made up of visual grade spruce laminations treated with a two-part stain system, which gives a light white-washed finish.
The structure of roof and columns express the geometrical construction of the ellipse itself, a ferrying between centre and edge with straight lines that reveals the two stable foci at either end, reflected in the collegiate layout below in the twin focus points of altar and lectern. As you move around the chapel there is an unfolding rhythm interplay between the thicket of columns and the simple elliptical walls beyond. The chapel can be understood as a ship in a bottle, the hidden ‘nave’.
RIBA competition won – July 2009 Planning Consent – June 2010 Construction – July 2011 Practical Completion – February 2013 Construction Cost – 2,034,000
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), in a bid to explore how the Bard of Avon can take center-stage in today’s digitally interactive world, has collaborated with Google Creative Lab to produce a three-day, real-time performance of…
Clerkenwell Design Week 2013:designers including Patricia Urquiola, Ab Rogers and Jay Osgerby talk about their participation in Clerkenwell Design Week in the first of a series of movies we filmed during the event.
We spoke to designers at showrooms across the central London district, plus Farmiloe Building and House of Detention hub locations, which all make up Clerkenwell Design Week.
In the movie, Jay Osgerby of design duo Barber Osgerby explains why the area is suited to hosting the event: “[Clerkenwell] is where all the architects and designers are based, it’s the perfect environment to show new work to an audience who’s really interested in it.”
“It brings a level of energy to a fantastic central location,” adds designer Ab Rogers.
This fourth edition of the annual event saw the largest exhibitor and visitor numbers, though PearsonLloyd partner Tom Lloyd thinks it still retains a compact local atmosphere.
“I think Clerkenwell is maturing into a great design event,” he says. “I think its size is very nice, I think people like the intimacy.”
Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola discusses why she likes exhibiting in the British capital: “Being in London always means to be involved in the work we are doing, [promoting] a new product and meeting new people,” she tells us. “London always gives you something else.”
Also in the movie, Giles Miller talks about his target of reflected pixels installed in front of a medieval gate “to stamp Clerkenwell on the map”.
This year’s Clerkenwell Design Week took place from 21 to 23 May.
We will be publishing interviews with some of the key designers exhibiting at this year’s show in the coming weeks.
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Swedish organic denim house, Nudie Jeans, this month debuted their first UK concept store, and officially their first Repair Station in the world, in the Soho district of London, UK. The 15th concept store for the brand, London follows Stockholm, Tokyo, Los Angeles,Zurich, Barcelona, Sydney and Nudie’s own backyard Gothenburg.
“We are very excited to be opening our first UK store, which will give us the opportunity to really tell our unique concept. The UK is one of our biggest profile markets and our store will meet the demands we have seen for our brand globally,” says Andreas Åhrman, Sales & Marketing Director.
Standing in a prominent location on the corner of Berwick and D’Arblay Street, the 100-square-metre store is presented over ground and basement floors, with a 40-square-metre showroom housed above. The interior concept is designed by creative director Maria Erixon and inspired by a Gothenburg food market, featuring raw and rustic vintage fixtures juxtaposed against a stark bright backdrop, while carefully preserving the beautiful architectural features.
The London store houses the first official Repair Station globally, and offers customers a complimentary repairs and alterations service by one of the experienced Denim Specialists.
The repair and reuse initiative reinforces Nudie’s ardent strive to set a new standard in sustainable production. With Nudie’s extensive range of unisex fits and washes, the store will be the faultless place for London and international visitors alike to find a perfect pair of jeans guided by seasoned denim experts.
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