Hasta La Ideas

Architecture studio AOC has renovated a four-storey townhouse in north London, adding wall-hung vintage bicycles and timber mouldings based on the faces of the resident family.

Named Bonhôte House, the nineteenth-century property was remodelled by London-based AOC to create a contemporary family home for a boutique owner, a film producer and their young children.

The house now features an open-plan interior designed to meet the family’s need for space, with a two-storey-high gallery added for displaying vintage bicycles and artwork.

A large portion of the original ground floor was removed, enabling the architects to create the double-height gallery at the front of the house.

The new entrance hall allows natural light to fill the room through an original Victorian window with folding shutters. Two bicycles hang on hooks from an adjacent wall, ensuring that they can be seen from various angles.

Shelving built into the walls provides a space for displaying the family’s large collection of books and objects.

“The family had a fascinating collection of artefacts they wished to display, from Dan Holdsworth prints to Paris flea market nicknacks,” architect Geoff Shearcroft told Dezeen.

To add character, the architects used the facial profiles of each family member to produce a series of bespoke timber mouldings, which are dotted throughout the interior.

These create a ripple effect when joined together and act as a contemporary counterpoint to the original Victorian skirting boards and architraves.

“Much ornament in architecture has the human form as its basis and we continued this tradition with a very literal translation of facial profile into moulding,” said Shearcroft.

Across the lower ground floor, a tiled floor with a basket-weave pattern connects the living space with the kitchen and provides a hard-wearing surface for the growing family.

“We explored a variety of patterns but the basket weave offered the right combination of rich associations, closed openness and playful variation,” said the architect.

In the kitchen, mirrored laminate surfaces create an extension of the pattern and reflect light back into the room.

A slumped concrete sofa sits at the foot of a brass decorative staircase, which leads up to bedrooms and bathrooms on the first floor.

Continuing up through the property, the original floor plan has been altered to connect the master bedroom to an en suite that overlooks the park.

“We re-configured the plan to create a series of different character spaces that were visually and vertically connected,” added Shearcroft.

The house is located in Stoke Newington, just a stone’s throw away from Dezeen’s offices. AOC Architecture previously remodelled an Edwardian property in Golders Green, north-west London.

Photography is by Tim Soar.

Here’s a description of Bonhôte House from the architects:

Bonhôte House, Stoke Newington, London

The Bonhôte House is a four storey townhouse in Stoke Newington, home to a film producer, a boutique owner and their young children. The couple needed more room for a growing family, and for their contemporary art and vintage bicycle collections, than their previous Shoreditch, East London mews house offered. They asked AOC to design a home that felt big yet intimate, luxurious yet useful, sophisticated yet playful, beautiful yet cosy.

The original 19th century property was narrow, dark and unwelcoming, and had been stripped bare by its previous owners. A key architectural move has been to remove a large area of floor, merging basement and ground levels at the front of the house to create a generous double height gallery, into which a new decorative stair descends from the entrance hall. This act of opening-up brings natural light into the basement living space, and creates expansive walls for display of large artworks and objects and for storage of valuable books.

On the upper levels, non-structural walls have been relocated to shape a range of spaces appropriate to the family’s lives. Throughout the property, new doors and internal windows connect individual rooms while maintaining distinctions between them, offering glimpses through the house itself, and then out into the city beyond.

The family wanted a characterful home, contemporary in tone without feeling ‘new’. In response, AOC enriched bare walls with bespoke timber profiles created from the facial profiles of family members – a reinterpretation of traditional mouldings. Used as skirtings, architraves and linings, these ornamental features ensure each room is uniquely tailored to its inhabitants. In the lower, more public, levels, all four mouldings are combined to create a rippling timber lining that softens and connects.

A unique domestic character has been created through deploying a range of materials, chosen for their associative qualities, to create diverse surface effects. A slumped concrete sofa, tinted green, anchors the new staircase at the centre of the plan, before evolving into a kitchen work surface. The use of mirrored laminate on storage units helps them dissolve into their surroundings, while providing endless games of reflection for the children. A basket weave floor pattern, used in a variety of scales and materials, reinforces the individual characters of different parts of the house whilst creating a coherent whole.

The architects worked closely with the family to ensure the house could support the visual choreography of special objects, while still being a practical space, able to manage their storage needs in a discreet, integrated way. The subsequent combination of bespoke panelling with open shelves, interspersed with glazed, mirror and even secret doors, bestows an ‘instant maturity’ upon the home, as though the family have been there for generations.

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News: the UK’s Royal Mint has unveiled a revised £1 coin with 12 sides, which it hopes will make the currency harder to forge.

The Royal Mint says it based the dodecahedral design on the threepenny piece used before the UK switched to the decimal system.

The coin features a bimetallic design similar to the current £2 coin and the mint claims it “will be the most secure circulating coin in the world to date”.

The new design will aim to reduce the amount of counterfeit versions produced of the current pound, which has been in circulation for over 30 years.

“The current £1 coin design is now more than thirty years old and it has become increasingly vulnerable to counterfeiting over time,” said Adam Lawrence, chief executive of The Royal Mint. “It is our aim to identify and produce a pioneering new coin which helps to reduce the opportunities for counterfeiting.”

A public design competition will be held at a later date to choose the design for the tails side before the coin is introduced in 2017.

Last week the United States Mint unveiled domed coins to commemorate 75 years of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

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Objects designed to support political activism including a graffiti-writing robot and a giant inflatable cobblestone made to be thrown at police will form the focus of an exhibition opening this summer at London‘s V&A museum.

Disobedient Objects will open at the V&A on 26 July and will be the first exhibition to present innovative examples of art and design developed by countercultures to communicate political messages or facilitate protests.

“Social movement cultures aren’t normally collected by museums, with the exception of prints and posters,” the exhibition’s co-curator Gavin Grindon told Dezeen. “We wanted to raise the question of this absence of other kinds of disobedient objects in the museum.”

The objects that will be exhibited were created by non-professional designers, mostly using craft methods or adhoc manufacturing processes.

These include a variety of dolls, masks and puppets such as the tableau created by American group, The Bread and Puppet Theatre, which was used in protests against the first Gulf War.

Craft skills such as sewing will be represented by items including hand-stitched textiles from Chile that document political violence and a banner created for the Unite union in the UK.

Painted banners and placards featuring humorous or evocative slogans have also been selected.

Grindon, who is an academic specialising in the history of activist art and current research fellow at the V&A, participated in activist movements and organised workshops with protesters to find out which objects would be most suitable for the exhibition.

“The show is about existing design so it made sense to use a documentary approach to find examples of things that have actually been made,” Grindon explained. “None of this stuff is professionally designed, it’s just happening in the public sphere in various ways.”

Other objects set to feature in the show include a shiny inflatable cobblestone thrown at police by Spanish protestors in 2012 as a harmless version of a weapon traditionally used by rioters.

A robot called Graffiti Writer that paints slogans on road surfaces illustrates a more high-tech approach to creating protest tools.

Spanning a period from the 1970s to the present day, the exhibition will include newspaper cuttings, how-to guides and film content to provide additional levels of context.

One specially commissioned film will document the evolution of “lock-on” devices used by protesters to attach themselves to objects or blockade sites.

Objects and imagery will be displayed alongside a text from the curators as well as explanations from the activists about how they came up with the ideas and how they were used.

“What we’d like people to take away from the exhibition is the idea that design isn’t always about professional practice – it’s something that people can get involved in themselves,” said Grindon. “The actors changing the world are doing so using something that they have in their hands already.”

The exhibition’s approach to identifying and procuring objects is in line with the “rapid response” curatorial process introduced by the V&A recently, which has seen it acquire objects including Katy Perry eyelashes and the world’s first 3D-printed gun.

Disobedient Objects will be on show at the V&A from 26 July 2014 until 1 February 2015.

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News: Chilean architect Smiljan Radic has been named as the designer of this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion and is proposing a translucent domed structure of white fibreglass.

The shell-like pavilion will rest on a bed of huge rocks, based on the Castle of the Selfish Giant imagined by nineteenth-century author Oscar Wilde.

“Externally, the visitor will see a fragile shell suspended on large quarry stones,” said Radic. “This shell – white, translucent and made of fibreglass – will house an interior organised around an empty patio, from where the natural setting will appear lower, giving the sensation that the entire volume is floating.”

The translucent fibreglass will allow the structure to glow after dark. “At night, thanks to the semi-transparency of the shell, the amber tinted light will attract the attention of passers-by, like lamps attracting moths,” said the architect.

Smiljan Radic – a 48-year-old architect who before now has built little outside of his native Chile – will be one of the youngest and least-known architects selected by the Serpentine Gallery in the 14-year history of the programme.

“We have been intrigued by his work ever since our first encounter with him at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2011,” said Serpentine Gallery directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

“Radic is a key protagonist of an amazing architectural explosion in Chile. While enigmatically archaic, in the tradition of romantic follies, Radic’s designs for the Pavilion also look excitingly futuristic, appearing like an alien space pod that has come to rest on a Neolithic site. We cannot wait to see his Pavilion installed on the Serpentine Gallery’s lawn this summer.”

The pavilion will open to the public on 26 June and will remain in Kensington Gardens until 19 October.

Last year’s pavilion was designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto and comprised a cloud-like structure made from a lattice of steel poles. Other past commissions include Herzog & de Meuron, SANAA and Peter Zumthor.

Here’s the full press release from the Serpentine Gallery:

Chilean architect Smiljan Radic to design Serpentine Galleries Pavilion 2014

The Serpentine has commissioned Chilean architect Smiljan Radic to design the Serpentine Galleries Pavilion 2014. Radic is the fourteenth architect to accept the invitation to design a temporary Pavilion outside the entrance to the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. The commission is one of the most anticipated events in the cultural calendar, and has become one of London’s leading summer attractions since launching in 2000.

Smiljan Radic’s design follows Sou Fujimoto’s cloud-like structure, which was visited by almost 200,000 people in 2013 and was one of the most visited Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei, 2012; Peter Zumthor, 2011; Jean Nouvel, 2010; Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, SANAA, 2009; Frank Gehry, 2008; Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, 2007; Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, with Arup, 2006; Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond, Arup, 2005; MVRDV with Arup, 2004 (un-realised); Oscar Niemeyer, 2003; Toyo Ito and Cecil Balmond – with Arup, 2002; Daniel Libeskind with Arup, 2001; and Zaha Hadid, who designed the inaugural Pavillion in 2000.

Occupying a footprint of some 350 square metres on the lawn of the Serpentine Gallery, plans depict a semi-translucent, cylindrical structure, designed to resemble a shell, resting on large quarry stones. Radic’s Pavilion has its roots in his earlier work, particularly The Castle of the Selfish Giant, inspired by the Oscar Wilde story, and the Restaurant Mestizo, part of which is supported by large boulders. Design as a flexible, multi-purpose social space with a café sited inside, the Pavilion will entice visitors to enter and interact with it in different ways throughout its four-month tenure in the Park. On selected Friday nights, between July and September, the Pavilion will become the stage for the Serpentine’s Park Nights series, sponsored by COS: eight site-specific events bring together art, poetry, music, film, literature and theory and include three new commissions by emerging artists Lina Lapelyte, Hannah Perry and Heather Phillipson. Serpentine Galleries Pavilion 2014 launces during the London Festival of Architecture 2014,

Smiljan Radic has completed the majority of his structures in Chile. His commissions range from public buildings, such as the Civic Neighbourhoods, Concepción, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, Santiago, Restaurant Mestizo, Santiago, and the Vik Winery, Millahue, and domestic buildings, such as Copper House 2, Talca, Pite House, Papudo, and the House for the Poem of the Right Angle, Vilches, to small and seemingly fragile buildings, such as the Extension to Charcoal Burner’s House, Santa Rosa, The Wardrobe and the Mattress, Tokyo, Japan, and The Bus Stop Commission, Kumbranch, Austria. Considerate of social conditions, environments and materials, Smiljan Radic moves freely across boundaries with his work, avoiding any specific categorisation within one field of architecture. This versatility enables him to respond to the demands of each setting, whether spatial constraints of an urban site or extreme challenges presented by a remote rural setting, mountainous terrain or the rocky coastline of his native Chile.

AECOM will again provide engineering and technical design services, as it did for the first time in 2013. In addition, AECOM will also be acting as cost and project manager for the 2014 Pavilion. While this is the second Serpentine Pavilion for AECOM, its global chief executive for building engineering, David Glover, has worked on the designs for a majority of the Pavilions to date. The Serpentine is delighted that J.P. Morgan Private Bank is the co-headline sponsor of this year’s Pavilion.

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British architect Richard Overs has converted a deserted bakery in Cambridge, England, into a modern home for his family (+ slideshow).

Overs, a director at NRAP Architects, renovated both the bakery and a small accompanying house to create the two-storey residence called The Nook, then tied the two buildings together by adding a black-painted timber structure in between.

The architect said the two separate structures lent themselves perfectly to the arrangement of a home: “The large space within the bakery provides flexible living space, whilst the smaller rooms within the baker’s house are ideally suited to bedrooms.”

Accessed via a private lane, the house’s facade is a wall made from a combination of light and dark bricks. An entrance leads through the wall into the new wooden structure, which contains a lobby and staircase.

The hallway leads through to the large room formerly used as bakery. With high ceilings and white-painted wooden trusses, the space creates a flexible living, dining and kitchen space.

A wall of glazing opens the kitchen out to a secluded courtyard located behind the facade, while a series of glass doors also lead out to a second courtyard at the rear.

Skylights bring additional daylight into the living space, while floors are covered with painted plywood boards. The kitchen worktops are salvaged from the architect’s previous kitchen.

“Our attitude to the fabric of the building was quite relaxed; elements of value were retained, others were removed,” explained Overs.

The hallway features a wall of exposed clay bricks, revealing the former facade of the small detached house, which contains a pair of bedrooms on each floor.

Here’s a project description from architect Richard Owers:

From Bakehouse to our House

Richard Owers, director of NRAP Architects, describes the process of converting a disused bakery in Cambridge into a home for his family.

The Nook …….. is where the hearth is!

“Converting The Nook was an important moment in my architectural career, the significance of which was increased by the death of my father the previous year. He had inspired me at a very early age to become an architect and throughout my career suggested it was important to live in ones own creation. Finally firing up the hearth at The Nook was therefore rather poignant.”

Rescue Operation

“An often overlooked challenge for architects interested in sustainability is how to adapt existing buildings in a creative and cost effective manner. This project demonstrates how a building with little apparent architectural value can be rescued through good design. It also illustrates that demanding physical and budgetary constraints require creative solutions, and that calculated risk-taking can overcome the difficulties of a cautious mortgage market.”

Dereliction

In October 2010 Richard Owers of NRAP Architects spotted a ramshackle bakery and detached house in south Cambridge. The bakery, more recently used as a launderette, was disused and boarded up. The baker’s house had been privately rented and was in very poor condition. The two buildings were stranded behind a parade of shops, within a sea of car parking, at the end of a tarmac drive. As a place to live it had little going for it – or that was the general perception.

The existing two-up-two-down house was entered off a forecourt, directly into a central room that doubled as entrance hall and dining room. A living room and kitchen were accessed off opposing corners of the dining room. The same pattern was repeated at first floor, with entry to the bathroom via a bedroom.

The Solution

A walled garden in front of the bakery provides privacy to the living spaces and definition to the forecourt. A black-stained, timber-clad structure was added to the house to link it to the bakery and provide a new entrance hall and staircase. The existing staircase was removed to provide storage space in bedrooms. A right of way, passing along the north edge of the bakery, presented a privacy and security problem that was overcome by blocking-up all but one of the existing openings on the north façade. In the remaining opening translucent glass replaces a timber door. Large windows in the south facade were introduced to re-orientate the living spaces to the back garden.

Expanding Space

In a tight urban context the balance between privacy, light, and views is hard won. An increased sense of space, achieved through large openings with strong connections to the outside, is often at odds with privacy requirements. The following images show how this was achieved.

Inside Outside

The walled garden has the feeling of a living room, carpeted in white pebbles with a planted edge and a Tibetan Cherry tree for shade. A large sliding-folding door allows the living spaces to extend into the garden, and the garden to extend into the living space.

Controlled Views

Views through the building and of external spaces are carefully controlled. The walled garden is first glimpsed from the front doormat and again at the foot of the staircase. It is not until one enters the living space that uninterrupted views of both front and back gardens are possible. Natural light plays on the different materials and surfaces to create an ethereal atmosphere that changes throughout the day and with the seasons.

Top Lighting

The space within the entrance hall expands vertically up to the first floor as you penetrate the building. A roof light above brings natural light into the heart of the space.

Open-plan Living

A compelling architectural diagram for contemporary living combines a compact arrangement of bedrooms with open-plan living spaces. The contrasting form and geometries of the two existing buildings lent itself perfectly to this arrangement. The large space within the bakery provides flexible living space, divided by free-standing storage and island units, whilst the smaller rooms within the baker’s house are ideally suited to bedrooms.

Special Places

The staircase is an exciting place to stop. In recognition of this we created an extended landing at the top, overlooking the entrance hall. The landing is large enough for a writing desk and chair.

Re-use, Recycle, Reclaim

Rescuing a dilapidated building is an intrinsically sustainable thing to do. Our attitude to the fabric of the building was quite relaxed; elements of value were retained, others were removed. The lintel over the original front door for example was reused above the fire place as a focus to the living space.

Brickwork to the original external wall of the house is exposed in the hallway, in contrast with the smooth plaster used elsewhere. Painted plywood, usually used as a sub-floor, has been laid directly on rigid insulation over the original concrete floor. Low energy florescent lights are discretely hidden behind a timber pelmet, and kitchen worktops and units were salvaged from my previous kitchen.

Process

As soon as our offer on the property was accepted I commenced the design to enable a planning application to be lodged immediately after ‘exchange’ of contracts. A period of six weeks between exchange and completion was agreed, to parallel the statutory planning period and allow just enough time to prepare construction information. Unfortunately the council took three weeks to merely validate the application, so construction was commenced, at some risk, prior to receiving planning permission. The pressure of paying two mortgages made it essential to compress the construction program. A contract was negotiated with a local builder prepared to wait until we had re-mortgaged to get the majority of his money. Construction was completed in three months and the property re-mortgaged immediately after.

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