Could this be the future of community centres? Open House is a vertical village of haphazardly stacked house shaped rooms recently opened in Anyang, Korea.
Raumlaborkorea, a research and intervention unit of the design group Raumlaborberlin, were invited to design, programme and build this centre as part of ‘Anyang public art project/ A new community in the open city’. Described by it’s designers as a ’social sculpture’, the project aims to knit into the existing urban and social landscape and not only serves the local community but was also built by them!
Two hundred residents of Anyang took part in building workshops and completed the stacked rooms which include a bicycle rent shop, a children’s play pavillion, a community garden and a tea room.
I love this project, Raumlaborkorea have reinvented the architecture associated with community and participation and created a playful and exciting project which also looks great!
New York designers Nema workshop have created this unusual interior for emerging brand D’espresso.
Asked to relate the design to its location in Madison Avenue, Nema workshop took inspiration from nearby Bryant Park Library but turned the room sideways to form this playful interior.
Full scale photographic prints onto custom tiles allow bookshelves to wrap from floor to ceiling, whilst gravity defying pendant lights jut out from behind the bar. A herringbone clad wall opposite to this mimics a floor in this surreal café space.
The designers’ slanted take on a straightforward concept makes for a spectacular, if not slightly disorientating interior!
Smiljan Radic and Marcela Correa from Santiago de Chile were invited to participate in the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale under the theme ‘People meet in Architecture’ curated by Kazuyo Seijima. As soon as you enter the Arsenale space you’ll spot the beautiful sculpture ‘the boy hidden in a fish’, a large stone with a space carved out for one person to fit into.
The minimal sculpture seems to refer to the grimm brothers story ‘the sea-hare’. The team aims to offer hope for a serene future after the earthquake in chile on 27 february 2010. After earthquakes, people need to rebuild a future that is protected, perfumed, and peaceful.
Its always nice to see campaigns that are fun and get people involved. Dulux Walls is a film for the Let’s Colour Campaign by Euro RSCG London for Dulux. The exciting initiative set out to transform dull grey areas into vibrant spaces with 120 different bright coloured paints and the help of members of the community. Everything was beautifully documented by award winning director Adam Berg who captured the colour in Brazil, France, London and India over a four week period.
Bus-Tops will be a public art installation on the roofs of bus shelters across London, inspiring wonder and creativity in unexpected places. LED panels will become canvases showcasing digital commissions by a range of established artists, as well as allowing Londoners to display their creativity, play games and express what is special about their London.
People will be able to submit and view artwork through a number of mediums including website and mobile applications. Using drawing toolkits, people can create images, text or animations for display on the panels. For those unable to view the roofs of bus shelters, the website will provide live updates of the artwork and the opportunity to construct personal ‘routes’ through the works.
Cutting edge technology will also allow the bus shelters to develop individual personalities, becoming ‘Viziters’ to the city in their own right in the run up to the Games. Over their period of stay, each Bus-Top shelter will develop a unique character through their relationships with each other, members of the public and participating artists.
The canvases will appear on the roofs of bus shelters across London from July 2011.
Norwegian architects PUSHAK have made a striking installation of moss-covered arches in the entrance and gallery space of the Architecture Foundation, London. The project, named Moss Your City, is the outcome of the Foundation’s international exchange scheme which is aimed at promoting the work of emerging architects in Norway and the UK.
PUSHAK intended the installation to be a representation of Norwegian landscape but its haphazard and angular openings read more like an eccentric English maze that’s been allowed to overgrow in strange geometries. It’s fairy-tale like quality has been taking urban dwellers by surprise since the exhibition was set up in June for the London Festival of Architecture.
The work, designed by Sissil Morseth Gromholt, Camilla Langeland, Marthe Melbye and Gyda Drage Kleiva, has emerged from the Oslo-based practice’s research into the relationship between contemporary architecture, landscape and natural resources. It was inspired by the Bankside Urban Forest (a focus area of the London Festival of Architecture 2010) and by the work of green activists across South London. The aim of the project was to show that moss to be a ‘beautiful and versatile material that can work in harmony with contemporary design’.
The exhibition has been extended until the end of this week.
The London based firm Arup Associates have won the top Golden Beetle Prize for their ‘insect hotel’. The ‘Beyond the Hive’ competition, hosted by British Land and The City of London, created a brief that called for a sustainable and creative insect habitat for the City of London parks.
The bio-mimetic design is constructed out of 25 layers of 20 mm-thick birch plywood. The irregular voids are cut out using a CNC machine and loosely bonded together on site with mechanical fixings. the 1500 mm x 1500 mm hotel’s facade is influenced from the voronoi pattern, an organic system of irregular shapes often found in nature, such as the wings of a dragonfly. the 500 mm-deep compartments provide an armature for the recycled waste materials, each compacted with different types of deadfall to cater to different types of insects: Stag beetles require rotting logs for their larvae to eat and grow in, while butterflies and moths prefer a series of vertical slots using dry wooden pieces and tree barks.
For the Serpentine’s 40th Anniversary the gallery commissioned renowned French architect Jean Nouvel to design its 10th annual pavilion. Following the tradition of experimentation associated with the Serpentine Pavilions, Nouvel designed a dramatic and daring red structure that contrasts lightweight materials with metal cantilevers. Large awnings and sloped walls in geometric forms provide the framework for glass, polycarbonate and fabric infills that create an interesting play between interior and exterior spaces. The structure is multifunctional, operating as a public space, cafe and an auditorium that will accommodate the Serpentine Gallery Park Nights. The design playfully incorporates traditional French outdoor tennis-tables.
The program has a unique model, giving the designer a maximum of six months for the entire process – from commission to completion, but with no budget restriction. Nouvel approached this project with the same conceptual rigour associated with his work so far and designed a dynamic pavilion for Londoners to enjoy for the summer.
In keeping with the theme of ‘the welcoming city’ the area between the South Bank and Elephant and Castle saw urban gardens in various shapes and sizes erected for the London Festival of Architecture.
Reduce, reuse, recycle was part of the brief and the environmentally minded projects were constructed using mainly recycled materials, palettes being particularly popular. The guerrilla gardening projects included a pop-up cookery school at much loved Borough Market where the students from the Cardiff University’s Welsh School of Architecture built nomadic allotments that provide people in tight spaces with the opportunity to grow their own food in dense urban environments.
Milos Mirosavic and Ivana Popovic (otherwise known as im.architecktur) are a pair of Serbian architects that take their coffee seriously. These images are of their BIJOU coffee shop concept, ‘a small and elegant spot for a daily dose of pleasure.’ Designed around notions of jewels and luxury, the bar space is wrapped with metal rods that are covered with tiles intended to ‘flicker like diamonds’ and reflect light over the floor, ceiling and walls.
The concept has won them much accolade and a prize in the ‘Business Premises’ category of the Tile Awards – a Europe-wide design competition aimed at illustrating new, creative and unusual uses of tiles to create ‘unconventional and sensational’ interiors. The competition, addressed to architects and interior designers under the age of 35, was initiated by German architecture magazine AIT to celebrate newcomers in the industry.
Concept image.
The tiles will reflect light on the shop surfaces.
