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‘Static Bubbles,’ Exhibition by Nendo

Shan Tara — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:41:53 +0000

This year, Tokyo-based design firm nendo has celebrated its tenth anniversary by doing what nendo does best : quietly but surely going about their work. This may not sound like a way to mark a successful decade, but the fruits of nendoís labour were anything but ordinary. It is this combination of thoughtfulness and caprice, hidden within minimalism of form and an unusual attention to process and detail, that make nendo what they are, and that characterizes the new work shownat Carpenters Workshop Gallery.

One keyword for understanding nendo’s work is ‘lightness’. Of the new work shown in this exhibition, the farming-net objects (2012) play with the visual perception of physicality. They claim space for their strange geometric forms but hover between perceptibility and imperceptibility, materiality and immateriality. Stronger than organdy but lighter and more flexible than wire mesh, the farming-net objects merge structure and form, object and shadow. They are absolutely functional yet prefer to suggest in their three-dimensional clouds the space that a container or vase might occupy.

Mobile ‘Bed Cube’ Bedroom

Shan Tara — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:41:01 +0000

This Mobile Bed Cube bedroom is the perfect way to hang on to some privacy in a shared space. This unique “bedroom” is the perfect solution for people who live in shared bedrooms or dorms. You can move it around in any direction according to the space in your apartment. It is compact, and can easily fit into any room.The cube evolved out of wanting cozy with the option of keeping a big, open space at the same time.

‘Contortion Table’ by Suzy Lelièvre

Ian — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:30:15 +0000

French designer Suzy Lelièvre made this work of contortion table, a great metamorphosis an everyday furniture.

D House, Chile by Panorama & WMR Arquitectos

Shan Tara — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:28:54 +0000

The building is situated on a cliff in Matanzas, Chile was designed by Panorama and WMRArquitectos. Build for a couple and their son the house is structured in a square volume of 9 by 9mts. Inside the architects intersect another volume at a higher level, which is rotated 45 degrees in relation to the plan, allowing double heights and the organization of space in the first floor.

The program is ordered in a simple way, a single space for the living room, dinning room and kitchen and on the back a sleeping area and the stairs to the second floor. Then, to the side and facing north the terrace, partly enclosed, allowing the users to be outside the days of extreme wind.

Three defined sectors as the result of the orientation to the panoramic views of the landscape, the isle, the beach and the forest in front of the ocean.

“Fonte Da Luz,” House in Portugal by Barbosa & Guimarães

Hans — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:51:05 +0000

Fonte Da Luz which means Source of light in Portuguese is a house build by Barbosa & Guimarãe architects located in an historical area. The architects Barbosa & Guimarães have explored all the resources of natural light that could offer the house. The housing is developed on three floors around the volume of the ladder, whose transparency guarantees the fluidity between the various functional areas.Inside of the building the architects mixed material as wood and marble. The other major objective where focused on the relationship between the pre-existing granite masonry and the new volume developing within it. The new object reveals some of the building’s history, from its remote origins in the 19th century until our intervention in the 21st century.

Barbosa & Guimarães

John Curtin School of Medical Research Stage by lyons Architecture

Hans — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 10:42:27 +0000

Australian architecture firm, lyons Architecture has completed John Curtin School of Medical Researc’, a research laboratory designed to enhance interactivity and collaborative research.

The body of the JCSMR-ANU building is formed of layered, linear bars of offices, support spaces, corridors, small controlled laboratory spaces and large PC2 Containment Level laboratories. These bars are graded across the section of the building in terms of their intensity of use, with the shared laboratory spaces and open-plan academic offices claiming the privileged perimeters.

At regular intervals these parallel ribbons are punctured by perpendicular zones that slice through the building from facade to facade through an enfilade of apertures, thresholds and windows. These penetrations make it simple to locate colleagues without entering the PC2 Containment areas but, most importantly, they leaven the buried interior spaces by providing elongated vistas through the layers of the building to the wider campus landscape. Consequently the building has an invigorating and porous spatial density.

Architecturally the dense, compact plan obliges us to reconsider the relationship between interior and exterior space. In Bigness Rem Koolhaas revels in the notion of an architecture where “the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the facade can no longer reveal what happens inside.

The humanist expectation of ‘honesty’ is doomed: interior and exterior architectures become separate projects”. Raphael Moneo inverts this thinking with his appreciation of dense “compactness”, valuing the extreme freedom it offers for the organization of interior space within a closed figure that “permits the building to live silently in the city but aware of its own condition, without flaunting the abundance of the interior”.

Neither Koolhaas’s exaggerated disjunction nor Moneo’s urban discretion sit comfortably as a rationale for JCSMR-ANU. The playfully ambivalent meeting of interior and exterior dramatically intensifies rather than denies their interdependence and JCSMR-ANU certainly does not live “silently” in the campus. Its presence is flamboyant and emphatic – but it does not flaunt, or conceal, its interior world. Rather than present, it re-presents the building’s interior with Lyons’ interest in abstraction and signification variously employed on the building’s exterior surface. Exquisitely formed precast concrete panels, which relate to the 1,700-mm laboratory planning module, display pictograms of the Vitruvian man, cellular structures, DNA spirals and nitrogen bases – a medical “powers of ten” rendered in soft, billowy white relief.

The DNA helix is formally interpreted in communal spaces that erupt on the building’s facade – in small meeting rooms for spontaneous, informal discussion and in the main stair that offers an open and generous vertical connection through the building at the point where it will graft onto the future stages.