I’ve just come back from the exhibition at the Design Museum and I thought it would be a nice idea to post few comments about the unique experience.

The excitment of speaking to David Chipperfield has shaken my evening. I don’t even know how I had the idea to approach him during the view of the exhibition. I was having a look here and there since the room was quite crowded at the beginning and I saw him wondering around the room. After a quick but amable chat I asked him the autograph and I went back to the beautiful models of the exhibition.

I have to say that the evening has been particularly inspiring for a series of reasons. I found the projects selected for the Design Museum quite interesting and informing at the same time (there were projects that are still to be completed).  I would probably argue the way with the projects were separated because there wasn’t a single path of circulation within the space. I loved the narrative through the big scale models throughout the room. The axonometric drawings on the white walls were an other really effective way to express the ‘reflective and resonant’ design of David Chipperfield.

It was overwhelming to see that his buildings are so similar to my way to see architecture. It is weird to think that 2 years ago I didn’t know much about him and, just recently, I have spent time looking at his way to convey semplicity and pureness through geometry, proportions and materials. I have always asked myself whether there can be a way to  make the ‘architecture lasts and resist the culture of spectacle’. David Chipperfield in my opinion cleverly succeded in this intent.

STUTTGART, Germany — The clash between builders and preservationists is as old as architecture itself, but it reached a fever pitch in the recent gilded age. And it is especially fraught in Germany, where the construction boom that began with the country’s reunification sometimes seems like a convenient tool for smoothing over unpleasant historical truths.

Few current projects better illustrate this conflict than Stuttgart 21, a plan to build an enormous new railway station, along with 37 miles of underground track, in the heart of this old industrial city. The $7 billion development, which is expected to be approved by the end of the year, is part of an ever-expanding high-speed train network that planners hope will one day link the entire continent. As one of the largest developments in Europe, it could radically transform the city center.

But the design shows a callous disregard for architectural history. Its construction would require the partial destruction of one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks: the Hauptbahnhof, Paul Bonatz’s Stuttgart central rail terminal, a monument of early German Modernism built from 1914 to 1928.

And in a particularly perverse gesture of “facadism” — a favorite tactic of bureaucrats and developers in which a few architectural elements are preserved while the rest of a structure is bulldozed — it would leave the station’s main hall and tower standing like some architectural amputee.

Even more troubling, Stuttgart 21 joins a growing list of misguided projects that are reducing Germany’s 20th-century architectural history to a fairy tale version of the truth.

Bonatz’s most celebrated works, like a system of streamlined locks and bridges built along the Rhine in the late 1920s, have a spare elegance reminiscent of the best examples of W.P.A. architecture in America. And even some of his Nazi-era work, like the 1936 Basel Art Museum, has an undeniably human dimension. Its stone facade, with its low classical arches, remains one of the city’s beloved landmarks.

But Bonatz is not an easy architect to love. The struggle to keep his practice afloat at the height of the Nazi era led him into endless compromises — aesthetic and moral. His studies for a gargantuan round stadium and a Munich train station — mercifully never built — represented the kind of grotesquely overblown classicism that Hitler adored. At the same time, his criticism of the work of Paul Troost, one of Hitler’s favorite architects, irritated the Gestapo. He eventually fled to Turkey.

Bonatz, in other words, was the kind of morally ambiguous opportunist found throughout architectural history, someone who may have ignored uncomfortable political realities when it served his interests and who fine-tuned his aesthetic to suit the values of his clients. Yet he also produced works of undeniable beauty.

Completed several years before Hitler took power, the Stuttgart terminal may be Bonatz’s most masterly architectural balancing act. Its imposing front facade, marked by a shallow arcade and towering stone pillars, is as haunting as an early de Chirico painting. Framed by stone entry halls at either end, it has a severe, stripped-down Classicism that also suggests why Bonatz was able to continue building well into the Nazi era. The two monumental wings, which extend back to frame the tracks, only add to the terminal’s imposing scale.

Yet Bonatz carefully softened this effect by placing the clock tower at the station’s southeast corner. The position of the tower, which once housed private waiting rooms for the king, helps to break down the design’s symmetry and gives it a human dimension. Set slightly off center from the city’s historic axis, it also demonstrates a genuine sensitivity to context, locking the design into a larger urban composition without interrupting the flow of traffic.

Stylistically, the design embodies Bonatz’s quest to find a balance between Classicism and Modernism. The first of the two wings, built from 1914 to 1917, is the most traditional and conservative, with spiraling wood staircases inside and elaborate ironwork grates over the first-floor windows. The great entry hall, built at the same time, had a traditional wood beam ceiling.

By the mid-1920s, when Bonatz was designing the second entry hall, he was using brick vaults instead of timber. The final wing, designed a few years later, was the most streamlined, its windows forming staccato horizontal bands that suggest that the architect was moving toward a more Modern aesthetic.

The entire composition can be read as an effort to come to terms with some of the period’s deepest anxieties: the struggle to keep pace with jolting technological and social changes and the related fear of losing contact with the past.

The new station, designed by Ingenhoven Architects, lacks similar ambitions. To construct it, the German rail authority plans to destroy everything but the terminal’s main halls and tower. The platforms would be buried underground, with the tracks set parallel to the old entry hall. A vast plaza would sit on top of this lower level, its surface pierced by big, eye-shaped light wells. Four new entryways, with shell-shaped glass and concrete roofs, would lead down to the platforms from the plaza’s corners.

The plan’s defenders argue that it is critical to the city’s economic future. It will reaffirm Stuttgart’s place as a hinge between Western and Eastern Europe, as well as speed up travel south, to Athens. What’s more, demolishing the old tracks and burying the platforms underground will free acres of valuable real estate in the city center — something that could generate billions of Euros in revenue for the rail authority.

Finally, there is the belief that large-scale infrastructure projects are just what we need in tough times. We need jobs, don’t we? And aren’t the best parts of the old building being saved?

What’s scary about this approach is its familiarity. Engineers, stop watches in hand, calculate the most efficient time between two points. Politicians crunch numbers, estimating that the bigger the job, the bigger the rewards. Developers begin counting the profits to be made when large swaths of public land are turned over to private interests.

Meanwhile, those who care about cities and their history are placated with the facadist dodge. And architecture is reduced to a picture postcard — an empty, superficial veneer.

In the case of Stuttgart, the nuances that breathe life into the design — the sequence of spaces leading from the city to the tracks, the conflict between tradition and modernity, will be lost. The new entry halls, however elegantly conceived, are likely to make the old hall seem like an appendage, stripping it of the function that gave it meaning.

There were other possible options. A proposal by the architect Roland Ostertag that would have replaced the existing train shed with a barrel-shaped glass roof would have been far more elegant and economical. Moving part of the tracks underground could have been part of that scheme too. And the difference in travel time would probably have been minimal. Many opponents of the plan assert that the new design would shave just a few minutes of travel time between Stuttgart and Ulm, the next stop on the line. Replacing the tracks that run between the two cities would save much more time. When I spoke to the station’s architect, he did not dispute this claim.

But this option was never fully explored, lest it give ammunition to the project’s opponents.

The insistence on putting economics above culture has already led to the destruction of major historic monuments like the Palace of the Republic in Berlin, a landmark of the East German period. It may soon lead to the dismemberment of Tempelhof Airport, one of the few great architectural accomplishments of the early Nazi period. If it continues, it will lead to a cheapened, oversimplified view of history, one that suppresses the conflicts and contradictions that make cities vital.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/arts/design/03railway.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4

But Claire Bigbie and her partner Jay Shapiro were unafraid to take on the challenge with their Noe Valley Clipper Street Victorian. I knew Claire from Readymade, where she worked as a stylist at photo shoots, and based on her work for the magazine, I knew her house would be impeccably decked out from top to bottom when it was completed. And so it was.

Let’s start from the beginning: the exterior color. The deep indigo is a stand-out on the block compared to the pale yellow, blue, and white homes, and the turquoise front door inserts just the perfect surprising pop.

As with most of the house, an artist’s touch sets the stage in the entry: their friend, a tattoo artist, painted the house number in classic Victorian typography on the window above the front door.

The bright hallway is covered with modern wallpaper and their favorite prints, silkscreens, and original art.

At the end of the hall is the living room/dining room/kitchen area where they spend most of their time and where most of their guests congregate. The open rafter ceiling gives the space a raw contrast to the high gloss of the white walls and media cabinetry

Here’s a great perspective facing the kitchen and hallway from the other side. The long, luscious counter is solid wood and super smooth to the touch. There’s bench seating underneath the window and a welcoming leather couch on the other side of the counter.

Bench seating and classic Eames chairs in the bright dining nook.

Leave it to Claire to create a singular bathroom, unlike any other. Tiled like a swimming pool, complete with curved wall, a mosaic with black tiles reads “10 Ft.” at the 10-foot mark of the wall near the ceiling.

Back at the front of the house is the bedroom, just off the hallway. The decorative fireplace is painted a beautiful blue and topped with a complete set of Sara Paloma pottery. 

The second bedroom, attached to the front room, is designated as their dressing room. (You can imagine Claire’s spot-on fashion sense, and thus the space necessary to house the clothes.)

The entire downstairs space is Claire’s studio (she works at Envelope A+D, an architecture and design firm in Oakland). It’s enormous, and filled with light pouring in through all the windows. Instead of the traditional French doors that most people would have put in, Claire and Jay went for a glass garage door. Genius.

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/wallflower/detail?entry_id=48918/

Av Peter Nilsson
Publicerad Wednesday 16 September, 2009.

The competition attracted 74 entries and 5 were shortlisted. Southend Pier was in 2007 voted Pier of the Year and is the longest pleasure pier in the world. An iconic pier with its own distinctive character, history and people. One of the main attractions of the Pier is the view of the sea, and in particular, the feeling of being on the sea.

”A key element of our proposal is to make sure that the people of Southend use the Pier and take it into their heart. The Pier Head should be a vibrant place filled with activities”, says Fredrik Pettersson, architect in charge together with landscape architect Niels de Bruin. We envision a walkable and bikeable street with attractive destinations located every 500 metres.

The Pier should be an extension of the High Street’s urban fabric onto the sea. We have proposed a series of destinations starting at Priory Park and ending at the Pier Head, transforming the pleasure pier into an urban pier. We imagine The Pier Head designed as a public space functioning like a modern agora, part theatre, part art space, acting as a vibrant meeting place for both the people of Southend-on-Sea and visitors.

The main feature of the new Pier Head design will be an open air theatre with a terraced platform that will create lee, view point and seating for the audience. The outdoor theatre, with the Southend coastline as backdrop, has the capacity of 500 spectators. New buildings, a Culture Centre and a Restaurant, will be built offshore next to the existing Pier Head, creating a balanced enclosure and populated edges around the theatre space.

”The dramatic curving shapes of the buildings are derived from the wind and the waves themselves. This public,yet enclosed, space will be perfectly integrated into the scenery. It will be sculpted by wind and wave”, says landscape architect Niels de Bruin.

In many ways, Scandinavian Surface follows a path well-trodden by Norwegian designers. The quartet met while studying in Norway’s second city, Bergen, and set up shop there to pursue careers in design. It’s a route familiar to the likes of up-and-coming furniture design group Tveit & Tornoe, and it has turned Bergen into a city stuffed full of creatives.

However, Scandinavian Surface’s tale strays from that plot somewhat. While Bergen’s design colleges mean the place is choc-a-bloc with furniture designers (like Circus and Geir Saetveit, as well as Tveit & Tornoe) and graphic designers (such as Grand People, Luftmensch and Haltenbanken), there are a few textile design graduates who’ve then switched discipline.

Scandinavian Surface’s Kristine Dybwad, Katrine Nylund, Ann-Tove Engenes and Asne Midtgarden all studied textile art at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, but now find themselves concentrating on wall graphics. It may sound niche, but the group is clearly making this niche its own.

What’s more, unlike many others, the founders didn’t join forces the minute they’d graduated, but got together after a decade of solo projects in applied arts, costume design and set design.

‘We wanted to use our experience in a more commercial way, compared with being an artist,’ says Dybwad. ‘We thought that together we would have the resources to go commercial.’

They got off to a speedy start in 2003, when they showed a big-leafed wallpaper design in a national touring exhibition. ‘It was new for Norway and had a good response,’ says Dybwad. A year later they took space at London’s 100% Design, and were rewarded with an award for best international newcomer.

It may not be a huge leap of faith from textiles to wallpaper, but Scandinavian Surface insists that it is rethinking wall covering itself. So its latest range, which launches at this year’s 100% Design, comprises 12 illustrated panels, which can be hung separately or together. It is called Panel Piece, and its creators think of it as an artwork rather than straightforward wallpaper. ‘It makes quite a bold impression when you put more than one together,’ says Engenes.

While the quartet’s medium may vary from that of many of their peers, their aesthetic is distinctly Norwegian. Panel Piece is strewn with references to the great outdoors, which can be seen from Bergen’s pretty cobbled streets and white, weather-boarded houses.

‘We like to think of Norway as our farm that we can harvest ideas from,’ says Engenes. ‘These panels are like glimpses of Norwegian nature. You get some fresh air in your room.’

Dybwad adds that these countryside references are combined with references from Norway’s old embroidered textiles, ‘like the geometric double stitch that recurs in each panel and connects the organic designs together’.

While the group has been trying to build up distribution and sales outlets, it has had some good uptake from the contract market. Newspaper businesses, a hotel, shops and an oil company have papered lobbies, loos or entire rooms in its designs. Its biggest client to date is the Fairmont hotel in Abu Dhabi, which plans to use the Spring Beech pattern for its lobby.

Dybwad, Nylund, Engenes and Midtgarden may share a similar sartorial aesthetic – interesting, feminine outfits in tasteful, Northern European muted colours – but they claim that they can always tell whose design is whose. They are clear about what the company style is – ‘very fresh and airy and quite dry’, according to Engenes, and again, this links back to nature.

‘The Norwegian climate is harsh and the topography is steep mountains, which are cut down to sea level by a network of fjords. This freshness and air is something we want to portray in our design,’ she says. Then there’s the mountain flora. ‘We study these plants, often small and dry, yet beautifully shaped and surprisingly tough,’ she adds.

This aesthetic is honed through the group’s design process, which could see one partner doing a sketch and another moving it on. ‘It feels like getting presents all the time,’ says Engenes.

Dybwad acts as manager and handles accounts, Engenes manages press, catalogues and graphic presentation, Midtgarden is the computer genius, and Nylund deals with customer contacts.

Dybwad admits that they could do with someone to take over sales and accounts – maybe the group’s presence at this year’s 100% Design will help to bring that about.

All work by Scandinavian Surface

The exhibition will take place from Thursday 9 July to Monday 13 July at the Free Range Art & Design Show, the Europe’s largest showcase of graduate art and design.

Join us for drinks at the opening night of my degree show between 6 and 10 pm in London. The full address is :

T5 Brick Lane Entrance – Old Truman Brewery – 85 Brick Lane – E16QL – London

At the show is possible to buy Frame and Mark magazines as well as exploring the work of the next generation designers from Ravensbourne College of Design.

Free admission

rodeca bar at 100% detail
image © designboom

tom dixon created the rodeca bar for 100% detail, as part of the london design festival.
using the company’s signature polycarbonate sheets, the brightly colored bar consisted

windows with shutters
image © designboom

general view of the rodeca bar
image © designboom

general view of rodeca bar
image © designboom

more:
http://www.tomdixon.net
http://www.rodeca.de
http://www.100percentdetail.co.uk
london design preview 08 : tom dixon at 100% detail

This 180m-high Herzog & de Meuron-designed pyramid tower is a proposal for the first skyscraper in Paris for 30 years.

The 50-storey building will be situated in the south-west of the city at the Porte de Versailles.

It has been nicknamed the ‘Delanoë tower’ after the city’s socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë, who won the fight to bring high-rises back to Paris after convincing the city council in July to make exceptions to the 30-year-old ban.

The ban prohibits buildings of above 37m-high and was inspired by the 210 Tour Montparnasse.

The privately-financed building is scheduled for completion in 2012 and is the first of six high-rise developments planned in the city.

The glazing in the roof of Hopkins Architects’ multi award-winning Evelina Children’s Hospital in Southwark, south London, will have to be replaced.

According to Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust, the glass used in the building’s four-storey atrium has been found to be ‘not compliant with the contract specification’ and will have to come out.

Worryingly, it has also emerged that the trust had been aware of the potential problems with the glazing in the ‘conservatory’ roof from as early as May 2007. Yet the glazing units, which have defective rubber seals, are not expected to be replaced until next year.

This is the latest difficulty to hit the building, which was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 2006 and hailed as a low-energy hospital ‘exemplar’, and follows problems with overheating. Two years ago the trust admitted it needed to install ‘additional chilling capacity for the ventilation system’ to combat ‘temperature control issues’.

In addition, a scaffolding tower has been parked inside the atrium for the last six weeks to tend to another, unrelated issue – this time with a damaged glazing unit.

Although the cost of the replacement is not yet known, it is understood contractor MJ Gleeson is haggling with insurers and suppliers over who will foot the bill.

A spokesman for the trust said: ‘MJ Gleeson is still working with its contractors and the suppliers of the glazing to determine the most appropriate solution.

‘[MJ Gleeson] has assured the trust that there is no risk to the safety of people using the building and that the problem will not affect the performance of the glazing.’

Hopkins was unavailable for comment.

Fresh back from Venice, Christine Murray has recommendations for those planning to visit the Venice architecture biennale.

1. Ordinary Architecture, China pavilion
Tucked away in the Virgin Garden and Oil Depot at the Arsenale, many visitors overlooked this stunning pavilion. Four architects built structures as a response to natural disasters, including the Paper-brick house by Li Xinggang, which questions the use of heavyweight materials after the Sichuan earthquake, when many victims were buried beneath concrete buildings. In the Oil Depot, photographer Wang Di exhibits his Red Dwelling & Beijing Streets photo series, which questions the selective history created through the destruction and retention of selective buildings.

2. Gaasitoru Gas Pipe, Estonian Exposition
A biennale favourite, this lemon yellow gas pipe in the Giardini runs from the Russian pavilion to the German pavilion without stopping, a comment on the controversial Nord Stream initiative to build a direct gas pipe from Russia to Germany. From the catalogue, ‘The installation highlights the spatial dimension of politics and the political dimension of architecture.’

3. 1907… after the party, Belgian pavilion
With the exception of a large photo print by German artist Thomas Demand and another by French fashion designer Hedi Slimane, the white-walled rooms of the Belgian pavilion are empty, but the floor is inch-deep in confetti.

4. Italian pavilion
There are more than two dozen architects on display in the Italian pavilion, but a highlight was Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei and Herzog & de Meuron’s installation, soaring pyramids of bamboo chairs.

5. Home/Away, British pavilion
Beautifully designed, the sparse and sober air of this exhibition acts as a counterpoint to the eccentric French and German pavilions nearby. A highlight are the lovely wooden models.

6. Extreme Nature: Landscape of Ambiguous Spaces, Japanesepavilion
Junya Ishigami has designed a gentle exhibition. Fine pencil sketches of gardens and houses cover the walls of the Japanese pavilion, while a series of transparent greenhouses, interspersed with plantings and household items and furniture, are positioned outside. The pavilion has a quietly powerful presence.

7. Open: Position Practice, American pavilion
There are real ideas here, in a pavilion that examines the work of architects in desperately deprived areas, highlighting ‘the means by which architects reclaim a role in shaping community and the built environment’ – an inspiring show and arguably the finest pavilion at this year’s biennale.

8. Towards Paradise, Gustafson Porter
Located on the fringes of the Arsenale, Gustafson Porter reclaimed a piece of land to create this magical, secret garden, which includes abandoned buildings, a large garden allotment bursting with fruit and veg, and an elegant balloon installation over an elliptical green lawn.

9. Fantastic Norway
Norwegian design studio Fantastic Norway’s red caravan journeyed to the biennale. The caravan is a mobile platform for architectural discussions, debates and workshops.

10. Gathering Place, Scottish pavilion
Situated next to Santiago Calatrava’s new bridge, Gareth Hoskins’ seven-metre high structure is a  whimsical staircase to nowhere on the banks of the Grand Canal.

Read more about the Venice architecture biennale