Monday, August 31, 2009

burnham pavillion by zaha hadid in chicago


As part of the Burnham Plan Centennial celebrations, Zaha Hadid Architects designed one of the two Burnham Pavilions. The Burnham Plan Centennial is all about celebrating the bold plans and big dreams of Daniel Burnham’s visionary Plan of Chicago. It’s about reinvention and improvement on an urban scale and about welcoming the future with innovative ideas and technologies. The design merges new formal concepts with the memory of Burnham’s bold, historic urban planning.

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The pavilion is composed of an intricate curved aluminum structure, with each element shaped and welded in order to create its unique fluid form. Fabric skins have been tightly zipped around the metal frame to create the curvilinear shape. The interior skin also serves as the screen for a video installation by Thomas Gray that explores Chicago’s past and future.

“Fabric is both a traditional and a high-tech material whose form is directly related to the forces applied to it - creating beautiful geometries that are never arbitrary. I find this very exciting.” - Hadid.

The Burnham Pavilions will be open and free to the public in Millennium Park now through October 31, 2009. More details here. Best of interior and architecture

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Outdoor Modular Seating and Outdoor Modular Sofa by Bonacina Pierantonio


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Italian company Bonacina Pierantonio has designed these contemporary, outdoor modular seating and modular sofa collections with a flair for fashion and a true love of the outdoors. The Ellipses Seating line by Giuseppe Vigano is distinguished for its repeating elliptical motif with a lacquered metal frame. The Tambo Sofa designed by Fabiano Trabucchi features a tubular profile in stainless steel with a contemporary brushed finish. These outdoor modular seating collections are available in white, black or honey finish and come with removable polyethylene foam seat cushions. The outdoor modular sofas allow for a totally customized seating arrangement, whether your outdoors are imposing or intimate in nature. Check out the Ellipses Seating and Tambo Sofa atBonacina Pierantonio.

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bonacina-pierantonio-outdoor-modular-seating-sofa-7.jpgBest of interior and architecture

A Taste of Tendence 2009 in Frankfurt


The Tendence 2009 consumer-goods fair was held last month in Frankfurt, Germany. Tendence is an exhibition that is popular with design-oriented retailers looking for new and interesting products. Below are 15 photos that offer a small taste of this year’s exhibition.

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The Hotel Fasano Rio de Janeiro by Philippe Starck


French designer Philippe Starck used wood, glass and marble as core materials in his design for the Hotel Fasano in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The 92 room hotel overlooking Ipanema beach enjoys a spirit of sophisticated casualness, with many furnishings in the vein of 1950s and ’60s Brazilian design, including pieces by Studio Branco&Preto, Sergio Rodrigues and exclusive creations by Philippe Starck himself.

Visit the Hotel Fasano website – here. Visit Philippe Starck’s website – here.

Best of interior and architecture

Mews House by TAKA Architects


TAKA Architects have sent us photos of a mews house they’ve designed in Dublin, Ireland.

The house was designed for a family that had recently moved out of their long-term family home and wanted their new home to maintain some sense of continuity with their former lives. The mews house was built in the rear garden of a renovated Victorian house where the parents live, and was built for one of their daughters to live in.

Photos by Alice Clancy

Mews House by TAKA Architects

These two new homes house two generations of the same family (A renovated Victorian House for the parents sharing a rear garden with a new Mews house for one of the daughters). The now grown-up family had recently moved out of their long-term family home and wanted these new homes to maintain some sense of continuity with their former lives. Two intertwined themes run through both homes, those of memory and tectonic expression.

The memories of the family are used as a conscious architectural driver throughout both houses. Their social rituals are given tangible form within the design of the new houses. Typical domestic objects are distorted in material and scale to form a psychological landscape specific to the occupants.

The daughters recollection of the stairs in the old house being ‘another room’, finds built form in an enlarged landscape stairway offering spaces for pause. Her fond memories of the kitchen as a social space and sitting by the open fire distort the two new ‘hearths’ (one for cooking one for fire) into non-orthogonal shapes suggesting uses yet open to appropriation. Finally the insistence of the ‘fire being the centre of the home’ is realised by the location of an industrial scaled chimney rising through the scheme at the centre of the plan, organising the spaces throughout.

In the parent’s new home their anxiety about moving from the old house was addressed. Their weekly social ritual of the wider family gathering together for Sunday dinner was a focal point, in order to maintain the continuity of the family unit. In the new home the dining table is given priority of place and a ritual character. Cast in concrete in an altar-like form the dining table communicates its importance through its immovable materiality.

As a further signifier of the special value of this space the expression of construction takes on a cultural role. In the wall behind the table custom-made glazed bricks are set. Named ‘Ruskin’ bricks (after Ruskin’s inspirational theories on construction in architecture); the bricklayer was given 100 identical bricks to lay in any combination he saw fit. Intended as both a marker of the process of construction and an explicit elevation of brickwork to the position of art, the result is a random graphic pattern that is not simply hung on the wall but part of the very construction that forms the building.

A similar interest in constructional expression is seen in the Mews house. The Mews house’s facades take their key from the Flemish-bond brickwork walls of the Victorian House, seeking a kind of ‘constructional context’ with its older brother. The unique bonds are the result of ‘separating’ the Flemish bond into two layers, and conceptually situating the home in the space between these two layers.

The extrovert front façade receives the ‘projecting brick’ layer, which oscillates in appearance depending on natural light conditions. To the rear, the façade becomes a mesh of brickwork where those projecting bricks on the front leave their resultant holes in the rear wall, allowing ventilation to the rooms behind to be taken directly through this brick skin.

Throughout both homes, construction is expressed directly as the finished product imbuing these two new homes with a powerful, domestic character.

Visit the TAKA Architects website – here.Best of interior and architecture