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Archived posts: Architecture

London Open House Weekend

Openhouse  

Blimey O'Reilly – where does the time go?  
  
One minute the trees and shrubs are just beginning to make with the shoots and buds, and then two seconds (and a billion gallons of rain) later, it's practically Autumn.  
  
And one of the heralds of Autumn is almost upon us again – the wonderful Open House London takes place on 20 and 21 September.  
  
Open House is an annual event where you get to wander about inside buildings old and new, and often get to meet the architects and/or owners too. There's a huge range of buildings that participate, from small residential homes to full-on skyscrapers. Though unfortunately 30 St Mary Axe (also known as the Gherkin), pictured above, isn't one of them this year, which is a damn shame.  
  
You can get the full programme from the Open House online shop, either snailmailed to you or downloadable as a pdf.
You may need to book for some events; and if you do, be sure to cancel your booking if you can't make it, otherwise they're going to ban you from all future events. Scary!

27 August 2008 | No Comments

A design guide to Newcastle

Newcastle_baltic

Living in a city like London, where there's constantly another show opening to attend, another private view to check out, another must-see product launch to go see, it can be easy to find yourself never venturing outside of Zone 6. If the world is on your doorstep, why go for a walk?  
  
But, heck, there's a wealth of incredible stuff outside the M25 if you just take a look.  
  
So we were dead excited when the good folks at Design Event recently got in touch to invite us up to take a look at Newcastle's design scene. So, come with us as we take you on a journey up north…

(more…)

18 August 2008 | 7 Comments

Designs of the Year

Kiosk

The new Brit Insurance Designs of the Year show started last week at the Design Museum, taking over from where the old Designer of the Year show left off in 2006. We went along on Saturday to take a look, and we’ll tell you all about that in just a moment.

But first, a gentle rant.

The show is, as you can hardly have failed to notice, sponsored by Brit Insurance. They’ve stuck their name right in front of it. The awards that go with the show are sponsored by them too. They’re called the Brit Insurance Design Awards. And frankly, that’s just rubbish. Instead of being mutually beneficial, it’s mutually detrimental. It makes the Design Museum look cheap, happy to bend over, grab its ankles and get its elegantly shaped butt branded by its corporate master; and it makes Brit Insurance look greedy and egomaniacal. Instead of making the event and awards the most important thing, they’ve made their sponsorship the important thing. And that doesn’t make us like them much.

This is a grim trend that’s been happening wherever sponsorship occurs (Carling Academy anyone?). Don’t get us wrong, it’s a very good thing that corporate sponsorship exists. It makes stuff happen, in bigger and better ways than would otherwise be possible. But, please, let’s restore some sense of modesty, elegance and sophistication to the way it’s done. Wouldn’t the Designs of the Year show, as supported by Brit Insurance, sound far better? Patronage, not prostitution*.

Rant over.

The show itself is a great mix of work arranged by discipline: Architecture, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Interactive, Product and Transport. You might question some of the entries, but it’s a really valuable opportunity to see what’s being going on across the design spectrum in the past year. It’s also great to be able to play with some of the entries, including the Nintendo Wii, Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori’s TENORI-ON digital musical instrument, and Ross Phillips’ Replenishing Body Kiosk (pictured above, being used by some kids in a much looser way than intended).

In the graphics section, we were particularly pleased to see the Butt Book nominated – it’s a compendium of Butt Magazine (that link is not at all safe if you’re at work), designed by Jop van Bennekom, and we’ve noticed it being the ‘inspiration’ for rather a lot of work recently.

Winners in each section, and one overall winner, will be announced in March.

* The fact that Peter Saville’s “THIS IS NOT A BROTHEL THERE ARE NO PROSTITUTES AT THIS ADDRESS” sticker is one of the graphics entries feels deeply ironic.

19 February 2008 | 1 Comment

Richard Rogers + Architects

Pompidou

While we were out in Paris just before Christmas, we managed to make some time to see the retrospective of architect Richard Rogers (and his practice) that’s currently on show at the Centre Pompidou.

And damn, we’re glad we did. It’s a fantastic show.

Normally architecture exhibitions leave us a bit cold: you’re just looking at little models of the buildings, rather than experiencing them for yourself. But this show takes place in one of Rogers’ most famous creations, and it makes the whole thing come alive. Here’s a bit from the exhibition guide:

Thanks to the three glass facades of the Galerie Sud, the exhibition is open to the city and visible from the street, respecting in this the basic principle of the builiding that Rogers designed with Renzo Piano. On the fourth side the only solid wall offers a comprehensive chronological presentation of 40 years of professional activity, taking in hundreds of projects and completed buildings. The 50 or so projects selected for the exhibition itself are presented on tables, abundant natural light being supplemented by that from the fittings designed by Rogers’ practice.

The exhibits are grouped into key architectural themes, and there are a huge number of incredibly detailed models; including Lloyds of London, the Bordeaux Law Courts, the Leadenhall Building and Terminal 4 at Madrid Barajas airport. One in particular stopped us in our tracks – a fantastic model of the (unrealised) masterplan for the development of the Lu Jia Zui district of Shanghai, which lit up to show huge amounts of information. That’s a terrible description. Here’s a picture instead:

Shanghai

In the middle of the exhibition there’s a large (and very pink) soft seating area, where you can lounge about and read a selection of books about Rogers’ work.

We left with a much better understanding of his buildings, and a real sense of respect for the practice as a whole.

If you get the chance, do make the trip. You won’t be disappointed.

7 January 2008 | 2 Comments

The way we live now

G2

So, cheerio to 2007, and hey there 2008, how you doing?

With the predictable glut of articles and features about the year ahead currently littering every magazine and newspaper you pick up, kudos to The Guardian for deciding to run with a pre-emptive review of the noughties, and particularly so for designing the article (in the G2 section) so beautifully. We highly recommend you nip out and pick up a copy.

We wanted to link out to the whole feature from here, but interestingly the Guardian Unlimited website has chopped it up into separate segments, and has also somehow forgotten to provide a link to it from their homepage.

Which is odd.

But as such, it rather neatly demonstrates how print media can still do some stuff far better than online media. Don’t get us wrong, we love the Guardian site; but it can’t (yet) present an article with the same pace and elegance as the newspaper.

For those of you who can’t get your hands on a copy, here are links to the elements of the feature:
The way we live now
The event
The face
The meal
The look
The soundtrack
The celebrity
The building
The fertility panic
The art
The book
The internet
The big Melt
The TV
The Superpower

And here’s hoping that the parts of the Guardian site still wearing their old clothes (as all the articles above are) soon switch into their shinier threads. (Compare and contrast: the soundtrack article above in old clothes and in new clothes.)

2 January 2008 | No Comments

People will always need plates

Trafficplate

Our friends over at People will always need plates have freshened up their site with some lovely new bits and bobs. Perfect timing if you fancy ordering up some sublimely elegant Christmas gifts. (And who’s to say those gifts can’t be for yourself?)

25 October 2007 | No Comments

Typographic cities

Surtees

We were wandering about the web today, and passed by Michael Surtees rather lovely DesignNotes blog, in which he’d just posted about the Typographic Walking Tour of New York that he’d done on Saturday.

It was organised by Tobias Frere-Jones from type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones, using the research he’d done for their wonderful typeface Gotham, which is based on American architectural signage.

Surtees has a fantastic Flickr set from the tour, and there are links to other sets on the H&FJ blog.

Deep yumminess. (And it reminded us of the Public Lettering walk that Phil Baines put together a few years back.)

Hmm. Wonder how much a flight to NYC is right now…

2 October 2007 | No Comments

An Oliver Jeffers themed weekend

We’re creatures of habit here at We Made This, so the weekend found us making our way down to London’s southbank for a bit of food and culture.

We kicked off at Borough Market. If you’re ever down that way round lunchtime, make sure you find the place that does the chicken wraps – they’re utterly delicious. And go rather well with a Berry Bliss smoothie.

Global_cities

We then ambled down to the Tate Modern for their Global Cities show, which you can still catch if you get along there in the next couple of weeks (it runs till 27 August). It’s a fascinating show, though it was the historical and sociological stuff that really got us going, rather than the art pieces.

While there, we browsed through the Tate bookshop, which is always a box of delights, and picked up The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers. It’s a truly wonderful kids book, a perfect combination of a great story and stunning illustrations; it reminded us of Dave McKean’s The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, which is high praise round these parts.

Jeffers

Sunday then found us meeting some friends at the Design Museum, which is currently showing an interesting Zaha Hadid show, and a huge exhibition of Jonathan Barnbrook’s work. We’re not massive fans of Barnbrook’s style (it’s just too damn hectic for our simple tastes), but his dedication to creating design with a social conscience is brilliant.

In the cafe there’s also a small exhibition of the Blanka posters created for the 50th Anniversary of Helvetica, and our favourite is the one by… Oliver Jeffers.

We headed back along the southbank having been tipped off that Stormtroopers had been seen outside County Hall.

Stormtrooper

They’re there as part of the Star Wars show (careful, noisy link) that’s on at the moment. We didn’t linger, as that whole particular bit of the southbank is a grim tourist trap (which is a massive shame considering how wonderful the section by the Royal Festival Hall is). But, if we had gone into the show, we would have seen yet another bit of Jeffers’ work, in the form of his customised Darth Vader helmet for Toys R Evil.

Oliver Jeffers, Lord of Southbank: we love you.

13 August 2007 | No Comments

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