Its been a while since posting updated info about the flat. Works were pretty much completed on site in September. There are some interior finishes and furniture that we are still working on, for instance in the living room, (as you can see in some sketch renders that I've posted below). But these are to be completed within the next couple of months as the clients are currently happily living in the flat after moving into it at the end of summer.The kitchen has turned out particularly successfully in its arrangment and finishes and is definitely the main social space of the flat. We are now just wanting to dress the lounge room more by creating feature furniture so that these two rooms set each other off nicely.
Entrance
Before & after: Main corridor (with new wardrobes)
Before & after: (left) main bathroom (right) service bathroom
Bespoke joinery in main bathroom & the shower room
Detail shots of bespoke wardrobe in bedroom
Before & after: kitchen showing island/dining table
Kitchen
Lounge room leading off of kitchen
Furniture items we're currently developing for this room
Showing different types of storage spaces within bench
Below are some shots of an ongoing project with UFO , for some 5-axis cnc milled screens for their nested house project.
The 3D wave pattern of 2 interfering wave-forms is translated via Grasshopper to the flat surface of perspex screens to be perforated by a 5-axis milling machine at Metropolitan Works.
The attempt is that of creating an interference pattern which will obstruct street views whilst letting light inside the apartment.
Below are some quick panoramas of the flat's interior. Everything is still very much work in progress with most of the furnishings and several fittings missing; some errors need rectifying (such as the joiner finishing the wardrobe doors in the wrong RAL colour in an outburst of self proclaimed creativity), but all will be on hold for 2 weeks as everyone in Italy is going on holiday. We are also trying to develop a way of photographing the interiors which will convey the experiential qualities of moving through the different spaces and interacting with the various pieces of furnitures; their textures and details. These will be appearing soon on the blog too.
As works are coming to an end; during July's site inspection we concentrated on the quality of the finishes and in particular the various paint jobs which appeared to have been rushed a little and therefore need some improving. Additionally the Joiner started delivering the various furniture items which had been undergoing a varnishing process in his workshop. The spaces starting to look more inhabitable and ready to be used.
living room awaiting sliding door
kitchen Island acting as a storage for all the remaining fittings
Below are some images of two tables for the London Met end of year exhibition, Andrea created shop files for. They are both located in the UFO unit spaces (Masters and Diploma) and were assembled by London Met students. There is also a simple layout prepared for a recent exhibition at London Met, describing the potential usage of one of the tables designed by UFO Australia.
Diploma table cut from 12mm plywood using only friction joints
Masters in Digital Design laser cut bench (scaled model 1:5)
With all of the services prepared and ready, it is now a matter of rendering and finishing the shell. So, recently the floor and wall tiles have been laid down. In particular, the shower is looking great as it appears as its own small room within a larger room. We had a couple of issues with lining up the tiles on non-straight, non-90 degree walls but we came to a solution. Below you can see a plan showing the different choice of floor tiles for different rooms. The larger,living areas use the herringbone pattern and the narrow, corridor like spaces use the parallel plank arrangements.
Apart from rendering and finishing the shell, we have also been deciding upon the details and finishes of the furniture that is getting made for the flat. This has been an interesting process- rendered images have allowed us to see the general look of the furniture within the room but due to the size of it (wardrobe is 2.6m high or bed is 2.1) we have been deciding upon the finishes and materials by making full scale models of only its details.
wardrobe handle detail
Next week, the kitchen will be fitted!! Am looking forward to that..
Here is an example of how a ritual gives a site significance. It is also a really nice story...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/world/europe/06rome.html
The general practise is that the grid is the essential underlying ordering system. In a city plan, the grid allows you to identify relationships between the city’s composite elements. The grid uncovers the form of the city as a geometric composition that is manageable and controllable and that makes sense. The grid flattens all elements including the landscape into a system that has orientation and measurement.
When the orthogonal grid is used as the starting point for organising and drawing space it is a democratic move because it calls for equal distribution – of space, of load and of weight. It’s a political move and proposes a system of efficiency which ultimately reflects the type of society that is foreseen to inhabit the city – one that is manageable to govern and is given boundaries to grow within. As a system of management, parts of the city grid will hence be zoned out and the development of each zone can then be monitored. The value of a point within the grid is then based on its relationship to other points within the grid. A hierarchy begins to grow between the parts that initially had equivalent value. If the grid is initially free of a hierarchy could it be said to be a tool of liberation? Or is it that when confronted with a site of no historical precedence, a vacuum, the grid is the only move that can be made?
Thomas Holme 1624-1695 : Pennsylvania
The grid that features in much of Superstudio’s speculations could be said to be an act to cancel out existing objects. Without objects, there would be no ownership, no point of time from which an object would come into existence so there would be release from a historical continuum. The new city that emerges comprises of the multiplication of the same component; a square from a grid that becomes a cube. The grid can deny objects but there is still a space that people move within so what comes to the forefront are the inhabitant’s actions. If the grid was the tool that could restart everything, then is the origin always in the form of the grid?
Superstudio 1972 : Supersurface-Life
An alternative starting point for spatial organisation and city planning is the path. Australia contains an extensive system of Songlines – the method that enabled indigenous people to map the continent. A person could navigate the land by repeating the words of a song which described landmarks, important watering holes and landscape phenomena said to be traces from the creator-spirit. The path not only located sites for food and water but also became the visual form of a ritual – that which gives significance to a space that then becomes a place. In contrast to the grid as an organisational tool, a path gives space a sequential and hierarchical order and to follow a path is to re-enact a ritual.
However, in the contemporary city space, infrastructure is both the path’s visual form and the object that facilitates a civilisations survival needs. The differences between the types of ritual spaces that exist now within a city are aesthetic or tribal. A tribal path is that which is defined by an individual or a collective of individuals that, by re-enacting a ritual begin to define territories whose frontiers are not fixed or are defined by an alternative phenomena.
In terms of city planning, the overall benefit of the grid is that it activates a vacuum space or a site without context because it doesn’t need objects to do so. A path on the other hand needs reference markers or objects to call it into existence. Where are the vacuum spaces – sites without context located today and can a path undefined by objects be the starting point for its materialisation? And if the grid stands for a democratic move then what would be the social implications of this move?
Last week the MA LAB was finally completed. After almost 2 years, the design having been updated multiple times and the go ahead obtained to cut the MDF sheets at Met Works; the cut pieces were assembled over two days by a group of MA students. The design was to provide 10 PC work stations for the MA students and ample storage space for models, materials and portfolios. Design limitations included the sole use of friction joints and the lack of fixings to the floor and walls of the room.
collecting the cnc milled panels from MetWorks
laser cut model of initial design
arranging the components and fitting the friction joints together
Principle studio attended the Smart Geometry Workshop and Conference in Barcelona to further the exploration into tensioned surfaces. The 'Building Prototypes' workshop served as an opportunity to develop through fabrication, the creative possibilities shared by digital design and the most up to date numerically controlled construction techniques.
The stage within the IAAC building in Barcelona
The tensioned fabric surface and cable net to be stretched across the IAAC hall, was calculated and stressed through Processing and imported in G.C to be developed into flat elements.
surface in G.C and Processing
This revealed to be the trickiest part of the exploration as no accurate method for the description of the fabric's elastic behaviour could be produced. A series of approximations involving the discretization of the mesh geometry were used to create flattened fabric templates
Cutting and stitching process
tensioned element within cable net
Despite the availability of a cutting machine, the fragility of the fabric made it impossible to use the cutter, which required for each profile to be hand cut. This and approximations in the unfolding script were perceivable once the 26 fabric tubes were connected to the net frame. For such a reason it was chosen to keep the 3 which appeared to describe the geometry more closely.
26 tubes failing to connect to each other and the supporting net
PrincipleStudio's co -founders are Fionnuala Heidenreich and Andrea Marini whom are both graduates of the Architectural Association School of London. This site both documents and comments on the projects, ideas and observations that we are currently working on - whether they be in a conceptual or construction stage.More specifically though, this site mainly documents the construction process of a Refurbishment project we are doing in Milan at the moment.
