There appears to be an almost infinite amount of events in the capital at any moment, be that exhibitions, festivals, walks, seasons etc etc. Must be a healthy sign of culture at the moment, but boy can it be a headache. The most recent weekend posed the challenge of trying to turn up to the glut of design and architectural-related show. I managed to make three – 100%detail/design, Tent London and one building inthe Open House shindig.
100%detail
Never been to this show before. Mainly consists of interior porn but there is some environmental products, systems and suppliers sprinkled in amongst the sexy lights/furniture and cool wallpaper and vastly over-priced tat. I was there to chair a conference session entitled “Exploring the boundaries of architecture for commercial buildings”. Not sure why they picked me – obviously the editor of Wallpaper was unavailable. The session nearly descended into farce as it was only ten minutes in that the three speakers down to talk actually all arrived. All my ad-libbing skills were tested to the max as I frantically switched between different versions of scripts depending on who actually was there. Given that preoccupation i couln’t tell you too much about the content of the session. I did sit in on the one previous, which did prove fairly illuminating.
A panel including Bill Watts from Max Fordhams, Bill Gething from Feilden Clegg Bradley and Ian Roberts from Buro Four (see below) tackled greenwash.
Bill Gething took a pop at lazy use of language and pictures in the event brochure. This related to the new Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, sitting in a spread on sustainability and innovation. Apparently the stadium has nine times the embodied energy that was used for the Olympic stadium in Sydney eight years ago. “Is that an acceptable design for something that temporary?” he asked.
Open House
I managed to get into the Shoreditch Prototype House yesterday. nearly half an hour queueing. It’s been up for some years and is a self-build terrace house by architect Cox Bullied. They dub it as a “prototype low energy house for dense urban sites and explores the idea of greening the city through the use of vertical planting as screen, filter, shade and oxygenator”. The last point is what makes it distinctive – architecturally it’s fairly standard urban spaces, but the greenery adds to the performance and look. The firm is using this experience to work up a protoype for a green terrace. Good luck to them.
Tent London
Again never heard of this before, but apparently it was set up by the people behind 100%design, who felt east was more where it’s at, design-wise. I popped along to witness the work being carried out by Jon Goodbun and his crew at WAG. They’ve created an installation called Open Tables, which was well worth seeing.
The idea is to break out of the current working environment. So instead of laptops or desktops you have physical digital furniture. Users press old-style buttons more akin to machinery or pull out drawers to navigate across the web, tag content and build up patterns of information. As someone that has a multitude of windows up at any moment during working hours the ideas behind this – integrating cyrber space with real space – are very appealing. According to Jon the sponsors of the installation Workspace are really keen on the idea. It was certainly refreshing to see contraptions that were part Heath Robinson, part intriguiing cyber cafe in amongst the oh so cool an pristine designs and technology on display at the rest of the show.
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