A living-room in a children's home

Tom Hughes

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the making. I spent Sunday volunteering at the site of our Childrens' Home project, helping them to get the building phase of their Living Room project underway.

The shared living room, before we started

It's been a fascinating project to be involved in. We were approached by The Mighty Creatives who were looking for someone who could work with the staff and residents at the Home to redesign their living room, making use of IT to communicate and visualise the process. In the end, we used StickyWorld and SketchUp with the LightUp plug-in… and if we could have found another software with a JoinedUp name, we'd have considered that too.

It's a tiny but intense project, and I found the design process really challenging. Working on occupied houses is always pretty involved, as being invited into the home requires a great deal of sensitivity to residents' preferences and relationships. At the same time, your own knowledge and experience as 'the professional' needs to be given a voice. As you'd imagine this particular living space is charged with a lot of meaning for many different people... But, by working together, we gradually achieved a design that everyone could take pride in.

The idea is that as much of the making work as possible is done by the staff and residents of the home, but I invited myself along on Sunday to lend a hand as they got underway. The electrian had already been in to do the first fix, so the next stage was setting out the studwork for the 'portal' feature, the lighting raft and the storage/entertainment wall. We made pretty good progress- a bit slowed by the effort of breaking up the world's densest fireplace hearth, but by the end of the day the design was beginning to pop off the page and in to the space. I loved being there to see this happen and hope to be back again as the project progresses.

In the meantime, we made a little film to celebrate the success of the collaborative design, and keep spirits up during the hard messy work ahead:

Living Room Project from 2hD Architecture Workshop on Vimeo.

Finishing touch

Thibaut Devulder

Mélanie and Béranger have been working hard on their self-build barn conversion during these last months. After creating the new openings in the stone walls, installing the new roof and finishing all the groundwork, they are now getting ready to repoint the interior of the freshly cleaned stone walls with lime mortar.

We are now finalising the detailed drawings for the internal timber structure while they manage the site themselves and do the hands-on building under their own steam. We are following their progress through their personal blog dedicated to the project.

Two 2hD projects shortlisted for RIBA EM Awards

Thibaut Devulder

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the shortlisted projects for the 2011 RIBA East Midlands Award for Architecture, celebrating the finest examples of architectural excellence in the region.

We are delighted that two of our projects have been shortlisted for this year's award:

Our stone memorial for the Nottingham Progressive Jewish Congregation

Our inflatable event space for the Lille Museum of Modern Art (LaM).

Lost Cuckoo report

Thibaut Devulder

The Lost Cuckoo project culminated last weekend with an event at the Wheee! International Childrens' Theatre and Dance Festival at Nottingham's Lakeside Arts Centre. Nearly 1000 visitors participated in this live public art project, building imaginative and gravity-defying structures.

In the weeks leading up to the festival, we designed with artist Marcus Rowlands and families from three schools in Bilborough, a cardboard building “module”. In essence, a box with a “secret corner” that could be popped in to join boxes together at interesting and unpredictable angles.

We've blogged about the project before: You can read more about the process, the event, and catch up on our live blog from the event itself.

We really enjoyed working on this project and are very proud of the results. This is largely down to our brilliant collaborators: Marcus Rowlands, Ruth Lewis-Jones from the Lakeside and — most importantly of all — the children, parents and staff from Portland, Melbury and Brocklewood schools.

Thanks also must go out for the generous support given by the Lakeside Arts Centre, the Arts Council England, Faspak, Staples and Nottingham Education Improvement Partnership.

The Lost Cuckoo this weekend

Thibaut Devulder

2hd and Marcus Rowlands would like to invite you, your family and friends to come and take part in The Lost Cuckoo, an exciting outdoor public art installation.

For the last four months we have been working with families from three schools inthe Bilborough area of Nottingham. Together we have designed a cardboard construction module that can be assembled to build unusual structures and forms. The families will be on hand to share ideas and help with your creations.

This event is part of the International Children’s Theatre and Dance Festival happening at the Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham, on Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th June from11am to 5pm.

You can download this printable poster to spread the word. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

This project is being supported by the Lakeside Arts Centre, the Arts Council England, Faspak, Staples and Nottingham Education Improvement Partnership.

Mass observation

Thibaut Devulder

Our friend Colin Haynes, who worked with us on the Sneinton Trail project, has just introduced me to the Mass Observation movement.

Initiated in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and film-maker Humphrey Jennings, this project aimed to record the daly life of Britain through diaries or open-ended questionnaires filled in by hundreds of untrained volunteers. Recording everything, from everyday conversations to wall graffiti and jokes heard in public occasions, they created strangely detailed and offbeat snapshots of British society.

Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald visits the Mass Observation Archive to talk about the inspiration behind Life In A Day. With thanks to the Mass Observation Archive for allowing us to shoot this clip at the archive and for their generous assistance www.massobs.org.uk ife In A Day is a historic global experiment to create the world's largest user-generated feature film: a documentary, shot in a single day, by you.

We love to share

Thibaut Devulder

At 2hD we work in close collaboration but generally a couple of thousand kilometres apart. While the gap between us can come and go, the work needs to flow on a seamless basis. We mash together a number of technologies to achieve this, but one tool has really helped us to crack our file sharing issues: SugarSync.

It is a cloud based backup that allows a fairly fine-grained control over which files get synced to where. We think it is, well... sweet.

If you would care to check it out, we can both benefit from free storage — 500 mb each if you sign up for a free (5 Gb) account, and 10 Gb each if you decide to move up to a paid account. Just follow this referral link. Sweet syncing!

2hD's Alina travels to Romania and Hungary as a trade mission delegate

Thibaut Devulder

Alina has been instrumental in the setting up of a Trade Mission to Romania and Hungary by the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce and the Enterprise Europe Network. Building on our industry and academic contacts in Timisoara, Romania, the mission will also visit Szeged in Hungary to explore new business opportunities in these two emerging markets. 

We packed Alina off with a small stack of our first printed 2hD "brochure" — a simple fold-out A4 flyer that says something about our approach and expertise. The main aim being to look too nice to throw in the bin, provide some intrigue and direct people here to the website. We hope it works...

Sandbox manual

Thibaut Devulder

As part of our submission for the Structures on the Edge competition, we created a fun model sandbox to illustrate the participative construction process for our Stranded installation. We invited the public to interact with the model and to play on a miniature dune, equipped with our scale prototypes of the facetted concrete sculpture and some toy tools.

Of course, we couldn't resist creating a little manual for the sandbox!

2hD in RIBA journal

Thibaut Devulder

A great article on East Midlands regional architecture practice has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. It features 2hD's Alina Hughes talking about her dual roles in practice and education, and the importance for the region of retaining talented graduates.

The Lost Cuckoo takes flight

Thibaut Devulder

We have started work with artist Marcus Rowlands on the Lost Cuckoo project. Working with families from 3 schools in the Bilborough area of Nottingham, we will collaborate on the design of a bespoke cardboard module or system. This will be used by the families and visitors at the International Children’s Theatre and Dance Festival in the live creation of an interactive community sculpture.

In our first set of workshops we asked families to build with standard cardboard boxes and colourful tapes. They produced an amazing array of sculptures and spaces, pushing the boxes to do the unexpected and giving us plenty of inspiration to start the design of our special module.

Further workshops will run over the months until the Festival, on June 4th and 5th at the Lakeside Arts Centre.

This project is being supported by the Lakeside Arts Centre, the Arts Council England, Faspak and Nottingham Education Improvement Partnership.

Quieting the lizard brain

Thibaut Devulder

Seth Godin exhorting us to "thrash at the beginning" of projects so that we can ship on time and on budget.

"What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship," says bestselling author Seth Godin, arguing that we must quiet our fearful "lizard brains" to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them.