We are delighted to be awarded the prestigious DICRéAM grant from the French Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animée, for the production of our multimedia art performance Ooo-Ya-Tsu.
In collaboration with art collective Qubo Gas and musician DDDIXIE, Ooo-Ya-Tsu is also supported by L'Aéronef, the French Civil Society of Multimedia Authors, Pictanovo and La Malterie.
Following our first artist residency last June, I joined in with the QuboGas team and musician DDDIXIE for a second work session on our Ooo-Ya-Tsu performance at music venue L'Aéronef, in Lille.
We started refining our projection video setup and doing the first animation test for the visual elements. As we were ironing out some technical problems with the dual projector setup, DDDIXIE's intriguing sounds also started to fill the air... We even got to show our work to a group of school pupils visiting the venue on the last day.
Many thanks to the team at L'Aéronef for their enthusiastic support and to Petit Seb of Digital Vandal for the video tweaking!
Photos © QuboGas.
Various Architects have just sent us photos of the finished interior of the new Lederne headquarters office they designed as part of the Olympiagård project, in downtown Oslo. We collaborated with them on the detailed design of the furniture and partition units.
Images © Various Architects.
Online magazine Arthitectural has published an article about our stone Memorial for a Jewish community in Nottingham.
Our clients over at InPhase get stuck in to prepping the space, and make a great promo in the process...
I moved the Oslo branch of 2hD in summer 2012 to a new shared office with Various Architects, located in the centre of Oslo on Sommerrogata 17. Since then the number of other practices joining us has grown regularly.
So 2hD Norway is now sharing this office with 18 talented and experienced design professionals — including architects, urban designers, interior architects, a lighting designer, a landscape architect and a graphic designer:
Making use of this interdisciplinary knowledge, we regularly collaborate with each other, pooling resources on large projects or competitions. Aside from creating an exciting work environment, this also allows us to tackle more complex or larger projects, with expert advice and skilled extra work capacity always at hand.
2hD was incorporated on the 14th November 2003 — making today our tenth birthday!
We'd like to thank our great collaborators and wonderful clients for keeping us passionate, challenged and in business. We look forward to working together in the future.
Entrance of the existing cabin
Planning permission has been granted to our project on the stunning settings of Sjusjøen, north of Lillehammer, Norway.
Overlooking the well-known Norwegian cross-country ski resort, this small mountain cabin, built in the late 1960s by the client's parents, had become too small for her extended family. The client wanted to remodel and extend it to accommodate family gatherings. With no running water in the kitchen and only two sleeping spaces, the cabin also lacked sufficient indoor storage to accommodate more than two guests.
Emotionally attached to the cabin, the client wanted our intervention to address these issues, yet preserve the modest scale of the building, as well as most of its interior and exterior finishes and furniture — some of them hand-made by her father.
We tackled the challenge by extending the cabin towards the west. Shifting the entrance to the other side of the cabin greatly simplified winter access, avoiding snow drifts from the roof and reaching out closer to the car parking space. More importantly, this allowed us to create a central spine running through the extension.
Linking together the extension and the existing cabin, this spine accommodates extensive storage spaces serving the master and guest bedrooms, where luggage can be droppped on arrival without cluttering the living rooms.
Clad in timber slats, contrasting with the other materials of the cabin, the spine acts a functional and visual link between old and new, sheltering the sleeping quarters from the common spaces.
At the end of the spine, minimal reorganisation of internal partitions allowed for a compact and comfortable kitchen and bathroom, with minimum alterations to the existing plumbing.
The wind lobby and storage were moved from the original access to the new entrance, with the addition of a ski preparation room. In their place, a new living room was modelled into the existing building fabric — opening up the cabin to the fantastic views to the wild marsh on the east and the sun's warmth to the south.
Externally, the extension matches the scale and appearance of the existing cabin. The two bodies however are connected by a section with a lower roof and cladding matching the sheltering slats of the existing entrance, clearly identifying the new from the old.
Inside, most of the floor and wall finishes of the existing wing are preserved. The new spaces, to the west and south, however, contrast with their sloped ceiling and stained boarding.
We're delighted to be working for InPhase Media Services on the initial stages of a warehouse conversion project. The site, near Nottingham station, will house two large film and photography studios and state of the art facilities including a massive infinity wall.
Head over to the InPhase website or see their facebook or twitter presence for updates as the project evolves.
The single-family house we designed on a hillside of Eidsvoll, in Norway, is now under construction by our self-builder client. Created as two wings intersecting with the landscape, the design reconciled our clients' wishes for both discrete privacy and openness to the surrounding woodlands.
Sketch impression of the house with its two intersecting wings, from which the terraces cascade into the forest
Moving out of their current undersized house in the same town, the family wanted to settle on one of the plots owned by the family (we helped the client masterplan this area back in 2011). The plot is situated on an ideally oriented hillside with woodlands at its doorstep and great views to the surrounding countryside.
We designed the family house to clearly separate public spaces receiving visitors (including a small home office) and the more private parts of the house. These two realms are organised in separate wings, articulated by two intersecting gables. At this intersection, an open atrium links the two levels and a sheltered outdoor porch opens up towards the adjacent woodlands to the south-west, stepping down into the landscape through a series of cascading terraces.
Interior view of the atrium, at the intersection of the two wings (Photo @ Caroline Prøven Brohaug)
The external form of the house also responded to the height restrictions of the local planning rules and the steep site slope. Despite the site steepness, the house benefits from a full wheelchair access to all key functions of the home.
Privacy from the existing neighbouring apartment building (also owned by the client) was preserved by vertical timber fins along the facade, framing the views and giving a common vocabulary to the different elevations.
Foundation and groundworks are almost completed and the timber superstructure (insulated with natural cellulose fibres) will be completed before the first snow, at the end of November.
Pictanovo, a visual art funding organisation based in northern France, has just awarded a grant to support our collaborative performance project Ooo-Ya-Tsu, as part of its programme Expériences Interactives, in the category Installations artistiques et médiation culturelle.
Images have just been published by Oslo's Various Architects of a masterplan for the Aalto 2015 Campus on the Espoo peninsula, close to Helsinki.
We collaborated with Various (with whom we share our office in Oslo) and UK consulants Ramboll on the masterplan for this competition entry.
Our approach revisited the idea of the Garden City for which Espoo is considered a Modernist masterpiece. At the core of our design was the Mesh, a three dimensional timber structure extending out of the teaching facilities and workshops into the public spaces. The mesh weaves together social interactions and experimental learning on multiple levels of circulation.
Images © Various Architects — published on October 04, 2013
Alina is in Bucharest this week at the invitation of the East Centric Architecture Triennale — where she has presented her shortlisted entry for the Essay Contest. The jury was chaired by renowned Finnish architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa.
Her entry, titled 'Conservation Versus Modernisation in Romania — Through the Lens of Transylvania's Saxon Villages', has been published in the Architext book 'A World of Fragments: Essays on East and Central European Architecture'.
It is part of her ongoing research at Nottingham Trent University into these fascinating historic villages and the controversy surrounding their conservation by foreign agencies.
Alina and I are leading the Vertical Studio module this year at Nottingham Trent University, as part of the MArch (Masters in Architecture) course. It's a 10 week design studio delivered to both cohorts of the MArch course, aimed at bringing in practitioners with a particular set of approaches, whilst introducing new students to NTU and preparing final year students for their major dissertation projects.
We've decided to build the studio around the notion of weaving — both as an approach to understanding one way of making structure and space and as an analogy for the multi-stranded assemblage of information, knowledge and ideas that go into an architectural design project.
The site we've chosen is what we've termed an 'urban appendix' — a former thoroughfare truncated by the building of Victoria Station in Nottingham, and then overshadowed by its replacement, the Victoria Centre. This unloved backwater will be stiched back into the urban fabric by housing a dressmaker's shop, design studio and workshop.
During the first week the students were set the ambitious target of putting on an exhibition of exploratory models. Following visits to Kula Tsurdiu (acting as client) and the NTU textiles exhibition and weaving workshops, the students investigated techniques of stitching, pleating, weaving and fusing to create their models. It was great to see a lot of careful investigation and reckless experimentation coming together in a short space of time — the students really responded to the challenge and we look forward to seeing their designs develop over the coming weeks.
Our design for a mixed development project in Eidsvoll, Norway, has been granted planning permission and work has started on site in Sundet, the historical centre of Eidsvoll, on the bank of the Vorma river.
View of the existing building in context from the riverside theatre
View of the existing building from south
Since its original construction, this building has seen its use change several times, from textile shop to (most recently) an indian restaurant, with each conversion bringing its new remodelling and awkward lean-to extensions added to the existing log timber building, further blurring the old and the new into a cacophonic mix of styles and functions.
We were approached by the client to reorganise the building into a mixed use development, including retail spaces on the ground floor and rental apartments in the upper floor. The nearby open courtyard — a great asset in the town's developing centre — was originally left disused next to the existing building. Realising the potential, we proposed to integrate it into the scope of the project, to define an attractive outdoor breakout space that opens up towards the retail spaces and the new apartments above.
Located next to the riverside and neighbouring a listed old dairy building, it was essential to preserve a sense of scale between the proposed higher density development and the street level — masterplanned to become one of Sundet main pedestrian axis.
To achieve this, the balconies and common roof terrace serving the seven apartments help to break up with the different built volumes on the site and create an interplay of different levels. The courtyard frames the view to the old dairy building facade from the street, sheltering technical areas out of sight from the street (waste storage and heat pump exchangers).
The palette of materials also help to clearly define the original part of the old building from its rebuilt extensions. The main body of the building will be reclad with its original light boarding, with roof form and windows restored based on old photography. In contrast, all rebuilt and new parts have flat roof and are wrapped in dark stained timber rainscreen.
The first phase of the project is now under construction, including the remodelling of the main building and reconstruction of the extension, to host a retail space on the ground floor and four apartments on the first and loft floors.
