Our proposed new approach for the house, as seen from the street
As part of a larger remodelling and refurbishment of a family house in Vinterbro, we have put a particular focus on redesigning the house approach from the street, linking a new accessible and welcoming entrance to the home with a new woodworking workshop and garage.
The existing approach, as seen from the street
Continuing our collaboration with artist Morgan Dimnet, of French art collective QuboGas, we developed an interactive installation that explored the relationship between of visual artwork and electronic sound composition.
The Yellow Brick Road #6 installation/workshop at the Frigo (Albi, France)
The project was inspired by the Mélisson, an educational modular sound synthesizer developed in the 1980s at the GMEA — Centre National de Création Musicale Albi-Tarn (France).
Initially created to introduce children to the fascinating world of sound synthesis through experimentation and collaboration, these playful instruments were also used by experienced electronic musicians to create complex soundscapes and compositions.
Morgan Dimnet wanted to place the Mélisson at the centre of his new installation/workshop, inviting pupils of local primary schools to use its intuitive physical interface as a composition tools for not only sound, but also for visual art.
Exploring infinite variations of sounds and visual compositions, the visitors are then invited to create a physical vinyl disc cover for their own musical creation.
Collaborative sound creation with the Mélisson modules (© GMEA)
As the knobs of the Mélisson modules are tweaked to create unique sounds and effects, this soundscape is translated into similarly unique composition of shapes and colours, projected onto the workshop’s wall — ready to be reproduced by the visitors on mini stamping workshops designed by the artist for the exhibition.
We developed for this installation a hardware interface that could “listen” to the Mélisson synthesizers, and a custom computer program that translated the sound creations into unique visual artwork, following the artist’s visual language and aesthetics.
The project took place in 2022 with several primary schools in Albi, and concluded by a public exhibition at the collaborative cultural centre Le Frigo.
Visuals and furniture design: Morgan Dimnet
Hardware interface and electronics: 2hD Architecture Workshop, with Jean-Jacques Devulder
Programming (Processing): 2hD Architecture Workshop
Music composition (vinyl edition): Roland Ossart
For this project, we helped our clients remodel their home to create a vibrant and flexible social space at its heart, where the whole family could share meals, be creative, work and entertain friends around a large communal table.
The remodelled kitchen, with its large communal table and views to the garden
The couple with their twin daughters had lived in this house, located in Bærum — not far from another remodelling projects of ours, for six years before they decided to remodel. Originally built in 1921 as a log house, it had been extended and altered several times over the course of a century.
The most recent of these extensions had caused the sole window of the existing small kitchen to be closed off, so that the only daylight was coming through an adjacent playroom. The neighbouring living-room, with its large windows towards the garden, was mostly used as a TV and music room. Despite its comfortable size, this room was surprisingly difficult to furnish, in part due to an awkwardly placed door to the outdoor terrace, and the large dining table at its centre was only used for occasional festive occasions.
Our analysis of the existing ground floor of the house
We sat down with the family to explore their needs and aspirations for their home, bringing in fond memories of former homes they inhabited and loved, and created together a concise brief for this project. Concentrating on three rooms on the ground floor, we were to create an attractive social space at the centre of the house, well connected to the beautiful garden and filled with daylight, to be shared by all members of the family for their daily activities: making food, sharing meals together and with guests, handicraft, playing the piano, doing homework (or home work!), etc. Occasionally, the family should also have the possibility to close off part of the ground floor when multiple activities should be kept separate.
… and our design strategy to transform the spaces, explained step-by-step
With a clear brief defined, and the house carefully analysed, a solution to unlock the potential of a home can be sought. A seemingly simple change can thoroughly transform the way the home is being inhabited.
With minimal structural changes to the house, we reorganised the internal partitions and windows to create a spacious room with a large communal table as its centrepiece, wrapping the kitchen area around an existing chimney. This creates a unified space while maintaining a gradation of privacy between the more discrete food preparation workbenches of the kitchen, the central table and the desk area close to the new wood stove.
A large French door, aligned with the kitchen benches, opens views and easy access to the garden, seamlessly extending the dining area onto the large terrace outside.
The fully shelved partition, which accommodates on the kitchen side the bookshelves and communal desk space, and on the living-room side the television, creates a soft boundary between the social kitchen and more private living-room, which can be fully shut off by a hidden sliding door when required.
Our proposed new ground floor layout
With the large TV screen discretely tucked out of the way into the new partition, the space in front of the large living-room windows becomes a sort of winter garden overlooking the green areas outside, with a breakout sitting space filled with daylight and plants.
Between this interior “garden room” and the open terrace outside is the covered porch, now free of circulation and transformed into a sheltered sitting corner. Whatever the weather, there is always a comfortable place to sit and enjoy the garden!
And as with most of our projects, the remodelling work was also the opportunity to upgrade the comfort and energy efficiency of the building in a cost-effective manner, allowing for further external insulation of the walls when the external cladding needs changing in the future.
“2hD approached our ideas with a completely fresh eye. They came up with a solution which, in retrospect, feels simple and natural, and yet completely changed the way we use our home to be together!”
We are very pleased to see our Canine Wellness Centre project under construction by Sheltered Spaces.
Can’t wait to see it come to life (our dogs are looking forward to a spa day too!).
I have just spent 5 days in Switzerland with 3rd year students and colleagues at NTU’s School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment
Our journey took us from Basel to Zurich and Chur (with brief visits to France and Germany), where inspiring buildings and places were not a rare sight — quality around every corner!
The Gotheneum, designed by Rudolf Steiner in 1923.
The highlight of the field trip for me was our visit of the Notre-Dame du Haut in France, a surreal environment where we learnt that a building can be both elegant and brutalist at the same time. Curved concrete ceilings and walls made for a fluid atmosphere, the interior filling with a green and blue light, as the sun moved through the stained glass.
Notre-Dame du Haut and all the other incredible sites we visited definitely opened the students’ minds to the endless ingenuity of architects. I am almost certain that a new level of creativity will be seen in the design studio and Tech & Environment modules from now on.
Other highlights included a tiny 1953 petrol station by Jean Prouvé at the Vitra campus, Chipperfield’s exquisite Kunsthaus in Zurich (2020) and seeing my colleagues try to get their heads round Rudolf Steiner’s extraordinary Gotheneum (1924-28).
The students were confronted with the culture shock of Switzerland’s meticulous city planning, so different to many urban environments in the UK. Seeing children safely playing in accessible and well maintained parks and sports facilities (without overbearing adult supervision) helped the students realise that good architecture and urbanism create healthy and safer environments.
A rendered view of our proposed remodelled upper floor, overlooking the forest
We are delighted to announce that our remodelling and extension of a house in Bøler has been granted planning permission by Oslo Kommune.
The post-and-beam timber house, designed by architects Karlsen & Westbø in 1979, sits on a beautiful plot sloping into Bølerskogen, a wilderness reserve on the brink of lake of Østensjøvannet, in Oslo.
We are looking forward to finalising the detailed design and the interior design with our clients!
The sketch interior of the “skogsrom”, a new family room extending the ground floor, which we transformed into a parents’ wing
In August 2022, 2hD was involved in the early stages of a project for new care leavers’ accommodation, collaborating with Simon Middlecote Architecture. Our contribution was focussed on the research process and feasibility stage; with the ultimate aim of developing the design brief.
One of the several diagrams we produced for the study, here illustrating alternative accommodation types
Care leaves are young people aged 16 - 18 who have previously been in foster care, but have now chosen to live more independently. Care leavers’ accommodation acts as a bridging space where these young people can be self-sufficient and live alone, whilst being supported.
We researched case studies of many accommodation types, both past and present and found that most existing models have been found wanting.
One important issue in particular was that many are excessively institutional because of the way they foreground security, whilst others sacrifice safety measures to provide a more adult, independent environment. It was essential that we move on from these established patterns, in order to pinpoint the design challenges in the context of today’s social care.
Timeline for care leavers
Diagram illustrating the layering of security in accommodation
Their housing needs to have a careful balance between public, shared and private areas to provide security without seeming institutional.
Furthermore there is a wide range of support needed within this group that adds further complications. For example, some care leavers need provision that is similar to that of a childrens’ home, and on the other end of the spectrum some need near-total independence.
We arranged visits to existing care leaves’ accomodation to have meetings with staff and care leavers themselves to understand their needs and their views on how the accommodation could be improved. All the stakeholders of this project (such as the care leavers, social workers, staff and the local community) were consulted on their opinions and lived experiences.
The outcome of our work was a briefing document for Simon and his client that clearly identified the needs of the project stakeholders and the current context in which the project design will develop.
The UK office of 2hD took a short trip to Oslo this month to study some of the city’s new building projects as fresh inspiration for our own practice. We teamed up with Simon of Simon Middlecote Architects — a long term collaborator, both in teaching at NTU and more recently on the Care Leavers’ Accommodation project (more on this to follow).
Some highlights included the Oslo Public Library by Atelier Oslo and Lundhagem Arkitekter. This huge building somehow feels inviting and warm, and people really seem to feel they belong there. The top-lit atrium connects spaces into a seamless experience without dominating the small scale and intimate areas that surround it. Facilities that we couldn’t dream of having in a public library in Nottingham, such as 3D printers and makers’ spaces with sewing machines and large format printers support locals to be creative. The books meanwhile are everywhere — within touch as you journey around the building but the shelving never dominates.
The overall impression is that you are likely to find interesting books by chance, whilst a digital navigation system guides you when you are looking for something in particular.
On Simon’s suggestion, we took a ferry across the harbour to visit the Norsk Folkemuseum and its collection of timber historic buildings salvaged from around the country. It was a great counterpoint to the fast-paced development around the harbour. Beautifully crafted and functional farmsteads, churches and civic buildings gave a sense of a more peaceful time, but also a reminder of the rapid development the country has undergone since the exploitation of its oil resources began.
Oslo is a unique mix of fjord-side port, with thriving, dynamic urban communities and peaceful suburbs enveloped by well-used and highly valued areas of natural environment.
Whilst not without its problems, there is a lot we can learn from the city about making workable, humane and happy urban places.
Although 3D software are essential tools at 2hD, we also love to make physical models — which have proved invaluable for communicating ideas to clients. Unfortunately, they can be time-consuming to make and we have recently missed using them as part of our design process. Could 3D printing be a solution?
I bought a Prusa MINI+ 3D printer, using a recent teaching award from Nottingham Trent University. The NTU architecture course has a real emphasis on hands-on making and craftsmanship, in conjunction with digital skills. Learning how to use the printer will bring benefits to both my practice of architecture and my teaching, allowing us to explore a range of ideas that we couldn’t before!
One of the Capybara trial prints…
The results of our initial trials to learn the technology were interesting, to say the least, but after a few slightly strange capybara models made for my youngest daughter, I think I was getting there!
2hD is also part of a team brought together by Tristan Hessing of Future Makers, looking into the recycling of waste plastic in design and architecture. We don’t believe in creating waste, so we are very interested in using recycled filament in our model making.
Following on from my award for innovative ideas in construction, one of the things we are considering at the moment is the 3D-printing of complex junctions in buildings. And if we can use construction industry plastic waste to create these building components, we’ll be part of a truly circular economy.
We have now access to an amazing CNC router at our new office space at Kroloftet. I tested it today for the first time, initially to fabricate some simple wooden gears for a homemade “analog music sequencer” I am developing for our next Ooo-Ya-Tsu art project (more in this later…)
The wooden gears, cut on the CNC router, with MIDI music “encoded” into grooves on the right
These gears were modelled in SketchUp and imported into AutoDesk Fusion, before being sent to the CNC router for fabrication. The geometry for the round grooves on one of the large gears was generated by a computer program I coded in Processing that reads musical MIDI files and convert them into 3D shapes, which can then can be grooved into the gears, effectively “encoding” the music into the wood. Fairly simple to start with, but it worked, so on with the prototyping!
Many thanks to Peter Magnus, expert digital fabricator at Kroloftet, for the heads up on using this amazing machine!
Panoramic view of the existing ground floor, all walls stripped to the log structure of the original house.
Building work on our remodelling of a family house in Gjettum has now started. The walls have been stripped, revealing the log walls of the original house, before the key change to the structure is reorganise the kitchen and living-room.
We have also done an updated survey, so that the furniture and benches of the new fitted kitchen can be produced.
Credits to our clients for tackling the demolition work themselves!
Our remodelling project in Gjettum, a suburb of Oslo, has been granted planning permission by Bærum Kommune. We are now planning building work to start on site in May 2022.
We are delighted to have joined the dynamic and eclectic work collective at Kroloftet, in Oslo.
In addition to a shared workspace, we now also have access to a fully equipped wood workshop, including a large-scale CNC router, to fabricate custom-made furniture and fittings for your next project!
We are looking forward to exciting collaborations with the many skilled crafts(wo)men at Kroloftet, whose disciplines include (among many others) metalwork, wood joinery, upholstery, boat building, illustration, film direction, ceramics and puppet making!
The collective wood workshop at Kroloftet
I am a senior lecturer on the architecture course at Nottingham Trent University and am proud to say that I’ve been nominated for and won a few awards there recently.
The last couple of academic years have created enormous pressure for the staff and students as we’ve all had to adapt to Covid-19. It was great in 2021 to have my work on the integration of online learning and teaching techniques recognised with a Teaching and Support award from the School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environments (ADBE).
I learnt later this year, in April 2021, that the students had nominated me for a Student-Led Teaching Award, and, in July, I was awarded a second ADBE Teaching and Support award, this time specifically for my pastoral support and coaching of students.
This last award recognised the pastoral support system I put in place using Microsoft Bookings to create a “virtual open door” for students. It turns out that returning to face-to-face education has created almost as many pressures as did lockdown, so I’m happy to have helped in some way to mitigate the problems for some of our students.
