The French digital creation centre Le Cube hosted us for a week last April in Paris, to continue developing our live drawing and music performance Ooo-Ya-Tsu.
As part of this artist residency, the Franco-German cultural TV channel Arte came to film us and interview our collaborators, the collective Qubo Gas, discussing how the Ooo-Ya-Tsu project fitted in their wider practice as visual artists.
Qubo Gas collective interviewed by Arte, during our artist residency at Le Cube, in Paris (photo © Qubo Gas)
This video is also available online on the Arte Creative website (photos above © Atelier A).
On Sunday I revisited the memorial project for the Nottingham Progressive Jewish Congregation. It was finished three years ago, and the beauty of the stone is now really coming through.
The Clipsham limestone we specified has mellowed down in colour and is showing a nice patina whilst the twisting coping stones and faced block to the interior look as crisp as ever.
Clipsham is a local stone with a noble pedigree- quarried less than 40 miles from the site of the memorial, it was used in the construction of Windsor Castle in the 14th Century and at King's College Chapel in Cambridge.
The coping stones were 'spun' into shape on site from a harder york stone, giving them a sharper line, greater weathering resistance and a darker blue/brown appearance.
The Master level architecture studio project that 2hD's Tom and Alina ran at Nottingham Trent University this year has concluded with an exhibition in the University's Arkwright building.
The exibition was designed by Alina and featured a dress by fashion designer Kula Tsurdiu (the project client) alongside selected work from the architecture students.
We're very proud to say that the low energy house 2hD designed for a Nottinghamshire village has been shortlisted for an RIBA East Midlands 2014 award!
The annual awards celebrate architectural excellence in the region, and the New House in Maplebeck is one of just eleven projects on the shortlist.
Replacing a 1980s bungalow, the design of the house had to complement the Conservation Area setting whilst achieving extremely high performance as a “zero carbon in use” eco-home. Designed using the PassivHaus Planning Package and executed in a palette of brick, oak, slate and zinc, the house includes a central frameless glazing porch and open stair, an integrated balcony and an extensive built-in photovoltaic array.
The shortlisting is credit to a great client and consultant team, including:
The house in Eidsvoll we designed last year is nearing completion now.
Our self-builder client has been hard at work finishing the house's timber frame (all using pre-cut I-joists), now well insulated with blown-in cellulose insulation.
The cladding of the facades is also underway, using wood shingles made of untreated malmfuru, a species of local pine grown slowly in the Norwegian mountains, which is rich in heart wood and naturally resistant to weather.
The family is planning to move in later this summer.
The Fabrica Art Gallery, Brighton's famous visual arts organisation, has offered to host our Ooo-Ya-Tsu performance for the Brighton Digital Festival 2014, next September.
Fabrica Art Gallery (Photo by Dominic Alves)
Based in a former Regency church in the heart of Brighton, Fabrica commissions contemporary visual art installations specific to the building.
As part of the presentation of the project, we prepared this short description of the project, for once in English:
Constructed as a cycle, the Ooo-Ya-Tsu performance sketches a poetic landscape around the interactions of visual art collective QuboGas, designer Thibaut Devulder, musician Olivier Durteste and a custom-made computer programme.
Ooo-Ya-Tsu takes inspiration from phase music and conjures up the imagery of mobile collages, in which new strokes, colours and sounds are overlaid and combined at each sequence.
The performance develops in three phases:
While based on a complex technical system, Ooo-Ya-Tsu keeps at its core the visual universe of the QuboGas collective: hand-drawn sketches on paper, in pencil, ink and watercolour. Digitised, these shapes and colours are combined with the soundscape composed by Olivier Durteste.
Ooo-Ya-Tsu offers a contemplative take on a collective artwork, where human gestures bring forth an infinite virtual fresco, an autonomous universe of sounds and graphics.
We have just sent an application for the Nasjonale Turistveger prequalifications, teaming up with three talented Norwegian designers: Mona Kramer Wendelborg (landscape architect), Brit Sejersted Bødtker (architect) and Thea Collett (architect and lighting designer).
The Haptisk team (from left: Thea Collett, Thibaut Devulder, Brit Bødtker and Mona Wendelborg)
This prequalification is organised by the National Tourist Routes of Norway, looking for teams of young and creative professionals to design fifty new resting places and viewpoints along its touristic roads, winding through landscapes of outstanding natural beauty.
These types of projects are close to our hearts: designing intimate spaces strongly anchored in their context, merging landscape and architecture, involving local communities and artists...
To illustrate the diverse and interdisciplinary skills and experiences of our team, we presented ourselves around three themes — thinking on the edge, togetherness and material tactility — choosing as our motto the word HAPTISK (Norwegian for haptic).
Thea is a creative lighting designer working for Rambøll Norway and both Mona and Brit share with me an office space in Oslo. It is great to collaborate once again with my co-worker from Sommerrogata 17!
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.
