Innehållsförteckning för Issue 58 March från Artichoke

In Brief

Artisan basins by Caroma Caroma’s new Artisan above-counter basins feature a thinner rim than previous versions, expressing the simplicity of Nordic style. The basins are available in a variety of sizes and shapes, including round, oval, square, rectangle, curved square and curved rectangle. Made from vitreous china, the basins are designed to add beauty, functionality and durability to the bathrooms. Caroma — caroma.com.au Storey Floors by Larritt-Evans For timber flooring company Storey Floor’s showroom and office in Melbourne, design studio Larritt-Evans was briefed to display the company’s timber boards in a unique way. Larritt-Evans created modular, oversized cubes from the boards, which feature prominently in the space. These cubes highlight the colour, size, versatility and quality of the boards. Larritt-Evans — larritt-evans.com Primo Pizza by Olaver…

Higher Ground

“Every seat in the house enjoys a range of views – up to the vaulting white timber-lined ceiling, out through the enormous old arched windows, up to the balcony-like top level, down to the open kitchen and central bar – and all around is the warmth and texture of the old brick shell.” Cafe owners and barpreneurs are still finding old buildings tucked away in Melbourne’s CBD to reclaim, reinvent and re-monetize. And global economic moribundity be damned, people keep on lining up to buy food and drinks from them! It’s fantastic, really, and it makes modern Melbourne what it is today. But as with all situations where a particular kind of creativity and a particular kind of experience move from niche to mainstream, the risk is that the creativity…

Designing for the experience economy

The experience economy is being fuelled by a generation of millennials who would rather spend their money on accumulating memories than objects. At Artichoke Night School session twenty-two, held on 26 October 2016 at Space Furniture’s Sydney showroom, four speakers discussed the design of experience-based environments for consumers and brands. According to Kim Verbrugghe, senior strategist at marketing and communications agency Deepend, our state of happiness lasts longer after buying an experience than buying a product. Verbrugghe laid the foundation for the evening by outlining Deepend’s “experience barcode” – “a magic formula for creating a successful experience.” As the other speakers – architects Christie Petsinis and Tim Wilson of Folk Architects, and Chris Bosse of LAVA – presented, it was interesting to consider how their buildings and spaces fit into…

3 min

Dropbox Sydney

“The very companies that are at the forefront of collapsing the physical office space ... are leading the way in how the workplace is evolving.” Architecture and design are often coined in terms of “bricks and mortar.” While this may have been true for its ancient origins, does it still hold sway in the twenty-first century when architects and designers have moved much of their activity to the digital and virtual worlds? The advancement of new technologies and work innovations has seen an increasing threat of the “office,” as a physical space, disappearing. Paradoxically, the very companies that are at the forefront of collapsing the physical office space and its processes are leading the way in how the workplace is evolving. One such example is the new Dropbox offices in…

The Space In-Between

When designing an “office of the future” as part of a student design competition in 2015, third-year Queensland University of Technology (QUT) interior design student Anna Carter envisaged her users as “green collar workers.” “I wanted to change the corporate image a little,” she recalls. “The brief was to make a flexible workplace that could potentially be flat-packed and transported. With The Space In-Between, I wanted to reinvent the workplace to be a more playful one, where a feeling of the outdoors and home or domesticity prevailed. I imagined a firm of environmental engineers inhabiting the space.” The venue was a disused floor of the Central Plaza 1 building in Brisbane’s CBD, and the intention was to explore inventive ways to re-use and re-populate buildings like these as city workers…

2 min

Artichoke Magazine Prize

The Artichoke Magazine Prize for design communication is awarded to one graduating student from each of the institutions in Australia and New Zealand that offers interior design/interior architecture degree courses, and which are members of the Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association (IDEA). Each institution’s prize-winning student is selected by its school head. IDEA — idea-edu.com 1 — Mitchell McGrath of AUT University This project, titled Incandescent, proposes an artist residency program at two sites in central Auckland, with the intention of connecting the residents with the public and heritage of the CBD. Participants are invited to reside in an apartment that has been redesigned to meet their daily needs within the program. The first site will function as a living quarters, accommodate social activities and contribute to the…

QT Melbourne

As a typology, the art hotel emerged sometime in the early twentieth century. There are some notable examples – Provence’s La Colombe d’Or from the 1920s, or New York’s Hotel Chelsea from the 1950s and 60s. Closer to home, there is Hobart’s Henry Jones Art Hotel and, more recently, the Art Series Hotels with locations in Melbourne, Bendigo, Adelaide and Brisbane. A precise definition is a little hard to come by: some, like those first two examples, were peopled by a who’s who of celebrated artists, others host rotating or thematic exhibitions, and there are those – such as the latter examples – that are characterized by interior designs that celebrate art and artists. While Melbourne’s new QT Hotel doesn’t brand itself as an art hotel explicitly, it certainly…

Designing futures

As I write this column it’s grad show season. All over the country, graduates in every design discipline are completing folios and preparing for exhibitions that demonstrate their learning and development over the course of their studies within degree or diploma programs. As an ex design educator, I understand the enormous effort that can be required to get to this point and also the immense excitement when it all comes together. Every exhibition has an opening speech in which students and academic and support staff are congratulated on the work they have created together and apprised of the possibilities and challenges that lie ahead. I’ve given a few of these speeches and as I reflect on my term as National President of the Design Institute of Australia, I would like…

4 min

Tarrawarra Estate Cellar Door

“The design of the cellar door is an exploration of stereotomics, where stereós means ‘solid’ and tomia means ‘to cut,’ in the original Greek language. By conceiving the design as if carved from a solid, as opposed to framed and bounded by a membrane, the designers have distilled a particular experiential clarity within the project.” What is a wall? At one level, the question is about as useful as asking “what is a person?,” which is to say not at all. However, the question can still be posed, and the answer is, of course, “many things.” A clue to just one method of interpretation can be found in British architect Kenneth Frampton’s 1995 observation that in the German language, “wall” can be translated as “die wand,” indicating a screen-like…

Design with flavour

The annual Eat Drink Design Awards provides a unique opportunity for architects and designers to join with their hospitality clients to celebrate the best Australasian eating and drinking projects. Endorsed by the Australian Institute of Architects and the Design Institute of Australia, the Eat Drink Design Awards continues to grow, now entering its sixth year. Once again, entries will be judged by an eminent jury drawn from the hospitality and architecture industries. The 2017 jury is: — Nat Cheshire, director, Cheshire Architects (New Zealand) — Ross Lusted, chef and owner, The Bridge Room (Sydney) — Vanessa Chrichton, general manager, The Rockpool Group (Melbourne) — Ingrid Richards, co-founder, Richards and Spence (Brisbane) — Cameron Bruhn, editorial director, Architecture Media Last year’s presentation night saw 350 architects, designers and their clients come…

1 min

The Great Room

“The intention was not to build in flexibility but to predict, or perhaps create, demand for spaces and to specify the areas accordingly. The resulting interior appears tailored and permanent, not generic, modularized or contingent.” One George Street is among the more handsome office towers in Singapore. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 2005, it faces Hong Lim Park and is diagonal to another Singapore building of significance, WOHA’s Parkroyal on Pickering. The development deals thoughtfully with the pedestrian plane, with each lift lobby captured in a glass bubble, footpaths flowing around, and another level of open access space, including a garden terrace, pool and gym, located on the fifth floor. The Great Room complements this public domain by providing a co-working environment that goes beyond…

Top of the class

Architect — Architectus Builder — Contract Control Services Timber Finish — Intergrain UltraClear Interior Mandeville Centre, Loreta by Architectus occupies a tight site on the grounds of Loreto Mandeville Hall, a school in Melbourne’s leafy Toorak. The new three-storey building is square in plan and accommodates a library, administration and staff centre, lecture theatre and Year 12 centre, as well as a basement-level car park. Its interior design is particularly compelling for a simple pinwheel arrangement, which belies the sophistication of its multiple programmatic requirements. At the scheme’s centre is the library and double-height atrium that makes the overall design appear all the more open. While the quality of light lends the mix of private and public zones a sense of welcome informality, the material palette of plywood, plaster, concrete…

2 min

DIA Awards

2016 Laminex DIA SA Design Awards The South Australian branch of the Design Institute of Australia (DIA) announced its 2016 awards as part of the Asia Pacific Space Designers Alliance 2016 gala dinner. The awards recognize excellence across three disciplines: Built Environment, Object and Communication. Premier’s Award: Nectre N60 Combustion Heater by Pecan Engineering President’s Award: Antica Pizzeria e Cucina by Genesin Studio Laminex Award: Pink Moon Saloon by Sans-Arc Studio Built Environment Gold: Antica Pizzeria e Cucina by Genesin Studio Silver Award: Longwood House by Track Architecture; Pink Moon Saloon by Sans-Arc Studio; The Hotel Lobby by Ann Dinh (student); Level 5 Kaurna Building by Laura Patterson (student) Communication Gold Award: Penley Estate by Parallax Silver Award: My Kingdom for a Horse by Parallax Object Gold Award: Nectre N60…

1 min

Amanemu Resort

My visit to the new Amanemu resort on Japan’s picturesque east coast was two weeks after Donald Trump was victorious in the US presidential election and just one week after the controversial president-elect met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo - Abe at Trump Tower in Manhattan. There is nothing material to connect these two events with my Amanemu experience and yet the timing made me ponder the way different concepts of luxury impact the interior architecture and design of hotels. The room at the glittering Trump Tower in New York where Trump and Abe-kakka met was strikingly gauche – an overwrought confection of furnishings and materials from across the history of interior decoration and the rise and fall of empires. This version of luxury is ubiquitous, particularly in the design…

Absent Bodies

Absent Bodies — 7 October – 17 December 2016 Anna Schwartz Gallery 185 Flinders Lane Melbourne Vic 3000 Japan-born installation artist Chiharu Shiota explores our most intimate constructs of psychological spaces: identity, the body, memory and states of being. Common among her works, which span three decades, are mundane domestic objects that speak to the lived experience and the embodiment of home. Her inaugural site-specific exhibition, presented from 7 October to 17 December 2016 at Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne, embraces these ideas. When entering the gallery, there is a glimpse of the haunting and sprawling web of red thread that deeply envelops the space and crawls on the walls. Absent Bodies features an impressive network of thin, red cotton thread, simply looped around each line that occupies the back…

4 min

Contributors

Marcus Baumgart is a designer and blogger based in Melbourne. With business partner John A. Clark, he launched the startup Baumgart Clark Architects. You can follow their adventures at archistartup.com. Tarrawarra Estate Cellar Door ( page 20 ) Peter Clarke is a Melbourne-based photographer who has vast experience in documenting spectacular buildings and interiors. Peter’s work captures the unique elements of each space, transcending expectations placed upon the complexity of built form. Middletown ( page 28 ) Peter Davies is a writer and editor based in Melbourne. He has an enduring interest in language, culture, art and architecture. He has qualifications in journalism, arts management, publishing and editing, and communications law. QT Melbourne ( page 110) Ella Leoncio studied at the University of Melbourne and is now a principal at Chamberlain…

2 min

Middletown

In the age of social media, the notion of “branding” has come to the forefront of our collective consciousness. Now that a brand’s touchpoints can follow in such quick succession, ensuring consistency in brand messaging has become increasingly challenging. In the case of Middletown cafe in Melbourne’s Prahran, the owners have taken this challenge particularly seriously. It’s for this reason that the design process was slightly unconventional – graphic design studio Pop & Pac was the first to be engaged by the owners. Pop & Pac lay the foundations of the brand identity very early on. They developed a loose vision for the brand and only once the bones were established did they recommend and appoint interior design firm Studio Tate. Having worked together on projects before, Pop & Pac…

In Brief

Riverside Centre foyer by KPDO KPDO has transformed the original 1980s modernist foyer of Harry Seidler’s iconic Riverside Centre in Brisbane into a contemporary and sophisticated meeting space. The design retains the purity of Seidler’s modernist vision by expressing the building’s unique essence with a focus on colour, form and texture. Cassina armchairs and custom-made carpets designed by KPDO sit comfortably with the subdued palette of the light-filled interior, while smooth white marble benches line the glass facade to offer riverside views. K.P.D.O — kpdo.com Rabobank by Geyer Geyer has designed the new Sydney headquarters for Rabobank, a global leader in food and agriculture financing. The nimble environment creates a “cooperative knowledge exchange” so staff can come together rapidly to solve customer needs. The kitchen table is a…

Woods Bagot Perth Studio

Occupying a prime corner in Perth’s financial district, The Palace Hotel endures as a powerful reminder of the city’s goldrush prosperity. In 1897, a local newspaper declared it “the most magnificent pile of bricks and mortar in Western Australia” and “a hotel that has no superior in the southern hemisphere.” A recent overhaul of the spaces within its opulent Federation Free Classical-style exterior has transformed the building into a cutting-edge design studio, by and for Woods Bagot. Woods Bagot is a firm with an even longer history than this building. Founded in Adelaide in 1869, the practice is now the sixth-largest firm in the world with seventeen studios in ten countries, and is focused on redefining the practice of architecture in the digital age. The hotel was renowned in its…

7 min

In Brief

Ell washbasin from Artedomus Ell is a new washbasin and counter-top, made with Corian or marble in various colours and types. The basins are accompanied by a grid panel made of the same colour as the countertop. The top is supported by brackets and can be paired with cabinets and shelves for a complete look. Artedomus — artedomus.com Lexus Design Pavilion by Joost Bakker and Etic For the 2016 Lexus Design Pavilion inside the Birdcage at the Melbourne Cup Carnival, sustainable artist Joost Bakker created Futurecave, a striking, textural and porous structure. All materials within the fabrication of the structure were recyclable, and the pavilion's core was created from 100 per cent reclaimed concrete. Etic, a design studio established by Emilie Delalande and designer Henry Wilson, designed the…

Jonathan Zawada

Despite being “so hot right now” in global design terms, artist Jonathan Zawada is refreshingly humble and delightfully grounded. With typical understatement and humility, the artist/designer/multimedia star describes his practice as “a bit varied.” The Perth-born, Sydney-trained graphic designer quickly recounts the impressively fluid portfolio that brought him to settle and work in Los Angeles five years ago. Early computer graphics work in Sydney morphed into textile and fashion design, with collaborations with his wife, Annie Zawada, and her family business, fashion label Ksubi. The couple also set up Tru$t Fun with Shane Sakkeus, designing and selling digitally printed silk scarves through outlets such as Liberty. Collaborations with fashion designer Romance Was Born followed. “I hold them in high regard,” says Zawada of Luke Sales and Anna Plunkett, the duo…

4 min