Archinect - News

New RIBA and Create London commissions debut to boost social life in large East London housing development

2023-07-12T19:28:00-04:00

A pair of new interventions commissioned for East London’s Becontree Estate have debuted this summer as an artistic effort to provide space for residents of the historic community that was at one time considered to be the largest social housing development in the western world.

The first, spread across six locations on the 281-acre estate, uses furniture designed by artists Ivan Morison and Heather Peak in order to create “subtle” spaces for gathering and interaction in areas that had previously been overlooked or underutilized. They say their contribution was made using a “shared vocabulary of basic forms” (cone, cylinder, and slab), and have the simplicity of children’s toys with the equally playful title “Two Cannibals Eating a Clown.”

Image © Thierry Bal

"We wanted to create sculptural forms that also offer rest and contemplation," Morison said. "We stack a cylinder on a cone and call it a table. We put a flat slab on a smaller slab and call it a bench. We put ...

Assemble wins Turner Prize, becoming first architects to win "UK's most prestigious art prize"

2015-12-07T16:20:00-05:00

The 18 members of London-based Assemble were named winners of the 31st Turner prize on Monday night, receiving their £25,000 prize from the Sonic Youth co-founder and artist Kim Gordon at an awards dinner broadcast live on Channel 4 from Tramway, Glasgow. Assemble are the first non-artists, in the strictest sense of the word, to win the prize. They were nominated for their work tackling urban dereliction in Toxteth, Liverpool...

Assemble, the architecture-ish collective known for their direct action urban interventions, has just won the prestigious Turner Prize. Working "across the fields of art, architecture and design," they are the first non-artists, in the strictest sense, to win the prize, and the first whose work so directly contends with the urban environment.

Specifically, Assemble was praised for their work in Toxteth, Liverpool, that involved using design to improve the living conditions and the houses of a derelict area called Granby Four Streets.

"[Assemble] draw[s] on long traditions of artistic and collective initiatives that experiment in art, design and architecture," the judges stated. "In doing so they offer alternative models to how societies can work. The long-term collaboration between Granby Four Streets and Assemble shows the importance of artistic practice being able to drive and shape urgent issues.”

With their Granby Four Streets project, Assemble created a showroom to display product...

A guerilla teahouse pops up in LA's Griffith Park

2015-07-01T15:01:00-04:00

The invitation was cryptic. A small piece of wood with a laser-burned message that read, "June 30, 2015. Please join us for tea and wishes overlooking the city. Sunrise, Griffith Park."

It's a rather charming story: an anonymous collective of artists have fashioned a Japanese-inspired teahouse out of charred wood reclaimed from the 2007 Griffith Park fire and offered it as a gift to the city. Surreptitiously assembled in parts, the teahouse was inaugurated yesterday morning for a select group of the artists' friends and associates.

The invited guests were sent clandestine notes that led them, as if on a scavenger hunt, to the wooden structure at dawn. There, green tea and cookies were offered and a ceremony was performed. An opera signer sang in the distance.

Apparently, this isn't the first time the group – who isn't named – have created a work of guerrilla architecture. And if the safety-and-regulations angel on your shoulder is balking at potential liabilities, rest easy. According to the LA Times report, the structure was designed with help from professional woodworkers. The artists pegged the wooden structure to an existing concrete and rebar foundation, which...

“72 Hour Interactions” to revive Witten, Germany into an urban art playground in three days

2014-07-16T16:22:00-04:00

The world championship for the "72 Hour Interactions" realtime competition is taking place in Witten, Germany later this month! For 72 intense hours starting July 23 at 6 p.m., five international teams will venture out and transform Witten's neglected public sites through nothing other than creativity and architectural design — while having fun in the process.

Each team will represent one of the cities in the Ruhr valley: Hagen, Hattingen, Herdecke, Wetter and Witten. Sixty participants from abroad and from the region will transform neglected sites throughout the city through means of what the competition organizers describe as "gameful architectural interventions".

Learn more about the competition on Bustler.

A Battle for Public Beach Access Continues

2014-06-19T17:56:00-04:00

"...these days, the future of this hidden beach on the San Francisco Peninsula is being fought in a courthouse 25 miles away, in a battle that has become the latest class-charged standoff involving a wealthy entrepreneur in this polarized part of California..."

The struggle being waged over Martin's Beach is just one in a long history of disputes over public beach access in California. While legally everything below the mean tide line is public, physical walk paths often have to be carved out of private property, something not perfectly accounted for in the law books. A similar case involved business magnate David Geffen in Malibu.

Meanwhile, on the activist side of things is The Los Angeles Urban Rangers, a group of urban explorers who develop tools and strategies to gain greater access to the city. One of their projects consists of leading tours along the Malibu coastline to "show you how to find, park, walk, picnic, and sunbathe on a Malibu beach legally and safely." Included in their tours are activities like "a public-private boundary hike, sign watching, a no-kill hunt for accessways, and a public easement potluck."