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Imaginative, sustainable & award winning architecture

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  • Nestworks exhibited at Arup Phase 2
  • Nestworks honoured in Animal Architecture Awards
  • Experimental Station, Dungeness
  • Birds in the blocks
  • Urban Birds
  • Trinity Experimental Station, Dungeness
  • It’s a unicorn
  • The Emerald Necklace
  • Cable Suspended Sod Roof
  • Urban Birds Nestworks

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51% shortlisted as AA Masterplan Architect

51% stu­dios has this week been short­listed with four other firms for the role of mas­ter­plan archi­tect for the Archi­tec­tural Asso­ci­a­tion, which has recently aquired the leases of a num­ber Grade 1 listed build­ings in Bed­ford Square in addi­tion to those already held for the his­toric build­ings at 34–36.

Oth­ers on the short­list are Don­ald Insall Asso­ciates, Richard Grif­fiths Archi­tects, With­er­ford Wat­son Mann and Wright & Wright.

 

The Floating Bridge

Today, March 22^nd is World Water Day and we are remem­ber­ing a project we did for the inau­gural Lon­don Archi­tec­ture Bien­nale in Clerken­well in 2004, work­ing with a gang of nine and ten year olds to con­struct a float­ing bridge made from 700 Evian bot­tles, the sec­ond in a series of bridges made from recy­cled materials …

Lot of Bot­tle: Our Bien­nale site was the Farmiloes Court­yard in  Clerken­well, where water has been a cen­trally impor­tant part of his­tory, from its springs, wells and spas and later also brew­eries and dis­til­leries. Clerken­well was the site of London’s first reser­voir.  In the 21^st cen­tury, though, we have lit­tle direct knowl­edge of where our water comes from and often no longer even drink it from the tap.  Water now costs more than soda, milk and gas in the US.  The fetishis­ing of water and its pack­ag­ing is prob­a­bly the sin­gle great­est threat to human and ani­mal sur­vival across the globe.

To con­nect think­ing about the envi­ron­ment with design and engi­neer­ing more than 700 1.5l Evian bot­tles were recy­cled from fam­ily life and with cable ties, plumb­ing pipes and climb­ing ropes were the pri­mary mate­ri­als used to cre­ate the bridge, which [fol­low­ing some exper­i­ments in bouyancy] suc­cess­fully sup­ported one tonne — that being the com­bined weight of the young engineers.

“Whilst the project is just a teach­ing aide for now, its com­mon­place build­ing blocks make it cheap to build. If a small-scale model can divert hun­dreds of plas­tic bot­tles away from land­fill, there’s no rea­son a big­ger project couldn’t use up even more in the real world, while cre­at­ing eas­ily assem­bled emer­gency bridges, rafts or a makeshift res­cue craft.” Lot of Bot­tle, Spark 3, The Guardian

The float­ing bridge was a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Dalling­ton School, 51% stu­dios and Tim Mac­far­lane of Dewhurst Mac­far­lane and Part­ners. Other bridges have been made from card­board and paper.

Also on World Water Day, we are wish­ing all the best of luck to David de Roth­schild and the crew of the Plas­tiki, a boat made of 12,000 plas­tic bot­tles, which has just begun a round-the-world trip to high­light the prob­lems of waste in our oceans, much of it caused by plas­tic bottles.

And we couldn’t end with­out men­tion­ing one of our favourite sites, The Big Pic­ture, which has a put up a stun­ning set of National Geo­graphic pic­tures of water [you can also down­load a free inter­ac­tive copy of National Geographic’s April issue on water]

Cut + Run New York

Cut + Run has opened a new sus­tain­able edit facil­ity at 599 Broad­way in NYC in a build­ing we first admired back in 1985  .  .  .  51% stu­dios’ radi­ant inte­rior for the award win­ning edi­tors of An Incon­ve­nient Truth mixes nat­ural light with reclaimed mate­ri­als to cre­ate an invit­ing and earth friendly edit­ing experience.

Recy­cle and reduce: The facil­ity embraces green build­ing strate­gies, pay­ing spe­cial atten­tion to pro­mot­ing the use of nat­ural light. A fam­ily of seven suites is crafted from recy­cled, light­weight and translu­cent mate­ri­als with a mono­lithic resin floor to reflect and amplify the nat­ural light.  No dry wall and lit­tle glass is used, and suites made from formaldehyde-free, post-industrial recy­cled wood fibre­board are sound­proofed with recy­cled jeans.

Suite inte­ri­ors are indi­vid­u­ally dec­o­rated and fur­nished, with one wall left pre­dom­i­nantly raw and fin­ished in a nat­ural soy based clear sealant. Split bat­tens enable the con­stant tech­ni­cal upgrade and main­te­nance whilst keep­ing cables dis­creet. Com­puter aided con­struc­tion by Show­man Fab­ri­ca­tors allowed a rapid fit out on site, and pro­duced beau­ti­fully clean interiors.

The com­bi­na­tion of translu­cent poly­car­bon­ate walls, top lit with dim­ma­ble low energy diodes and a mocha coloured resin floor give the over­all effect of a calm radi­ance. Five offline suites, a graph­ics suite and a new HD fin­ish­ing suite are the cre­ative heart of the space. All rooms have been the lat­est ver­sions of Avid and Final Cut and are SD/HD compatible.

Mumsnet Towers

51% stu­dios would like to wish Mum­snet a very happy 1oth birth­day.  It’s been won­der­ful work­ing with you, and amaz­ing to con­sider the action your new shed meet­ing room has seen over the last year alone ! Con­grat­u­la­tions and all the best for the next 10 years!

Shed Mod­ernism: Bis­cuit­gate hap­pened here …

When Jus­tine Roberts approached us to design a meet­ing room for Mum­snet Tow­ers, the para­me­ters were sim­ple: it had to pro­vide pri­vacy and yet allow nat­ural light through it and it had to be good value for money. Oh, and it also needed to be light­weight, demount­able and sustainable.

51% stu­dios chose poly­car­bon­ate pan­els over glass to pro­vide acoustic insu­la­tion, fil­ter the light and give pri­vacy whilst still being light and easy to trans­port and han­dle. Pan­els were cut to size on site and can be recy­cled after use.

The fram­ing is from sus­tain­able British grown cedar, adapted from a rain­screen pro­file we have been using in Dun­ge­ness, set back-to-back to pro­vide stiff­ness whilst sup­port­ing the pan­els with­out any fix­ings. Cedar is also light­weight, and weath­ers to a soft sil­ver over time. We achieved the clean floor to ceil­ing fin­ish with the help of Tripledot’s fine car­pen­ters who scribed the cedar to the undu­lat­ing planes of the exist­ing ware­house shell.

We love the clever com­po­nents Item Prod­ucts makes for pack­ag­ing and have used on the their heav­ier duty han­dles for the slid­ing door. We exposed the self fin­ished poly­car­bon­ate edge so no frame was needed on the lead­ing edge of the slid­ing door, allow­ing it to slot effort­lessly into the same cedar detail as the other panels.

For pho­tos and videos of Mum­snet 10^th Anniver­sary Party at Google HQ, do have a look at these links on Flickr or Mum­snet

• Out & About

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