Vicco’s Tower
Conceptually this project frames nature in the city. It is a lightweight timber tower on an asymmetric steel stiletto.
Vicco’s Tower frames specific views and creates particular qualities of light in each space. From the study, a ‘panorama’ window frames the garden as a landscape. A double height vertical glass slot shows a London Plane — one of the original avenue planted by the Georgians. A horizontal slot at bath height allows a very private contemplation of the garden. And above the sky.
51% studios’ artist client AK Dolven says: “To be able to bathe in the moonlight and a shower under a tree is something I thought was only possible in the remote place I come from in Norway. With this inside-outside space I can continue these elemental experiences in East London.” . In a dense urban environment, nature gains in focus and beauty: architecture as lens.
Materials have been designed to wear well and age gracefully, with minimal finishing or product applications. Money was spent to ensure adequate glass insulation and a full house water purification system from the pure H2O company to support our clients health and negate the need for adding to the recycling pile with bottled water.
Vicco’s Tower won an RIBA London Award in 2008 and has been shortlisted for the Georgian Group Architectural Award and a Grand Designs Award. RIBA Awards are given for buildings that have high architectural standards and make a substantial contribution to the local environment.
“Vicco’s tower is a rear garden extension of a traditional small Hackney house to give a new stacked kitchen, study and master bathroom in that order for a Norwegian artist living in London. You cannot help being mesmerized by the artist’s own touches so a modest project becomes one of singular aesthetic consistency.
The extension addresses the back garden with an area of nearly 100% glazing in the lower ground kitchen such that it feels almost like one was cooking out of doors. Above this is suspended a two storey solid wood tower containing the more private study, entirely lined with birch plywood followed by a large bathroom which has an entire glass roof and brilliant light.
Altogether a very successful building from modest but sure means.” RIBA website
To see AK Dolvens work, please visit: www.akdolven.com Photographer Vegar Moen is at www.vegarmoen.com
Baumhaus
Working with Dewhurst Macfarlane, David Bennett and Peter Deer Associates, we recently developed a GGBS concrete structure with a self finished interior to create thermal flywheel. Adjustable vertical louvres protect the exposed west façade from over heating, water is harvested for use in the garden and an airsource heat pump works with southfacing solar panels on the roof to lessen reliance on the grid.
A slim pool in the basement is planned in a later phase.
The project due on site later this year. The 51pct Project team is Cathi, Hazel, Anderson, Jack, George and Peter. The Quantity Surveor is Jackson Coles
The Green House
This was one of our first projects and still one of our favourites.
12 years ago we fell in love with this Georgian railway workers’ cottage with eccentric works, even though (or maybe because) all the best bits had been ripped out in the 60’s and it was terribly rundown … but it had a garden that had once been loved and three doors onto Little Green Street and one onto College Lane. We added a timber lined interior and started gardening even before we started the construction.
Enthusiasm
“One of the year’s most intriguing exhibitions is a set of amateur films produced in Communist Polish factories. Re-presented at the Whitechapel by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, the films were bankrolled by soviet bureaucracy, who thought they were funding sturdy propaganda films. In fact, the filmmakers produced poetic, and sometimes epic works that speak of workers’ dreams of happiness, love and freedom.” The best and brightest 2005 by Niru Ratnam for Observer Magazine.
Films of love, longing and labour: At the invitation of the Whitechapel Gallery and the artists, we transformed galleries in the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Kunstwerke, and Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona into a film makers club-room, three beautiful curtained cinema spaces, and an archive lounge.
Enthusiasm investigated how the amateur, the enthusiast or the hobbyist works invisibly within the relentless flow of ‘official’ culture, frequently adopting a counter-cultural tone of tactical resistance and criticism. In Poland under socialism even leisure was organised through factory-sponsored associations, and yet these film-makers activities became a space for dreams of love, criticism and freedom.
Out & About
