Victorian – SpecNews

London house extensions awarded by Don’t Move, Improve!

Dezeen promotion: a south London residence updated with new living spaces, custom-built furniture and a two-storey lightwell has been named winner in a competition to find London’s best house extensions (+ slideshow).
Designed by Tsuruta Architects to reveal “memories of place and construction”, House of Trace is a two-storey addition to a Victorian property in south London.
The prize for Best Historic Intervention was scooped by Fitzrovia House, a project by West Architecture that involved inserting a new residence behind the Georgian facade of a bomb-damaged west-London house.
Dezeen’s architecture editor Amy Frearson and RIBA London Director Tamsie Thomson were among the judges, who were chaired by NLA director Peter Murray.
“The standard of Don’t Move Improve continues to rise each year,” commented Murray.

Fashion, Trends, Beauty Tips & Celebrity Style Magazine

Architecture, art, design, fashion, cultures, some of the vintage pieces and people all create an image in my head for a design.
Q. The fashion item you most want to buy now?
Q. If you weren’t a jewellery designer, what would you be?
Architecture and jewellery design were and are my dreams.
When we meet she reveals that architecture and design have always been her real passions.

Project Orange’s West Stow Lodge has a pared-back interior

West Stow Lodge was designed by London architects Project Orange for a family with three young children in a village near Bury St Edmunds.
To emphasise the sense of visual continuity throughout West Stow Lodge, Project Orange spaced the mullions of all the windows evenly, at 600-millimetre intervals.
Oak joinery, white-painted bricks, and concrete flooring were used to make the interior of this new house in Suffolk, England, more contemporary than its traditional pitched-roof exterior (+ slideshow).
“The interior materials echo the exterior, and are intended very much as an honest expression of the construction,” said Ash.
“Within this setting, the house can be seen as a nuanced, contemporary exploration of the domestic vernacular architecture in Suffolk,” said Ash.

Party with the Eameses! Inside the modernist masters’ riotous home

As Charles Eames used to tell his staff: “Take your pleasure seriously.”
The Eameses playful mischief is still evident in their home studio, the smaller pavilion that stands across a small courtyard from the house.
New employees of the Eames Office would be set the daunting challenge of rearranging the keys to make a new tune.
As the British brutalist architect Peter Smithson, an Eames-admiring contemporary, put it: “They made it respectable to like pretty things”.
A replica features in the exhibition, providing an appropriately anarchic plinkety-plonk soundtrack to the riot of ideas.

Art, design and architecture: what to see in autumn 2015

The last British Art Show was the best so far.
AS
The dynamism, unexpectedness and sheer abundance of the art market makes these art fairs a window on the new – and the old.
Jonathan Jones
Groundbreaking attempt to place pop art in its global context or another rehash of familiar names and images?
This long-overdue survey should allow us to focus more on the art, less on the man.
The spiritual art of the past echoes in his work – martyrs, triptychs, meditation, all that sacred jazz.

Should Britain’s ‘worst building’ be demolished?

That view of 20 Fenchurch Street that brought you to tears is the exact opposite of what he wanted.
Either 20 Fenchurch Street is there as long as it endures, or we do something about it.
After a day in Paris at Frank Gehry’s exhilarating fish-like, wave-like I found myself on the South Bank almost weeping at the view of 20 Fenchurch Street.
I still find it very hard to accept that Centre Point, a building that once personified hit-and-run property development, should now be a listed building.
Or even Sant’Elia, although buildings like 20 Fenchurch Street do seem to exploit modern engineering to create futurist dreams that would be a lot better left on paper.