Tag Archives: London

Underground Music

London entrepreneur Ajit Chambers is looking to rehabilitate and spruce up 26 closed London underground stations in order to reopen them as bars, tourist attractions, and music venues. Chambers has already received permission to do so from Mayor of London Boris Johnson under the condition that no public money is used in the renovations.The reopened areas would likely include Aldwych station (which is already featured in many films), South Kentish Town station, Y0rk Road station, Brompton Road station, closed tunnels and platforms at Euston station, and Down Street station, which now acts as an emergency exit for the Picadilly Line.

We think this is a fantastic idea! Since some of the stations were closed down as early as the 1930′s , they will still feature the decor and architecture of that time period which could offer a really cool theme to the new establishments. And, there’s nothing else happening in them, so why not? Though Transport for London has warned Chambers about potential safety hazards due to some of the stations being close to operating railways, he is still moving forwards with plans. After hearing about the successfully innovative events in the Old Vic Tunnels this year, we look forward to seeing this project go through!

(Source: The Independent)

London’s Newest Real Estate: Birdhouses

The Secret Garden Project is underway with the building of hundreds of birdhouses along London streets in a sculptural endeavor known as the Spontaneous City in the Tree of Heaven by London Fieldworks. We think that, not only are these houses an interesting sight to see, they are a wonderful accommodation for our winged friends.

The habitats are also meant to house bugs, nearly all of which we would much rather have in a tree than scrambling around our offices. The housing sculptures reflect their surrounding human-sized buildings, and offer various sized homes for various sized creatures.

We would love to see what one of these looks like with a full house! We think these houses are a great way to promote urban biodiversity and show the importance of maintaining suitable livings spaces for wild animals everywhere, let alone in major cities.

(Source: GreenMuze)

Stuart Haygarth and Zieta Process at the London Design Festival

After the robots invasion in Trafalgar Square, which we blogged about 2 days ago, the London Design Festival is gracing us with more exciting installations. We have come across two that we particularly like at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

First, there is Stuart Haygarth’s redesign of one of the museum’s marble staircases. His work consists in recycling banal objects that he finds (eye glasses, mirrors, debris), to then turn them into something completely different from their original function, but, more importantly, into something beautiful.

In this case, he used over 100 parts of picture frames that have been discarded, that he cut and arranged so as to perfectly mould the stairs, leaving a path in the middle for visitors. And we absolutely love how it looks, especially because it gives so much perspective to the stairs.

The other installation, called Blow and Roll, is in the pond of the museum, where Polish designers Zieta Process have set up a metal structure. Think it sounds pretty generic? Well, think again.

They have rolled several tubes made of steel which are each fixed on a set of wheels. The tubes were then inflated, leading them to unfold. Just like blowouts.

And by reflecting the whole structure, the water in the pond gives even more perspective to the structure.

We actually had to see the video to understand how it all worked.

[Vimeo http://vimeo.com/14877644]

We simply cannot wait for the week end to check out both installations, as well as all the other events at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

(Source: Tree Hugger)

Light-writer robots take over Trafalgar Square

If you have walked past Trafalgar Square this past week end, you have probably noticed the robot invasion. The installation by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram is called Outrace, and is part of the London Design Festival. It will occupy Trafalgar Square for another 3 days.

The machines come all the way from an Audi factory in Germany, where they normally glue and weld car parts together. But the two designers have hijacked the machines to turn them into light-writers. By accessing the Outrace website via a computer or mobile device, people can send messages to be drawn by the machines.

The movements of their ‘heads’ draw letters, which are captured by long exposure cameras, as the robots are adorned with lights. The message then appears on Trafalgar Square, but is also sent to the sender to publish on Facebook. The impact of the installation is then not restricted to the physical location of the machines, but is also transmitted worldwide using social media. And it looks pretty cool.

The sight of those machines is part beautiful, part scary: they sort of look like they are dancing, but their movements are also so quick that they remind us of those robots going all crazy and homicidal in sci-fi movies.

We are going to try to light-write something. If we manage to get a slot, we shall post the result here.

(Source: FT and Coolhunter)

London 2012 Olympic stamps

So far, the London Olympics have been a bit of a disaster in design terms, starting with that infamous logo. However, things are at least on the up.

Royal Mail have released a limited edition set of stamps to celebrate the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. There will be 30 in all, released in three sets on 10 – one each year. This year’s set is hilariously named “On track for 2010″.

We’re not blown away by these, but they’re nice illustrations, and at least a step in the right direction…

(source: Design Boom)

Table tennis in London

Table tennis (or ping pong, or whiff whaff for the sillier among you) is one of our favourite sports. Probably because of the Baby-sized bats/paddles you need to play the sport. So we’re loving this innovation from the London Olympics 2012 team.

All over London, table tennis tables are popping up. There are 100 in all, and they’ll be there for the next month – completely free of charge. So you can simply wander up and play any time you feel like it.

The idea is to encourage people to take up the game, as the Olympic Committee have resolved to get 1,000,000 more people playing sport by 2012. And Table tennis is the perfect choice as summed up quite brilliantly by our dear Mayor BoJo at the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony:

“There you have, I think, the essential difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations such as the French looked at the dining table and saw the opportunity to have dinner. We looked at the dining table and saw an opportunity to play whiff whaff.”

And who can argue with that?!

(source: TreeHugger)

Tube or false?

We love this new ad campaign on the tube at the moment.

Each poster features some little-known fact about the London underground, some of which are actually quite interesting.

What we really love however is that each fact is set on a background of fabric from a tube seat. Admittedly they are hideous, but we still recognised them and it made us smile…

(via Notcot)

Climate Change Adaptation Strategy

Just a small departure from our usual design-ish posts today, but we really had to put something up about this – the Climate Change Adaptation Strategy.

What this is, as far as we can tell, is the London authorities asking the public how they would combat climate change. People post up their suggestions, and people vote for their favourites. Now this is all very well and good; democracy is a lovely concept and we like being asked for our opinions. But you do wonder exactly why we are being asked.

Copenhagen succeeded in nothing more than confusing large numbers of people. The inaction also fuelled climate change sceptics and the whole IT saga out in East Anglia made a lot of people lose faith in the scientists. Consequently, you’ve now got a lot of people who really don’t believe that much can be done about the state of the environment, and even more who don’t really care.

Now it seems like the London authorities also fall into that bracket. They should, of all people, have access to expert information and opinion, pressure groups and activists lobbying for change and presenting plans for a greener future and – in a nutshell – green options coming out of their ears. It appears that either isn’t happening (unlikely, the green wing are a vociferous lot) or more likely they don’t get it or don’t care.

So much as we love the sentiment of being asked for our opinions, climate change is an expert, scientific issue. And if those with access to the experts and scientists aren’t putting forward a proposal, it’s time to worry. Much as’ National Vegetarian Day’ and ‘Force companies to turn their lights off at night!’ (two of the most popular people’s proposals at the moment) are excellent ideas, they aren’t going to save the planet.

That’s a job for the politicians, and it seems like they may have given up.

Merry Christmas (everyone) from Red Sofa

Our friends over at Red Sofa recently put together this video as their ‘christmas card’ this year.

The video pretty much speaks for itself, so we won’t go into too much detail, but we love it for proving that you can still make great films for under a fiver. As long as you don’t take yourself too seriously…