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_THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITIES BARKING BATHHOUSE_Something & Son _THE IMPORTANCE OF GRAPHICS MOVEMENT CAFE_ Morag Myerscough
THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITIES Barking Bath House Something And Son
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1. British nationalist
2. Muslim radical
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3. Child from Barking Community
CREATE has commissioned Something & Son to design and build The Barking Bathhouse. Focusing on wellbeing, The Barking Bathhouse will experiment in the latest design, health and beauty ideas to help people feel happy and relaxed this summer during perhaps the most hectic period in London’s history. The Bathhouse will open on 24 July in Barking town centre and provide affordable spa treatments as well as a free social space for people to meet. Something & Son are the design practice behind the hugely successful FARM:shop in Dalston which saw the practice create a fully functioning farm within a disused shop. This new project is one of the Mayor’s Outer London Fund projects being delivered for Barking and Dagenham Council. The Barking Bathhouse will combine a spa with a bar, where visitors will be able to sip healthy cocktails under a canopy of growing cucumbers and sunbathe in seaside-inspired pebble bays. After soaking up vitamins and being pampered with a variety of treatments – using produce grown by local allotment gardeners – visitors will be able to sweat it out or cool down in a traditional wooden sauna or a cold room with a pioneering ‘dry ice’ chiller. The purpose-built design of the Bathhouse is inspired by 20th century working men’s bathhouses, ultra modern spas and Barking’s industrial heritage.
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CREATE
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Application for construction of pavillion created interest in the council.
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4. Man from Barking Community over the Barking Bath House Facade 5. Diagram of funding process for Barking Bath House 6. Sketches of Barking Bath House
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Something & Son created the Barking Bath House with Create sponsored by The Outer London Fund on the basis that Barking was in need of regeneration for a lack of an art scene and in response to the success of the public square by MUF Architecture in the vicinities. Through the funding the sum of money went also to cover grants for local individuals with interest in massages and health treatments to work in the temporary Bath House and later in the new location for the permanent version.
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MUF Architecture public square
Something & Son 7. Exploded axonometry of Barking Bath House 8. Map of Barking Bath House location 9. Sketch of Barking Bath House 10. Graph of division of Funding
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SOMETHING AND SON
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Something & Son
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Something & Son is a design practice rooted in a long history of British inquisitiveness and experimentation, applied to the creation of a more sustainable world. Our work reflects our varied backgrounds and shared passion for social enterprise, the environment, engineering and art. We like to create popular, provocative and witty work that tackles the big design and social challenges of our time.
of change. Engaging with ech project with the existing and trying to work with the existing, examplary is the Barking Bath House because, thanks to the Outer London Fund, they managed to give grants to individuals from BArking with special interest to Health Treatments and SPA and on top of that giving them a permanent working position in the future Bath House, a more permanent option to the existing temporary bath house.
A keenness to collaborate has led us to work alongside swift experts, mushroom men, scrapyard merchants, farmers, scientists and sociologists.
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When I met with Andy, a co-founder of the practice, we chatted about how the Barking Bath House came about and a little bit of history of the practice. We met in the FARM:Shop, another successful project of theirs located in Dalston, London. Something & Son works like a pentagon, each project has its area of interest: from Architecture to Art, from Environment to Social, Something & Son covers everything.
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Matter of great interest for the practice are the existing communities and the easy direct message that architecture can give to them, a message of hope and reasurance, a message
11. Graph of how Something & Son works as a practice 12. Next page, images of Something & Son previous projects, including the Barking Bath House
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Drawing on the industrial heritage of Barking, as well as the aesthetic of darkened timber farm buildings found in nearby Essex and the wooden beach huts of Kent, Something & Son will combine functional design and new spa technologies to create the Bathhouse building. The clear roofed structure of the bar area will allow high levels of sunlight into the communal space. In the treatment area, strong spotlights will pinpoint areas such as the nail bar, creating some drama in an otherwise low lit, tranquil space. A raw aesthetic throughout will challenge traditional notions of ‘luxury’ while creating a blissful space to relax.
and are thrilled to have commissioned The Barking Bathhouse. Working with Barking and Dagenham we hope that the project will reinvigorate Barking town centre, bringing back a social space for local people, as well as providing a place for visitors to escape the crowds in central London during the Olympic period. CREATE is a great place to nurture new design talents like Something & Son, and The Barking Bathhouse is very exciting project for east London.”
The pod-based structure, to be prefabricated and docked together on site, has been planned with the future in mind, and when the Bathhouse closes at the end of the summer the different pods will be separated with the aim of relocating them locally for continued use by the community, including local allotment owners, playgrounds and youth centres. The Bathhouse will also run a rich and varied events programme with workshops, talks and discussions with happiness and wellbeing as the central ethos. From talks on whether money can make you happy to chocolate making and meditation workshops, the programme will focus on establishing personal happiness. A workshop on the beauty myth will offer photoshop makeovers showing how media images of beauty are unattainable, while laughter yoga, clowning workshops and comedy nights will all bring an extra bit of happiness to the day. Anna Doyle, Producer, CREATE, said: “We have developed a relationship with Something & Son over the past two years
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THE IMPORTANCE OF GRAPHICS Movement Cafe Morag Myerscough
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The Movement Café is a new temporary café and performance space next to the DLR station in Greenwich, South East London, designed by British designer and artist Morag Myerscough. It sits in a corner of the site of the former Greenwich Industrial Estate that is currently being regenerated by developers, Cathedral Group. Built from scratch in just sixteen days to 24 coincide with the opening of The Olympics (the developers thought it important that the gateway to the Olympic borough was not an unattractive construction site), The Movement Café is an explosion of colour and type and sits at the centre of an amphitheatre-like space created from the natural level of the site, post-demolition, being 2m below street level. It’s the result of a public art collaboration between Myerscough and Olympic Poet and prolific tweeter Lemn Sissay. Sissay has been commissioned by Cathedral to write a poem about Greenwich, which will eventually be set permanently into the road that cuts through the site when it is completed. In the short term, the poem, Shipping Good, is painted on the hoarding that wraps the site. Myerscough’s design for The Movement Café was inspired by one of Sissay’s tweets: This is the House. This is the Path. This is the Gate. This is the Opening. This is the Morning. This is a Person Passing. This is Eye Contact.
Lemn Sissay, June 27th 2012 The designer has used words and phrases from this tweet and painted them by hand on large wooden panels, positioned over the core structure of the building which is covered in an original hand-painted Myerscough multi-coloured geometric pattern. Sissay’s tweets will be written daily on a blackboard in the cafe. The outdoor amphitheatre seating area provides a lovely, contemplative, sheltered place of respite for commuters and visitors to Greenwich and several times a week plays host to storytelling, poetry reading and acoustic performances. All furniture is made by Morag Myerscough and Luke Morgan from reclaimed laboratory tops. Cushions are hand sewn from kite fabric. The cafe’s prominent position at the gateway to one of the most important sites during the Olympic games, presented a unique opportunity to showcase the best of British design talent and creative collaboration. Designer Morag Myerscough used the tweets of a poet to create the bold graphics surrounding this temporary cafe in London. Located close to the Olympic Park in Greenwich, the cafe was commissioned by developer Cathedral and constructed in just 16 days to coincide with the start of the games. The brightly painted words on the facade spell out phrases such as ‘this is the gate’ and ‘this is eye contact’, which originate from one of many creatively written tweets by poet Lemn
Sissay. “I had worked with Lemn Sissay on a previous project and wanted to collaborate with him on this project,” Myerscough told Dezeen. “So we met up, and he mentioned these tweets he does everyday and I liked the idea of somehow incorporating them into this project.” The structure of the building is made from plywood, scaffolding and shipping containers. ”I have used containers before for projects,” she said, “but this time it was important to me that the containers were used only as a base and not as the main feature.” She also explained how her studio will re-use most of the materials when the building is deconstructed in a few months time. Myerscough collaborated with artist Luke Morgan to design the colourfully painted furniture, which includes stools and tables made from reclaimed wood. Amphitheatre-style wooden steps climb up around the edge of the cafe’s outdoor seating area and are covered with cushions made from kite fabric.
THIS IS THE HOUSE THIS IS THE PATH THIS IS THE GATE THIS IS THE OPENING THIS IS THE MORNING THIS IS A PERSON PASSING THIS IS EYE CONTACT 13. Lemn Sissay poem on which the MVMT Cafe is set upon
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