I told you I’d be putting up some sketches, didn’t I? I know I’m so slow in keeping promises, I just get distracted. Anyway! I’ve been sitting by my window drawing most of the morning and some sketches are getting there. Am drawing from pictures and site sketches, these sketches are for the High Street 2012 projects.
As you probably can see if you’ve been in the area, this is the entrance to Whitechapel Tube and Overground station.
Once I’ve illustrated my idea and presented it I’ll put that up as well, maaaybe. How are you feeling about the sketching style? Trying out some cartoony inspiration. and playing with Tria markers on tracingpaper. It makes the ink flow easier, makes it easier to blend and spread colours. Thoughts?
Saturday! Yey!
Today is going to be a lot of working and typing and studying, so I thought I’d start it off with some pictures from last night for you guys. My friend and I went to see the Forgotten Spaces exhibition at Somerset House, down by the Thames. Riba invited architects, students, engineers and designers from all fields to submit proposals to develop the forgotten spaces (hence the name of the exhibition) that are found across Greater London.
From Somerset House’s website:
Our cities are awash with obscure pockets of land, from land under flyovers, unloved green verges and disused car parks, how might we reclaim them? From underground climbing tunnels, city grottos, rooftop social hubs and inhabited church spires, this exhibition showcases a range of imaginative proposals from all over the capital and explores alternative ways to use and interact with urban space.
It’s very relevant to us just now as we have some similar briefs going on in Uni, but this is something anyone interested in spatial design, eco design or really just London. A bunch of architects, designers, students and others chose forgotten parts of London and redesigned them in order for them to be spaces that people can use and will enjoy using. So many ideas, and so many good ones! Particularly enjoyed Alex Scott-Whitby’s live project (IN)spires in which he takes use of the forgotten church spires across the capital to give artists and designers cheap studio space. Looked a bit drafty, but love the idea!
Social behavior by Denzien Works was a neat idea as well, and had the ultimate goal of rejuvenation the eco system of Central London by giving bees more places to nest! Now. I have to say I am not a big fan of bees. In fact I hate them and have a phobia. Even so; the design and frugality of the idea is interesting.
Check out the RIBA website for all short-listed entrants and projects. Or actually go to Somerset house. Go in the evening, and the view will be pretty darn good! (Yes, it’s picture time now)
Oh, by the way. Forgotten Spaces is on until 29 Jan, and open from 10.00-18.00. Admission is free!
The entrance to the exhibition was covered in black plastic (like bin bags), which made it really grungy and cool.
This wasn’t actually part of the exhibition (was upstairs by the café), but it was really cool.
Feel free to notice the awesomeness of the reflection in that puddle!
Yes. I live in London. Gives me the right to snap pictures where Big Ben is in the backround, not centre stage.
But still. That is a pretty neat skyline.
Yes. So, video time!
I tried to upload it directly to the blog to show in a nice little window but couldn’t get it to do that so I had to make it a youtube video. With any luck I’ll get it in a window anyway…. (Just now I’m waiting for it to upload to youtube…)
This is part of my research for High Street 2012, partly a bit of a branding exercise and partly just a What-is-Whitechapel-exercise. I’m making a short one too this week, so will put that up when I’ve made it.
Right… Youtube says 33 minutes to go.
I’m just going to do something else for a bit.
I’ll just go get my laundry.
okay. 16 minutes to go. (sorry bout this)
Oh! I know! I’ll tell you about a lovely little place I had tea in Brick Lane the other day! You know riight at the top of Brick Lane, near Verge bar? Where if you turn left you at some point find Shoreditch overground station? There is a lovely little Swedish tea house called Fika! It is LOVELY. And one of the guys who works there is lovely too. Wonderfully Scandinavian interior (which makes me feel very welcome, obviously) and the cutest little roof terrace I have seen in a long time. Check out their website and you’ll see some of what I mean: http://www.fikalondon.com/ Anyway. So my friend and I were out celebrating her birthday in the afternoon, and we stumbled across little Fika. We had wonderful cups of tea and sat gleefully enjoying the roof terrace and its green-ness in the middle of Brick Lane. (well, actually the top, but you know what I mean)
ooh! 3 minutes left!
Finally.
Right. So no window. oh well. Click the link, please :)
Marianne
I’ve been a terrible blogger this last month. Sorry, but between Uni, London, the tube and design festivals I have been ridiculously busy and not really too concerned about updating everyone else.
But walking down Mile End road today, more specifically at Booth Memorial, I suddenly realised: Autumn is here! Finally!! I love Autumn! So here are some pictures from Whitechapel and Stepney Green, taken in the last week. I am currently working on some briefs for High Street 2012, so in a bit there will be a video and some sketches up here as well.
Hello sunshine! love the glow of the trees where the light hits them.
This is actually what first caught my eye today. The leaves on the road have been run over so many times that they are literally embedded in the asphalt. Like they were painted on to it! Beautiful artwork there, Mother Nature!
Unfortunately this picture had to be taken through my window… Lost some of the amazing colours that play along the brickwork in the mornings.
…who says Whitechapel isn’t beautiful??
The last few days I’ve been trotting around London Design Festival, and am really enjoying it. So far I’ve seen a lot of the smaller showrooms and shops, as well as bigger events like Designersblock in Clerkenwell and Tramshed in Shoreditch. Today at Tent (Brick Lane) I talked to Cameron Fry of Liquidesign about his designs, my use of them in my final project and some other stuff that involved sanding down stools and interns. (but not sanding down interns) Nice guy. Check out his stuff on Liquidesign´s site.
Now. Some of you may know that I have been bragging on twitter that I would tweet about stuff that I see, but as I am the only person in the world to not have any kind of smartphone, I have to manually take the pictures from my camera over onto my computer and then upload them to my blog. And I will!!! I swear. It’s just that I seem to have left my memory card reader in Norway. So I need to buy one here. The store is only down the road, so I will get one tomorrow. I hope.
Also up for this weekend: 100% design in Earls Court! Yey!!! I was a rookie at it last year and LOVED it, so am v. excited to go back.
Other than that London is treating me well (don’t worry, Mum) and tomorrow is enrolment for London Met, so everything will be up and running soon!
If you are in London: Go out there and grab the rest of the weekend!! There is SO much good stuff going on! Check out London Design Festival´s website here, and make sure you pop in if you see a yellow speech bubble outside a shop or café!
Live it!
This week I´ve been doing a project for a pharmacy up here in Norway, the last project before leaving for London. Their break-room was so white it was painful, and noise was free to travel through the paper thin walls into the adjacent office. Something had to be done! This started out as a bit of a brainstorming, and I´ve photographed pretty much every bit of my process. After a trip to Oslo´s Grønland I came back with the fabrics to create this decorative acoustic wall paneling. Because budgets were tight, I did it all by hand using cheap panels from Acoustic tuning´s Foam Line. These are delivered in charcoal grey, and measure 762×762 mm. I used 3 panels to create the artwork/wall panel/fancy thing.
I found these in a clutter of fabric rolls at a shop in Oslo, and they became the main palette for my design.
Before cutting into anything at all I needed to get sketching…
And then did some dry-runs..
Still in love with the colours, but needed some more work on the pattern of it…
My desk turned into a little bit of a mess…
This desk actually came from my great grandma´s house. My brother painted it red something like 13 years ago. While we´re on the interior of my bedroom (at my parents house), here´s another one:
Sorry about the incredible yellowness of the picture, my camera desperately tried to compensate for the light from the lamp. The lamp and table are both from an old pharmacy, the picture is brought home from Africa by my Granddad decades ago.
So anyway. I finally decided on a design, so time to get cutting and pasting!
Here I am, working in the break-room where the panels are going up. The fabrics needed ironing, and I am simply gluing them onto the back side of the foam. Simple but effective :)
Getting there….
After dressing all the panels in fabric I laid it out on the floor…
And then I hung it on the wall!
(click link to see video) —> tekstilprosjekt
I took it down probably 5 times after the initial hanging, and it ended up a little differently then shown above. I´ll post pictures once the entire room is done!
Bed time, moving to London tomorrow! Yey!
Hope you liked my work, comments are welcome!
A group of Norwegian designers got together in 2004 to create the company Scandinavian Surface. Ann-Tove Engenes, Kristine Dybwad, Katrine Nylund and Åsne Midtgarden are all MA graduates from The National College of Art in Bergen, at the Departement of Textile. They had been working in the business around 10 years when they decided to use the inspiration one gets from working in a beautiful country like Norway; more specifically on the west coast, in Bergen.
Steep mountains, a million rhododendhron flowers, dramatic coastline, sparkling locals,
cascades of rain and rare outbursts of sudden sunshine; we find these conditions brilliant for developing new designs.(…)(…)Memorizing the excitement of getting a glimpse of a moose or an eagle. Always seeking to capture the Norwegian freshness,we transform it into decorative pieces of Scandinavian surface.
Their designs are contemporary glimpses of Norwegian nature, sometimes balancing on digital inspiration in pixel-like patterns. I love the bold but discreet use of colour, the feminine but urban feel, the way the wallpapers and panel pieces define the room they are used in without taking over the interior.
I used their wallpapers Rhubarb Spring Green and Rhubarb Indigo Blue in my hotel project, where a lot of the focus was to give the hotel a Norwegian theme with an international, contemporary twist:
Recently they´ve added the Moose Memory collection, where the moose is “stitched” into the design. Love it!!
Of course the ladies have a huge collection including horses, eagles, wolves and just nature without animals. Check out their website for more designs and feel free to fall in love!
Wallpapers are shipped worldwide by http://www.photowall.se, UK manufacturer and dealer is Surface View.
Have a good weekend!
Hi guys, a lot of new visitors these days!
Great to see that you´re checking out my work and apparently enjoying it! (though apologies for some of the watermarks. the auto-mark-thingy got a bit out of hand. I´m going to try to fix it.)
So I´m counting down to the big move to London, but I still have a bit of holidays to go. Mostly because I haven´t had any yet. Since my exams in June (final project is partly available up top of my site) I´ve been working in a pharmacy in my home town outside Oslo, but I´m wrapping that up now so I have only about 4 days to go. From then on it´s packing, planning and organizing, but most importantly: 10 days in Trondheim! yey! I´ve missed Trondheim so much since moving post-studies, and am super excited to be back there with my friends at least for a few days.
Meanwhile I have to really get on with figuring out what to write my dissertation on. I really can´t decide. On the one hand I´d like to write about a tiny, geeky subject and make me one in about 5 people to know a lot about it. But really. That might just drive me mad, and I think it might be a good idea to explore a larger field that will teach me more relevant stuff that I can really use. Soo…. I really don´t know.
I´d love to write about furniture in some way.
I´d love to write about lighting and lighting effects and put an economical and environmental spin on it.
I´d love to write about textiles, colors, traditional and cultural influences, and how this affects tastes across Europe or maybe the world. Or actually: the world is in Europe now, seeing as how Europeans are traveling so much but also looking at immigrants effecting tastes and looks. Huh. I like that one. I´m going to think more about it.
Because I´m combining my two years in Norway with the third year at London Met I´m really lagging on the whole dissertation-planning-thing. My fellow students will be ready to go, and most of them have probably already started in September. So I need to get cracking. Any views? do you like that last idea as much as I do? That could be seriously interesting. huh. big smile on my face! :)
Any thoughts appreciated!
Do it, Love it, Live it!
So FINALLY, I am getting around to posting some of my renderings from the last semester at the Norwegian School of Creative Studies. I just finished my two years studying Interior Design in Trondheim, Norway.
As of September I will be a Londoner, finishing off my BA Interior Design and Technology at London Metropolitan University, and am very much looking forward to it, thank you! Check out my work, three of my projects are posted in separate galleries up top on the homepage. Browse them and feel free to comment and/or contact!
From the Hotel project
Studios used in my final project are Dare Studio, James UK, &then Design, PINCH, Liquidesign and Åker Collective. As not all of them have gotten back to me about posting renderings of their designs some of them are not up yet. Right now you will see furniture by Dare Studio, James UK and Åker Collective in my work.
Enjoy!
also:
Please respect that hours of work have gone into this work.
Do not steal, copy or print-screen any of these images.
(I know there are ways to get around the watermarks and copyrights. Please don´t. That´s just bad attitude.)
So! Finally I can come out from hiding, as my exams are over! yey! As promised I will be posting some of my work, feel free to enjoy (but not steal) . After months of hard work and no actual life I was thrilled to be awarded not just one but both awards for the interior design program at NKF Trondheim, and am both humbled and honored by the Gullspire (golden sprout, I guess. Sounds better in Norwegian) for Best 3D-visualization and Best Student Work. Thank you, I feel very lucky!
The after party was awesome, and made me realize all over again how much I love the people here and the town itself. Thank you girls, for being amazing friends and inspirations, thank you guys, for being awesome and cute!
Sadly, this means that my time in Trondheim is over for now. These days I just walk up and down the streets saying silent goodbyes to all the beautiful parts of this ol´town I´ve come to call home. Thanks Trondheim, you´re awesome! Will miss every aspect of my time here, and mark my words. I´ll be back! In however many years it takes me to either get broke or sick of London.
Today, life is great. This week-end I have felt like a 15-year old, a fox, a best friend, a slightly drunk person (I was probably much more than slightly drunk) and more than anything: I felt really, really happy. Thanks guys and girls and town and beer!
So in fact not much furniture today. sorry. But projects will be up and rolling within tomorrow night!
Love it! (life, this time!)
Year books must be signed! <3
