Your Tips For Copenhagen Fringe Living: Part 1

In case you missed the news, White Line Hotels is at it again with another fantastic opportunity to win a weekend away.

The destination this time?: Copenhagen, the city of refined rebellion.

The catch?: more a little give and take than a catch, all we want is to know where you like to catch up with the local spirit when in Copenhagen.

Let us in on your personal tips and we’ll enter you in our competition to win a weekend at Avenue Hotel — White Line Hotels’ own insider pick. We’ll even throw in a little surprise from our partners at Design By Us. See how rewarding sharing can be?

To get you started hot-wiring your brain and turning over all those Copenhagen memories, here’s some offerings from what we’ve heard from you so far:

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Bathroom Culture at Roca Gallery

Mention the words “pavillion” and “Barcelona” in the same breath and undoubtedly you’ll think of Mies Van Der Rohe’s magical project erected for the Barcelona International Exhibition in 1929 (demolished in 1930 and subsequently rebuilt by these wonderful people between 1983 and 1986). Whilst I couldn’t help but draw a parallel, this wasn’t actually the pavilion I had in mind when writing this post. Being heavily into interiors and always on the lookout for interesting and unique products, a recent visit to Barcelona lead us to the much talked about Roca flagship building on the Carrer de Joan Güell. Distinguished Barcelona architects OAB completed the Roca Barcelona Gallery in 2009, creating a luminous showcase “representing the company’s past, present and future” over 3 floors. To interpret and convey a brand’s values by means of a building, can’t be easy; an architectural challenge that Borja and Lucìa Ferrater of OAB managed to achieve with impressive grace and eloquence, however. For those not familiar with Roca, they are world leaders in bathroom spaces and very relevant in design and architecture terms for the likes of us who are “in the trade”.

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Cabinet Home: Not Your Average Mobile Home

Rintala Eggertsson Architects have created a transportable home that was installed close the MAXXI museum in Rome during 2010.

The house is composed of three units, an ensemble of large ascending steps, each one of which the size of a shipping container that could be potentially transported anywhere. Cabinet Home is a wooden construction with a 10 m2 garden that collects rain water and sun, inspired by the idea of building an ecological one-room house. The aesthetic is minimal, and it opposes the clear exterior that reflects the sun and blends with the surroundings against the dark and shadowy interior that offers shelter for the sometimes-excessive Mediterranean light.

On the ground floor there is a kitchen and a dining room, which open to the garden. On the first level, a living room (or library) with a small terrace overlooks the garden. Finally, on the second level there is a bedroom, with access to the rooftop and a view to the sky.

Sami Rintala and Dagur Eggertsson conceive contemporary architecture as “the theatre of our primeval social and private behavior, fulfillment of our biological true needs, whether we realize, accept and implement this fact or not. Cabinet Home is based on a simple idea of combining three nature elements that are freely there to be used for no one’s loss and everybody’s gain: trees that grow by themselves, rain and sunshine that come rain or shine.”

With this project, the Finnish-Norwegian office is encouraging the use of solar energy and is proposing a model for a discrete use of space and resources in Western culture; with it they consider it relevant to promote the idea that quality of life can be achieved through excellent design and simple materials, and not necessarily through more square meters.

The project was jointly supported by the Norwegian and Finnish embassies in Rome. Whatever it is about the country they come from, Norwegian architects are taking pioneering leaps in blending inside and outside, sometimes nearly erasing the line completely. If you like the look of Cabinet Home, you’ll definitely need to go see White Line Hotels edit Juvet Landskapshotell.

Project data:
location: Maxxi Museum, Via Guido Reni 4, Roma
size: 28, 5 square meter interior + 10 square meter garden
materials: wood; sawn timber structure, board exterior façade, plywood interiors
construction time:16.-26.5.2010
construction team: Sami Rintala, Rintala Eggertsson Arch., Rinchard Barriteau, U2 Arkitekter, Jani Rintala, Tuomalan Tekniikka Ltd, Tony Karlsson, Tuomalan Tekniikka Ltd.Politecnico di Milano: professors: Paolo Mestriner, Massimiliano Spadoni, Giuseppe Cusatelli students: Chiara Cabrini,Clara Ferrari,Veronica Grazioli, Marta Bartolini, Emanuela Baldissera, Alessandro Parise, Giacomo Grazioli, Edoardo Giancola, Federico Zarattini
sponsors: ONYX Solar, Spain – Tuomalan Tekniikka, Finland – Iguzzini, Italy – ACER, Italy – Finnair Cargo, Finland
support:Norwegian Embassy in Rome – Finnish Embassy in Rome

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Contributing Writer: Gabriela Galati

Images: Rintala-Eggertsson Architects

Why Can’t We Be Ourselves Like We Were Yesterday?

When I walked through the darkened entry door of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum last week, there were a few things I expected to find, and even to feel, when visiting the first major survey of the movement. A Michael Graves tea kettle, for example. Maybe an occasional twinge of repulsion as well. Postmodernism was, in a way, very reactive; surely not all of its expressions could hold up decades later. Add to the mix that no one seems to know how many more “post” prefixes to add on to accurately describe where we’ve philosophically been at in the last 10-20 years, and what I really expected was an almost indescribable suffocating nausea. I also expected that to fuel a good few conversations about why we, in a collective sense, seem to be struggling to throw over the weight of post-modernism (or post-post-modernism, or so on…) the way they had done with modernism, and just get on with it.

The last thing I expected was to be slapped in the face, almost immediately, with an overwhelming and incongruous sense of nostalgia. How on earth did that happen? Jenny Holzer’s Protect Me From What I Want never seemed so relevant…

In one way, I was relieved. That kind of reaction must really mean that post-modernism really is dead. The discussion is over. We are free. So why did I still feel such a sense of loss?

For one, the curation and exhibition design were excellent, and they knew what they were doing: throwing a funeral service. The low lighting, ostensibly to protect the objects exhibited, worked with the dark industrial display units to create an extremely somber atmosphere that at times created the perfect backdrop, by means of contrast, to postmodernism’s most colorful and playful moments. Pieces by early postmodernist Italian design group Memphis were among the works that looked more joyous for this context; the expected Michael Graves tea kettle, however, could have been an Egyptian relic in its low-lit vitrine.

Postmodernism covered a lot of ground, and the stand-out achievement of the exhibition was the successful transition between art, architecture, product design, film, fashion and, perhaps most importantly, music. Pop songs become siren songs, irresistibly pulling you around dark corners to discover the next chapter in Postmodernism’s story, and then decline. Indeed, the room on pop music seems to serve as the exhibition’s control room. Here costumes from Grace Jones, David Byrne, and Klaus Nomi are displayed at unnatural heights, elevating the characters they represent to a God-like status. If any doubt remains as to music’s importance in the exhibition’s narrative, that becomes as dead as the movement itself at the exhibition’s end. Staring at Andreas Gursky’s Tokyo Stock Exchange (1990), you’re pulled around one last corner, past a Robert Longo drawing, by the sound of New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle. In this last dark room is the video Longo directed for the song, and it’s almost impossible not to see it as an epitaph for a movement that, at that time, was just beginning to crash under its own weight:

I feel fine and I feel good
I’m feeling like I never should
Whenever I get this way
I just don’t know what to say
Why can’t we be ourselves like we were yesterday

Far from its funeral service, London’s Bethnal Green is still just off average tourist’s radar. For a different London experience, base yourself at White Line Hotels edit Town Hall Hotel & Apartments.

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Contributing writer: Melissa Frost

Photos: Victoria & Albert Museum

Don’t miss it. Go see the bricks.

Intimate, honest and sometimes raw. The images printed in the relatively new bi-annual interiors magazine Apartamento (issue 7 is on sale now) tell stories of real life interiors and to me, are quite reminiscent of Jürgen Teller’s photography (Teller being featured in this very issue is purely coincidental, I’m sure of it!).

No mis-en-scène, no gloss, no lavish or “casually” arranged minimalistic displays but inspiring interiors from all over the world which in their unique and lived-in state show us that style is at its most natural when it isn’t staged but when it occurs almost haphazardly, from our own particular individuality. Whilst this is not as easy to achieve as you may think, it certainly looks that way on the matte pages of this simplistic publication. Famously described by The New York Times as “the first post-materialistic interiors magazine”, Apartamento shows us that interiors are nothing without the people living inside them.  Strong and fascinating characters such as photographers, authors and other creative eccentrics are the perfect companions in these (their) featured spaces.  A clear emphasis on colour and simple composition, makes for some powerful imagery and brilliant reference material for either domestic dwellers or design lovers. Since its launch in 2009 the Barcelona-based magazine has regularly presented cultural and promotional events in line with its international distribution in cities such as Tokyo, New York, Berlin, London and Milan.

The concept for October’s event in Barcelona was conceived by Ana Dominquez and Omar Sosa and features a unique and exclusive collection of photographs shot by Nacho Alegre, photographer and founder of the magazine. The Apartamento Bricks Still Life exhibition brings to life a basic object like the builder’s brick and turns it into a surprisingly delicate and evocative sculpture. Don’t miss it. Go see the bricks. Go meet the people and get yourself a copy of Apartamento.

Exhibition runs from 29^th September to 21^st October 2011 at Otrascosas de Villarosàs, Via Laietana 65, Principal, Barcelona.

While in Barcelona, go see another honest and intimate gem in the city, White Line Hotels edit Hotel Omm. Don’t miss it.

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Contributing writer: Stefanie Soar

Photos courtesy Apartamento