BEYOND BINARY CLASSIFICATION
Thursday evening was a delightful experience.
I was invited to the opening of Pentagon Tiles London Showroom (http://www.pentagontiles.com/), designed by my erstwhile student and now close friend Simon Astridge of the Simon Astridge Architecture Workshop (SAAW). Such projects are evidence of the potential of architecture to make poetic space when design talent and enlightened Clients coalesce.
On a tiny derelict urban site in Leather Lane, in the Hatton Garden area of London, the project defies binary description. As Pentagon Creative Director Sam Frith articulated:
“We are questioning preconceptions of what a showroom is, and the relationship between the products we display and the space itself." (Pentagon Website)
Of course this is a showroom of ceramics but it is also, a library, a depository of the materials of earth: a retreat - a place of meditation and choice, a place of gathering, a place of learning, a place of exchange and a place of repose. But most of all it is a gallery that celebrates the art-form of ceramics. In this project SAAW invite tactility, you cannot help but touch these projects as they envelop you: all the materials that surround you are sold by Pentagon. This is 'show room' at its most primal: the space is the product and the product the space.
To paraphrase Peter Zumthor we might suggest:
'Building in the earth, building with the earth, building into the earth, building out of the earth...'
This is a place in which Man and Earth conjoin in celebration of Man's manipulation of that which we stand upon, that through the alchemy of heat, and the application of colour, we transform. If George Nakashima's furniture breathes life into dead trees, this place breathes life into the material that supports our every-day existence and as with all significant architecture make the everyday extraordinary.
I was invited to the opening of Pentagon Tiles London Showroom (http://www.pentagontiles.com/), designed by my erstwhile student and now close friend Simon Astridge of the Simon Astridge Architecture Workshop (SAAW). Such projects are evidence of the potential of architecture to make poetic space when design talent and enlightened Clients coalesce.
On a tiny derelict urban site in Leather Lane, in the Hatton Garden area of London, the project defies binary description. As Pentagon Creative Director Sam Frith articulated:
“We are questioning preconceptions of what a showroom is, and the relationship between the products we display and the space itself." (Pentagon Website)
Of course this is a showroom of ceramics but it is also, a library, a depository of the materials of earth: a retreat - a place of meditation and choice, a place of gathering, a place of learning, a place of exchange and a place of repose. But most of all it is a gallery that celebrates the art-form of ceramics. In this project SAAW invite tactility, you cannot help but touch these projects as they envelop you: all the materials that surround you are sold by Pentagon. This is 'show room' at its most primal: the space is the product and the product the space.
To paraphrase Peter Zumthor we might suggest:
'Building in the earth, building with the earth, building into the earth, building out of the earth...'
This is a place in which Man and Earth conjoin in celebration of Man's manipulation of that which we stand upon, that through the alchemy of heat, and the application of colour, we transform. If George Nakashima's furniture breathes life into dead trees, this place breathes life into the material that supports our every-day existence and as with all significant architecture make the everyday extraordinary.
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