The Lab is a purpose built arts facility in Dublin City which includes Gallery, Rehearsal studios and the City’s Arts Offices.

We we’re invited by Orla Whelan Artist and Sheena Barret Curator to make a structural intervention for a show by Orla; “In Paint; In Teeth; In Mountains; In Stars”.

As part of the exhibition program we were then invited to present our recent collaborative work in the context of our studio practise.

Ten years ago we completed our first project together and in 2007 we established a partnership in the creative hub of South Studios [Dublin 8] with the tenet of devoting 1 day a week to those self-directed, multidisciplinary projects that had origianally inspired us to work together.

Now are practise has become defined by collabirative processes and the varierty of our work. In addition to various residential and commercial architecture projects we have prodeuced furniture, designed and built exhibition designs, video, photography and garden installations.

In this talk we preented projects with and for artists, photographers, film makers, fashion designers and craftsmen and the work processes engaged with.

The Video of the Talk is 44 minutes long and was shot and edited by Jenny Brady.

We’ve been based in a collaborative studio since 2007, and since then there’s been a few interesting developments in this area with the likes of Block T opening in Smithfield and the Fumbally Exchange in the Blackpitts. Farther afield we’ve seen the likes of the Hub (Vienna & elsewhere) and this place; Studio Banana.

If south studios had a Spanish cousin this place would be it.

Originally set up 4 years ago (within a month of south studios opening), Studio Banana is large subterranean studio comprising of over a dozen freelance creatives and startups.

The basement studio was founded by Spanish starchitects Studio KG, who also designed the smart fitout. They’re joined by a medley of creatives from the fields of photography, audiovisuals, architecture, graphic design, product design, animation, fashion & advertising. Spaces rented by the desk create an environment where a variety of independent creatives can share facilities and develop their practice both autonomously and through collaborative process.

What’s the set up like?

The set up is simple; a long banquet style table is the centerpiece of the office space, wrapped with 5 shared office spaces each of which can open up to become part of the central space. The entrance area doubles as the meeting space with the wide steps down from the street becoming, with the aid of a few cushions, a raked auditorium for monthly movie/presentation evenings where the studio is open to the public.

Getting light into the basement is dealt with fantastically in what could have been a tungsten dungeon – clerestory glazing filters sunlight into the meeting areas, the front door illuminates the entrance hall and roof lighting from the rear of the plan filters down through heavy louvres and polycarbonate screens. Everything is painted brilliant white – sometimes too austere, but it works fine here of the soft quality of the light entering the building.

What they do that others don’t?

These guys are not hiding their lights under a bushel! In addition to the open nights, Banana pimps out the talent for Cursos Banana (classes), and runs Banana TV, a mixture of in-house production and video selections curated by the various creatives.

They are also developing the Studio as a brand in it’s own right, hiring out its constituent elements under the umbrella company as a combined service; a real media agency across all mediums. I had the pleasure of meeting Key Portilla-Kawamura who explained their global vision (Yep, they’ve a global vision too!) of establishing connections with studios world-wide in places as far afield as Auckland and the Americas.

Special thanks to the most gracious host Victoria Ovin, product & packaging designer, multi handed collaborator and studio manager who gave over some of her morning to guide me around and make introductions.

!Hasta luego!

www.studiobanana.org
www.studiobanana.tv
www.studiobananacursos.com

For her 10th collection Eilis Boyle forsook the traditional catwalk presentation and commissioned Aisling Farinella & Richard Gilligan to produce a video of her work. We were asked to design and light the exhibition to launch the video.

The challenge was to, within a single room, light half a dozen pieces, several oversize photographic prints and maintain the least possible amount of ambient light so as not to take from the video which was being projected against one wall on a continuous loop.

The pieces themselves had really strong textures and by using hand made spot lights created with black out cinefoil elements of the delicate patterns were brought out in the form of shadow play.

The hanging system we had previously developed for the IGI ‘Laundry’ show whereby we created a set of weightless invisible ‘tracks’ 3m above the floor. The tracks consist of 0.5mm nylon chord maintained in tension through simple eyelet and counterweight system and with any potential sag in the lines is controlled through the mass of cement blocks.

The wonderful movie produced by Aisling & Rich can be found here.

Two storey extension with new kitchen and bathroom areas.

Design strategy includes lowering ground floor and extending existing first floor into roof and out to rear to provide additional accommodation.

New extension is being clad in brickwork salvaged from existing house, giving an old familiar face to a new build.

Sustainable strategy involves robust detailing and careful specification of heating and insulation to achieve a high level of comfort and low operational running costs.

Thermal imaging and airtightness testing to be used to ensure level of specification is matched in construction.

Full 40m2 extension, planning exempt design, integrating concealed steel structure to allow for first floor extension at future date.

Design strategy to allow for master bedroom relocated with dressing area to ground floor, with new bathroom and kitchen extension forming new courtyard to allow light into the middle of home. Careful design of circulation areas to provide a variety of storage areas for growing family.

Sustainable strategy includes thermal imaging airtightness testing to insure design specifications met in quality of build.

Music can define space, clothes can have structure and buildings can communicate subtle, complex messages.

Why then should the fashion designer not design walls or the architect not make patterns?

The sometimes strict divisions of labour and of specialisation we now experience were not always the case. Composer Richard Wagner used a word Gesamtkunstwerk in his 1849 essay “Art and Revolution” to mean total artwork, a synthesis of the arts in one piece, where one piece might encompass dance, music and drama together. Your average renaissance man would throw his hand at painting art sculpture and science with equal gusto. Charles and Ray Eames designed furniture, architecture, communications, Film and graphic design, considering all to be worthy pursuits. In terms of the total work the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright might be a good example the where furniture, building and landscape are all designed together as an expression of a single idea.

This project though no ‘total artwork’ was an attempt to achieve a level of that synthesis between the mediums of fashion (Made for you by Arms) and architecture (abgc) for Music From Ireland (MFI).

The Brief

Music From Ireland is a music industry & arts collective set up by First Music Contact to promote Irish talent at International Music Showcases & Conventions and is funded by Culture Ireland & IMRO.

At each show event there are showcase gigs organized by participating countries and record labels. There is a back end too, with a trade show environment where music industry types show their wares. A CD is produced for each event with a showcase of artists and this is the de facto business card, flyer, information leaflet for introduction for the band and the Music From Ireland concept.

MFI commissioned abgc to design Ireland’s Stand.

The Installation

The concept was to make an enclosure out of the talent (the CDs) and as this structure was emptied of it’s contents it would reveal a secondary message to maintain engagement in the display; the glass half empty should look as good as the glass half full. This enclosure would be completed all the furniture necessary to run a trade show so that every single element of the stand would be Irish made by Irish design, from Ireland.

The finished product would have to be demountable (flat pack), lightweight, robust, visually engaging, easily assembled and had to fit into standard long-haul luggage allowance. It was likened it to a picnic hamper in a flight case. When fully taken apart the entire set up weighs 21kg and fits into a large suitcase.

The brief demanded a frugality of structure. After examining numerous designs and systems with the assistance of David Delahunty (industrial designer) a tubular steel frames with linen or plywood skins as determined to most fit the brief. The frames and skins rely on each other and act together in compression and tension to solidify the structure when folding or fabric skin and collapsible frame are simply screw fixed together.

After the initial concept was realised and approved fashion Designer and maker of things Renate Henschke of Made for you by Arms came on board for the detail design and fabrication of the installation with abgc.

The rear screen itself is screw jointed tubular steel sections, with linen pockets system holding 256 cds, the pockets triangles are arranged in a pattern with the spot colour linings in a subtle pattern. As the CDs are emptied from the pockets over the course of the event so the pattern is revealed.

Over the next 12 months the installation will travel to, Midem (Cannes), Canadian Music Week (Toronto), SXSW (Austin, Texas), The Great Escape (Brighton), Popkomm (Berlin) and CMJ (New York).

abgc wish to thank David Delahunty (industrial designer), re-dress’ Rosie O’Reilly and designer Clare Geraghty for their assistance getting the screens completed over the final few days before we shipped to SXSW.

There’s much discussion these days about disused commercial/industrial space and the onus on civic authority and property owners to allow encourage creative use of space, reduce eliminate start up costs to incentivise action and to stimulate recovery.

The Tabacalera Is an exciting reuse of an old Madrid factory, originally earmarked for local government, funding shortfalls inspired the local authority to loan out a derelict building as a self managed community arts space.

The block consists of a scores of artists studios, meeting rooms, classrooms, random halls, a large fabrication workshop, yards with a variety of potaging, a library, theatre, separate concert venue, restaurant and bar.

One of the stumbling blocks emerging artists is the catch 22 of not having space to produce work and thus not being able to afford the space to work from. The solution here is to make the space available as artist’s studios. In return the artists teach one day a week. These rules apply for any club or group and one can have access to the space so long as you provide a benefit in kind to the community. Both Artists and Community are winners.

An extraordinary amount of classes take place, from discussions on modern cinema to Tango classes to hands-on workshops from the resident artists in painting and sculptural processes. There are night-time concerts allowing young bands and DJs to strut their stuff, along with frequent exhibitions, installations and showcases

Everything within the centre apart from the contents of the bar is free.

Copyleft — all rights reversed

There is a strong left leaning ideology spearheading the venture in an attempt to achieve a free and open exchange of ideas similar to ‘open source’. Here they use the term ‘copyleft’: an artist retains the right to be identified as the author of a work (whatever medium) but that any work produced in the Tabac can be used, studied, copied, shared, or modified, and within that freedom there is a freedom to distribute modified (and therefore derivative) works.

The sole income from for running the centre comes from the bar and restaurant. This pays for utilities and maintenance and everything else is barter. Dublin artist Kenneth Lambert (who has since taken up a Tabac studio space) and I each enjoyed a stew and a beer for lunch for €5 each. While we were hanging out in the bar our Nigerian host kindly told us that we (the Irish) were the blacks of Europe and described his research project into writing the history of Euro Africans who predate the African Americans and who’s history remains largely untold. Indeed he related the history of Veslaquez’s African assistant, a worthy painter in his own right, whose pictures are buried in the Prado for fear their exposition would devalue the masters work, or so it was explained to us.

Its not without it’s problems – open doors can attract an anti social element, and the bars lose out to beer-sellers on the street that undercut their prices. It’s a worthy study both for it’s success and failures.

The Tabacalera is fascinating initiative, pushing the limits of community, barter, artistic collaboration and intellectual copyrights. The idea that artists who benefit from public funding should also be educators for the community pro bono is something we could definitely learn from.

The Cabinteely village café is located in Irelands first ‘A’ energy rated apartment building, and taps into this ethos with a simply finished unit using simple materials, for aesthetic and economy, in addition to using the ‘found’ unfinished walls wherever possible.

The unit’s existing concrete block work walls were cleaned down and painted and the existing in-situ cast concrete ceiling was left exposed. The table-tops and terracotta tiles were sourced in local salvage yards. The former were combined with bespoke square section stainless steel bases to form ‘canteen’ style bench tables while the latter were used on both floor and wall to define the kitchen and service areas.

We sourced decorative electrical flex in Elephant Grey, brass light fittings and Swiss made light bulbs all of which were assembled to form the pendant lights over the table

The feature wall used standard bullnose external light fittings sourced in a local hardware store and reused as interior lights. Standard steel conduit is folded into a feature pattern on the wall to house the lights’ cabling.

The kitchen counter and display table are made of polished concrete, in natural colour and regular aggregate, and include polished insets of 3 sets of cutlery which were included during the casting process.

You can visit the great folk at Urbun here
or follow them here!

We sliced and diced the painted mdf panels of Nathair Nimhe to make these new shelves for our office.

We added the mojo by utilising further offcuts – 9mm MDF sheets gave us a tidy uniform shadow gap between the members, while the inner shelves are 18mm furniture grade plywood to counterpoint the baby blue.