OUR SPONSORS: BEAN BURO

ABOUT BEAN BURO

The studio is an emerging architecture and interiors practice from London and Paris, led by Lorène Faure and Kenny Kinugasa-Tsui, with a team of international designers to provide architecture, interior, installation, furniture and product design services. The Hong Kong studio was opened in 2013.

The diversity of the practice with its collaborators reinforces a core vision for the practice: to respond to the exchanges of global cultural narratives, incorporating overlapping design disciplines specializing in the social, economical and political production of urban spaces.

We believe architecture is an emotional, spatial experience produced by both the user and the author. Our design methodologies stem from the observation, speculation and analysis of contextual narratives. These narratives, or ‘stories’, generate dynamic exchanges of historical, environmental, cultural and social factors, resulting in highly inventive interventions while preserving plenty of intellectual wit.

COLLABean, as an integrated part of Bean Buro, is a trans-disciplinary platform for collaborations between practice, research and academia. COLLABean can provide design research services for business organisations, and wherever appropriate, to involve specialists’ input from a network of highly reputable designers, academicians and researchers in the design field.

The practice has since produced a string of successful interior architecture projects for luxury residential clients as well as reputable companies such as Cheil, Leo Burnett, Warner Music, and has been awarded Silver Winner in the Asia Pacific Interior Design Award 2015, Gold, Silver & Bronze Winner in the A’ Design Awards, and Finalist Winner of the 13th Modern Decoration International Media Award. The studio has a rigorous methodology of exploring spatial narratives through conceptual drawings and models that explore the humanistic aspects of design.

PSYCHOLOGICAL THRESHOLDS/ FELIX SAGAR [Y2]

The boundary edges of Regent’s Park offer scant preparation or protection for those who suffer from psychological conditions like agoraphobia, and who as a result find its open spaces terrifying. A new after-school centre and playground helps children with such anxieties to develop a happier relationship with this most loveliest of royal parks. Taking its cues from the existing canal-side condition and the pedestrian bridge that spans over at that point, a careful articulation of spaces for occupants of different ages and heights manages to create a deliberate mixture of constrained smaller rooms and others that offer more panoramic views over the park.

SENSING SILVERTOWN/ BEN SYKES-THOMPSON [Y3]

A disused flour mill that was built in the Royal Victoria Dock in 1905 is turned into a sensory park based upon sight, sound and smell. In part in the older tradition of parks providing repose within the city, here that role is accentuated by inserting new facilities through which citizens are able to self-diagnose early-stage problems developing in their eyes, ears and noses. As a landscape project and a creative reuse of a powerful existing building, a novel community-distributed model of healthcare is promoted. Detailed technical analysis provides a sharp edge to the sensory pavilions inserted into Millennium Mills and its surrounding landscape.

LUND POINT HIGH RISE MASH-UP/ BETHAN RING [Y3]

Stratford is one of London’s development hotspots but this process is also leading to the erasure of the hitherto communities that lived there. So, rather than demolishing a tower block on the Carpenters Estate, this design project strips it back to basics and provides facilities for a diverse mixture of users: allotments for existing residents, live/work studio spaces for artists, digital fabrication laboratories for UCL students, and a rooftop vantage point for West Ham football fans supporting the team in their new Olympic Stadium home. To help out the occupants, sets of pattern-book construction manuals demonstrate how the various elements can be constructed.

FARM/TEMPLE OF FALLING WATER/ MARYNA OMELCHENKO [Y3]

In the gritty area of Limehouse in east London, close to the canal basin, a new urban farm is inserted that also serves as a place of contemplation for those who wish to walk through it. Aeroponic tubes are fed with water that is collected on a large disused railway bridge that spans over the main road to the neighbouring DLR station, thereby linking the local environment directly to the building’s programme. The daylight strategy for the contemplations spaces involves filtering the sun’s rays through raised water tanks, producing a softer and more relaxing environment for the building’s occupants, accentuated by the greenery inside

HOLLY-BURB-LAND/ SOPHIE PERCIVAL [Y3]

So successful has Hampstead Garden Suburb been in defying change over time that it has become perhaps what it was always destined to be, i.e. a television and film set in which to make endless Edwardian class-based dramas. Here a few existing houses in Meadway are stealthily tuned into studios by peeling back the existing walls, inserting sections of luminous pink bricks, and hiding camera positions into the ubiquitous hedges that line the estate. All of the changes conform (albeit unconventionally) to the strict building controls in the suburb, with the twists compounding the uncanny feeling that many visitors feel while walking around already.

ASCLEPEION BY THE THAMES/ ACHILLEAS PAPAKYRIAKOU [Y3]

The project explores the notion of a “Cultural Mash-up” between London and Ancient Rome. Following the unit’s agenda of the soft city the investigation turned to London’s museums and the ideas of dislocation, time warp and fluidity in order to find a way of representing the relationship and blur the lines between the two cities and eras. The majestic cast of Trajan’s Column in V&A’s Cast Courts became the focal point of this analogy.

PRISONERS OF KNOWLEDGE/ CHAPLIN KO [Y3]

In this ingenious twist on the ‘halfway houses’ that are used to re-introduce prisoners to society, the emphasis in this project is on rehousing, and training, those who worked as prison librarians while they were inside. Pockets of deep shade and bright light are used to highlight the book displays that are made open to the public, and especially to local children, who are given their own library. Careful textural interplay between concrete and timber surfaces give a sensuous tactility to this new building on Camden Road, which replaces an existing community library and forms part of the wider redevelopment of HM Prison Holloway.

CARLTON MEMORIES/ LINZI AI [Y3]

Within the tough urban environment of Victorian London, the city’s pubs offered decorative oases of rest and indulgence, especially soft in the snug bars to be found in the Princess Louise in Holborn and other such pubs. Here the same sense of material and decoration is reused to design places of drinking in contemporary London. But now the focus is on adapting the Carlton Tavern in Kilburn, which was in the process of being illegally demolished by developers until the local community fought back. A series of pavilions create lounges, games rooms and a microbrewery with framed views back to the partially demolished older pub.

CENTRE FOR SLOW SPORTS/ ROSIE MURPHY [Y2]

Urban workers need places to escape the frantic pace of London, and so a slow sports centre in the City of London offers a chance to engage in time-honoured leisure pursuits like bowls, chess, tiddlywinks, and staring contests. These sports pride themselves on the languidness and carefulness with which they have to be practiced, so different from other kinds of activities that demand speed and aggression. In this new building, sunk as it is into an existing basement car park below an urban square, the stretching out of the sensations of time is also investigated graphically in the form of sliced and specially extended drawings.

THE MUSEUM OF IMPERMANENCE/ ELENA REAL-DAVIES [Y2]

Urban workers need places to escape the frantic pace of London, and so a slow sports centre in the City of London offers a chance to engage in time-honoured leisure pursuits like bowls, chess, tiddlywinks, and staring contests. These sports pride themselves on the languidness and carefulness with which they have to be practiced, so different from other kinds of activities that demand speed and aggression. In this new building, sunk as it is into an existing basement car park below an urban square, the stretching out of the sensations of time is also investigated graphically in the form of sliced and specially extended drawings.

INCENDIARY INSTITUTE/ CAROLINA MONDRAGON [Y2]

In a dense urban site near to Brick Lane, a test facility is created for the kinds of experimental new materials being developed by the digital artisanal culture increasingly common in that area. Visitors to the building can walk around and enjoy activities such as the burning of materials, enabling them to experience the softness of ashes, probably the softest of all our urban materials. Alongside fire, the tall chambers can also be used for crushing, exploding and generally destroying the city’s materials. In the rear courtyard, at lower level, a garden of remembrance contains the damaged fragments of various experiments carried out.

EDIBLE EDEN/ SIMINA MARIN [Y2]

In the much-loved but much-threatened Camley Street park, this project suggests an innovative strategy that aims to resist the gentrification and displacement created by the Kings Cross redevelopment by building a nutrition school for local children living nearby in the poorer district of Somers Town. By introducing them to the processes that are involved in growing and cooking food, the revised park will help to stimulate play, physical pleasure, and a healthier diet for these children. Tall chimneys to be used for cooking intertwine with voluptuous timber structures that are all designed to play off the lush existing vegetation within the park.

COMMUNAL REUSE/ NICHOLE HO [Y2]

The ideological onslaught by the Conservative government and developers that is now castigating post-war housing as ‘sink estates’ contains a clear intention to displace poorer inhabitants from central London in favour of wealthier residents. How, then, might wholesale gentrification be resisted? While acknowledging the deficiency of Welfare State housing in its lack of social facilities, as well as the need for more varied dwelling types today, including for multigenerational families, this reshaping of a 1970s block near to Euston Station imagines a partial decanting to insert a playful community centre, alongside shared spaces between dwellings for used as larger family dining-rooms and such like..

LONDINIUM COURT OF URBAN JUSTICE / PETER DAVIES [Y2]

The Museum of London will soon be relocated to Smithfield Market, so what should happen to its current site? After examining the Barbican Estate via a careful analysis of light and colour, a far softer and more nuanced appreciation is derived of its seemingly tough aesthetic, with now a new court of urban justice inserted to deal with issues in the City of London. A complex layering of access from the 1960s pedways and the Barbican creates four separate routes for the key users of the courtroom: judges, lawyers, those being accused, and the general public who bear witness to events inside.