218: Carved, kept, copied
OMA's Soviet-ruin museum, biblioteka coffee in Moscow, the Findling carved into a Norwegian boulder, Tian Jianxin's hammered manual at Capsule, AA Okayama by Hasegawa, and David Caon's modular Fushi.
Six projects from last week, mixed between rooms to enter and objects to use. OMA’s Moscow Garage Museum keeps a Soviet restaurant ruin as its first exhibit. Down the street, biblioteka coffee by kidz arranges itself around the books that name it. In Norway, the Findling by Of Possible carves a residence into a roadside erratic boulder. In Beijing, Tian Jianxin sets a hammered manual at Capsule. In Okayama, Jonathan Monk and Go Hasegawa split a hotel across three buildings on one plot. And David Caon’s Fushi is a modular system of objects that fold flat.
Six different scales, six different shared questions about how a thing should sit in a space. None are decorative. Each chooses one rule and lets that rule do the work — a ruin, a stack of books, a boulder, a hammered sheet, a three-house plot, a folding hinge — and asks the room or hand to take it from there.
For two decades a derelict Soviet restaurant sat at the heart of Moscow’s Gorky Park; OMA seals its prefabricated concrete frame in translucent polycarbonate and reopens it as Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.
From Cafes by Design: Inside a 66 sq m corner unit, Kidz designs Biblioteka Coffee, a new location for the cafe chain that pairs books, vinyl and espresso under a single material logic of opposites.
From Weekend Retreat: In Austerlitz, New York, Of Possible builds The Findling on four 500-million-year-old glacial erratic boulders, a larch house with no front door whose entry drops you directly into the middle of the plan.
Inside a raw-ceiling space in Beijing‘s 798 Art District, Capsule stages A User Guide, Tian Jianxin’s hammered manual of figures pulled from rice cooker pots, dustpans, and a Soviet fuel barrel.
From Vertical Living: On a narrow plot between the museums and Korakuen gardens of Okayama in Japan, conceptual artist Jonathan Monk and Go Hasegawa design AA Okayama, a 214 sq m hotel of three buildings holding a single guest room.
From a studio in Tokyo, David Caon develops FUSHI with Gifu kiln Fudogama, a modular system in which a single Mino Yaki cylinder builds both a console and a lamp.
