London Open House

This weekend was the London Open House 2005.
I could only enjoy the saturday oportunities because on sunday I had to go to the supermarket and stuff.
We started after lunch by visiting the Horse Hospital, wich I thought it was a real nice thing to visit and then discovered that it is an old and small stable that has become a 2nd hand clothing shop.
I'm sorry to say that I think of it as a fraud. Didn't like it at all..
After that we went to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust to see The Orangery.
The Orangery (RIBA award 2005) is an open air space with wooden floors and coffee tables to serve one of the hospitals coffee shop. Was built on the Main Boiler house roof, a pretty ugly and under utilised space, squeezed between the Southwood inpatient building and the Old Nurses Home.

The RIBA Award jury said:

"The Orangery is a piece of serendipity dropped into the heart of Great Ormond Street Hospital. The Orangery is well used by staff and visitors and a measure of its success is that consultants, who had not previously used the coffee shop, do so now. The client intends to use the same approach to other courtyard areas where possible. This is an exemplary scheme is the way it uses gash space - an unused and unloved roof area - and creates a facility at once exciting and tranquil. This is architecture as therapy - in the way the Maggie's Centres are - and both architect and client deserve equal credit for it."

In the Hospital we visited as well the Chapel of St. Christopher, a beautiful golden chapel that was designed by Edward Middleton Barry in 1875 and was a part of the old hospital building.

In the Bizantine idiom, the Chapel is of modest dimensions, though the immediate impression is of a larger building. It's a tour de force of high victorian ecclesiastical style, the most sumptuos hospital chapel in the country. Oscar Wild described it as "the most delightful private chapel in London"

After leaving the Hospital, we went to see the Wellcome Trust Building with its magnificent glass beads sculpture - The Bleigiessen.
It's amazingly high and has almost 27.000 very fine stainless steel wires (0.5 mm diameter and 30m long) and over 140.000 glass beads looking like marbles, all them weighting almost 14 tonnes!





























































The author, Thomas Heatherwick said "The aim was to produce a sinous, curvaceous form, and one that had variety, so that it would look different from each of the building's nine floors".

Later in the afternoon we visited a house in Kentish Town, Artchive, Philip Hughes private art gallery. It's a mews workspace converted to a pavilion/ summerhouse/ studio/ gallery /workshop. Uses mirrors and glazed surfaces to produce theatrical distortion of spaces.
The rear connects to the garden and has a lovely apple tree full of apples.
It's a RIBA award winner 2005. Hughes Meyer Studio / Sanei Hopkins architects 2004.