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    Sam Jacob Studio adds glass-tube entrance to London's V&A museum

    British architect Sam Jacob has used ribbed glass to create a contemporary entrance for London’s historic V&A museum and updated its bathrooms with a broken-ceramic cladding that feels “a little perverse”.

    The studio drew on the Victoria & Albert museum (V&A’s) collection for its designs, choosing glass for the lobby in a nod to the museum’s glass collection and crushed jasperware for the bathrooms.
    The lobby has glass tubes in three sizesThe entrance structure was designed in response to the existing proportions of the building and is formed of three bands of glass tubes, starting with 120-millimetre diameter tubes on the lower level that become thinner on the upper levels.
    Sam Jacob Studio wanted the design, which marks the entrance from Cromwell Road, to function as a modern response to the surrounding Grade I-listed museum building.
    It sits in front of a large arched window”The heights of the whole structure and the way it is split into three levels is a contemporary response to the historic fabric,” Jacob told Dezeen.

    “This helps the new elements resonate in a harmonious way even with a very different design sensibility,” he added.
    “Working with historic buildings is a great challenge and one that means it’s important to understand what is really there, and why it might be like that.”
    The contemporary lobby was designed as a response to the historic museumUsing glass for the lobby also helped create a more dramatic and dynamic effect at the entrance, while nodding to the large arched window that dominates the space.
    “The glazing for the entrance – especially the glass tubes – were a way to retain a sense of transparency at the entrance, but also to dramatise the way light is transmitted into the space,” Jacob said.
    Sam Jacob Studio designed the lobby for the Cromwell Road entrance”The effect of the tubes is to act like lenses, and the movement of people through the entrance becomes visually more animated, producing different effects as the daylight changes over time,” he added.
    “It’s also a response to the large arched window above, that has texture and colour to the glass, so that the whole interior elevation now acts in a similar way.”

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    “It’s glass used not so much for quality of transparency but for the dynamic effects of light passing through that it creates,” he added.
    Jacob also added sliding doors to the lobby and designed a collection of moveable stations that will be used for bag checks on entry.
    A welcome desk with mirrored backing sits in the lobbyAt the museum entrance, the studio added a welcome desk made from glass tubes with a mirrored backing that reflects the surroundings.
    As well as the lobby, the architect also updated the bathrooms. Here, Jacob used crushed jasperware waste material from the Stoke-on-Trent factory that makes the V&A’s Wedgwood porcelain collection.
    This was used to create colourful wall panels constructed by crushing 700 kilograms of blue, grey, pink and black ceramic waste.
    Terrazzo made from jasperware decorates the bathroom”Terrazzo is a material you often find in these kinds of spaces, so our intention was to introduce a really unusual material element by using the waste jasperware,” Jacob said.
    “It is a material that resonates with the history of the V&A, and with the history of British applied design and with a certain luxury,” he added.
    “Even in a fragmented state, jasperware colours are instantly recognisable. Using it in this smashed-up state, and making a feature of its brokenness, felt like a very modern take on those traditions.”
    Bathroom walls have life-sized digital printsThe design was also intended to make the museum’s visitors think about reuse and how we care for objects.
    “It also feels a little perverse – using broken ceramics in a museum where objects are usually incredibly carefully looked after,” Jacob said. “But a beautiful kind of perversion – all the coloured fragments make a speckled colour field to the walls that surround you.”
    “It’s an interesting experiment in the high concept reuse of waste material, about how we care for objects and the impact that the production of designed objects has on the world.”
    The V&A Museum is in a Grade I-listed buildingThe bathroom walls have been decorated with life-sized digital prints showcasing figures from V&A’s collection, as well as landscape scenery.
    For Jacob, designing for the V&A meant “working in the shadow of people” such as British designer William Morris, a history that made him think about what a similar design response might look like today.
    “We tried to channel a contemporary version of that same spirit of applied arts to help transform some of the most functional spaces of the museum into places of delight, places to interact with the collection in different ways, and make it a more accessible and engaging experience,” he said.
    The glass entrance lets light into the interiorOther recent projects by Sam Jacob Studio include an office, bar and events space for the ArtReview magazine in London and a neolithic shelter in Shenzhen port.
    The photography is by Timothy Soar.
    Project team:
    Architecture: Sam Jacob StudioLighting: Studio ZNAStructure: Price and MyersMain contractor: AlcemaSpecialist fabricator: MillimeterTerrazzo: DiespeckerQuantity surveyor: Currie BrownMechanical and electrical services (M&E): Harley Haddow / JRG Electrical

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    Yinka Ilori gives London studio colourful revamp

    Designer Yinka Ilori has collaborated with British architect Sam Jacob to give his London studio and office a bright revamp.

    Ilori worked with Jacob to transform the standard industrial-style unit into a bright and lively flexible workspace.
    Yinka Ilori collaborated with Sam Jacob to redesign his studio”We wanted to rethink what an artists’ studio is and look at how we could experiment with space to create a flexible and multifunctional environment that could respond to the different needs,” Ilori told Dezeen.
    “Yinka’s brief at the outset was a really great question about what a designer’s studio could be: how it could be a place to create but also a place to share, to host and to communicate,” added Jacob.
    Ilori’s office space is largely pinkEntirely painted in the bright tones often used within Ilori’s installations, furniture and artworks, the space is divided into three distinct zones.

    These areas, which will be used as an office, exhibition area and archive with a kitchen, are divided by curtains and sliding doors so that they can be combined into a large space.

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    “The aim was to create distinct areas in the space, and we did this using different materials from solid walls, sliding doors, felt and translucent curtains so that there is a flexibility in the way the space can be arranged,” explained Jacob.
    “Plus the way Yinka uses colour has a real effect on the definition, organisation and feel of space.”
    A transparent curtain divides two spaces”We wanted the studio to have distinct zones but at the same time be able to open or close spaces to create privacy,” explained Ilori.
    “We’ve used a number of translucent and solid curtains as well as large sliding doors to my office which means all the spaces can feel connected or we can separate different areas out,” he continued.
    “We’ve also used colour to define the function of the space so my team and my work area is dominated by pink, while the communal spaces and display spaces use blues and yellows.”
    Ilori’s office is accessed through a pair of sliding doorsOverall, Ilori believes that the collaboration with Jacob has resulted in a unique office that makes the most of the space.
    “Sam and I have quite a lot of common ground in terms of our design aesthetic so it was a really interesting experience to be able to share our ideas,” he said.
    “We were both able to see things through the others’ perspective and specialism which is what has resulted in us creating something really quite unique.”
    Furniture is stored in the archive space”We spent a lot of time discussing the space together to see how we could make it work for me,” he continued.
    “It was through those discussions that we were able to shape the design to make sure it was as practical as possible and could really function as a contemporary studio.”
    Ilori recently created a colourful maze-like installation for the V&A Dundee and designed a rainbow-coloured basketball court in Canary Wharf.
    Jacob’s recent projects include London’s Cartoon Museum, an events space for the ArtReview magazine and a contemporary neolithic shelter in Shenzhen.
    The photography is by Lewis Khan.

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