Sarah's Mood

As many of you know, I've been working on some dream designs for the bakery my friend Sarah is planning to open. We've been discussing a vintage vibe, kind of Anthropologie-esque, with lots of kitchen implements repurposed as lights etc. In terms of materials we are thinking about exposed brick, lots of wood, and muted pastels- maybe lilac and mint??

This is a board of images that I've been thinking of as a jumping off point for the interior:

For Sarah's Bakery

I did a little sketch for Sarah that updates and formalizes a little more the sketches I did before on lined paper in my notebook.

Best Laid Plans

Here are the plans for my Vitra Design Museum. These were printed out 8' high so they're a little hard to see at this scale, make sure to click and blow them up to see a little more detail. Probably unless you've had some architecture education they aren't going to mean anything to you, but for those of you who get something out of them, enjoy:

Process Work

A layout of some of the process sketches I did while designing:

Sheila Hicks Exhibition

Final Presentation!

Today I presented my final studio project of the year, the Vitra Design Museum lobby! In the previous critique my marker and pencil renderings didn't go over very well, so this time I attempted watercolors:

Ticket booth

Lobby seating

Lobby and Temporary Exhibition from Mezzanine

Cafe

Cocktail lounge at night with view into museum

These were still dubbed too heavy-handed, but I think they're a definite improvement.

Keeping With the Trends

Here are two sketches of my updated design.

This is my lobby seating area, now the furniture layout is more flexible/variable:

This is my cocktail lounge, I've updated it to include lighting from FLOS by Philippe Starck:

Sharpie Sketching

In another chapter of my love affair with sharpie sketches, here are some new sketchup sharpie renderings of my Vitra Design Museum lobby:

This is a glimpse of the facade:

This is the seating area on the ground floor:

This is a glimpse inside the cafe during the day:

And this is inside the cafe/lounge area at night when it is an after hours cocktail lounge:

This is a peek inside the museum's administrative offices:

Sketchup Saved My Life

I've been having a serious love affair with Google Sketchup. I'm not that comfortable drawing perspectives, so this software that lets you quickly make a model on the computer has hugely enhanced my perspectives. They help me keep everything to scale, and have really sped up my process!

This is the view from inside the bookstore/gift shop area. The steps to the after hours cocktail lounge on the mezzanine level double as a bookcase in the downstairs.

This is the view from the sidewalk of the museum at night. The light from the mezzanine cocktail lounge spills out onto 22nd street.

This is the staircase that takes you to the mezzanine cocktail/lounge as well as further up to the 2nd floor where the permanent collection is housed

The ticket office, just inside the gift shop area as you enter the museum.

This is the view across the mezzanine cocktail lounge/cafe.

Mapping

I've spent a lot of this year learning about maps, and was enchanted to find this adorable map of Fort Greene. Check out Pratt!

Stairs...

This is a sketch I did today of the view if you are standing inside my hypothetical gift shop/bookstore and looking into the museum lobby. The shelving for the books is literally built into the stair.

Sarah's Bakery

My dear friend Sarah Warren (check out her blog here) is planning to someday open a bakery (hopefully someday soon!) so I've been drawing up some ideas for her. One idea we had, was that at her bakery while the customers wait in line they have a chance to watch the pastries being made.

Now I know that you're thinking- we've seen plenty of open kitchens before! But what you're used to seeing is the whole kitchen, complete with sweating bakers saturating the space with their stress. Instead, the peeks that you get of Sarah's kitchen will create a calmer atmosphere. There will be a number of strategic reveals built into the kitchen wall: through one small window you'll see hands kneading dough, through another you watch as hands ice a cake, but you'll never see the bodies those hands belong to:



The customer gets the best of the traditional open kitchen: the appetizing peek at what lies ahead, without the worst: the anxiety inducing scene of chaos and stress.

These sketches don't show it, but we've also talked about putting antique shutters on the windows to go with the antiquey/Anthropologie vibe.

ps. the images are scans from my notebook, so the noise in the background is my handwriting on the other side of the page showing through

Vitra Design Museum Concept

As some of you may know, Pratt offers both a two-year and a three-year masters in interior design. The two-year masters is for people who spend their undergrad studying a related discipline, either architecture or interior design. For people like me, who have their undergraduate degrees in something more or less unrelated (mine is in art history and psychology), Pratt offers a 3 year program. Considering that all the schooling I've had for the preceding 18 years has focused on being able to express myself verbally- its quite a change to be tackling things visually. But, in some ways my verbal background can be a plus, and my current professor has encouraged us to write out what we'd like our design museum lobby to feel like, which I think was a really helpful step. So here it is:


Concept for Vitra Design Museum

Most people making the pilgrimage from the 8th avenue subway west into Chelsea are pursuing one thing: art. While it is also a district that holds some restaurants, nightclubs, and a copious number of taxis, it is first and foremost a destination for art connoisseurs. Usually they are tackling Chelsea in twos and threes, if they are New Yorkers they are frantically trying to multi-task: consuming culture while catching up with friends, if they are out of towners, its an even more social excursion incorporating art watching with people watching.

The Vitra Design museum offers a respite from the monotony of Chelsea attractions. After pounding the pavement up and down the blocks between 10th and 11th aves, (and bemoaning your lack of first born to sell in exchange for that breathtaking Jean Nouvel chair at Gagosian) you enter the Vitra Design Museum for a break. The gift shop which projects into the street is the first sign that this is a break from your usual Chelsea, these are objects you can afford!!! Moreover, these are objects that are projected out into your space instead of tucked protectively deep in the hallowed concrete reliquaries of the galleries.

Passing through the gift shop, the lobby and cafe that you experience next offer up a much needed spot to sit, relax, and get into that deep conversation about Merda D’Artista thats been bubbling up since you left the Manzoni show. As you’re lounging you notice that the staircase is flanked by some intriguing pieces of design, which now that you’re rested and re-caffeinated you’re ready to explore.

Having explored the collection, and exitted back through the gift shop - picking up a great new book on Sheila Hicks inspired by the temporary exhibition, you pass back out onto 22nd street.

Later that week when you return to Chelsea to hit up some Thursday night gallery openings with friends, you leave the Pace Gallery and are excited to see that there are still lights on in the Vitra Design Museum. Is it a private party? No, its their bar- you and your friends are no longer relegated to headache inducing paper cups full of cheap white wine! You can stop into the Vitra Design Museum cafe and sip on some bespoke cocktails while enjoying gossiping and people-watching through the windows.

Neverending Story

For our latest studio project, we are designing the lobby of the hypothetical Vitra Design Museum. (Slight sidebar, go check out their website and ooh and aah over the insanely expensive awesome furniture.) Anyhow, as part of the project we are also designing a hypothetical temporary exhibition to be displayed in our lobby, and I am designing mine around the work of Sheila Hicks. She is a totally phenomenal textile artist who is in her 80's today and still working, in fact she has a retrospective that just opened at the Philadelphia ICA. As part of my thought process for the exhibition I story-boarded out the visitor's experience:


I've never done a storyboard before, but you can see that its really helpful in terms of figuring out what pieces of art will go where and what the feeling of the space will be. Considering my collage background it was something that I was pretty good at and didn't take too long.