Flatpacking Wu-Gu

One very large aspect of this project is the extensive use of off-site assembly.

Majority of the fitout was flatpacked and assembled off-site, to work in parallel with the site work in order to reduce amount of time required.

The entire off-site process has taken almost as long as the site work to date, which means, without off-site construction planned into the design, the construction time could have been doubled.

Snap shots at the off-site "assembly line" over the past weeks...

arrived all flatpacked...these are only half of the components.

painting of the components before assemblage

...drying...

one of the first few units assembled

colour matching with the sample (the little piece of plywood) - this is a pretty good match. We did have some difficulty with application method, but we ended up with a good result

full-on!!
there are a few types of boxes, some are better painted after assemblage, some are better painted prior

call in the helpers!
the system was designed to minimise skilled labour requirement, so when necessary we can get more people to help

neatly packed!
there are still more to go, but probably 90% done!

Eki finalised

A few of the finalised photos of Eki.

  

 

 

Eki is the official distributor for high end hair products, mainly Shiseido Professional.
The limited space has to multi-task between showroom, office space, product dispatch centre - basically the "pretty side" and the "paddling side" of a business.

We have created a pure space for the products, which also multi-tasks; display shelves can be placed anywhere within the white cube with the system we custom designed for the project, 2 projection screens can be used for different purposes simultaneously or independently... and as everything can be tucked away, the space itself can be used to house functions such as product launch and award presentation.

The "pretty side" of business is what "sells"; but it does not exist independent of the "paddling side" which holds everything together.  In Eki the "paddling side" of business surrounds the "pretty side", holding it together literally.

... more photos to come ...

Turning page

Our project Streetology has been included in German magazine, Page, as a leading examples amongst other international projects to show how the celebration of a vending machine culture and a new creativity has taken the idea further into new sales concepts for stores, marketing and communication all over the world (projects from Amsterdam, Okinawa, Frankfurt, US to Sydney.)

Here is a translation of the article for the curious, courtesy of my lovely German friend Nataly:

"Analog Info Graphic"
The shop design for Streetology in Sydney makes reference to the vending machine concept.  Olivia Shih and Yoshihito Kashiwagi who are running the Architecture Office Facet Studio in Sydney have come up with a concept where T Shirts are displayed in transparent tubes. They are sorted by colours and stacked in 2,550 vending tubes. When a customer buys a T Shirt in green all green T Shirts drop down a spot, effectively creating an analog info graphic display; the bar with the most purchased colour is decreasing the fastest.
The shop design, in cooperation with Simpson Design Associates and Agency babekuehl is celebrating a democratic attitude/ Zeitgeist expressing what is popular on the street - as the name says "Streetology".

Sneakerology web-based publicity round up

Here is the round up of publicity received by Sneakerology in the cyber world, on top of the previous entries I have already made...


Again, I have only taken the few influential online trendspotting/ design magazines/ blogs, which were then fed to numerous other online magazines/ blogs.... which means there are most likely articles in the cyberspace that I am unaware of...
Click on the individual magazine names in photo captions to access the original article.

Thanks everyone for all your support!!!

Fast Company 

Architizer

LS:N Global 

Both Sneakerology and Stretology are on Architonic

Facet Studio is on designboom!

We are very excited that our project, Tea Room, has been
published on designboom! (read the article HERE)
designboom is a web-based magazine on art, architecture and design, with 4.2 million readers per month. It was selected
by TIME Magazine in 2007 as one of the top 100 design influencers
in the world.

Live Broadcasting

Today, we had life broadcasting from M House site! After lobbying our Japanese builders for months, we have finally convinced them to install wireless network on site, and now we can have video conference on site across continents, even together with the structure engineer from the other side of Japan.... oh the convenience of technology.....
Having overseas projects now is made easier with internet and Skype...it felt like we were on site!

a very excited Yoshi (and me holding the camera..)

the builder is walking through the house with the web camera....action packed (for us anyway)!

glazing between the roof rafters letting in gentle natural light, brightened up the interior