Unfortunately, Astrid Klein and Mark Dayham were unable to come to Moscow and communicate with our audience live, and the audience listened to the lecture via the Internet. Bureau Klein & Dytham is an atypical example of the integration of European architects into Japanese culture. When Klein and Daitham first came to the land of the rising sun 20 years ago to work at Toyo Ito's bureau, they, in their own words, did not even expect to create their own bureau here. Klein and Daytem then graduated from the Royal College of Art in London and were fascinated by the bold search for Japanese architects, they wanted to come and see it all with their own eyes. But after cooperation with the office of Toyo Ito, the British nevertheless switched to their own practice, took on any projects, architectural, design, exhibition…. It is difficult to say how Klein and Daitham won over the Japanese, perhaps by the quality of the environment they create. Even in the smallest projects, she is always comfortable for a person and thought out to the details.
Astrid Klein and Mark Daitham lectured on several architectural and interior projects they had done, mainly for Tokyo, but also for London. We started with the most romantic one, the Leaf chapel in the resort town of Kobuchizawa at the Risonare hotel. The unusual shape of the chapel is associated with the action taking place inside it, as if it repeats the sensation of the bride's light lace veil. The form is formed by two halves - "leaves", steel and glass, which seem to float above the ground. A glass sheet with a fine lace pattern on its surface imitates a pergola. The metal structure supporting the structure resembles the veins of this "leaf", which thin out from the central stem to the edges. The steel white "sheet" is perforated with numerous holes, each of which has a lens. Light enters there and "projects" the lace image onto the white surface inside the chapel. This gives rise to the feeling of a "fabric" like a veil. At the end of the ceremony, when the groom lifts the veil from the bride's face, both halves of the chapel move apart, removing the "steel curtain", and reveals a view of the reservoir and the magnificent mountain landscape.
In this fertile place, Klein and Dayham built other buildings, such as a reception hall. An elongated shape, absolutely transparent, using only glass, metal and mirrors, like a pencil case, covers an extended banquet table. Placed in the middle of the forest, it literally dissolves into the environment and the border between the inner and the outer becomes almost arbitrary. Klein and Daitham carried these ideas into the Moku Moku Yu project - shared baths in the same hotel. Such joint bathing among the Japanese is an ancient and venerable tradition. Astrid Klein and Mark Daytham wanted to build this space while avoiding repeating the traditional structure while maintaining the right sense of the place for the ritual. And they came up with an image: swimming together, in a wooden "pool", under the trees, in the snow! It could be realized with the help of two halves of the building, two interpenetrating circles, which, according to the architects, would make it possible to “blur” the external differences between the interior and the exterior, between men and women. Visitors are separated immediately upon entering, each in their own half, but then, they can reunite in a shared outdoor pool.
According to Klein and Dayham, a linear functionalist "response" would hardly be appropriate for such a ritual site. On the contrary, intersecting rounded spaces with local centers, without the traditional hierarchy, straight axes and linear plans are able to create a subtle sense of movement, a series of certain states of being.
In Tokyo, on the main tourist street in Okinawa, Kokusai Dori, with many trendy shops and galleries adjacent to traditional buildings, a bright and unusual building, the so-called Ai Cafe, was created by Klein & Dytham. The cafe itself, however, is only part of the house, which consists of four "units" with shops on the ground floor facing the street. The key element of the project was a 25-meter facade-screen hung on a concrete volume. Behind it was hidden a balcony ledge at the level of the 2nd floor and numerous wires running along the street. The screen also prevents the direct sun from entering the room. Klein and Dayham punched it with square holes allowing light and air to pass through, resulting in a fine grill on the façade, under which is an image of pink orchids. This cellular structure of the facade, in addition to the external aesthetics, also transformed the atmosphere of the cafe located behind it, which turned out to be literally "painted" with light penetrating through small holes.
A similar motif of "painting" the facade and turning it into a kind of "membrane", creating a whimsical pattern of light and shadow in the interior, Klein & Dytham used in a tiny Billboard building, also in Tokyo. In general, the city, according to Astrid Klein and Mark Daytham, is literally filled with such miniature structures in very inconvenient areas, which, following the Tokyo architect Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, began to be called "pet architecture", something like houses for pets. And just Billboard is one such example.
The building is only 11 meters long and 2.5 meters wide, but this is at one end, at the other it tapers to 600 mm. In fact, this building is just one facade, or, as the architects themselves call it, "residential bulletin board". In the meantime, it is quite remarkable on a busy street thanks to its unusual façade with a white bamboo grove painted on it. The reverse side of the glass was painted bright green, which makes the drawing look like "shading" of shadows from the bright sun during the day, and at night green light penetrates the bamboo and this whole "plantation" starts to glow. In fact, here the facade becomes a pure image, and the image becomes a facade.
Another small house in Tokyo designed by Klein & Dytham is Sin Den - a hairdressing salon and an apartment above it. The clients were a young family with a child, the owners of this salon, according to Astrid Klein and Mark Daytham, people with a sense of style and their own outlook on fashion, which largely determined the creative approach to designing their future home. In search of the most comfortable housing, while accommodating 50 sq. m. of free land, they went through many different forms of the building and finally found a rather "dodgy" option. From the outside, it looks like a massive "black box" with whimsical graphics in white lines across the facade. In the center is the head of a woman with lush hair that turns into flowers and branches, a kind of symbol of hairdressing. And inside it is a rather comfortable room with large windows.
Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham's portfolio includes not only architectural and interior projects, but also such design things that can hardly be categorized as, for example, a fence around a construction site or a "green screen". This, of course, is not an ordinary fence, but without exaggeration, an art object. A multifunctional complex is being built here, designed by Tadao Ando, and the architects Klein & Dytham were offered to come up with a fence that would hide the unsightly appearance of the construction site. “We needed material,” says Astrid Klein, “that would not deteriorate over time, but would only improve. And this can be a green hedge, a living, growing structure. " All 274 meters of the "fence", however, were not made of greenery. Vertical strips of natural hedge were mixed with strips of green glass with the image of grass. The project was designed for only 3 years, but it looks like they want to leave it, in any case, it would have already been marked at one of the design competitions and the residents themselves also like it.
A large interior project was done by Klein & Dytham for the well-known Selfridges shopping center chain in London. For almost a century of history, this brand has not changed its policy - to always surprise and delight customers, showing them those things that they will not find anywhere else. By the way, if we talk about history, then the first public demonstration of the TV was arranged right on the first floor of the Selfridges store. Klein and Daytham's project was called Wonder room - it is 1800 sq. m. London's finest shopping space on the ground floor of Selfridges on Oxford Street. This is a hall of brands that, like a hundred years ago, amaze visitors, only now they are technical gadgets, like gold mobile phones, etc.
The main motive in the interior is a graceful "arcade" or wall of thin panels that runs along the perimeter of the room. Between them, transparent cubic showcases with jewelry are mounted and seem to float in the air. Each brand has its own space, and when you are facing the store, the row of panels does not prevent you from looking at their windows. But if you walk past and look at an angle, the panels line up into a kind of screen, behind which individual brands disappear, and all attention is focused on the central space.
Another original interior was designed by Klein & Dytham for the joint office of the large advertising company TBWA and the equally large Japanese agency Hakudo. Their first priority was to find a suitable location, and the architects settled on an old bowling alley in a large 8-story entertainment complex in downtown Tokyo, which, incidentally, is still in operation. They liked this unexpected location of the new agency, literally between golf and bowling, which will be a big surprise for clients every time. The office occupies two floors, where on the lower floor there is a reception, a gallery, a space for meetings with clients, and above it, climbing a wide staircase, an inner garden, recreation areas and a cafe. By the way, they sit on the steps when this space is used as a hall for presentations. The design seemed so successful that now the office is often rented by other companies for their events.
Klein and Daytem in all their projects are a little ironic, although they deny their belonging to either postmodernism or to any other directions and styles. Each time they find opportunities, and relatively cheap ones, to make the living environment much more pleasant for perception, and here the ornament, according to Klein and Daytham, just allows to expand the framework of perception of the building. It seems that the main thing for them is not to get bored, they turned even such a serious thing as financial transactions into a game in the Bloomberg ICE project. Astrid Klein and Mark Dayham wanted all age groups to somehow become familiar with this complex world of numbers, and came up with an interactive screen that collects information from around the world and processes it in a very clean and understandable form. You communicate with the screen by touch, you may not even touch it, the sensors will sense you at a distance.
At the end of the lecture, Klein and Daitham recalled the popular Pecha Kucha festival, which they invented in 2003 to promote young designers who in Japan, in the face of fierce competition, often find themselves out of work. Each is given 20 seconds for each of 20 slides to present himself in front of the jury, and the winners are invited to work for large companies. The Pecha Kucha project, by the way, is absolutely non-commercial, and nevertheless Astrid Klein and Mark Daytem have been working on it for several years, expanding the geography to 25 cities; now such mini-festivals, already without the participation of the founders, are regularly held all over the world.
