Wooden It Be Nice
Je Ahn likes maths. That might be a strange thing for a long-haired, handsome, successful, cool-looking fellow to admit as he eats lunch in his open-plan east London office. OK, perhaps a little less strange when you consider that Ahn is the founder of Studio Weave, one of the city’s most successful young architecture, design and public-art practices.
You would, after all, want the person designing your home, office or school, to be on fairly good terms with his or her calculator. Yet Studio Weave does quite a bit more than simple, dependable, four walls and a roof-style architecture.
“We work to bring people together and make them happy,” he says. “Some people have described us as playful, but that’s so broad it’s almost meaningless. We try to focus on a human element, rather than just the material reality.”
Architects haven’t always thought like this. Ahn knows that, back in the 20th century, big-name building designers such as Le Corbusier believed a perfect new block could be reduced to a set of logical principles, creating houses for a regimented population that were like “a machine for living in”.
Today, many in the profession question this sort of thinking. “I’m a keen mathematician, I like how we construct the world through logic,” Ahn says. “But all language and logic are poor translations of our minds. There's no really good way of communicating how we feel and what we want to share.”
Studio Weave has the hard architectural chops to win commissions for multi-million-pound housing developments and key public-sector contracts; its west London school for autistic children has been nominated for the RIBA Stephen Lawrence Prize. Yet the team also possess the kind of warm, fuzzier skills that lead to things like Le Haut-Perché, a beautiful, small, elevated wooden hikers’ shelter beside a stream on the outskirts of Bordeaux; or The Lullaby Factory, a winsome arrangement of brass gramophone horns set into an interior courtyard in Great Ormond St Hospital, which transmits soothing music. These developments aren’t best expressed in an Excel file, but, as Ahn says, “Sometimes you have to let go of constructed logic.”
Studio Weave‘s fuzzy logic is thriving in one of biggest cities in Europe, despite Ahn being the most rural person he knows. “I was born and raised until the age of 13 in a small fishing village near an industrial city called Busan in south-west Korea,” he says. He moved to Britain as a teenager and lived with his family for years at 33 St John Street, a terraced Victorian house a few blocks from where his office now stands in London.
Studio Weave’s new installation for Greenwich Peninsula draws on this old family home. Called 33, the work is a wooden version of a Victorian terrace that stands at the entry and exit point of the area’s Central Park. It’s built from British timber, and though it mimics Ahn’s old Victorian home, there are other elements in there, too. “The window proportions are more Georgian,” he says, ”and the fretwork on the wood will remind you of the Tudors.”
Fellow Studio Weave employees Amelia Hunter and Esther Escribano worked on the three-storey folly, which is accompanied by a series of graphic hoardings and colourful seats around the structure, as well as diagrammatical furniture layouts, laid onto the folly’s floor, entitled Printed Water, all courtesy of the London design-graphic practice, HATO.
The Studio Weave folly has a vivid central staircase that gives access to elevated views of over the surrounding area, and also a fun little building to hang out in. The team began by looking back through the peninsula’s history, from the Docklands era to today, when the district is more closely associated with entertainment and urban living. “There’s actually some Victorian housing at the far end of the park,” says Ahn. “So, the new folly references that too. It’s my way of inviting people to a house, to enjoy the view, and to have a house party.”
Ahn and his colleagues understand how that old form of dwellings sums up the historical side of London, just as the new apartments and facilities of Greenwich Peninsula exemplify the modern. While some nostalgic city dwellers prize those old places, others recognise that many terraces weren’t especially well built, and aren’t particularly suited to the challenges of a modern city.
“London is undergoing a great change,” says Ahn. “While you still see plenty of Victorian houses, bigger developments are coming in. The actual size of the rooms and the dwellings are the same, but the world is getting denser, and the only way you can live better lives is to live compactly.”
“Some people have described us as playful, but that’s so broad it’s almost meaningless. We try to focus on a human element, rather than just the material reality.”
33 doesn’t express this exactly, but it does give visitors a chance to think about the old, the new and what it means to have a home. There are no instructions or guidelines for the folly, beyond a set of opening times – 11am-5pm, Friday to Sunday during summer/autumn 2018 – and a limit of 15 people on the upper floors at any one time. The ground floor of the folly will host community events, musical and theatrical performances, as well as art workshops, but it will be open too, for people to do pretty much what they want inside.
It’s my way of inviting people to a house, to enjoy the view, and to have a house party.
In this way, 33 is more like Ahn’s other great love: the written word. “I’m a big fan of literature,” he says, “I think the key part of the English language is that it leaves a lot of gaps, so the reader can make up his or her own mind.”
Undefined gaps are the sorts of thing that many architects abhor. As Ahn says: “A lot of architecture still happens on spreadsheets.” But practices such as Studio Weave are proving that, in a modern, urban environment, you need to think outside those spreadsheet boxes. “We’ve lost certain intangible, softer elements,” he says. “Studio Weave is trying to bring that back in.” That’s a tricksy, delicate yet admirable task, because, as all good maths brains like Ahn know, “The formula doesn’t exist.”
33 is at the entrance to Central Park, Greenwich Peninsula, SE10
