#studio three

This renovation focused on building a sculptural light-filled liner inside a 106 year old space. With thrift, four layers of old construction and modifications were left untouched. All of the desks are simple glulam beams laid on their sides, all of the fixtures are custom made from raw steel, and the monolithic cabinetry is made from practical and cost-effective plastic laminate. The service spaces feel dark, hefty and crude, to contrast with the glowing, faceted and crisp work spaces. Photography courtesy of D’Arcy Jones Architects

Warm Up // Studio III // Put Down That Drone

Warm up blogpost, to get back into it!

This look in any way familiar? (Probably not, it was a lot smaller). This is the sunflower grown from the tiny seedling that I got from @creatingcharlottepj and @smythiecreativetech at the end of last year. 

This year I’m taking the ‘Put down that drone’ studio, which has a focus on storytelling, so I’m going to warm up into it by dramatizing the story of this sunflower. 

For two weeks it lived in it’s two inch square pot on my windowsill in Auckland, waiting until I went home for the holidays. The plant was only a couple of inches tall and had two tiny leaves when I took it home. Getting it home was stressful enough, carrying it by hand through a taxi-ride, a two-hour bus-ride, and then a twenty minute car-ride, but by some miracle it made it home alive and unbroken. 

That’s where I made a mistake. 

Confidently I put the seedling out into the front garden, certain that from here it’d be okay. But when I looked out twenty minutes later, things weren’t looking good. The plant stalk was lying flat on the ground, and also a couple of feet from where I’d planted it. Checking on it I found that the stalk had been snapped completely in two, from either one of the roaming dogs or chickens that live on our property.

Emergency care ensued. I scooped the plant up and put the cut stalk into a pot of potting-mix, and put it inside next to a sunny window in the hopes it would recover. 

Over the next couple of days things weren’t looking good. The plant looked progressively worse and worse each day, almost keeling over and giving up. 

Then after a week, it shot up again! 

Several pot transplants later, and this is what it bloomed into. I was concerned that even if it did grow, it wouldn’t flower, or that it might be too fragile to survive to bloom, so I was happily surprised.