T-House

Presented as part of the Festival of Extreme Buildings, Albert Street, B4 7LN 

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Launch event 23 May 2007, 4-5.30pm

Artists reserve the right to cancel the event in the case of extreme weather conditions.

Presentation continues through to September 2007

T-house is a collaboration between Colin Pearce and Ranbir Lal. Part-architecture, part-sculpture, the design for T-house is a deconstruction of the built form - in this case the Japanese tea house and the English garden pavilion. T-house unfolds a series of environments through its intersecting planes, dynamically opening out like a giant piece of origami.

www.festival-xtremebuilding.org.uk

T-house is intended for location in the public realm where it is hoped it will act as both container and shelter for a wide range of social, aesthetic and artistic interactions to be determined by the general public. T-house is a developing concept which, will be researched further with a range of different groups of people from Eastside during the Festival of Extreme Buildings where a prototype of the T-House construction will be presented May-September 2007, venue details tbc.

To be kept informed about T-House events at the Festival of Extreme Buildings please email info@vivid.org.uk

(Further information on the Festival of Extreme Buildings can be found at www.festival-xtremebuilding.org.uk)

Project history and development

"The simplicity of the tea-room and its freedom from vulgarity make it truly a sanctuary from the vexation of the outer world...Nowadays industrialism is making true refinement more and more difficult the world over. Do we not need the tea-room more than ever?"
Ch. 4 The Tea-Room.The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura.1906

Artist Pearce and architect Lal set out to design a transportable and flexible building - functioning as a place of conversation or contemplation founded on the pleasures of drinking tea.

The duo aimed to create an innovative and contemporary construction whose design and detailing will be initially informed by some of the better known international traditions of "taking tea", but will take a fresh and modern approach to it.

"The well known historical influences which for us informed the development of such a place were first and foremost, the Japanese tea house (now an internationally recognised almost the platonic ideal) and to a lesser extent the English garden pavilion and, in its more eccentric variants, the architectural folly."

To read the full artists' statement click here

T-house research event, June 2006

As part of VIVID's 2006 Architecture Week programme, Habitat, Colin and Ranbir invited the public to join them for afternoon tea on 19 June, to assist with further research into possible T-house environments and peoples' tea associations.

Viewers were invited to bring an object and memory they associated with tea drinking to join the artists' T museum, sample a range of world teas and discuss potential features of the T-House.