Taking place in the capital’s most exciting venue, the Truman Brewery, a vast reclaimed industrial site in Brick Lane, Tent London is the most comprehensive and diverse design event of the year, showing art and architecture, vintage and contemporary design by emerging and established designers from around the world.

Open Tables is a software application and a spatial environment, which researches and facilitates collaborative working between individuals and groups. The core purpose of Open Tables is to explore the potential for new kinds of collaborative working to emerge in spaces that combine analogue and digital modes of interaction: engaging both the mind and the senses in the navigation and production of information.

Come and see us at Tent London to talk to us about the project. We will be available at the stand throughout the exhibition.

Tent London opening times:
Thursday 18 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Friday 19 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Saturday 20 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Sunday 21 September: 11.00 – 17.00hrs

For more information on Tent London, please visit their website @ www.tentlondon.co.uk
To find out more about our project, please visit project’s website @ www.opntables.com

Open Tables (OT) is an experimental new kind of collaborative working environment. For the Tent Urbantine installation we have defined four research topic areas, looking at contemporary design issues around sustainability, workplace environments, and ubiquitous computing. However, OT can be set up to research any topic depending upon the needs and interests of the client/participant/co-designer – whether bike design or stock markets – and we anticipate producing many OT variations in the future.

At the heart of Open Tables is the OT WebApp, the central repository of discussion material. It’s purpose is to organize information in a way relevant to the topic discussed. Items are collected off the web from a number of defined web feeds. Items are collected and collated into topics using the tags that the describe those items. The WebApp allows OT participants to browse items, filter by topic, tag and mark relevant or rejected depending upon whether you think this item is relevant to the discussed topic or not. You can also leave comments for each item.

Within the OT physical installation the content is interacted with through a series of physical spatial interfaces. The WebApp has a number of XML outputs which allow interface devices at the installation to communicate to one another. Item modified in the physical installation is automaticly updated on the webapp. This also works vice versa. Whilst the information displayed on the webapp is in a particular, already familiar web format, the same information in the installation is displayed through a series of spatial and physical conditions, aimed at promoting social interaction.

On the web, the OT WebApp can be engaged with through the OT website. Feel free to browse/tag/relate items. All information is collected and displayed in the space relevant to generate discussion. If you register you are also able to add items yourself as well as subscribe to our newsletter to be notified where next physical installation will be taking place.

The four research topics that OT is currently running are:

SUSTAINABILITY IN EDUCATION

RESEARCHING RECYCLING

GLOBAL NETWORKS AND THE INTERACTIVE EVERYDAY

COLLABORATIVE WORKING ENVIRONMENTS

If you have a blog, or would like to recommend a website which addresses any of these issues, and you would like to have your content fed into the OT system for the Tent Urbantine installation, then please submit your feed to info@opntables.com

The feeds that you submit to the Sustainability in Education topic will be feeding into a live EU funded research project into design education, and will be shown at the DEEDS 360 degrees conference (http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/events/deeds-360degrees) in Brighton on Saturday 20th September 2008.

For more information about Open Tables, please visit http://www.opntables.com or our blog http://blog.opntables.com or drop us an email at info@opntables.com

Open Tables is a Working Architecture Group [WAG] project. http://www.wag-architecture.co.uk

WAG have previously worked on Nincomsoup with DAAM in 2001 and on new seating additions in 2004. We are also currently working on alterations to award winning Nincomsoup in Old Street.

More information coming soon..

We have been working on a number of architecture projects in and around East London’s up and coming Homerton area. These include a new build eco house on Fenn St, which will be going on site later this year, an eco bar in Bohemia Place, currently in planning, and the remodelling of a house on Kenworthy Road. One other project, which has thrown up lots of interesting local London history, is a feasibility study for a housing developer, for the former Convent of the Sacred Heart, on the corner of Kenworthy Road and Hassett Road.

This triangular site contains two main building blocks, with gardens and a courtyard. The square shaped building near the centre of the site, which is Grade II listed, was built around 1800 by Leny Smith, a local silk manufacturer, as Sidney House and Estate. The house was bought by the Catholic Church at the end of the nineteenth century, to be used as a convent. The original house was extended with a new wing to the north west, and a new block was added to the east at this time. The complex has remained intact and in excellent condition since then, with the exception of a lift block added to the south façade of the original building during the nineteen eighties. Particularly notable, are the main staircase, and some hallway plaster moldings.

The main entrance to the original Sidney House was from the north, accessed by a driveway from Sidney Road, as Kenworthy Road was called until 1939. Sidney Road was itself previously the northern section of Wick Lane, an ancient Hackney route leading from the mills of the Knights Templar’s estate to the north east (on the site still known as Temple Mills), down south along Kenworthy Road, crossing the Hackney Brook (which presumably now runs culverted below Wick Road), across what is now the eastern edge of Victoria Park, before finishing along the only stretch of road that is still called Wick Lane, in Old Ford.
The gardens of the Sidney House extended west of Sidney Road for almost a mile, and were one of many luxury estates that existed in Homerton from the Tudor period, formed out of the extensive lands of the Knights Templar in this area. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the village was the home of Homerton College, which still exists within the University of Cambridge, if not any longer in Homerton itself. Eton College too, had a presence here. The construction of the North London railway in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the now long demolished Victoria Park station near the southern end of Kenworthy Road, turned the area into something of a leisure destination among the north London middle classes for a while. However, the spread of Victorian developer housing, and the construction of two workhouses, which would later became Homerton and Hackney hospitals during the various fevers that hit London in the mid nineteenth century, meant that the middle and upper classes largely left the area. However, in recent years the gentrification of the areas around Victoria Park, have lead huge increase in local property values, and the Olympic Village site, less than half a mile to the east, promises a major revival in the areas fortunes.

In our approach to developing the site , we sought to reestablish the importance of Sidney House within the site, by clearing away minor ancillary Victorian buildings in front of the old house. We proposed that the eastern Victorian block be developed as 4-6 affordable housing flats, whilst the Sidney House building, together with its west wing extension, contained 11 luxury flats. These have been organised so that the most important architectural spaces and moldings stay coherent and intact. All flats would have a garden or balcony space, and the roofs had courtyard gardens incorporated into them. It is possible to have a site wide environmental strategy. Solar Heating panels could be sited at roof level, as might a wind turbine. There is space at ground level to store the plant required for energy distribution, rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling.

WAG: project instigators and architects

Project description: When the railway embankment running north from Liverpool St Station, parallel to Mare Street, was constructed in the nineteenth century, the century long relationship between John Soane’s exquisite St John’s church (built in ) and Bethnal Green High Road was broken. The utilitarian steel bridge that now crosses Bethnal Green High Road 5m above the pavement level, all but blocks views of the church from the high road, and completely destroys the place that must have existed between the calm white stone of Soane’s modest masterpiece and the chaos of Bethnal Green market streching out in front of it.

WAG have developed a series of optical and digital installation proposals for the railway bridge that will allow a sense of the space of the place that might have existed there during the 18th and 19th centuries to be discerned. WAG’s first ideas examined the possible construction of a huge periscope which would sit like a lid over the bridge, bouncing reflections of the hidden view of the church over the bridge. Other kaliedoscopic variations of this machine attenuated the verfremdung – or alienation – of the originary scene.
However, whilst these analogue proposals had an elegant visibility to their mechanism, this same visibility would literally sometimes block other parts of the church view not currently obscured! WAG therefor settled upon a more sublime digital option. A bank of video cameras fixed to one side of the bridge record hidden views of the church, which are played back in real time on a continuous digital screen which lines the other side of the bridge. As this screen is digital, it is of course possible to discuss what other content it might carry. This might include local community content, commissioned video art, and advertising (which might pay for the project.
The intention of the project is not to simply make the bridge (modernity) invisible, but rather involves something like a dialectical aufhebung – or sublimation – of the lost view of the church building. The project hopes to encourage thinking about the role and ownership of images and views within the public realm, and to provoke questions about the experience of historical space.

WAG have started discussing the idea with Spacia and Railtrack, who own the property.

This piece of work is part of the Democratic Billboard, an ongoing WAG research and development project. This series of urban, architectural and art ideas explores the possible future development of the emerging media, advertising and communications infrastructures within the public spaces of the metropolis.