Master's thesis

2013 - Jönköping

Martina Vesik

By making furniture or interior design, architects have through time been able to experiment and realize their designs at a much faster pace than with buildings. Through close collaboration with the carpentry firm Snöstorps Snickerifabrik, I have been working with real scale prototypes and details through the conception and fabrication of a store interior.

The main purpose for retail architecture is to display products and to assist the interaction between customers and shop assistants. What can architecture do to make the products more attractive and to reduce the visual noise often seen in stores with different kinds of products? How custom-made or similar should the architecture be if the store suddenly multiplies into a chain and spreads to other cities?

This master thesis is about the making of a telecom store interior, from idea to a finished 1:1 scale “prototype”. Intensive investigations regarding product display have been carried out and form-finding studies were conducted regarding display areas, furniture, ceiling and graphics. In order to appreciate the complexity of the realization of a project, these investigations covered the whole production and assembly process.

2012 - Göteborg

Martina Vesik - Anna Weber - Karin Hedlund

Millipede is an undulating, hinged, floating jetty with many arms. It is a moving bridge, its load bearing glulam beams are hinged at two points and it has two floating supports that help the bridge follow the fluctuating water level. The glulam beams meet ground in tracks that allow for movement and stabilize the bridge.

Millipede spans 36 meter and is 50 meters long. It is spans the moat from Kungstorget to Kungsparken; going from city to park. At Kungstorget the walkway is two meters wide, and when it reaches Kungsparken it has widened to four meters. The 524 arms of the Millipede are all individually adjustable and at the city side function as upright railing, they then fold down into the water and become a part of the construction. The closer to the park the longer the arms and finally the bridge becomes a flowing park bench, bringing people closer to the water.

From soap to mobile exhibition

The course Design and Communication Tools was about exploring ways of casting combined with digital design and CNC milling. The final project was a mobile gallery at Chalmers University of Technology. 

CONCEPTS

Freezing diffusion and depth in transparency

Controlled haphazardness

Moving colour

Hexagon geometry

Peep holes

Situated along the important axis of Plato’s way, in the middle of the neighbourhood of Keramikos, the project responds to the Urban Constitution by proposing an attraction point in a “village”, a public space for the neighborhood, and inserting a pocket public space, a plaza, that is located on the street. The morphological characteristics of Keramikos are the different heights of the buildings, forming a fragmented, terraced streetscape. We play with this by integrating the building into the context and responding to the various heights thus creating outdoor terraces and a fragmented volume dialoging with the existing scale.