Allied Operations, a group of design professionals based in New York, is selected as one of the Bathing Beauties.

Their beach hut model “Magic is in the Air” will be featured in Bathing Beauties’ exhibition at the Scarborough Art Gallery in the UK, 13 March – 20 Sept 2010

For more information about exhibition, check out Scarborough Art Gallery

Allied Operations - "Magic is in the Air"

Organization: Allied Operations
Design team: Sangmok Kim, Si-Yeon Min
Location: Lincolnshire coast, UK
Program: Beach Hut
Site area: scale less sqm
Building area: 110sqm
Total floor area: 110 sqm

Project description and concept:

‘Magic Is In the Air’

A beach is magic: water, waves, sand, grass, sun, and wind collectively conjure up an ethereal landscape, where  everything is in motion.

So – why should a beach hut alone stand still against all of this? Can it stop being a lonely, man-made artifice and become part of the magic movement of nature?

We propose a tumbling beach hut, shaped as a crooked conical hat. Its form derives from the magic hat of a wizard – a wizard of the old English myths.

With a single D20 stainless steel spiral pipe covered by high-performance PTFE textile (a lightweight fabric woven entirely from high-strength polytetrafluoroethylene fibers), it will constantly tumble while balancing itself against the wind. This is the moment when the hut begins to take on a magical life of its own.

It becomes nature.

During the off-season, the temporary nature of the fabric provides users with the flexibility to demount and leave the bare structure behind.

The spiral tumbles on, shifting its identity from private to public. It becomes nature again, open and free for all.

About Allied Operations

Allied Operations began with a few graduates from GSAPP (Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation).

We were hoping to design exercises to keep our brain stimulated after our day-job. Also we were hoping we wouldn’t be CAD monkeys once we were off the clock.

As you may know, most of the Nobel Prizes resulted from people dedicating their lives fully to what they loved, not simply because of some state-of-the-art laboratories.

In keeping with this spirit, we turned our homes into a forge for creativity.

A/O exists on the premise that compounding residual hours of operation in different time zones and extremely cohesive Internet communication is the best way for this design team to execute a project.

We love to say, “Quantity is failure of efficiency, and efficiency, the failure of capitalism.”

A/O operates between these two parameters. We are a humanist operation. As architects, we are brutal, crazy and unconventional.

We approach projects according to their own unique demands and not to some predetermined style requirement.