Inspirations

Architect Arnaud Guirao, co-founder of Moon Safari architecture and urban planning talks about his experience, when using Stereo, Stereo Air and Strato. In his view, using ceilings to also handle acoustics was a major technical and aesthetic opportunity for this project. 

Thank you for visiting us at Clerkenwell Design Week last week. We hope you enjoyed the experience in our acoustic tunnel!

“In the office space market today, demand is changing”, explains Sabine Moscato of Naud & Poux Architects. “The need for services and meeting spaces is on the rise. There are practically no more single-person businesses in these buildings. Office catering standards are also evolving. Coffee breaks are being used as opportunities for small informal get-togethers, so dining areas and lounges are taking on new functions. All these trends are exerting a significant impact on how these spaces need to be designed.”

Stéphane Montel is the owner-manager of Acoustic Systems Interior (ASI) and will soon have been installing Texaa solutions for 15 years. Vibrasto for him is “sheer delight” triggered by the appeal of the material, how easy it is to fit, its meticulous finish and versatility across projects. In his own words…

At Texaa, colour counts! So, when we completely renew the range of colours for our Aeria fabric that is the hallmark covering for all our products, it involves a process that mobilises our whole business from the workshop in the Bordeaux area right through to our people in the field.

After years of testing its Aeria* textile and stretching it to fit the myriad of situations architects and acoustic engineers have wanted to put it in, Texaa ended up developing a new open-knit modular textile ceiling solution mounted on frames with a more or less transparent appearance depending on the configurations chosen. Its technical and aesthetic characteristics appear to be turning it into a new-generation solution for specifiers.

Texaa is a family business employing around fifty people in one of greater Bordeaux’s activity centres in a building designed by architects Luc Arsène-Henry and Alain Triaud. Come into the lobby, follow a narrow corridor, push open a sound-proofed door with a round window in it and you are in the workshop.

Historically there were always heathered colours in the Texaa range, but they were left aside in the 1990’s, when they were replaced by solid monochrome colours. They have returned as a necessity, triggered by the research done into reworking the whole colour range.

Texaa began as a business venture in 1979. At the time I was no longer happy working for the pharmaceutical company I was with, and a friend happened to speak to me about a firm that had been making trimmings for over a hundred years – braid, silk cord, pompons and the like – for local slipper and sandal manufacturers, along with ‘open weave’, heavily sized textiles, like canvas, for the production of bags etc.

Two giant bubbles, in yellow and white, the colours of arc en rêve. Each with a surface area of two hundred and twenty-eight square metres and some seven metres high…

For almost four decades now, Texaa has forged its way ahead with little regard for the beaten track.

In 1977, architect Henry Bernard commissioned Texaa to treat the acoustics of the twelve commission rooms at the Palace of Europe, seat of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. We returned to the site some thirty-seven years later to study the effects of passing time.

It is time we had a new colour range. Certainly not because of fashion’s whirlpool pressures or a feverish Pantone compliance with latest trends, but because times change and it is important to be aware that they have.

Nothing escapes colour. It captures us before being captured. Seeing it is something else. Because it belongs to the sensitive order of the world, artists of all types – designers, architects, sculptors, writers, film makers and musicians – are immediately concerned. They seize it as if it were a phenomenon, whose principles, nature and effects are to be explored, which enables them to broadcast its physical and symbolic substance. Telling the stories of a few subjectively chosen works is a way to dive into colour and the experiences of it that those who created the works relate. A white page to cover with colours.

Texaa’s hallmark, our “DNA”, is without question Aeria, a sound transparent, knitted fabric produced in our workshops in Gradignan, Gironde. Neither hand nor eye are left indifferent by the unique way in which light plays over its texture, creating an irresistible urge to touch and caress it, as if in search of intimate, insightful confirmation of something sight cannot grasp without the palpable experience of touch.

It all begins with a shared experience, that of visiting an empty flat and of finding it horribly echoing and resonant. And then of discovering that by filling it with furniture, curtains and living beings, it suddenly becomes a particularly comfortable, cosy and appeasing place to live… Let us not forget that textiles have long played a key role in interior design, through curtains, wall coverings and upholstery etc.

The programme for a concert given on 29th August 1952 at Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, announced that a piece of contemporary music for the piano was to be performed. And indeed, as one might have anticipated, the audience waited eagerly as the pianist settled down, adjusted his piano stool and unfolded his score. Only to then close the lid of the keyboard. Thirty-three seconds ticked by before pianist David Tudor once again lifted the lid.2 Not a single note had been played, but the first movement was already over… It was time for the second movement, and then the third.

The interior design of the ‘Aubette’ building in Strasbourg is often referred to as the Sistine Chapel of abstract avant-garde art between the wars. The work was completed in 1928 by Theo van Doesburg, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp, and pays eloquent witness to the endeavours of Modernist artists working in this period to marry colour with architecture.

Colour comes from the earth beneath our feet. Already in pre-historic times, man used the ochres and black manganese of the land, along with charcoal and red chalk, to paint frescos across the walls of the caves he inhabited. Later, he would use milk of lime to whitewash the walls of his home, together with a whole host of renderings, pigments, dyes, paints and colourings…

Texaa new generation blinds are stylish and thick, and block out practically all light. Engineers and consultants worked hard to achieve unusually high specifications, while designing a new product with a considerably lower environmental impact.

What does innovation look like in a curtain? You need to look closely at the light billowing shapes of Texaa’s new soundproofing acoustic curtains to see anything new. First exhibited at architect@work  in Paris and Berlin this autumn, these are the first curtains in the Bordeaux manufacturer’s range that claim to have real soundproofing qualities.

Architect Arnaud Guirao, co-founder of Moon Safari architecture and urban planning talks about his experience, when using Stereo, Stereo Air and Strato. In his view, using ceilings to also handle acoustics was a major technical and aesthetic opportunity for this project. 

Thank you for visiting us at Clerkenwell Design Week last week. We hope you enjoyed the experience in our acoustic tunnel!

“In the office space market today, demand is changing”, explains Sabine Moscato of Naud & Poux Architects. “The need for services and meeting spaces is on the rise. There are practically no more single-person businesses in these buildings. Office catering standards are also evolving. Coffee breaks are being used as opportunities for small informal get-togethers, so dining areas and lounges are taking on new functions. All these trends are exerting a significant impact on how these spaces need to be designed.”

Stéphane Montel is the owner-manager of Acoustic Systems Interior (ASI) and will soon have been installing Texaa solutions for 15 years. Vibrasto for him is “sheer delight” triggered by the appeal of the material, how easy it is to fit, its meticulous finish and versatility across projects. In his own words…

At Texaa, colour counts! So, when we completely renew the range of colours for our Aeria fabric that is the hallmark covering for all our products, it involves a process that mobilises our whole business from the workshop in the Bordeaux area right through to our people in the field.

After years of testing its Aeria* textile and stretching it to fit the myriad of situations architects and acoustic engineers have wanted to put it in, Texaa ended up developing a new open-knit modular textile ceiling solution mounted on frames with a more or less transparent appearance depending on the configurations chosen. Its technical and aesthetic characteristics appear to be turning it into a new-generation solution for specifiers.

Texaa is a family business employing around fifty people in one of greater Bordeaux’s activity centres in a building designed by architects Luc Arsène-Henry and Alain Triaud. Come into the lobby, follow a narrow corridor, push open a sound-proofed door with a round window in it and you are in the workshop.

Historically there were always heathered colours in the Texaa range, but they were left aside in the 1990’s, when they were replaced by solid monochrome colours. They have returned as a necessity, triggered by the research done into reworking the whole colour range.

Texaa began as a business venture in 1979. At the time I was no longer happy working for the pharmaceutical company I was with, and a friend happened to speak to me about a firm that had been making trimmings for over a hundred years – braid, silk cord, pompons and the like – for local slipper and sandal manufacturers, along with ‘open weave’, heavily sized textiles, like canvas, for the production of bags etc.