Architecture Videos

Bluetube Bar
by Dose

Editor-at-large

6 December 2011

This timelapse movie shows how a group of Oporto University architecture graduates, who call themselves Dose, constructed a spiky temporary bar for a student festival using blue plastic tubes and cable ties.

Here’s some text from Dose about the project:

The BLUETUBE BAR presents the TUBE-IT system as a feasible and flexible low-cost constructive resource. This system is based on the assembly of “corrugated tube” and “plastic clamps” and was tested in the construction of a temporary bar for the annual academic festival in Porto – [Queima das Fitas do Porto 2010].

Horizontally, the given intervention area was limited to a 3x3m square, whilst vertically the construction should not exceed 5m high. Constrained by the restricted budget, the requested functional device / building should nonetheless emphasize, by its materiality, an outstanding alluring outcome.

When applying the TUBE-IT system, the chosen main material – corrugated tube – is rolled up around a given existing structure in a helicoid manner. In addition to its structural purpose – i. e. to attach the different tube layers to each other as well as to the structure itself – the plastic clamps enhance the desired visual impact of the whole. This kind of tube, usually used in construction with an infrastructural role, becomes the design’s primary element.

Conceptually such an approach departs from a system of modular repetition and explores the continuity of a single element. The building process – managed “in situ” – stressed out and demonstrated both feasibility and versatility of the developed system, reinforcing at the same time the idea that it may just as well be capable of hosting a diversity of other spatial and constructive challenges.