The annual Open House London architectural festival opens its doors this Saturday 14 September. Rayan Elnayal and Heba Tabidi of design studio Space Black discuss their guest-curated third spaces at this year’s edition. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is Monocle on Design Extra.
It's a short show to accompany our weekly program where we discuss everything from architecture and craft to furniture and fashion.
I'm Mailie Evans.
Open House begins this weekend, a two week festival that gives Londoners the opportunity to peek behind closed doors and become better acquainted with the city's architecture architectural heritage.
As part of this year's lineup, a range of guest curators have been invited to host tours, curate collections and highlight lesser known gems across the metropolis.
African and Swana.
Third Spaces is one such collection of sites from guest curators Rianne Anayl and Heber Tabidi, co founders of the design studio Space Black.
The duo joined me at Midori House to discuss some of their architectural selection.
The collection focuses on spaces that are significant to the African and Suana community in London.
And Suana just stands for Southwest Asia and North Africa, just a more inclusive way of including Arabic speaking countries.
We looked at spaces that we felt probably hadn't been celebrated enough.
Some of them new to the Open House collection, but also some of them new to London, like Total.
It's a Sudanese restaurant and it's amazing and the food is incredible.
There aren't that many places in London that you can find Sudanese cuisine.
Spaces like that that we think people would really appreciate but wouldn't know without us putting it out there.
And as well as these new spaces highlighting really old spaces that are at risk.
We're second generation and our parents came in like late 80s, early 90s and there are sites like Shepherds Bush Market which were really significant for communities coming over because that's where they would sell produce that they'd only really find in Sudan and at really reasonable prices.
And it would be like Sudanese, Eritrean, Ethiopian market traders that would sell products.
And it was also just like a gathering space for loads of our parents and their friends to come.
These places are really at risk because of development and we kind of wanted to give them opportunity to be spotlighted.