The PLAY-TIME apartments is a project of seven units for short term rental in Ciudad Lineal, Madrid. The developer chose the place because he was looking for an oasis in the city. As architects , we proposed to intensify that condition. The movement of the building gives each housing with its own terrace and the construction system provides its own garden in the perimeter. The units, two per floor , are independently assembled on a vertical core -with elevator and services- so they can be oriented freely, limited only by urban conditions and the spiral staircase that climbs around the perimeter, to which they turn their backs.
Diagram
The result is seven tree houses, surrounded by more than forty different species of climbing plants, chosen according to the orientation, whether they are evergreen or deciduous, their leaves and fruit color, flowering period, smells and textures. Thus the green tapestry provides the main architectural features of the envelope (solar and hygrothermal control, vision and intimacy adjustments) and a catalog of sensorial experiences.
As a result, the building collects the aspirations of the developer as well as disciplinary obsessions (the vertical garden, the spiral organization, typological subversions, and the apparently free and in-formal envelope shape) but it does so in a way we had to learn everything along the way and we now feel that we could not do without any of the elements without sacrificing the entire project.
The central conceit of Ann Hood’s seventh novel should be as irresistible to book groups as wine and cheese: An empty-nester, at loose ends after her husband of twenty-five years leaves her for another woman, joins a local book club, looking for “the comfort of people who wanted nothing more than to sit together and talk about books.” The group’s theme-of-the-year requires each of its ten members to pick the book that matters most to them. Naturally, we expect their choices to reveal something profound about these characters, but in fact The Book That Matters Most is mainly about Ava North’s rediscovery of the power of literature to heal not just her latest heartache but a childhood trauma she’s long tried to ignore.
The book group, run with firm control by Ava’s friend and neighbor, a librarian who takes her role very seriously, is a motley mix, including a grieving widower; a local Providence, Rhode Island, actress who’s fighting breast cancer; and a young hipster in a porkpie hat. Even here Ava must navigate rueful reminders of her former, fuller life: She immediately recognizes the hyper-efficient mother who had made her feel inadequate at her daughter Maggie’s elementary school, and a young woman who used to babysit for Maggie — already a tenure-track professor teaching women’s studies in the English Department at Brown University. (Ava teaches French at an unnamed, presumably less prestigious local school.)
As for Ava, she finds the assignment challenging: “She couldn’t even remember the last book she’d read that mattered at all. In fact, she purposely chose books that didn’t matter.” She comes up with the sole outlier on the list, a book in which she found consolation when she was eleven, after her sister and mother died within a year of each other: From Clare to Here, by Rosalind Arden, an author no one has heard of. It’s a fictional out-of-print novel created for Hood’s narrative, about a mother who loses one of her two daughters and decides to stay with her in the underworld, rather than return to earth with her living daughter. Part of Hood’s plot revolves around tracking down the book’s provenance.
Another, more effective strand involves Ava’s wayward twenty-year-old daughter, who after some rough teen years is supposedly “finally on track,” studying art history in Florence for the year. Alas, unbeknownst to her distracted parents, she ditches the program for Paris, with the vague idea of following in Hemingway’s footsteps and becoming a writer. Alternating chapters highlight the contrast between Ava’s gradual emergence from her post-split funk and Maggie’s harrowing journey into heroin addiction.
Hood, who has written movingly about losing her only sibling, a brother, in a household accident in 1982 and her five-year-old daughter to a virulent strain of strep twenty years later, is clearly no stranger to trauma. Loss and grief have been recurring themes in her novels, along with women struggling in stifling marriages to discover their own sense of self. Her 2014 novel, An Italian Wife, follows an Italian-born woman from the arranged marriage that takes her to America through the next seven decades. She bears seven children — the last of whom, the result of a passionate affair, she gives up for adoption but then spends the rest of her life trying to find. In The Obituary Writer(2013), the story of a 1960s suburban housewife chafing at the confines of her life converges with a parallel narrative about an early-twentieth-century obituary writer who lives in denial for years after the loss of her married lover in the San Francisco fire of 1906.
By comparison, the action of The Book That Matters Most is tidily compressed into a single year, excepting flashbacks to “That Morning” in 1970 when Ava’s sister Lily died in a freak accident for which her mother, aunt, Ava, and the police detective who failed to determine exactly what happened all blamed themselves. As in her earlier works, several plotlines converge neatly — though in this case, rather predictably.
Hood’s novel is meant to be a heartfelt paean to the power of literature to enlighten, soothe, and resonate personally. After reading The Great Gatsby, Ava says, “I had forgotten how a book can affect you.” She draws parallels between each classic and what’s going on in her own life. For example, the theme of “A return after long wanderings” in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being mirrors her husband’s awkward attempt to patch things up between them. Later, reading Slaughterhouse-Five while trying to track down Rosalind Arden, Ava realizes that she’s becoming as “unstuck in time” as Kurt Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim. And of course there’s plenty about Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each unhappy in its own way.
As these rather too-precise correspondences suggest, the impact of Hood’s unabashedly sentimental novel is repeatedly undercut by a lack of subtlety. She describes Ava’s response to From Clare to Here with typical mawkishness: “Could a writer understand how her book had saved someone long ago, when the world was a fragile, scary place and the people she loved weren’t in it anymore?”
Even before the pat, schmaltzy ending, everything is spelled out. The group’s literary discussions are often painful to read — stilted, simplistic, and didactic. Typical is the cancer patient’s defense of her choice of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: “The novel shows us that strong values help us triumph over adversity.”
As I write this, there’s a part of me that asks how I, who love books and reading so much, can beef about a novel that makes a case for how much books matter. The answer is that I wish Hood had made a less cloying case.
Everyone gets anxious from time to time, mostly when outside of the comfort zone – speaking in public, exams, big decisions and so on. But sometimes anxiety becomes so frequent that it begins to take over our lives.
Do you worry about anything? Do you have problems sleeping? Your worries interfere with your day to day activities? Then you might be anxious.
Take now this quick, easy quiz and find out what’s your anxiety level based on what you see in these paintings!
Can We Guess Your Anxiety Level By What You See In These Fine Art Paintings?
Architecture Research Office and FilzFelt have teamed up to create ARO Block, a series of modular acoustic tiles that provide sound control in a customizable, easy-to-install system. Generated from remnant material of FilzFelt’s CNC cut products, which are often times small, ARO Block not only creates distinct felt tile patterns but also prevents leftover fabric from going to waste.
Courtesy of FilzFelt
Inspired by geometry, spoke systems, and architectural shingles and cladding, ARO Block tiles are 3 mm, 100% Wool Design Felt mounted to a thin 10 mm virgin PET acoustic substrate.
Courtesy of FilzFelt
The tiles are available in 63 wool felt colors, and several geometric shapes such as triangles and irregular four-, six- and eight-sided figures. Put together, these tiles additionally create geometrical voids.
Courtesy of FilzFelt
Courtesy of FilzFelt
Since 2008, we have been committed to our reuse policy, notes FilzFelt’s co-founder and Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Traci Roloff. All offcuts and remnants produced during our manufacturing process are collected and repurposed into sampling, products, or sold to customers requiring smaller quantities. As our manufacturing volume has increased, we’ve been challenged with finding new uses for our remnant inventory. Our company has made efforts to seek out design and production partnerships to establish new uses for our remnants.
As the dust settles, hindsight makes the chain of events that culminated in UK’s vote to leave easier to discern
It is two months since British voters surprised themselves by deciding to end the UK’s 43-year relationship with the European Union – “independence day” to some and “the worst political decision since 1945” to others.
As a stunned political leadership on both sides of the Channel continue dithering about what to do next, it is worth looking back at the origins of a crisis the EU elite had not expected.
A perforated brick screen shields a verdant courtyard at the entrance to this small two-storey house in Hanoi, Vietnam, designed by local studio Nghia Architect (+ slideshow). (more…)
In 1978, Australian ecologists David Holmgren and Bill Mollison coined for the first time the concept of permaculture as a systematic method. For Mollison, “permaculture is the philosophy of working with and not against nature, after a long and thoughtful observation.” [1] Meanwhile, Holmgren defines the term as “those consciously designed landscapes which simulate or mimic the patterns and relationships observed in natural ecosystems.” [2]
In 2002, Holmgren published the bookPermaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, defining 12 design principles that can be used as a guide when generating sustainable systems. These principles can be applied to all daily processes in order to humanize those processes, increase efficiency, and in the long term ensure the survival of mankind.
What if we apply them to the design process of an architectural project?
“By taking the time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.” – David Holmgren
According to Holmgren, the first principle is focused on the observation of nature, in order to understand the elements of the system in which we are working, before acting on it. Attempts to understand and really engage with the situation we face should naturally lead to a deep reflection that allows us to deliver an appropriate response.
In architecture, before sitting down to design, you need to ask yourself: What is the real need of the user of the project I’m designing? What is the context that surrounds it? How can I respond to this need in the most efficient and appropriate way possible?
Connecting with the user and interacting with the context of the project will facilitate our conscious process when engaging with the commission. We will have fewer opportunities to make erroneous assumptions and will be obliged to respect the users’ pre-existing conditions and specific circumstances. A good architecture project will result if we are attentive to the clues that we are receiving.
“By developing systems that collect resources when they are abundant, we can use them in times of need.” – David Holmgren
The “green fever” that overtook architecture a few years ago relies on a rather passive sustainability, with the aim of achieving real efficiency in every possible way. However, beyond the “sustainable techniques” that can be applied, an appropriate question in regards to this principle might be: how do we deliver the best possible architecture using only the available resources, or even less?
Although architecture itself can function as a system to capture, store and use available resources such as the wind, sunlight, and rainwater, our responsibility as architects should not be narrowed down to these methods.
We must be aware that each line that we draw on our plan has an associated cost, a footprint. It makes no sense to raise large skyscrapers full of solar panels if your single construction generates a huge waste of resources and a series of negative externalities in other areas.
“Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.” – David Holmgren
For this principle, Holmgren says that “you can’t work on an empty stomach,” ensuring that we get immediate rewards to sustain ourselves. He adds that the designed systems should ensure the survival of the community without compromising their future and that productivity should be measured in terms of the real products from the effort that was invested.
Beyond the fair and necessary monetary payment we receive for our work, our performance and productivity as architects should be measurable in relation to all the positive externalities that our projects are generating.
An architecture project has the ability to greatly influence the context in which it operates, and we can’t lose the opportunity to identify and develop its potential benefits to the greatest extent possible. A project can’t be considered sustainable if it only fills our pockets but does not “surrender” positively in other ways, or worse, if it harms its environment.
“We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well.” – David Holmgren
This principle is represented by the planet Earth, with the idea of showing the most visible “example of a self-regulating ‘organism’ which is subject to feedback controls, like global warming.” The proverb used to describe it suggests that this negative feedback usually takes time to emerge, and the impact of our actions are not immediately visible.
In the case of architecture, we are generally prepared to plan our designs for the present, but not to think too much about what will happen with them in the future. It makes sense to do it that way, because our work needs to fit a user and a context in particular, with needs and requirements that are relevant today. How can we rid ourselves of an unpredictable and unfavorable future?
The key is just to “self-regulate” what we propose, in order to discourage, prevent or rethink the design answers (and/or related activities) that at least today, we can identify as inappropriate.
“Make the best use of nature’s abundance to reduce our consumptive behavior and dependence on non-renewable resources.” – David Holmgren
For this point, the call is to “let nature take its course,” to the greatest extent possible, and Holmgren gives us a somewhat extreme but clear example to understand its depth. The building of the Argentine Permaculture Institute was designed and built with straw and earth, materials that if not maintained – to allow life inside the building – will slowly return again back to earth. Its impact is minimal and its service life is directly associated with its use.
This is a difficult principle to apply because we are used to – and we were trained to – use materials, systems and services based on (nonrenewable) fossil fuel processes, but it challenges us to incorporate as many resources as possible which can be restored at a rate higher than their consumption.
Solar, wind, hydro and geothermal energy, or biomass and biofuels, can be effective options to explore which allow the operation of our “off-grid” projects; while some renewable materials like adobe, cork, straw and bamboo can provide good alternatives if properly applied. Woods produced through sustainable forestry techniques can also be added to this list.
“By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste.” – David Holmgren
This principle is simply based on using all the resources we have available, avoiding waste of material. It’s easy to waste when we have abundance, but what would we do if there were no warehouses filled with construction materials to build our projects?
We grew up in a profligate world, and as architects, from our first months at university we begin to spend more than necessary. Every week we make models and print meters of sheets of paper; expensive materials in many cases quickly end up in the trash. In professional life, the plotter is continuously hard at work and our old models are amplified to the scale 1:1.
Why not always design from the standard dimensions of materials to avoid waste? Why not consider whether it is really necessary that our housing project measures 6500 square feet, or whether that cantilever or that curved wall that force us to spend increasingly scarce resources are justified?
“By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go.” – David Holmgren
To explain this principle, Holmgren gives the example of the spider’s web: each is unique, however, the geometric pattern of spiral rings is universal.
Many times we are told in architecture school that it’s not necessary to “re-invent the wheel” every time we undertake a new project. There are many operations, dimensions and spatial configurations that are obvious and effective for architecture because they arise directly from previous experience and the behavior of human beings.
If we follow these proven patterns using common sense, we will be working on a solid and unquestionable basis, which can then lead to a project’s full potential through its development. The details, as part of our particular contribution, move away from mere ornament to emerge as an added value, that supports and gives identity and specificity to the response.
“By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between them and they support each other.” – David Holmgren
This principle is clear and we all have seen it at university or in our working life: “many hands make light work.” It is likely that working together will allow us to reach a better result, because we can share strategies, compare views, and question our ideas with each other, in addition to speeding up a process that individually could take longer and be less effective, or even wrong. But we can go further:
Our designs can be really integrated if all the elements that constitute them are adequately working together, forming a cohesive whole, where nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.
Moreover, the possibility is in our hands to define the way the designed space will be inhabited in the future, and in that sense it’s possible to incorporate subtle operations that encourage integration among users, creating spaces of friction and meeting that come into balance with those essential private spaces for individual development.
“Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources that produce more sustainable outcomes.” – David Holmgren
At this point, the “maintenance” concept arises as a subject that is far more important than it seems, because the larger a building is, the more resources and processes are required to preserve it and prevent its decay.
If we as architects are really committed to a project and its future, we will try to make our design minimize and facilitate maintenance requirements, from its materials to the size and the configuration of spaces.
A good building should require minimal attention from its users, allowing them to realize their activities without constantly concerning themselves over malfunctioning systems or materials that show excessive wear.
If a project’s dimensions are adjusted to the real needs of the customer, it is more efficient in its construction because it uses fewer hands and fewer resources. In turn, it becomes easier to achieve thermal comfort, facilitating the heating and cooling of interiors, and even improves other everyday issues such as simplifying cleaning.
“Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides.” – David Holmgren
In this tenth principle, Holmgren says “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” stating that diversity “offers insurance against the variations of our environment.”
If we take notice, a city has different types of buildings, with different sizes, configurations, and orientations. Each was intended to respond to the specific conditions of each site and particular user. If instead, we find neighborhoods where absolutely all houses are the same, something is wrong. Why should a house located on the main street be equal to one that is located in a quiet side street with little movement? Why should a home that receives plenty of light from the north be equal to one that is oriented more towards the south? It makes no sense.
Diversity reflects a certain specificity in the responses that each architect has delivered, allowing each project to be designed in accordance with the circumstances surrounding it.
“The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.” – David Holmgren
“Don’t think you’re on the right path just because everyone else used it.” Holmgren is clear to say that the most popular technique does not always match with the best approach.
This principle tells us to seize and to value all the opportunities that at first glance don’t seem relevant, and to analyze the commission received with open eyes, allowing us to see beyond the obvious.
If our project seems to be moving in the wrong direction, it may be good to turn it around completely. If there aren’t variables contained within the site that help us to design, it might be good to look beyond the walls surrounding it.
On the edges, just by being outside the “norm” (or a centralized look), it could be that a series of spontaneous situations can happen which in most cases are correct because they arise naturally, without pressure or stereotypes. Our designs should arise in the same way; avoiding preconceived ideas and fashions that restrict us to working within certain margins, because we can easily ignore the “key point” of the project.
“We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing, and then intervening at the right time.” – David Holmgren
Finally, Holmgren said that “the vision is not seeing things as they are but as they will be” and that “understanding change is much more than a linear projection.”
Although it is a difficult task, as architects we must be able to imagine the future. The buildings we are raising today make up the context for other architects in the following decades and somehow, we are determining what will continue to be used or not.
Our responsibility is to anticipate appropriately what is to come and the best way to do this is by making sure that each of our projects helps us orient ourselves, as human beings, to the best possible future.
Perhaps if we follow these 12 principles we would be closer to leaving a good legacy. It’s just common sense.
Four Season House is a private residence located in Yun-Lin County, Taiwan. Completed in 2016, it was designed by MORI design. For Season House by MORI design: “This green house is located in Yun-Lin County which is a model of happy rural simplicity. The first impression of the base is surrounded by cropland, bamboo groves, and country roads. Also, there are several trees on this base. We retained the existing..
Sig Nordal 