Six buildings have been shortlisted for architecture’s most unwanted award – the Carbuncle Cup 2016 for the UK’s worst new building (+ slideshow). (more…)
Located in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico, the most important enological zone in the country. This experimental Project base on the idea of a origami paper transfer to metal.
This is a building of craftmanship caracter, dynamic and adventourous. It reflects the identity of the craft beer that is offered in this place with the name of Media Perra.
The context where is located the project is surrounded by mountains and silhouettes that these mountains Project. One of the ideas was to generate these silhouettes and build the main structure only with folds that will form walls and roofs, and create a volumetn of Media Perra.
We analized the solar path and shades to create different abstract planes and lighting details inside and outside the tasting room.
The sustainable concepts that we use often in our firm in all the projects are very important. The outside layer of the building consist in two layers of rust metal with a layer of straw in the middle, and the walls are made of adobe block, a trademark of the Kumiai natives living near by.
The building is oriented to take advantage of natural resources in result having a natural ventilation because is located in a very dry area with extreme weather conditions.
The shape of the roof help accumulate water, and natural lighting is made of recycle bottles with water, and doors and furniture are made of recycle metal, product of the facade.
Even that the project is only 1200 ft2 the interiors are designed to directly connect between spaces, creating large and dynamic áreas. Media Perra is seeking an experience of identity and dialog between frequent visitors.
Dezeen promotion: installations, pop-up shops, events and 200 interior design brands will return to designjunction during this year’s London Design Festival (+ slideshow). (more…)
A copper-clad chapel and a faceted wooden sauna are among the four buildings competing for Finland’s most important architecture prize (+ slideshow). (more…)
It’s the year 2036 in Generic City, a gloomy place where once mighty skyscrapers are lucky to be in decrepit condition, if they haven’t already been swallowed by the ever-increasing number of sinkholes appearing throughout the city. But the city is not lifeless: a constant hum echoes about the city, a well-choreographed churning motion in pursuit of one central activity. In this city, the world’s most precious commodity—not gold, not diamonds, not even black gold but just simple, fresh water is under the total control of a mega-corporation named Turquoise. The people are ruled by an oppressive autocracy and life is divided between the haves and have-nots. Life revolves around access to water.
Is this the opening paragraph of the latest dystopian novel? No, but it might be Joshua Dawson’s interpretation of our troubling future. With CÁUSTICO, an ode to the growing tradition of “speculative design fiction” pioneered by countercultural avant-gardists of the 1960s (think Archigram, Superstudio and Archizoom) Dawson exaggerates the implications of current social phenomena for the purposes of rhetoric. While the truthfulness of his vision is a little on the improbable side, the work is an eye-opening narrative on the increasing scarcity of fresh water. At the same time, Dawson’s dystopic vision opens a conversation about the relationship of the architect with utopianism, while his representational techniques brings up the question of what exactly the work of the architect entails.
The project’s 5-minute video clip begins with a moody sequence that looks like the usual B-roll for an apocalyptic film, but in contrast to this surrealist vision, Dawson aims to address the very real and very tangible problem of water scarcity. In support of this, his clip is populated with curated audio from actual news reports on water privatization, climate change and groundwater mining. As Dawson explains:
Water is the Blue Gold of the 21st century. Due to increasing urbanization, the continued rise of the population, shifting climates and industrial pollution, fresh water is becoming humanity’s most precious resource. Multinational corporations are stepping in to purchase groundwater and distribution rights wherever they can and are driven to commodify what many feel is a basic human right.
Worldwater.org reports that historical armed conflict over freshwater resources extends as far back as 3000 BC in Ancient Sumer, which highlights just how crucial and important fresh water is. A well or spring within your city’s borders decided whether one would survive or perish in a siege. In the global market of the 21st century, drinking bottled water has become a widely accessible but somewhat wasteful commodity—you can freely enjoy Perrier from France, San Pellegrino from Italy, or Fiji Water from its namesake. However, this ceaseless extraction does come with a price to pay. A number of large metropolitan areas have experienced drought-like conditions in recent years. Quite spectacularly, as California faces its fifth consecutive year of drought, mega conglomerate Nestlé continues to extract as much as 36 million gallons of freshwater from its national parks, all to the tune of a $524 yearly permit.
Dawson predicts that this continued extraction will produce the new landscape of the future—cavernous sinkholes, and subsidence which will cause buildings to lean like the tower of Pisa. These new contexts give birth to the architectural typologies of the future: water tanks, siphons, wells, and subterranean mansions along with a new pattern of economic zoning that is articulated through verticality. With water so central to Dawson’s envisioned future, its private owner, a mega-corporation named Turquoise, becomes the governing power in the area and controls all of development. With Dawson’s Indian background in mind, it’s not difficult to perceive that the city of Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi where governmental planning is replaced by corporations with carte blanche, may have served as an inspiration for this view of urbanism.
Dawson himself mentions that CÁUSTICO was inspired by Liam Young’s Corporate Dystopian Cities, which is also another way of saying that the renderings are not likely to become reality. Speculative works such as these reformulate the common narrative of the modern architect as a utopian visionary, instead presenting an outrageously negative future as a service to mankind—a warning to society, and a call take more control of the built world. While none of the visualized architectural representations will ever be constructed, they contribute towards an improved built environment by inciting discussion. The fascinating contradiction of dystopian narratives is how they highlight the ceaseless opportunistic spirit of man to conquer any environment, with architecture and construction as a primary tool. Consider the advanced infrastructure found in your favorite dystopic novel which served as the lifeline of a struggling group of rebels, or the rickety shelter that was the only beacon of hope in a character’s desolate world. Heroic narratives rarely evade architectural discourse.
But is this architecture? Many might be tempted to say no, citing the project’s embrace of speculative fiction rather than concrete reality, where the real domain of architecture lies. But is that how restrictive we’d like to think architecture to be? What’s interesting about Dawson’s presentation is the lack of an architectural entourage to populate the renderings. Under normal circumstances, these human figures with carefree expressions contribute to the presentation of an architectural vision. With scenes like visibly happy children running in a plaza they show how life is improved by this design, convincing the audience that the architect is doing their job—they’re making lives better. This is why representation is not only an integral and necessary tool but also the actual product of architecture—a concept that Beatriz Colomina has been known for supporting. The speculative architect is still an architect.
Instead of this entourage, Dawson has provided a series of dialogues with fictional residents of the city, and they are effective. Instead of visual cues to paint a story of how a building affects the user, there is vivid storytelling to achieve the same end. The technique remains comfortably within the architectural toolbox: non-architecture is that which has no affect on humans and that certainly isn’t the case for Dawson’s design. In spite of its downright impossibility, what makes this project significant is how it impacts upon human life, and creates a conversation between built form, society and our individual lives.
We understand the architecture profession as that which is primarily concerned with innovations that will improve society and life of man—this is the heroic tangent that architecture has followed since the days of the 20th century avant gardes and the formation of CIAM. In this case, should it be required that architects produce tangible and concrete innovations (buildings) in pursuit of this endeavor? Josh Dawson’s work seems to be the antithesis to that. Many fear that architecture is losing its relevance, but projects such as Dawsons suggest that in fact architecture is simply expanding its reach.
Technology company WobbleWorks has launched an updated edition of its hugely popular 3Doodler pen, which can now draw using materials like copper and wood composites (+ slideshow). (more…)
The world’s longest glass bridge, our roundup of the best Minimalist rebrands and a teepee-shaped home with a spiral pool (pictured) feature in this week’s issue of Dezeen Mail.
Read Dezeen Mail issue 321 | Subscribe to Dezeen Mail
Introduction / acknowledgments
The accurate study previously done by Nicola Baserga and Christian Mozzetti, more than providing basic information about land use regulations in Lugano, gave us a reliable direction to our design concept. They provided us a good foundation for our proposal and due to their previous work, the project was already advanced before it even started.
Geometry
The irregular polygon which defines the site has seven sides and holds about 1,000 m2. The setbacks imprint an inner polygon (with a curve in one corner) that corresponds to a 330 m2 area in which it was possible to build 3 m above ground level. However, inside that inner figure we could only have 230 m2 per floor, considering the maximum height allowed (six floors) and the building program. The geometry of the slabs has two centers, as two cores of activities. On first three floors, it corresponds to one small apartment each, and for the three upper floors, it corresponds to two different programs in one large apartment.
Structure
The design of the structure follows those two cores. Each core is supported by a “T” concrete wall that supports vertical and horizontal loads. The “T” wall is associated to two columns for vertical loads. Both cores are structurally combined which their “T”s perpendicularly displayed in order to support horizontal efforts in both directions. A lonely extra thin column, placed on the extreme north, frees the slab geometry to configure areas where it wouldn’t be possible.
Such disposition of vertical elements waives the slabs of having beams. Therefore the slab plane has no clearly readable direction as usually happens with a structure with beams. As a result, once inside the building, the rigorous geometry of walls and columns cannot be easily understood. As if, once built, the building gives away its essence to be broken into parts, back to the surrounding geometry and the landscape.
Facades
Each façade is either an opaque plane, made with wood panels, or a transparent one, made with glazing panels. The opaque plane always meets a transparent one. As a result, from inside, the view has always an escape to the outside. On the other hand, from outside, the building volume seems like not having solids, just by planes.
Ground level
The ground level is an open passage. Specifically for those who have the building as a destination, the ground level shares two different programs: housing and office.
The office space is placed slightly sunk in the middle of the garden. As a result its height is shorter than that we typically associate to an inhabited construction and one cannot immediately realize its function. Besides, it was carefully placed aside the path and protected by the two structural reinforced concrete wall. As such, it merges two contrasting features: on the one hand it is quite discrete; on the other hand it brings some vitality to a peripheral corner of the site.
At this level, the housing program is just announced by a small abstract prism, the elevator hall, whose size and feature were carefully calibrated not predominate in that space.
Neither house nor office, the predominance on the ground level is an open space. Although surrounded by gardens, the ground here is completely constructed..
Underground level
There are two floors underground: the parking garage and the storage. The parking garage covers the entire available area, about 650 m2, and it is shallow enough to allow us to keep an historical retaining wall, and its function, at Pico street. This floor is full naturally lit and ventilated, and the access is provided by a gentle ramp, even for walking standards. It results that the ambience at this space is perceived as placed on the surface and not as a typical undergrounded one. The storage, 250 m2, has an inner perimeter inscribed in the previous floor. The setback from the boundaries avoids the use of both double high retaining walls and excavation on the border.
Low energy
All façade panels were designed following parameters defined by our consultant in order to achieve the best energetic performance. The wood panel outside is ventilated and assembled on a frame which holds successive layers of thermal insulation, vapor barrier and an inside drywall panel. The glazing has triple glass panels on aluminum frame. The south and west glass facades are shaded by a retractable aluminum louver.
Controlled ventilation
Thermal losses are drastically reduced due to a mechanical system of controlled ventilation, independent in each apartment.
Geothermal system
One more strategy adopted to reduce drastically energy consumption for heating and cooling is the geothermal system. Four geothermal probes go down 225 m into vertical loops.
All these issues aim a low energy building and allow to achieve the Swiss standard for energy consumption, the Minergie.
Maison&Objet 2016: Homeware patterned with optical illusions features in the latest collection of products by the late Zaha Hadid (+ slideshow). (more…)
Sig Nordal 