The residence is situated in Delphini, a location along a small gulf at the North-West part of the Cycladic island of Syros in the Aegean Sea. The gulf surrounds a small uninhabited island. As the site extends towards the gulf, the small island becomes its focal point, its point of reference.
The property belongs to a Greek five member family which is based in London and has links to the textile and shipping industries of the island.
The residence consists of five independent wedge-shaped volumes divided in two complexes of two larger and three smaller buildings and a later addition of one rectangular volume, the owner’s studio.
Each complex’s functions and large openings are organized around a courtyard and altogether oriented towards the sea. The axes of the intervening courtyards point to the small island. For the external sides of the complexes small, random openings provide privacy.
The two volume group, the first one to be built, is designed as an autonomous residence, containing spaces for all the main activities of the family.
The construction is based on traditional methods.
Local stone is used throughout the volumes in order to enhance the sense of solidity such as the sense that the buildings emerge from the earth.
Natural materials are used, such as timber ceiling beams, local soil mixed with cement for the external floors, untreated internal plastering made of lime and local sand, etc
The construction methods, the choice of natural materials, the gradation of closed, open and semi open spaces in combination with the building’s orientation provide natural ventilation and lighting, shadow and protection from the strong wind, enabling the house to operate in balance with the nature throughout the year.
Syros House could be seen as a descendant of Mitato,Kalivi and Themonia, the basic monolithic stone shapes that were always been on the island, and as the ideal of Primitive Hut , man’s longing to go back to the essential and the continuity through landscape and memory.
From the architect. Trumpf Poland’s new headquarters in Warsaw, housing offices and exhibition areas, represent a prototype for an economically constructed industrial building combining a simple form with complex surfaces and differentiated interior spaces.
As if wanting to tell a story about the inner workings of the building, gleaming stainless steel fins cover the façades of the new Trumpf Poland Technology Center in a soft gradient. Produced from high-grade sheet steel, the fins are laser-cut and folded to widen and narrow over their 10-meter length — a direct architectural application of the machine tool- and laser technology for which the company is known.
With this new two-story, almost 3,000 square meter building, the company gains office space for about 50 employees, as well as a distinctive showroom for the presentation of flatbed laser cutters, bending machines and punch presses.
Strategically located on an arterial road, with highway access and close to the airport, the building plugs into a suburban district filled with commercial and industrial enterprises, parking lots, and available land for development. It is positioned in the northern area of a 10,000 square meter lot bordered by roads to the north and south, and by further commercial lots to the east and west, enabling potential for further expansion.
The new building pulls from this heterogeneous context with a corresponding internal organization and a somewhat prototypical outward appearance: its box-like exterior is de ned by the strong stainless steel façades on the north and south sides of the building, facing the roads as if billboards, presenting an image that is notably powerful yet graphically elegant at the same time. On the interior, carved out of the upper floor is a 16 x 16 meter courtyard-like roof garden, an unexpectedly charming and intimate space for work breaks and for small customer events. A warm, dark grey granite floor and large potted Juneberry plants create atmosphere.
The building’s interior configuration is oriented circumferentially around the slightly o -centered courtyard garden on the upper floor, and an enclosed block with utility and storage rooms lying beneath it: towards the north and east stands a double-height, L-shaped showroom, while towards the south and west, the building is split into two levels housing o ces, conference rooms, and an employee cafeteria. At the intersection of these differentiated zones, the southeast corner of the building houses the foyer with the reception desk. Opposite, in the northwest corner, the open showroom is stepped down into a single-height space displaying an array of products and machining heads alongside examples of their application. Above this, reachable via an open staircase, a glass- enclosed gallery provides a spacious room for client meetings and receptions, allowing views into the showroom below, also connected to the upstairs o ces and courtyard. The showroom’s double height connects it visually with the courtyard garden and thus constantly receives light from two sides.
Both the interior and exterior of the building are characterized by an economic use of industrial materials. The courtyard roof garden is bordered towards the showroom with U-pro le translucent thermally insulated glass, and the load-bearing structure is left visible from within the building. In the o ce area, where the cores and emergency staircases can be found, the frame has been executed in solid reinforced concrete, while the double-height open area is constructed with a black-painted steel skeleton. Beyond creative and aesthetic concerns, another advantage of this design was the quick, twelve-month construction time it enabled.
Aluminum and stainless steel were used for the outside shell of the building. Trapezoid-pro le corrugated aluminum covers the two functional and understated side façades facing east and west: one side with cutouts for the glazed entry door and a large delivery gate, while on the opposite façade, two long bands of windows allow natural light into the training and o ce spaces. A system of polished stainless steel fins have been installed over the post-and-beam glass façades that front the showroom towards the main road as well as frame the building to the south, turning these views into a calling card of sorts for the company and its products.
The fins are made from laser-cut, square-edged stainless steel sheets, produced in varying widths and mounted to oat slightly o of the building on an intricate, at-pro le scissor construction, giving the appearance of gently opening and closing waves. Cut and applied in increasing widths, a soft progression from relatively open to almost closed louvers is created, responding to the demands of the interior uses of the building: on the north side, narrow slats grant ample views into and out of the showroom, while they widen towards the single-height display area, facilitating the dimmer light demanded by display screens. On the south side of the building, the louver system is predominantly closed, providing the o ces situated alongside it steady protection from the sun. After darkness falls, the illuminated interiors appear from the outside as a shimmering screen.
The surrounding grounds are landscaped with a loose arrangement of birches and delphiniums, their natural structure contrasting with the strict geometry of the gleaming metallic building.
The CK House is a private residence renovated by iHouse. It is located in Hanoi city, Vietnam and was completed in 2015. The CK House by iHouse: “I met the home owner on a rainy afternoon. He introduced me to his house, which, though a bit old but was spacious, had three floors, a front yard and a backyard and was fully functional for the whole family of three generations..
By David Turetsky
It seems HR leaders are consumed with Big Data these days—how to gather it, organize it, and effectively use it to contribute to an organization’s success. There’s no doubt that there’s immense pressure on CHROs to glean meaningful insight from the reams of HR data they deal with daily. But in their zeal to extract big-HR-picture trends, they may be overlooking the value of smaller data that’s right in front of them.
It’s like opening the lid of a treasure chest and being so awed by the collective wealth before you that you’re blinded to the individual beauty of each jewel inside. Small data is the separate, discreet jewels that comprise the HR Big Data treasure.
All companies manage an ocean of information, which often gets created as pockets of independent data sets. Small data is that Excel spreadsheet of competitive pricing analysis saved on an employee’s desktop, or that Word document containing an individual’s performance review. Both of these work products contain invaluable data and takeaways that, when centrally aggregated and analyzed, can provide actionable business insights. Those insights can be on almost anything: The state of a company’s workforce conditions, productivity, talent management, retention levels, and even potential flight risks.
Ultimately, small data represents individual work products or processes that employees or groups create to do their jobs better. It’s imperative to make these disparate work products or processes accessible on a shared drive or through a project management system in a secure environment. That way, they can be leveraged across multiple users and enable business leaders to deliver value to a broader community of users.
Better access to data and analytics can help executives and their HR teams address bubbling issues and implement organizational changes. But to begin this process, senior leaders need to understand where the data exists, establish a standard process for collecting the information, and have an end-goal in mind so there’s structured progress.
Organizations need to ask questions like: What is HR trying to achieve by using analytics? What are the short-term and long-term goals for its use? Is the company trying to find ways to reduce overhead costs, or improve recruiting and hiring practices?
The fundamental goal is to bring all of the information together in a central inventory and use it to derive key insights and plan strategies to tackle specific business challenges. Four ways senior leaders and HR practitioners can do this are:
1. Build awareness. Work with other senior leaders to build awareness of the importance and value of your company’s small data sources. Find all of the pockets of small data so they can be saved in a central repository, analyzed and shared. Consider launching an internal communications campaign to increase awareness among employees about the importance of finding and leveraging small data to make more informed business decisions and improve outcomes.
2. Standardize data collection. Given the independent nature of small data, it’s crucial to establish best practices for gathering and saving data so it eventually can be used in an apples-to-apples comparison among data sets. Simply offering better access to data doesn’t lead to better outcomes; the right tools and a structured system and protocol are necessary to enable employees to mine small data for successful outcomes.
3. Clarify goals. Whether you’re searching for cost savings or striving to improve your company’s talent management process, set clear goals—short-term and long-term—to establish benchmarks for your small data analytics program. Identify those “low-hanging-fruit” goals first. This will help your organization achieve a few early wins and encourage momentum as you tackle larger, more complex projects requiring more time and patience.
4. Create a data culture. Whether the focus is on small data or Big Data, your organization’s primary goal should be to build data acumen, intelligence and, over time, confidence among senior leadership and your entire staff. Help employees who are typically not involved in using HR data analytics see their role in creating and capturing small data sets in their day-to-day activities.
The future of data analytics will include personalized, understandable insights that allow workers to do their jobs and, ultimately, live their lives better—and, of course, insights that contribute to business success! So don’t neglect the smaller jewels in your HR data treasure chest. Those assets can help drive insights into business decisions large and small.
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I recently read The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun. What struck me after reading this book is that the same myths that apply to innovation also apply to sales. So what’s the sales lesson here? Don’t get caught up in the myths of sales because they can fool you into being less successful.
The innovation myth is that great ideas come in a flash in an epiphany. You may remember the myth about Archimedes who ran from his bathtub yelling, “Eureka!” through the streets after realizing that he could use water displacement to distinguish between the density of gold and false gold. Except that myth is not true.
Innovation progress doesn’t occur in a straight timeline and it involves a long sequence of experimentation and discovery that can take years to reach fruition. Archimedes worked on his problem long before that productive bath.
What’s that mean for your sales success? Too many salespeople think that it will take only one sales call and their customers will miraculously understand why they should buy. Eureka moments, however, don’t often happen in sales. Customers realize they should buy after you work your sales process which includes building rapport, doing skillful questioning, and demonstrating proof of performance.
When you think of air flight innovation, you think of the Wright brothers. Thomas Edison comes to mind when you think of electric lighting. Henry Ford is the inventor of the automobile, right? Wrong. And that’s the myth that there is a lone inventor.
Back in the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci was creating designs and models for transport vehicles. Karl Benz from Germany then created the first true automobile in 1885. Ford therefore built on previous knowledge; he’s just easier to remember.
What you have are multiple people innovating. It starts with the person who came up with the initial idea for an item. Then there’s the first person to build a working model. Last, it’s the first person to successfully commercialize the invention.
Sound like sales? It’s a myth when salespeople believe that the sales process revolves around them. It’s at your peril when you forget about the other people who work to make your selling successful.
How could you sell without people in credit, operations, delivery, tech service, manufacturing, and customer service? That’s a scary thought. Your sales success depends on your working with so many other people doing their jobs well so you can deliver your sales promises. You may be the one with the sales quota, but you don’t sell by yourself.
All too often, there are those who think there’s a clear map that will guide someone to produce innovation—there isn’t. Instead, one’s attitude is important to foster innovation because so many innovators’ ideas are initially rejected because they make people feel uncomfortable and force them to deal with change.
What kind of attitude helps? It’s the ability to deal with failure and be persuasive.
Galileo’s sun-centered solar system was opposed by the Catholic Church. Did you know that Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was rejected by Western Union? Even Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were turned down by AltaVista and Yahoo, the dominant search companies of the day. How did they prevail? They had the right attitude. They were persistent in the face of failure and they were persuasive.
Salespeople without that attitude are destined to be much less successful in sales. They have to find other ways to make the sale when their customers say no. Most successful salespeople believe that a “no” is simply a no for now. Being persuasive is not about strong-arm tactics either; it’s ethical persuasion where a great idea is communicated effectively so that the other person wants the solution.
Scott Berkun says that innovation is complex, has many meanings and factors, and can’t be captured in the pithy quotes that make for good myths. Sales is also complex and depends on many factors. That’s why the same myths apply to both.
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Small businesses have had an important decision to make over the past decade. In the words of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “To add an e-commerce channel to your business model, or not to add one, that is the question.” Okay, Hamlet didn’t actually say that, but you get the picture.
As a small business owner, it’s very important to consider the value of taking your business online in a 21st century economy that loves the convenience of online shopping.
The benefits of adding an e-commerce channel to your existing business are numerous. For starters, you’ll increase your availability to 24/7/365. Whereas your brick-and-mortar stores likely closes at a certain hour, your e-commerce website stays open.
Furthermore, with very few barriers to entry, there are very few reasons to not go online. “Starting out online means very low startup costs,” online business expert Brian Haines notes. “You have no buildings to construct, no vehicles to buy, and few (if any) staff to hire. Simply build your site and start selling.”
Haines is obviously simplifying things a bit, but he’s right on the money. In just a few days, you can have an e-commerce site up and running. Here are a few things to think about:
1. Understand the costs. The first thing to think about is cost. Building an e-commerce site is going to require an upfront investment, and it’s best that you estimate this dollar amount as accurately as possible before getting started.
For what it’s worth, most e-commerce sites cost between $5,000 and $10,000 to develop, design, and launch. But you certainly don’t have to spend that much. Thanks to site builders like Shopify, you can get started for free and realistically develop a basic site for less than $1,000. However, if you plan on really investing in e-commerce, expect to spend $5,000 or more in the long haul.
2. Launch a site. Actually taking action and launching a site is the hardest part. But once you get started, you’ll realize that it’s fairly easy—especially if you use a site-building platform.
During this phase, focus less on the aesthetics of your site and more on the user experience. You can always come back later and change things like color schemes, images, and graphics, but it’s much harder to make adjustments to things like navigation.
If you’re unsure of what you’re doing–even with a site builder—it’s best to pay for a professional developer. This is not the place to cut corners or save money.
3. Make mobile a priority. When moving online, your goal shouldn’t be to follow the status quo. In order to make your presence known, you need to do things differently. One key area where you can stand out is with mobile. Roughly 30 percent of all mobile shopping is now done on smartphones and tablets, yet few sites are properly optimized.
“Steps can still be taken to enhance the mobile shopping experience, and help give consumers the extra push to complete their purchase before losing interest,” supply chain expert Paul Trujillo points out. “The impulse buy is a major source of revenue for many companies, and it’s important to capitalize on that urge when you have the customer’s attention.”
4. Figure out inventory logistics. When an online channel is added to your business model, you obviously have to make changes to your supply chain and inventory practices. Specifically, you’ll need to answer questions like these:
There’s a lot to think about and you want to make sure you aren’t assuming anything. If you aren’t careful, you could overwhelm your supply chain, and ultimately compromise both channels of your business.
5. Don’t forget about brick-and-mortar. When adding an e-commerce channel, it’s easy to forget about your existing brick-and-mortar channel. Be aware of this and make a point of not compromising your current business model. The goal is not to cannibalize your existing sales, but to instead increase sales via another channel. If you have the resources, consider hiring someone to head up your e-commerce division, so that you can focus on the core business.
There may be certain businesses that have little to gain from moving online, but the majority of brick-and-mortar small businesses can increase sales and grow revenue by venturing online.
As you can see, it’s not as difficult as you may have previously thought.
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London Design Festival 2016: a “liberating” adult nappy, poo tableware and an event space furnished with manure are among the offerings at one London Design Festival exhibition (+ slideshow). (more…)
Sig Nordal 