From the architect. Tsiaogou teaching school locates in Song County of Luoyang City, Henan province and has 49 students and 4 teachers. The school has no reading room so that the 320 books they currently have are scattered in all the classroom. This project will add a new reading room and supply more books. All the current and new books will be put in the reading room for all the students to borrow.
The campus is pretty tight. there’s no empty classroom can be transformed into reading room and the playground cannot be occupied as well to make sure the children have enough space for outdoor activities. So the school planned to use the corner of the fencing wall adjacent to the teaching building as the site for the new reading room.
When we visited the site and saw the beautiful big cedar, we decided that the reading room shouldn’t crouch in the corner. Instead, it should be treated as a cottage underneath the tree umbrella.
The final design uses a fanlike shape to form a space surrounding the cedar. In front of the reading room, we set a exterior wood terrace of 8m in diameter. Together with the big tree umbrella, this terrace become a comfortable semi-exterior space where children could leisurely sit and enjoy their reading, or watch the games on the play ground of their classmates. The shape of the reading room doesn’t occupy the corner of the teaching building ,so that the window of the office is not blocked and the small parterre is reserved. We also put doors on the backside of the reading room from which children can go to the small parterre. This design makes the reading room not just a functional room, but also an interesting connection between indoor and outdoor activities that reconstructs the entire space of the campus.
We make the reading room slightly lower than normal height. The height of the inner side of the slopping roof is only 1.8m and relatively tight for adults. We hope to make the children feel that this is special for them through this detail.
We exposed the structural grid in interior to use as bookshelves.
Because the site locates in mountain area, wood structure is selected to make the transportation and construction easier. To ensure the thermal performance, we didn’t use too much glass openings, but introduce skylight to make the interior brighter, and solar system for lighting. The uses of these facilities is also an introduction of sustainable technologies to the children besides functional consideration.
During the construction process, we already heard from the school that the children were very curious about the new reading room and often came to see the construction site. Now the reading room is open and becomes a beloved place of the children. On the blackboard beside the reading room, we found that the children call it big sailboat that is their imagination of it. We hope that the wood cottage under the huge tree umbrella could become a beautiful memory of their childhood.
From the architect. Klopf Architecture, Arterra Landscape Architects and Henry Calvert of Calvert Ventures Designed and built a new warm, modern, Eichler-inspired, open, indoor-outdoor home on a deeper-than-usual San Mateo Highlands property where an original Eichler house had burned to the ground.
The owners wanted multi-generational living and larger spaces than the original home offered, but all parties agreed that the house should respect the neighborhood and blend in stylistically with the other Eichlers. At first the Klopf team considered re-using what little was left of the original home and expanding on it. But after discussions with the owner and builder, all parties agreed that the last few remaining elements of the house were not practical to re-use, so Klopf Architecture designed a new home that pushes the Eichler approach in new directions.
One disadvantage of Eichler production homes is that the house designs were not optimized for each specific lot. A new custom home offered the team a chance to start over. In this case, a longer house that opens up sideways to the south fit the lot better than the original square-ish house that used to open to the rear (west). Accordingly, the Klopf team designed an L-shaped “bar” house with a large glass wall with large sliding glass doors that faces sideways instead of to the rear like a typical Eichler. This glass wall opens to a pool and landscaped yard designed by Arterra Landscape Architects.
Driving by the house, one might assume at first glance it is an Eichler because of the horizontality, the overhanging flat roof eaves, the dark gray vertical siding, and orange solid panel front door, but the house is designed for the 21st Century and is not meant to be a “Likeler.” You won’t see any posts and beams in this home. Instead, the ceiling decking is a western red cedar that covers over all the beams. Like Eichlers, this cedar runs continuously from inside to out, enhancing the indoor / outdoor feeling of the house, but unlike Eichlers it conceals a cavity for lighting, wiring, and insulation. Ceilings are higher, rooms are larger and more open, the master bathroom is light-filled and more generous, with a separate tub and shower and a separate toilet compartment, and there is plenty of storage. The garage even easily fits two of today’s vehicles with room to spare.
A massive 49-foot by 12-foot wall of glass and the continuity of materials from inside to outside enhance the inside-outside living concept, so the owners and their guests can flow freely from house to pool deck to BBQ to pool and back.
During construction in the rough framing stage, Klopf thought the front of the house appeared too tall even though the house had looked right in the design renderings (probably because the house is uphill from the street). So Klopf Architecture paid the framer to change the roofline from how we had designed it to be lower along the front, allowing the home to blend in better with the neighborhood. One project goal was for people driving up the street to pass the home without immediately noticing there is an “imposter” on this lot, and making that change was essential to achieve that goal.
This 2,606 square foot, 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom Eichler-inspired new house is located in San Mateo in the heart of the Silicon Valley.
Product Description. Accordingly, the Klopf team designed an L-shaped “bar” house with a large glass wall with large sliding glass doors that faces sideways instead of to the rear like a typical Eichler. This glass wall opens to a pool and landscaped yard designed by Arterra Landscape Architects.
You won’t see any posts and beams in this home. Instead, the ceiling decking is a western red cedar that covers over all the beams. Like Eichlers, this cedar runs continuously from inside to out, enhancing the indoor / outdoor feeling of the house, but unlike Eichlers it conceals a cavity for lighting, wiring, and insulation.
A massive 49-foot by 12-foot wall of glass and the continuity of materials from inside to outside enhance the inside-outside living concept, so the owners and their guests can flow freely from house to pool deck to BBQ to pool and back.
The computer does things correctly, and I think it’s very important in architecture to also have the incorrect. – Peter Cook
In connection with the exhibition “Peter Cook. Retrospective” currently on view at the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin, the Tchoban Foundation has released a video of the architect discussing the importance of drawing in the architectural world. Cook compares drawing to new computer-based techniques, arguing that while software can do amazing things (including being instrumental in realizing his own Kunsthaus Gratz), drawing allows the architect to learn, communicate and experiment in a way that is irreplaceable. Watch the teaser to the Tchoban Foundation’s video above, or read on for the full discussion.
Cook cemented his place in architecture’s firmament in the 1960s with the architectural drawings and media collages he created as part of Archigram, creating some of the most recognizable and influential “paper architecture” in the history of the profession. However, despite being best known for these early works, Cook has continued to explore architectural ideas in his drawings throughout his career. The exhibition at the Tchoban Foundation’s Museum for Architectural Drawing is on view until February 12th, and showcases the evolution of this these ideas from start to finish.
Exhibition: “Peter Cook. Retrospective” at Tchoban Foundation
Find out more about the exhibition here.
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Times Square – New York City – New York – USA (by Thomas Richter)
The Thompson Exhibition Building was designed for Mystic Seaport, Museum of America and the Sea, as a keynote building for the 19-acre riverfront campus. The project’s mission was to transform the north end of the Seaport to greatly enhance the quality of exhibition space and to offer a more robust year-round experience for visitors.
The building is located where the Seaport’s previous indoor-oriented exhibit spaces were concentrated, and forms the new Donald C. McGraw Gallery Quadrangle. This sociable greensward, with a panoramic view of the Mystic River, provides an appealing venue for activities ranging from outdoor concerts to impromptu picnics.
In addition to a 5,000-square- foot exhibition gallery with a high ceiling for displaying boats, the building features visitor reception and events space, a retail shop, a café and outdoor terraces overlooking the Mystic River. Energy-efficient components and geothermal heating and cooling are also incorporated in the design.
The flexible exhibition space features soaring ceilings and demountable walls to accommodate objects of varying size and installations of all types, from watercraft to priceless works of fine art and gallery-based educational programs. A riverfront gathering room graces the west side of the building and can be reconfigured for conferences, additional gallery space, or educational programs, adding to the new building’s versatility.
The Thompson Exhibition Building incorporates a wraparound deck that allows visitors to enjoy the riverside setting and serve as a covered overlook to the Quadrangle green.
Overall, the building stands for what we came to regard as “the geometry of the sea” – the spiral shape of sea life, the kinetic movement of ocean swells, the crash of waves on the shore, the billow of sails, and the faring of wooden hulls. Wood was the ideal material for these purposes because it can economically enclose a large clear-span space while forming complex organic geometries.
The intention overall was a wooden structured volume that would suggest a hull’s interior architecture. To support a long porch along the north edge of a new quadrangle, wooden columns and struts give the effect of sailing vessels’ masts and spars. Railing cables and turnbuckles provide detail around the deck to conjure ship’s rigging.
For the building’s structure, curved glued-laminated wood ribs were utilized to imply a sailing ship’s top timbers, the curving members that delineate a hull’s shape. Wood purlins between the ribs bring to mind planking that forms the skin of a hull. Douglas Fir was specified for the glued-laminated structural members as it was the species New England ship builders preferred after the Civil War once the western forests had been opened up.
The building’s overall form was also designed to recall natural phenomena, too, like a wind-driven wave crashing onto the shore. On its interior, the curled the structural ribs at either end inward all the way down to the floor to suggest the spiraling vertebrae of marine creatures.
Today China inaugurated the world’s highest bridge, opening the new crossing to traffic after the structure was completed in September, reports China Central Television (CCTV). Crossing the Nizhu river canyon at 565 meters above water level the Beipanjiang bridge spans 1,341 meters to connect the provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou in the Southwest of the country. The 4-lane bridge is part of a network of new highways around Yunnan and Guizhou that allow access across rugged terrain that was previously largely inaccessible.
Costing around 1 billion yuan (US$144 million), construction of the bridge began in 2013, and had to be carefully designed to deal with the extreme wind conditions caused by the Beipanjiang Valley. “Where to place the bridge piers was a problem,” explained Liu Bo, deputy chief engineer of CCCC Highway Consultants, to CCTV. “The gorge here is over 500 meters deep, so how are we going to design the structure of the bridge to deal with the strong wind field problem?”
In recent years, China has become a hot-spot for record-breaking bridges. The mountainous terrain in the western regions of the country has recently given rise to the world’s longest and highest glass-bottomed bridge, the world’s first all-glass suspension bridge, and the world’s longest glass skywalk, all of which enable tourists to take in the dramatic landscape.
News via CCTV, India Live Today and highestbridges.com
Sig Nordal 