Rock & Branch
Janitor’s Shelter for Boramae Park
A Tail of The Hill
The building has such unique program and location. This facility is served as a place where the park janitors rest, wash and store cleaning tools at the same time. Boramae Park has small and large hills within the park. The site is located at the endpoint of one of those hills. The fan shaped area, which is about two-thirds of the site, is in contact with the road and the rest one-third touches the end of the hill. In fact, the site is in-between the last tail of the hill and the road. With the site given, the park required a shelter for the janitors and the storage for the equipment.
The rock and the branch
First, the initial design concept was to minimize the shape of the site, which results an arc-shaped mass along the road providing a shelter for the janitors. Then, the arc-shaped mass has been elevated from the ground in order to allow the flow of the hill into the inner courtyard of the building. The floating mass is supported by the several storage rooms rather than the columns. Since these storage rooms are the continuation of the land and should portray the rocks on the mountain, they are finished with black exposed concrete and are scattered randomly on the ground. The floating mass, a shelter for janitors, is treated with exposed concrete and layered with the vertical wooden louvers. The width of the wooden louvers are especially thin as the entire building illustrates an image of the rock – storage rooms on the ground – and the branch – floating shelter – in the mountain.
An interactive elevation
The main elevation of the building is about two-thirds of curved surface and one-third of straight line. As the road passes around this elevation, people who walks around the building would experience a visual variation with the wooden louvers arrayed throughout the curved surface. A slightly wide spacing of the louvers allows the observer a visual alteration depending on his or her viewpoint – the exposed concrete surface is much revealed from the front view and it is gradually concealed as the viewpoint changes. By walking around the site, the observer could capture the sequence of elevation in which the finishing material alters between the concrete and the wood.
The four pine trees
While arranging the building on the site, preserving the existing four pine trees has been emerged as a critical issue. In order to minimize any harmful work to the nature, the building has been set back a few meters from the site boundary and doing so, one of the storage buildings has been digged into the hill. The hill then naturally continues to the terrace above the storage, which further connects to the courtyard. Consequently, the four pine trees has become the key elevation of the building, which enable a gentle flow from the outside hills to the inner courtyard.
An open path
The site is situated where the promenade starts. Furthermore, various circulations through the park is crossing around the site. In order to preserve the circulation flow, the main shelter has been built on pilotis whereas a few storages are dispersed on the ground floor. In doing so, the pedestrian path is fully reserved and also the generous open area below the facility could be used as a public space for special occasion.
Unlike the introverted quality of the traditional courtyard house, the owner of this site asked for a variety of mix-use program, including tea house, dinning, party space, office, meeting, as well as dwelling and entertainment. The contemporary and sometime “public” program opened up the courtyard to become “extraverted”, so as to induce more human interactions.
These required us to break the general understanding of the courtyard as an enclosed typology by introducing the experience of “meandering in the hutongs” into the courtyard, and the interventional approach was derived from the unfolding spatial narrative of hutong life.
The cautions with which specific renovation measurements are made demonstrate circumspection. First, we converted the narrow corridor squeezed between two rows of brick building to a mode that is compatible with the hutong-courtyard typology by demolishing the temporary structure to the east and in the middle, so as to introduce cross-sectional changes along the 60-meter long site.
Then by adding 3 different types of “loggia” at the hinge of the expanded spaces, we redefined the layers in the longitudinal depth, thus reconstructed a “three-step-courtyard” in the spatial sense.
Here the “three-step-courtyard” is not an imitation of the traditional symmetrical courtyard pattern in the hutongs, but a contemporary reinterpretation of the multi-layer courtyard space and its possible variation along the depth, andhow it will shift the movement of steps and sense of space. The owner’s life – all the mixed programs, were sorted and divided by 3 courtyards full of vegetation, making the daily routine of walking in and out the site a continuous spatial experience full of rhythm.
In the process of renovation, one might find some interesting spatial model, but in the end, it all has to integrate with the life it carries.
Further beyond, what interested us in the renovation is how design strategy can appropriately reduce the amount of construction: using existing footprint to make small-scale buildings, using wood, brick, tile…all these local materials, using local craftsmanship but through new tectonic method, to respond to the problem in everyday scale and at the local level, so the users’ lives can unfold in it naturally.
Intervention in the hutongs therefore needs to be based on the true understanding of life and culture, the “Aura” of a thing as Walter Benjamin pointed out, instead of rigid protection to its physical appearance.
The O’Reilly Clinical Health Sciences Center is a new teaching and learning facility serving as the third of a trio of buildings that make up the College of Health and Human Services at Missouri State University. Through its careful siting and unique physical presence, the new building creates a micro-campus for the college within the university’s broader campus context. Its bold, angular form cantilevers over the building’s chamfered corner entry, acknowledging its companion buildings and inviting in the students who circulate between them.
Programmatically, the center is comprised of undergraduate and graduate curricula in occupational therapy, nursing, nurse anesthesia and physician assistant studies, with each requiring tailored classrooms, specialized skills labs and simulation labs, faculty offices and support spaces. The building cuts back its southwest corner to create a second entry plaza for a ground level outpatient clinic serving the local community. Housed in an otherwise purely academic building, the clinic is designed to be not only a fully functioning healthcare facility but also provide real-world experience for students.
Collaborative spaces for students flow throughout the building, creating an interior “street” in the social sense and continuously connecting all levels by a faceted, undulating wood ceiling. The lobby itself contains a variety of options for student collaboration, from café tables outside the center’s main lecture hall to seating pods for small group interaction. Spreading vertically from the lobby and flowing across level two, additional seating pods, a tech bar and group study rooms adjoin the more formal learning spaces. The street culminates at the third level in a student lounge with dramatic views back to the main campus and an outdoor courtyard terrace that doubles as both respite and didactic learning space for occupational therapy instruction. Collectively, this variety of collaborative environments connect teaching and simulation labs, and also form community space that brings students from diverse programs together for inter-disciplinary learning.
Materially, the building reinterprets the campus’ palette of limestone and cast concrete with a fiber cement rainscreen. This material choice helps define the dual character of the building’s expression – it is at once a light structure, barely touching down on the campus, and simultaneously a chiseled mass. In either interpretation, it is a significant addition to the campus’s growing array of contemporary architecture.
Product Description. Swiss Pearl was selected as the exterior cladding material, as its planar characteristics coupled with a concealed mounting system resulted in the visual emphasis remaining on the chiseled building form.
The glass was selected to be as color neutral as possible, so as to resemble voids nested within the building mass.
The Supreme Court of Vermont has ruled that architecture is legally allowed to be ugly.
The judgement was made in response to lawsuits filed by Vermont residents against several planned solar developments, claiming that the “unsightliness” of the panels was damaging to their property values.
But the court found that ugliness alone does not qualify as nuisance under state law, citing a long-standing rule barring private lawsuits based solely on aesthetic criticism.
“Property values are affected by many factors; a decrease in market value does not mean there is a nuisance, any more than an increase means there is not,” argued the court in their statement.
Prosecutors had previously argued that the nuisance law was wide-reaching enough to cover the claim, noting the state’s tradition of valuing “scenic resources” in policies including strict anti-billboard laws.
News via WCAX.
San Francisco – California – USA (by Florent Lamoureux)
From the architect. Located on the Landes de Juzan campus in Anglet, the Activity Generator proposed by the Côte-Basque-Adour Agglomeration is a place where innovative young companies can be found, encouraging interdisciplinary cross-fertilization between academic research and industrial knowledge.
This business hotel is set in an urban wasteland, open on a wood and a protected estey in the heart of the Basque coast Adour. The building is a reflection of the dialogue between this landscaped site and the program.
To answer the environmental challenges of the program: dual certification and the BEPOS objective, the idea is to make architecture the vector of these performances, playing with the assets of the context and appealing to the common sense of the users.
Creating an interior landscape built in echo to the natural landscape, the building is manifested in its implementation by making perceptible the structural forces, the innervating networks and the envelope of the building as architectural elements in full participating in the Identity of the place. The atmospheres are qualified by precise assemblages of raw and durable materials such as concrete, wood and metal, providing a sensitive touch at the spaces.
The architecture of the generator is revealed with subtlety in order to create, at the heart of the effervescence of the agglomeration, a privileged environment, calm and conducive to work, a way to inhabit this place. The limits between the exterior and the interior are intentionally blurred in order to benefit from the vitality of the environment, with the concern to integrate in the heart of the building the presence of natural light and its variations.
In the West side, in an urban connection, the experimental hall exposes itself in a panorama on Mirambeau street, by a large horizontal incise, as a signal announcing the research and development work housed in the generator.
To the east, echoing the landscape of the Estey, the facade of the offices opens generously on nature. External walkways let you enjoy the softness of the site and encourage informal meetings by extending outside the workspaces.
At the heart of the generator, the bioclimatic atrium brings together these workspaces as a forum open to debates of ideas.
It also gathers the vertical and horizontal circulations treated in rhythmical route, revealing the activities, letting enjoy natural light and offering framing on the trees landscape.
Each one is no longer the inhabitant of a floor, an office, but a place of work in which are shared knowledge, tools, dedicated spaces and services.
Evolutive, the building is designed to shape, adapt to the demand, suspended to future societal, technical and energy evolutions. Leaning on the structure as a pivot, the envelope is an interchangeable and recyclable skin. The interior is designed as flexible and reversible, it remains ductile to the uses.
The generator will live at the tempo of the young companies that will invest it, appropriating it and making it evolve.
Product Description:
-A structural logic inseparable from architecture:
The innovative companies hotel is based on three interacting strata that make up its structural architecture.
The telluric grip:
The cascading earthworks anchor the building in the site. The reinforced concrete structures partition the plateaus of the terraces and initiate the verticalities, in an atmosphere of mineral landscape.
The structure adapted to spaces:
The main structure in reinforced concrete is designed without the fall of a beam, by a principle of posts / slabs “mushroom” favoring the modularity of the partitioning. Exposed in raw way, sails and concrete floors participate in the passive design of the building by their large capacity of inertia. The structure and framework of the technichal hall (volume without intermediate support point) are composed of glued laminated pine douglas elements and metal connectors.
An efficient envelope:
This structure is protected by a technical wrap adapted to the uses and orientations. This wrap of glued laminated timber casing douglas pine presents various qualities according to the needs: opaque, transparent, translucent, waterproof, porous, filtering, insulating …
The facades of the offices are designed on a modular principle in plug on the regular weaving of the structure. This system is designed to allow a simple and quick modification of the façades while guaranteeing air and water waterprooffing and sound and thermal insulation.
The glazed parts are all accessible on one level or by external gallery for easy maintenance and without nacelle or special equipment. Similarly the roofs all have direct access from the floors.
OMA’s first major public building in the UK has been granted planning approval. Known as “Factory,” the groundbreaking new cultural center will serve as a the new home of the Manchester International Festival (MIF) and as a year-round concert and arts venue.
OMA was selected for the project following an international competition in 2015, beating out proposals from firms including Rafael Viñoly Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Zaha Hadid Architects and Mecanoo. The project is being led by partners Ellen van Loon and Rem Koolhaas.
“Much of my professional life has been spent undoing limitations of the traditional typologies,” said van Loon. “From classical opera and ballet to large scale performances and experimental productions, Factory in Manchester provides the perfect opportunity to create the ultimate versatile space in which art, theatre and music come together: a platform for a new cultural scene.”
The £110 million venue will be located in the new St. John’s neighborhood of Manchester on the site of the former Granada TV Studios, and will be developed in partnership with developer Allied London. Economic impact of the project is estimated to create almost 1,500 full-time jobs and add £1.1 billion to the city’s economy in a 10-year period.
Construction is scheduled to begin in Spring of 2017.
News via OMA.
OMA Selected to Design Manchester’s ‘Factory’, Their First Public Project in the UK
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Sig Nordal 