From the architect. House built for a couple with the idea of providing a contemplative and reflective space. This theme was addressed in two ways:
A more intimate, where the whole house is organized around a small patio and differences in levels. This internal patio allows a visual contact between the surroundings of the house, bringing the residents’ life together. Nature, on this small scale, can be observed according to the variations of the seasons.
The theme was also approached on the scale of the landscape. The land has a wide view of the Serra da Mantiqueira. Thus, starting from the most intimate dimension, traveling almost a spiral, one can climb up on the landscaped roof and observe the landscape amplitude.
The levels were chosen so that it could be observed over the house of the left lateral neighbor, increasing still the perception of the amplitude of the Mountain range.
For these purposes, the house, the inventiveness of solutions and details allow a simplicity and objectivity of the project, privileging comfort and not the spectacle.
This 2016 has been a hectic, frenetic year with complex geopolitical, social, and cultural issues placing our world at a crossroads of an uncertain future. Do we look back into the nostalgia of a safe past, or do we step up and be an active part of a hopeful future?
As architects we have a tremendous responsibility in this scenario; historically, our profession has shaped the collective ideas of the future, generation after generation, by weighing-in on the crises that arise in our societies. In the absence of clear leadership to guide us towards an inspiring future, this is our opportunity to serve as agents of change for the future we deserve.
ArchDaily’s role is to provide inspiration, knowledge, and tools to the architects who will face the hyper-urbanization currently underway in our world. And I am happy that the orchestrated effort of our global team is working towards this ambitious goal, reaching more than 500,000 daily readers in our English, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese editions, taking advantage of the Internet to connect architects from every corner of the world and bring architectural inspiration and information exchange in an unprecedented way.
As we turned 8 this year, we unveiled a new site design and an improved building products catalog, both of which are under constant improvement thanks to the data we gather from more than 3 billion monthly events and interactions created when you use ArchDaily. One example is the “Recommend For You” widget that we launched in the sidebar of projects and articles, crafted specifically for each user and based on a recommendation engine built by our engineers and data scientists. We will continue to diligently focus on similar projects during 2017 by developing more data-driven solutions to help you navigate the vast amount of projects and knowledge that we have amassed in the “ArchDaily Iceberg.” We’re also dedicated to improving what we expect to be a useful tool in your daily design workflow, the My ArchDaily platform—a service already used by hundreds of thousand of architects to save and sort projects.
Our growth has also helped us connect directly with you, our users, in different ways. Reaching 2 million fans on Facebook and 1 million followers on Instagram has given us more robust settings to transmit knowledge and inspiration. Even live!
We are also teaming up with some of the world’s most important construction materials manufacturers—such as Saint Gobain, CEMEX, Hunter Douglas, Equitone and more than 300 companies worldwide—to bring you compelling content and the latest industry news. By connecting the projects that we publish with invaluable data about the products used to realize them, we hope to enlighten architects about the palette of materials available to them.
Aligned with the initiative to provide more immersive content we launched our VR for Architects section.
And we will continue to work hard with our global team to bring you a curated selection of projects, together with news and articles that add value to the architects in their day to day efforts to build the future that we deserve, as you can see in our Best of 2016 section.
You see some amazing things on America’s public lands, like this cute little bobcat hanging out within the snow-covered trees in eastern Oregon. Can you spot it? While common, bobcats are rarely seen. Sometimes called wildcats, bobcats are roughly twice as big as the average house cat. They have long legs, large paws, and tufted ears, and gets its name for its tail, which appears to be cut or “bobbed.” Photo by Kevin Eldredge, @mypubliclands.
What if you were told that you burn calories even without exercising?
Oftentimes, when we think of burning calories, we think of hitting the gym, dancing the Zumba, jogging in the park, and busting out the Wii Fit. We fail to realize that everything we do that requires movement of the body actually burns calories.
If you’re a waiter, at the end of the day, you’ve burned some mega calories running back and forth from kitchen to table and back again for hours and hours. You’re a stay at home parent? Chasing after kiddos, playing catch and roughhousing burns calories! Everything does!
Is vacuuming every day going to turn you into a sports calendar model overnight? Nope.
But it WILL help you stay on track with your diet, especially if you’re logging your caloric intake. If you’ve discovered that you’re about to go over your daily calorie allowance by noon – then it’s time go out and rake some leaves.
So, if the word “exercise” makes you wanna run… the other way… no worries. Here are 30 realistic and “non-exercisey” activities that you can do (or do MORE of) that will burn 100 calories.
Dancing – 20 minutes
Vacuuming – 25 minutes
Gardening – 30 minutes
Do the week’s ironing – 40 minutes
Raking the leaves – 40 minutes
Washing your vehicle (wax and clean out the inside for more burn!) – 30 minutes
From the architect. This small mosque of 100m2 included a renovation of an existing masonry cross-vaulted space and the addition of a minaret, grafted onto the existing structure as a symbolic landmark, next to the 18th century old palace. A new civic plaza was created in what was before an adjoining parking space, turning the frontage of the mosque into a public square with seating, water fountain, ablution space and shading under a newly planted fig tree.
Diagram
Given the non-alignment of the existing structure with the required directionality to Makkah, the design approach was first set to correct the orientation though a series of physical transformations and additions. The directionality towards Makkah became the only tool/language mobilized to shape the new mosque and its surrounding, at all scales, from the interior of the mosque to the outdoor plaza
On the architectural level, the mosque’s new slender minaret is linked horizontally through a gently concave canopy to a curved wall at the plaza level, delineating a portico for the mosque below and creating a transitional space between the interior of the mosque and the street as well as adding privacy for the mosque from the outside.
The envelope of the mosque is strictly formed of thinly sliced painted white steel plates, faithfully angled in a parallel direction to Makkah. When looked at obliquely from an angle, the steel plates stack to compose a complete and comprehensive volume of the mosque. Looked at frontally, the mosque’s volume, through its thin planarity, disappears and blends with its visually rich historical backdrop, momentarily suspending belief in its actual presence.
Diagram
Rather than the traditional inert Cube/Dome/Minaret volumetric expression of normative mosque architecture, the design offers a lighter reading of the typology, an ephemeral tectonic presence. The concave/convex planar surfaces of the new mosque brace the outside plaza and street in an extroverted geometry, and link it to the interior religious space which would have been usually hermetically enclosed. As we now know, these two spaces (the religious space within and the public space of the street without) were hybridized in the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings where the public space of the city intersected the public space of the mosque.
Atop the minaret, the word Allah (God) is folded bi-axially from the minaret’s elements, becoming an integral structural element that is reinforcing the fragile steel armature, rather than being just an ornamental applique. The minaret becomes a frail element that without this calligraphy would fail structurally and break apart. Seen from one side, Allah is read in an affirmative solid form, a modern interpretation of calligraphy. Seen from the other side, Allah is read as a void, a doubtful absence, but also emanating the immaterial and ineffable idea of God, in reference to the lack of representation in Islam. It is also a deconstruction of the word from a metanarrative to a text that can be interpreted, through the creation of a physical rather than an optical lenticular. Here, the text is literally a construct, and writing/reading happens between the lines. The Minaret itself is the same height as the surrounding trees; and when seen frontally becomes transparent to blend with its context.
Below, at the curved wall entry to the mosque, the pixelated and equally structural word Insan (Human) is added to the steel plates, to create a Hegelian dialectic of God/Man. The juxtaposition of both renders the idea of humanity as an integral part of the equation with God, placed in a new dialectic, and becomes a reminder of the humanistic tradition of Islam, as referenced in noted Islamic theologian Mohammad Arkoun’s book Humanisme et Islam – Combats et Propositions (Paris, Vrin, 2005) which places Islam at the origin of the18th century Enlightenment project.
Diagram
Insan becomes the epicenter of the ground plane of the plaza.
As one moves around the mosque, the planar reading of the mosque formed by the steel plates becomes transparent, while the two words (Allah/Insan) becomes more apparent, and vice versa. The overall lightness of the mosque’s tectonic sits also in a relational contrast to the heaviness of the Moukhtara’s palace stone volumetric.
A fig tree shades the new plaza, and creating a book end along with the existing Olive tree on the other side of the street, alluding to the ‘Fig and Olive’ verse (souret at-teen) in the Quraan and referencing the importance of both trees in Christian tradition as well. At the threshold, the entry to the mosque’s hall, which accommodates both women and men in the same space, is articulated with a chiseled glass façade holding two wooden doors that float within it.
On the inside of the existing structure, the minimal intervention involved a ‘white-out’ of the concave surfaces of the vaults, using special Lime mix brought from Aleppo in Syria, as well as the introduction of a new skylight that cuts the vaulted space to register the direction of the Quiblah wall towards Makkah, and bring light towards the Mihrab space.
Through the skylight, one can see the minaret in a visual looping of exterior back to the interior, linking visually the disassociation in typical mosques between the sound and the vision.
Ground Floor Plan
Similarly, the Mihrab is articulated with a concave reflective polished stainless steel arched wall that, though pointing towards Makkah, implodes this axiality by merging it visually with the wider context, bringing outside in, and distorting the interior spatiality of the mosque.
Towards the back of the mosque where the actual reading of the Quraan would happen, a wooden wall with the word iqra’ (read) is articulated in relief. It references the Islamic scholar Youssef Siddiq’s argument and interpretation that the first word in the Quraan, iqra’, of which the Quraan word is a derivative, argued for a critical and contextual reading of the Quraan as a post-structuralist ‘text’ to be read critically, and not as a meta-narrative to be recited blindly.
The call to prayer, in collaboration with artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Nisrine Khodr, was re- interpreted along the same lines as a variation on the normative call to prayer by the idea of having it spoken rather than sung, in a return to the words where the listener focuses on the meaning rather than the melody.
Model
Overall the design of the mosque is a celebration of the ethos of modernity as it relates tectonically to the notion of abstraction, of ephemerality, and representationally to the continuity of the humanism tradition in Islam. It represents a part of a cultural war of ideas that needs to be fought against the fundamentalist forces across religions, a war where architecture is a weapon.
Iran-based BMDseign Studios has unveiled Concave Roof, a double-roof system with steeping slopes resembling a bowl for the purpose of rainwater collection in arid climates like Iran, where a lack of water could lead to mass displacement in the future.
Because precipitation in this area is less than one-third of that of the world average, and evaporation is more than three times higher than the world average, the concave roof system is designed to “help [make] even the smallest quantities of rain [flow down] the roof and eventually coalesce into bigger drops, just right for harvesting before they evaporate” explained the architects.
Courtesy of BMDseign Studios
Courtesy of BMDseign Studios
The outer shell of the roof system not only collects rainwater but also provides additional shading and allows air to move freely between it and the inner shell, acting as a cooling mechanism for both roofs.
Courtesy of BMDseign Studios
At a school with 923 square meters of concave roof area, it is expected that 28 cubic meters of water could be collected, with an efficiency of about 60 percent. Further research for the system will focus on maximizing this efficiency.
Courtesy of BMDseign Studios
Reservoirs connecting to the collection systems will be placed between building walls, allowing for further control of temperature fluctuation of indoor spaces due to the heat storage capacity of water, all of which will “[lower] the overall carbon footprint of much-needed air conditioning in this harsh environment.”
Architects: BMDseign Studios Location: Jiroft, Kerman province, Iran Architect in Charge: Babak Mostofi Sadri Design Development: Dena Bakhtiari Design Team: Babak M Sadri, Dena Bakhtiari, Nazanin Esfahanian, Negar Naghibsadat Structural Engineer: Sina Rostami
2017 is coming soon. If you want to make the most of it right from the start, I have two apps that can help you do that. Here they are:
1. HabitMaster (iOS)
HabitMaster is my best-selling app for building habits. You can use it to set daily, weekly, and monthly habits. You can also use it to set reminders and days that are okay to skip. Your goal with the app is to not break the streak.
Resolutions 2017 helps you keep your New Year’s resolutions. With this app, you can list your resolutions and rate yourself on how well you are doing them. It also allows you to set action items and reminders.
Sig Nordal 