From the architect. Villa CG is a family home in the eastern Dutch city of Enschede, close to the German border. The villa is located at the Museumlaan, a new, particularly special avenue reserved for designs by architects of national and international standing including Erick van Egeraat. The clients, a couple with two children, commissioned Powerhouse Company in 2013 to design ‘the most beautiful house on the street’ within a strict budget.
Villa CG is a two-storey home characterized by horizontality. Our design takes its cues from the surrounding low hedge to create a house that is about balance and equilibrium, symmetry and grace.
From the street, the house presents itself as a simple cube, clad in an unusually long, thin brick and divided vertically by a wide cantilevered first floor slab. The front elevation is designed to be private and closed, with only a single opening for the entrance. The slab shallows the height of the building, its severity and roots it into the flatness of the context.
At ground level, the underside of the slab is glazed at either end of the core to form two window bays containing the kitchen/dining room and study/guestroom. The glazing wraps around the back to give views over every aspect of the garden from the house. Inside, the exterior darkness of the bricks combine beautifully with American walnut veneer fittings. The first floor, however, is the reverse – closed on three sides for an efficient use of openings.
The materials used in Villa CG are timeless and of a very high quality. The long, slim bricks give the cube a delicate and elegant level of detail. The color of the brick was selected very carefully in combination with the wood veneer of the interior. This, in combination with the translucent door that separates the entrance hall from the living room, the sand colored Earthcote wall cladding, light grey polyurethane floor and a variety of woods make the house appear dynamic yet harmonious.
Portland Hilltop House is a private home designed by Olson Kundig. It is located in Portland, Oregon, USA. Portland Hilltop House by Olson Kundig: “The Portland Hilltop House was commissioned by an artist couple who own a series of stores featuring American art, craft, and jewelry. Situated on a hillside with views toward downtown, the design draws on classical proportions and scale to produce a sophisticated yet comfortable home. The..
Walmer Yard is the first residential scheme in Britain by Peter Salter, the internationally acclaimed teacher and architectural designer. Seven years in the making, four finely crafted houses built around a shared courtyard in Notting Hill are now being shown to the architectural press.
Detail
The houses reflect Salter’s unique approach to the design of spaces for living. The structure, volumes and materials are employed to create a series of rooms and circulation spaces that are precisely tuned to domestic use, private peace and sensory experience.
The scheme offers an alternative ambition for contemporary domestic architecture: it uses a combination of new, old and non-standard materials selected for fitness for purpose rather than ease of construction, convenience or cost. The design and construction has as a result involved painstaking experimentation in materials and techniques, exacting craftsmanship and successful compliance with regulations for non-standard approaches.
Cast from in situ poured concrete, structured around rectangular and elliptical stairwells, each house fits within an interlocking plan around an acoustically adjusted timber-lined courtyard removed from the street. The floors are a single unrestricted span supported by the stairwells, creating flexibility and extending space and circulation as well as allowing the play of light deep into the rooms across smoothly moulded concrete ceilings.
Sketch
Each of the interior rooms and the connections between them are designed to be experienced from within; the complex interplay of structural form and material textures, light and shadow, colour and sound are the result of decades of teaching by Salter and his team at the Architectural Association and other leading architectural institutions in Britain.
The houses were commissioned by developer Crispin Kelly to demonstrate the potential of Salter’s drawing, design and engineering skills. Having worked with Alison and Peter Smithson in the 1970s, Salter built his reputation as a teacher at the Architectural Association and since 2006, as Professor of Architectural Design at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. He has taught many of the leading architects practising in the world today.
Sketch
It is the crafted appearance of in-situ concrete, a reflection of its handmade form and manipulation that prompted its use at Walmer Yard. It carries the imprint of a bespoke craftsmanship; its scale of construction in tune with the other material elements that form the interior of the houses. In-situ concrete offers a sense of permanence to the architecture of the room; its density and massiveness of fabric providing quietness and a stillness for sleep.
Concrete belies its 20 year indemnity on workmanship and material. Its degree of permanence, through age, offsets the embodied energy used in its making. Ground and granulated blast furnace slag, a byproduct of the iron and steel industry commonly known as GGBS, is used as the finest of fine to replace 38% of the cement content of the concrete matrix, to further offset embodied energy.
The concrete structure, a mixture of frame and spandrel panels, forms a table-like construction over the underground garage. The tabletop slabs are highly reinforced, to transfer loadings across the floors to the elliptical staircase drums on the periphery of the site.
Close living between dwellings requires quietness and privacy. The concrete walls surrounding the periphery of the courtyard provide a buffer against the airborne sound of the room and contribute to the acoustic renders, rigid insulation and timber louvres that dispel sound from the external central space. This tuned fabric between room and courtyard is a technical space – it presents surfaces and enclosure to the rooms, whether those rooms are inside or out. The concrete spandrel of the bedroom is cast to receive a low level window, from which to view from the bed the early sunshine or morning light. Sitting on the bed, the procrastinating early riser is offered another window. The spandrel wall is divided by construction joints, grooves that separate head height, concrete cast in a phenolic- faced formwork, with that of the lower wall casting using birch-faced formwork. The differences between formwork surface are startling, with the smoothness of the phenolic construction reflecting light to the extent that it appears almost white, set against the birch faced-forms in which the imprinted grain collects shadow – a soft darkness. The phenolic cast wall overhead connects to the soffit of the slab above, making a visual reconnection with its smoothness and reflectivity. By lining the soffit formwork with a wide roll of linoleum, the soffit is cast with minimal joints and is smooth, in some places even shiny. This soffit connects to a ceiling-high window that enables light to illuminate and pan across the ceiling, penetrating the room to a depth of 2.00 m. The concrete spandrels contribute to a patchwork of material finishes to the rooms that work together as textures, complementing chopped straw clay renders and the exposed welding of the carbonized steel bathrooms. The use of phenolic and birch-faced plywood becomes a vocabulary that is used throughout the project. It anticipates the graduated light quality that occurs as occupants move from shadow to light. Walls at ground level are constructed as double skin concrete, using different forms for internal and external surfaces.
Just as the interiors are governed by a rule system of concrete finish, so too other concrete surfaces carry a hierarchy of finishes to enable architectural decision-making, judgment and reading. The concrete retaining walls of the basement level media rooms and car park follow the striation of day joints with triangular fillets of protruding concrete, which later got struck back to form a series of stepped datums revealing an exposed pebble matrix, almost like the remnants of a shoreline. The recognition of this surface plots the edge of the site and the party wall.
Floor Plan Upper Ground
Perhaps the most complex surfaces of all are the board-marked concrete walls that describe important elevations. This arrangement of board marking can be seen on the front elevation to Walmer Road and its return as a solid balustrade up the stepped ramp to the courtyard beyond. Because of the difficulty in connecting the sections of boardwork of random strip design, each length of formwork was built complete and shipped to site ready for placement. One timber form approx. 9m. in length weighed 7 tonnes and was lifted by crane into place. Following trial castings, the formwork was faced with strips of wire-brushed redwood. The redwood varied in section between 40mm and 70mm high and was chosen for its graining. A design of inset and protruding redwood strip was decided upon, whereby each protruded run of concrete was set 5mm beyond a hypothetical face; similarly, inset runs of concrete were set back 15mm from the face. The finished concrete board marking produced particular light striations and variations across it surface. The protruding concrete produced shelves of white daylight and the recessed elements deep shadow – an amazing ensemble of striation, almost a fixed geology or a sea washed eroded cliff.
In-situ concrete wall panels were cast at each front door to signify entrance. These fluted elements were regarded as door cases similar to the fluted and reeded timber door cases of Georgian houses. Each concrete flute perfectly describes the finger.
The floor slabs were screeded with a small brown Thames river gravel and large black Scottish river pebbles. These were ground back to form a terrazzo finish and a threshold to the timber floors beyond. In other places, concrete floor surfaces were struck with a ‘three stone’ floor design similar to that of a lime-bedded Japanese floor.
As with all in-situ concrete work, aggregate bridging and other anomalies become “par for the course”. Such imperfections required a strategy, a judgement: to leave or to treat. What was clear was not to cover it up! The majority of aggregate bridging was left as an indentification of process. Others were framed and scabbled back . Scabbling became the preferred option, as it offered an alternative and unpredicted surface.
Warren Cottage is a private residence renovated by McGarry-Moon Architects. It is located in Kingston upon Thames, England and was completed in 2016. Warren Cottage by McGarry-Moon Architects: “Commissioned in 2012 to extend the cottage and create a large family home required an architecture of restraint. With the cottage restored to its former glory, the new extension meets the old with a touch of glass. Its palette is muted but..
The Site is flanked by a picturesque hill side terrain on the northern face and also a large natural water catchment area which is used for hydro power generation by a service provider.
Axonometric
The design strategy was to increase the indoor/outdoor interface “design elements” and reduce the indoor “eclosed” experience to a “minimal”, thereby urging the residents to enjoy and experience the fresh air, scenery and vistas. A column free interior space facing the picturesque hill side was designed so as to soak in the picturesque hill side terrain even during the monsoons.
The program houses a Living, Dining, Kitchen, Sleep facilities with ancillary services primarily for a weekend getaway. The open to sky spaces such as “decks”, “terraces” and “balconies” are used for passive recreation and form the primary architectural program of the project. The architectural main frame is “pinched” at zero point facing north and zooms outward towards the southern hemisphere. The “Deck” emerges from the “zer-point” condition to nest into the body of the programmatic components.
The “Deck” in a way transports the users and “sails” through stunning landscapes.
This election season has taken a toll on our psyches, both individual and collective. Many are questioning what it means to be [fill in the blank] and I don’t blame them; I’m finding it difficult, too.
Last month, I gave a QCommons (think TED for the Christian community) talk on Building Community as Lifework where I urged conference goers to get out of their comfort zones and echo chambers because that’s where change happens. Because outside of our comfort zones is where the good work is most needed. So it feels weird to be here now suggesting that maybe, just maybe, we all need to go back into our burrows for a moment so that we don’t sacrifice the work that we will undoubtedly need to do over the next four years.
Now, more than ever, it is important for us to put optimism into practice through visioning and goal setting.
December is the month where I prepare for a refresh. Instead of thinking about everything I didn’t accomplish in the previous 11 months, I start looking forward to what I have planned for myself in the upcoming year. It’s the month when hopefulness about the future collides with the prevailing energy of the season of giving. Everything usually just feels…lighter. But this year is different. Just last night, I found myself looking for the “time-out” button on Facebook. My newsfeed is consumed with others’ confirmations of their worst-case scenarios—worst-case scenarios that I then start to consider and find myself researching for validity or probability. I know this is unhealthy for me. I want to remain connected to my friends and what they’re doing. I also want to be informed and up-to-date on current events. Now, though, I’m feeling as though both of these desires are coming at a steep cost.
Our thoughts are magnetic and have the power to shift the world around us. That means our work in this moment is to thrive despite uncertainty. We have to allow room for our collective consciences to step in on our behalf.
Setting goals and envisioning your future needs two necessary ingredients to take shape. The first is the belief that anything is possible and all that you desire is within your reach. The second is the knowledge that you are in control. It’s difficult enough to become our best selves when our environments feel relatively stable. How then, can we do this in the midst of post-election chaos?
It’s simple: we choose to.
Now that I’m able to recognize how the national (and in some cases, international) climate is affecting my mood, I am taking a few deliberate actions to preserve my sanity and position myself to be able to use December in the way it was meant: for reflection. I am inviting you to do the same over the next 30 days.
The Post-Election Reset
1. Filter your networks.
Perhaps instead of asking the crowd to avoid retreating to their echo chambers, I should have recommended practicing discernment. Review the list of news and “news” outlets you’ve liked. Are they all legitimate? Are there any that you could do without? You will likely never be able to read every take on the same issue so identify the source that is most credible for you and abandon the others.
2. Share your news.
Instead of sharing the news of the day, share your news of the day. What moved you? What brought you joy? What did you learn today? What issues are you struggling with and would like your network to help you address? Put yourself back in the center of your universe and allow others to renew their connections with you.
3. Acknowledge your real fears.
You can’t own others’ fears and when bombarded with information it can be hard to decipher which fears you genuinely hold and which ones you’ve adopted. So take a moment—a short one, don’t dwell in negativity—to acknowledge what is scaring you right now. What is driving your post-election anxiety? Are there any underlying fears that are resurfacing for you at this time? Write each one down on its own piece of paper. Then…
4. Draft your vision.
Where are you this time next year? How will you feel? What will you have accomplished? Who are you in relation to those fears? This is your vision. Write it down in first person, present tense (i.e. I am a successful author of a newly published novel.). Frame your vision (literally!) and seal your fears in an envelope.
5. Choose your fount of positivity.
In the first step you filtered your networks of sources that can prompt or fuel negativity. Now it’s time to find spaces that encourage and nurture positive thinking. Is there a blog or newsletter you enjoy reading? Is there an online community that you would like to be a part of? If you cannot find an existing resource, create your own. Start with one. Whatever it is that brings you peace and joy, find it, and find ways to bring more of it into your life.
Whether it’s post-election anxiety or a general desire to reset, these steps will help you adjust your mindset, reorient yourself towards what’s positive, and set the stage for some major growth in 2017.
Cheers!
Candace Hollingsworth is a management consultant and coach based in the Washington, DC metro area. You can join her community of dream-makers and risk-takers here.
From the architect. As Japan copes with a declining population, universities are trying to attract an increasingly international student body for both long and short term stays. This dormitory and International Center for approximately 140 international students efficiently houses, educates, and integrates a population that is both culturally and economically diverse through a collection of shared public spaces and rooms that range from singles and doubles with private baths, to rooms sleeping four with shared bathing facilities.
These shared rooms allow JIU to offer accommodations for as little as $80/month and are particularly geared towards students of modest means from emerging Asian and Eastern European countries. The building is sited along the main access road to the university on the edge of an expanse of rice fields. It is comprised of a 9-meter wide dormitory bar that hovers over the International Center that projects out to engage the landscape.
The International Center is comprised of a gallery, archive room, and event space in memory of the late Prince Takamado who helped broker the Japan/Korea partnership that hosted the 2002 World Cup. JIU maintains a close relationship with the Takamado family. One enters the building off the campus road through a void in the bar that separates the two programs on the ground level. A louvered surface interspersed with projecting balconies masks exterior walkways that serve the dormitory rooms facing out over the rice fields beyond. Multiple sliding glass doors open onto the walkways, recalling the ‘engawa’ space of traditional Japanese houses. The provision of shared spaces, the walkway, and balcony system expand the compressed living space into the outdoors.
Product Description. The most conspicuous material is the aluminum louver the makes up the south façade. We used horizontal louvers with three different dimensions. They are attached each with the maximum cantilever from the vertical support to create a woven pattern to comprise a unified façade to the public, and shaded walkways with a dynamic play of light for the inhabitants.
