© Jeremy Bitterman

• Architects: Rapt Studio
• Location: W Traverse Pkwy, Lehi, UT 84043, United States
• Chief Creative Director: David Galullo
• Team Lead: Christine Shaw
• Project Architect: Jeffrey Warren
• Area: 132.396 ft2
• Project Year: 2016
• Photographs: Jeremy Bitterman

• Senior Designer : Tanja Pink
• Designers: Joanna Paull, Sarah Hirschman, Andrea Hsieh
• Art Director: Sam Gray

© Jeremy Bitterman

From the architect. Every single one of us is a living, breathing collection of data. Ancestry can take that data — any kind of data, really — and translate it into stories of human connection. The story of Ancestry itself is a tale of family, genealogy, migration, and attention to detail. To create the company’s ideal space, Rapt Studio brought all those components together, turning abstract ideas into something you can touch, see, and feel.

© Jeremy Bitterman

© Jeremy Bitterman

That meant making sure the space felt like home for both the young, agile tech side of things and Ancestry’s longtime employees — self-described “crusty book nerds” who’ve been there for nearly four decades. Throughout the building, you can find portraits of senior employees paired with archival photographs of their relatives found through the website. It shows firsthand how historical imagery gets personal in context.

© Jeremy Bitterman

At the entry point to the building, there’s a multicolored, multidimensional graphic installation in the lobby. The different colors represent different ancestries of various populations, like you might see in a map showing migrations over time. Because the colors are repeated, it suggests a kind of shared global heritage. It’s one of many examples of the link between family and global genealogy, including break areas and family rooms that serve as central, collaborative spaces on each floor. These are supplemented by a variety of dens, living rooms, and kitchen tables arranged to help teams work and relax side-by- side. The cafe is a nod to “Sunday dinner at Grandma’s house,” and includes a long,communal table beside a pizza oven, surrounded by decorative plates from around the world. It reminds us of the shared ways we all break bread together.

© Jeremy Bitterman

Ancestry goes beyond connecting you to a long-lost relative. It can also show you how we all go back to just a few big populations, a few big families. Now it has a headquarters built on that brand principle and identity.

© Jeremy Bitterman

Light Installation Diagram

© Jeremy Bitterman

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Courtesy of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

The team led by Tom Wiscombe Architecture has been selected as the winner of the Sunset Spectacular Billboard Competition, which tasked firms to design a multi-dimensional, kinetic billboard to “bring creativity and originality back to the Sunset Strip.”

Triumphing over finalist proposals from Gensler, TAIT Towers Inc. and Zaha Hadid Architects, the winning design, titled “West Hollywood Belltower,” draws from West Hollywood’s unique history and relationship with the billboard, and builds on its evolution from 2-dimensional sign to 3-dimensional icon-object.

Courtesy of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

Partnering with builder/operator Orange Barrel Media, Structural Engineer Walter P Moore and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Tom Wiscombe Architecture has envisioned a proposal that rejects the stereotypical “sign-on-a-stick” billboard typology in favor of a “spatial and interactive” intervention on the streetscape.

The design of the Belltower consists of three faceted “petals,” which have been pulled apart and rotated to create an occupiable interior. Unlike standard billboards that are intended to be seen only in passing, the Belltower invites pedestrians to occupy the area around and within the billboard. In this way, the structure operates in a manner associated with deep-rooted urban archetypes representative of community engagement, such as bell-towers, clock-towers and obelisks.

Courtesy of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

Courtesy of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

On the outer faces of the perforated metal planes, a variety of technologies have been employed to display the billboard’s media content: irregularly-shaped high-resolution LED screens, video projections and theatrical lighting. These options will allow the Belltower to cater the display to specific content types, which will include a combination of commercial media, feeds from concerts and other cultural events, branding and news from the City of West Hollywood, and video art installations curated by MoCA.

Courtesy of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

Courtesy of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

The interior space will also be customizable, and will allow visitors to control its appearance:

“The interior space of the Belltower is vertical, immersive, and engages the public imagination. It contains a sculptural object that is programmed with interactive and trending social media,” explain the architects. “Pedestrians can interact with it directly via apps on their smartphones, altering patterns of light pulled from the deep web, or ‘pushing’ digitally altered media content onto it.”

Courtesy of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

Courtesy of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

Adjacent to the structure, a public square containing seating areas, site lighting, drought-tolerant landscaping and flexible space for outdoor markets or events will connect the billboard to the rest of the city while providing pedestrians with a setting to meet, relax and play.

Courtesy of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

“Ultimately, the significance of this project is that it will exist simultaneously in two realms: the local physical space of the Sunset Strip and the global digital space of social media. Potentially the most ‘Instagrammable’ billboard in the world, this project will actively share the uniqueness and creativity of West Hollywood with the world.”

Courtesy of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

The winning team will now continue to work with the city to refine their proposal before its realization.

News via Tom Wiscombe Architecture.

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© Marcos Mendizábal

• Architects: CARREÑO SARTORI arquitectos
• Location: Gerónimo de Alderete 1155, Vitacura, Región Metropolitana, Chile
• Author Architects: Mario Carreño Zunino, Piera Sartori del Campo
• Area: 595.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2016
• Photographs: Marcos Mendizábal

• Electric Project: Pablo Oyola
• Sanitary Project: Leonardo Cuevas
• Landscape Project: Carreño Sartori Arquitectos
• Collaborators: María José Saez
• Calculation Project: Vertical Ingenieros – Roberto Soto
• Plot Area: 499 sqm

© Marcos Mendizábal

From the architect. The project introduces an open interior spatiality, in which the different levels are related with the context through large windows and a gap which cross the interior.

Sketch

While the first floor extends to the site edge through a side yard, the second one is facing the street and the neighbor gardens. Finally, the terrace of the third level has views to the valley and the Andes.

© Marcos Mendizábal

The products exhibition is related to the visual experience of the site, the city and the valley, complementing the permanence in the building, where the clients come with enough time to buy specific products.

© Marcos Mendizábal

The sequence of spaces and views is experienced through a set of stairs that differs in their sizes and materials. The continuity between the first and second level is achieved with a wide stair. After that, a lighter and vibrant metal stair is placed to link the terrace.

Sections

The relationship between parking spaces and use spaces is extremely required, forcing a set of operations to clear the ground, defining the project physics. A concrete base contains the building basement, organizing the first level and receiving a reticulated metal structure, passing over the cars and their circulations.

© Marcos Mendizábal

The northern light is almost completely sealed, opening the building to indirect light of the south. A brightly interior is achieved, in which the objects are exhibited avoiding the glare of direct sunlight. The outside is directly illuminated, alternating inside and outside views.

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Vertical Walking movement. Image © Rombout Frieling Lab

Vertical Walking, an experimental prototype by Rombout Frieling Lab designed “to move ourselves between floors in a building,” exploits the potential of the human body, materials and intelligent design to require less than 10% of the effort required by taking a flight of stairs – and without the need for any sort of ancillary power supply. The ultimate aim of the designers is to allow people to “move harmoniously through our vertical habitats of the future.”

The designers acknowledge that the price of urban land is “skyrocketing.” With a further three billion people expected to move into urban environments in the decades to come, they argue that we will be forced to exploit vertical space: “more and taller towers [and] the use of attics and roofs.” At the same time, the global population is ageing; “staircases are becoming major bottlenecks.” Elevators, they state, rely on significant amounts of external power, while depriving us from daily exercise.

According to its designers the prototype has been successfully tested by a wide range of users, including those suffering from Multiple Sclerosis (MS).

Vertical Walking Integration. Image © Rombout Frieling Lab

Vertical Walking. Image © Rombout Frieling Lab

A prototype which was until recently stationed outside the Giardini at the Venice Architecture Biennale is currently on display at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. The designers have patents pending.

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