Reality TV star Kris Jenner says she’s reading a book about “Le Courvoisier, which is an architect” in a recent episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians (+ movie). (more…)
From the architect. A new home for the head of ce of Australia’s iconic meat brand. The founders/owners of this iconic specialist Australian meat business have always been ahead the pack. They wanted their new head of ce to reflect essence of their brand; a high end meat supplier to Australia’s leading chefs, hotels, restaurants and consumers, as well as housing a range of pragmatic and state of the art production and cooking facilities.
Australia has a strong food culture, and this business is a key part of that. The Vic’s Meat brand is two faceted; at a retail level, it represents the ultra high end retail experience for a very indulgent kind of foodie/home chef types through Victor Churchill located in Woollahra. Vic’s Meat is the trade brand – it’s more of a B2B type brand that services high end restaurants and hotels. They have also developed the television show and iphone app, Ask the Butcher.
We set out to design a flexible, pragmatic, robust, inspiring space that would embody the Vic’s Meat brand – a space where our clients could run the business, oversee production, entertain top chefs, showcase the latest ideas in meat cooking and technology, host regular television appearances and welcome international guests and suppliers.
An Austin-based startup has created a prototype of a prefabricated micro dwelling that can be slotted into a framework like a bottle into a wine rack (+ slideshow). (more…)
Michael Maltzan Architecture has released new images of their design for the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, Texas, coinciding with the announcement that the building will open to the public on February 24, 2017. The building is conceived as a multi-disciplinary lab for creativity, which will contain “an experimental platform for creating and presenting works in all disciplines” as well as a flexible teaching space and a forum to host partnerships with visiting national and international artists.
The $30 million, 50,000 square foot building will be located in the new arts district of campus, adjacent to the Shepherd School of Music and James Turrell’s Twilight Epiphany Skyspace. Program pieces in the building include an art gallery space, a 150-seat black box theater, a experimental performance space and a cafe. These spaces will be centered around a light-filled atrium containing a fully-fitted maker lab, with immediate access to a wood shop, metal shop, paint booth, rapid prototyping areas, classrooms, a technology library and AV editing booths.
“The interior of the Moody is designed to foster a sense of openness and possibility” said Michael Maltzan. “The double-height makers’ space at its heart can be imagined as an interior quad, echoing the other quads found throughout the Rice campus. This interior landscape brings the most diverse programmatic functions into contact with one another, while opening views out to the campus.”
“This emphasis on transparency extends to the building’s exterior, whose brick-clad upper story seems to float over an entry level encased in floor-to-ceiling glass. With pedestrian paths cutting across the site’s open lawn and into the building, a set of stairs on the north façade turning back to form an interior amphitheater, and the cantilevered mass of the second story creating covered walkways below, the Moody will be one of the most active social spaces on the Rice campus, and a welcoming facility for all of Houston.”
Development of the Moody is made possible by a $20 million grant from the Texas-based Moody Foundation, a charitable organization with an emphasis on education, social services, children’s needs and community development, with additional generous support from the Brown Foundation and other donors.
The Moody will also contain facilities for its first artist-in-residence program. The first resident will be Mona Hatoum, an internationally acclaimed Beirut-born Palestinian artist whose sculpture, performance, video and installation pieces are currently on display as part of a major survey exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. Hatoum will begin her residency in spring 2017, following the completion of the building, to develop works for a major exhibition to be displayed at Houston’s Menil Collection in fall 2017.
Development on the Moody is funded by a $20 million grant from the Moody Foundation, a charitable organization that places an emphasis on education, social services, children’s needs and community development. Additional support comes from the Brown Foundation and other donors.
The building is currently under construction.
Our US job of the week on Dezeen Jobs is for a business development coordinator at New York studio Hollwich Kushner, which designed a residential skyscraper set to become the tallest building in New Jersey (pictured). Visit the ad for full details or browse other architecture and design opportunities on Dezeen Jobs.
From the architect. Shade becomes shelter.
…And at the appropriate place, builds up coexistence between individuals.
A couple, a traditional house in the Empordà and one dream.
Houses should evolve along with its user. Ana María and Manuel, our clients, made the decision of spending as much time as possible in their summerhouse in Sant Mori. Located between Figueres and Girona, Sant Mori is a rural village with irregular geometry, which offers a characteristic Mediterranean landscape scenery to its inhabitants, bounded by fields and forests.
The Blasco-Nicolau family was already using the house regularly during the hottest months of the year and therefore, the swimming pool has always been an important feature to their summer lifestyle. Nevertheless, its use was mainly focused on the water area, as the adjacent space was not comfortable despite its appeal.
The idea was to bring back the space’s vitality with the purpose of making it the house’s exterior heart: a meeting point, an exterior room for the family. A place under a canopy’s shade, where three generations would coexist, chat and share moments.
The pool area used to be a place of joy and gathering for the family in summer. Due to the pasing of time and to low maintenance, it ended up being a cold, uncomfortable and neglected place.
Lying under the sun is one of the pleasures of open spaces and a canopy is a haven of shade if you want to get away from the sun.). We should return this area the identity it had one day.
Facing east, the swimming pool was surrounded, on two of its sides, by the façade of the main room of the house and by the cold and hard neighbour’s common facade. On the contrary, the remaining sides were surrounded by vegetation with views towards Sant Mori’s fields and forests.
We had a clear answer:: Generate– a new facade with dominant horizontality on the existing common facade, in order to give this space a sense of unity.
Once again, the project’s challenge was how to achieve the objectives using all resources given and reducing the visual impact as much as possible. The functional necessity to build a large storeroom with a facade to the outdoor area wasn`t going to be an obstacle but a defining elements of the project’s strategy. The recycling of some extra floor tiles from a previous project carried out by the owners was also going to sum up . Minimum investment in all resources, maximum transformation in the spaces revitalization. A contained architecture for an intense lifestyle.
The project starts from an already existing piece (50×50 cm, with open joints) that helps to organize the project’s development, creating a very structured grid pattern where alignment lines and modular order are respected. The noblest areas, such as the solarium and the living room, contrast with a solid wood pavement, which gives the necessary warmth to the place.
Canopy and storeroom share a common roof: a single supportive element, that rests on a concrete wall. The structure is formed by two metal rectangles and follows the project’s key principle: 8mx2m storeroom formed by UPN-240 and 12,5mx3m canopy formed by UPN-300, joined together on one side by UPN-200. This connecting line is in charge of assuming everything the project demands: a subtle edge yet complex beam (formed by three profiles that help to reduce the sag or deflection), collects the sliding doors that compose the facade of the storeroom at its lower edge and produces the gutter at its upper profile. One single element with three accomplished objectives.
The light belts of the canopy project a sequence of changeable shadows on the floor, which reflect the passing of time.
Proposal of minimum intervention: A simple horizontal element, which generates shade and transforms dramatically the interior/exterior perception. It is not under the sunrays where architecture is experienced, but under the shade’s shelter. Consequently, walls or openings aren’t limits but a subtle and vibrant barrier created by its own projected shadows.
The project Blasco-Nicolau is an example of Mesura; of how, from a small intervention it is possible to generate an enormous impact on architecture’s use and enjoyment. An effort to reduce what is strictly functional and structural to achieve the highest quality of the space. The smart use of all available materials as well as the way in which they are carefully selected, leads to a transforming and at the same time calm and restrained intervention.
El uso inteligente de los materiales disponibles, así como su cuidadosa puesta en obra, permite una actuación transformadora pero, a su vez, tranquila y sobria.
Urban Agency and Group-K have placed 3rd in a competition for a “Wood Experience Center” on the island of Jeju, South Korea. The project location is an area of the island called Redorum, a wild natural environment containing a dense cedar forest and a tranquil lake. The architects responded to this unique site by designing a building that both preserves the unspoiled beauty of the landscape and creates an iconic building containing an exhibition hall, workshop and library.
The architects began by asking the question, “How [do you] design a building which can truly be in dialogue with the “genius loci” of the site?” The solution was to create a low, one-story building that both blends and complements the natural context. A semi-circular opening in the back of the structure forms a natural courtyard for the building to open onto, while the front features opening with views of the lake.
Urban Agency and Group-K propose a timber structure for the building to reflect its environment through “materiality, proportion and architectural expression.” The building is also clad in timber siding; together with the parabolic roof, the aesthetic begins to mirror the rhythm of the surrounding tree trunks. Because the timber would be left untreated, the timber would silver with time, allowing the building to blend increasingly into the site.
Wood finishes continue into the building interior, where wooden floors, ceiling and walls envelope visitors in the sensory qualities of the material, connecting the indoors to the outdoors. The only other material in the project is the glazing from the strategically placed windows offering framed views to the forest and lake, giving the space an interior expression akin to a modern tree house or hut.
The parabolic roof gives the interior spaces additional ceiling height, and provides room for a large mezzanine that cuts through the building, bringing visitors higher into the canopy level of the forest and providing the best view out beyond the lake.
From a tiny alcove featuring an oversized skylight to a glass shed that can be assembled in remote locations, this week we’ve rounded up the most-pinned bedrooms ever to be featured on Dezeen (+ slideshow). (more…)
From the architect. The house is located in an urbanization in the town of Pilar, province of Buenos Aires. The environment is characterized by a long-standing, profuse vegetation.
On a 20m x 40m. plot, the implantation seeks to minimize the footprint of the house to achieve a greater absorbent surface soil, and direct natural illumination of all north-facing areas of the house.
The resolution of the cross section allows incorporating the gallery insidet the built volume and qualifying the public area with a higher altitude.
On the ground floor the window system favors the expansion of the living room and the kitchen into the gallery. The access, toilet, sauna hydro-massage and the service area safeguard this huge ground floor from the street.
The stereotomic plinth made of reinforced concret confers solidity. Furthermore, the tectonic finish of the house with a steel frame system along with a metalic cover, complet the expressive-comstructive system of the house.
“We define stereotomic architecture as that one in which gravity is discountinuosly transferred, in a continuous structural system where the constructive continuity is completed. It´s a massive architecture, petreous, heavy. That one that sits on the soil as emerging from there. It´s the architecture that follow the light, that one that pierce the walls so the light could enter. It´s the architecture of the podium, the plinth. That one of the stylobate. It´s, summarizing, the cave architecture.” Campo Baeza.
“We define tectonic architecture as that one in which gravity is discountinuosly transferred, in a structural system with knots where the construction is syncopated. It´s a boney architecture, woody, light. That one that settle on the soil as raising on tiptoe. It´s the architecture that safeguard from light, that look after their hollow to control the light coming inside. It´s the shell architecture. The one of the abacus. It´s, summarizing, the architecture of the cottage.” Campo Baeza.
