SADAR + VUGA and local partner PRG°B R Architektur have been awarded first prize in a competition for the new Headquarters for the Supreme Court and School of Magistrates in Tirana, Albania. The winning proposal, selected from a pool of over 30 international firms and from a shortlist of 5 finalists, renovates an existing 3,000 square meter Italian Rationalist structure while adding four light-filled courtrooms and a new educational block.
Courtesy of SADAR + VUGA
The design is a product of its site along the periphery of the Grand Park Tirana, drawing inspiration from the tranquility of the forest and the strength of the existing structure, characteristics that create what SADAR + VUGA refer to as an “urban oasis of sorts.” The renovation and addition enhance these natural qualities while introducing a lively spirit to the site through the creation of an animated urban square, an independent educational facility, intelligently organized administrative spaces for judicial staff and four transparent, tectonic courtrooms that feel open, yet secure.
Program pieces have been dividing into unique architectural objects, arranged to give the complex a campus-like feel. Outer walls of the court complex are constructed of a light tubular steel structure and floor to ceiling glazing. Green roofs also feature throughout the addition, pulling the park into the building.
Courtesy of SADAR + VUGA
Courtesy of SADAR + VUGA
The educational center takes on a more stoic personality, featuring a conventional concrete shear wall structure, and is set across from the existing building to create a public plaza for the complex. Additional program pieces include classrooms, a conference hall and cafe.
US studio Duvall Decker Architects has created a residence in central Mississippi that is “shaped to draw the outdoors in and lure the family out” (+ slideshow). (more…)
An American artist has turned the remains of legendary Mexican architect Luis Barragán into a diamond, and is offering to exchange the gem for the architect’s professional archive, which is currently housed on the Vitra campus (+ slideshow). (more…)
From the architect. The Mezzanine House is a single family house, located within a dense single house residential area in Ljubljana. It was completed with collaboration between elastik and Hikikomori. The design for this house deploys a split level device, which organizes the daily experience by deploying split level compartments around the central space of the kitchen and living room.
Section
This organisational principle vertically connects the family activities from half basement, to ground bounded living zone, towards kids’ rooms in the mezzanine level. Master bedroom and guest rooms top the highest floor sector, while offering a connection with the roof terrace. The cantilevered en-suite bedroom provides a shelter for the terrace extending from the living room.
The volumetric compactness of the Mezzanine House is facilitated with the internal split levels that create a landscaped, continuous living space, compartmentalized around the vertical axis.
The challenge was to create a low energy house with high living standards using standard materials like brick and concrete and glass, but not to compromise on architectural design. The house only consumes 19.8 kWh/m2a for heating and cooling that makes her A rated house. The house is equipped with heat recovery unit and collects rain water from the roof. the plot is only 400m2 so it was positioned with a lot of care not to cast shadows onto neighboring buildings and to avoid shadows from them. Passive insulation was used in the best possible way.
AD Classicsare ArchDaily’s continually updated collection of longer-form building studies of the world’s most significant architectural projects. Here we’ve rounded-up ten groundbreaking residential projects from this collection, ranging from a 15th century Venetian palazzo to a three-dimensional axonometric projection. Although some appear a little strange, all have been realised and have made lasting contributions to the wider architectural discourse. You can study residential cubes, spheres and inverted pyramids—plus projects by the likes of OMA, Álvaro Siza, and Richard and Su Rogers—after the break.
Looming over the small Bavarian town of Hohenschwangau are the turrets and towers of one of the world’s most well-known fairytale castles. Schloß Neuschwanstein, or “New Swan Stone Castle,” was the fantastical creation of King Ludwig II – a monarch who dreamed of creating for himself an ideal medieval palace, nestled in the Alps. But the structure and engineering prowess of this grand residence for a waning monarch isn’t what you might expect.
On the 29th December, 1940, at the height of the Second World War, an air raid by the Luftwaffe razed a 35-acre site (known as the Barbican) in the heart of the City of London to the ground. Following the war, the City of London Corporation—the municipal governing body for the area—started to explore possibilities to bring this historic site into the twentieth century. This is what they ultimately commissioned.
Much of the spatial composition of the Villa dall’Ava was influenced by its site: in a garden, on a hill. The clients commissioned OMA to design a house with two distinct apartments—one for themselves and another for their daughter—and made one very specific request for a swimming pool on the roof, with a view of the Eiffel Tower.
A popular tourist attraction and bizarre architectural experiment, the Kubuswoningen is located in the Oude Haven – the most historic section of the port of Rotterdam. Known for his desire to challenge conventions, Piet Blom did not want the Kubuswoningen to resemble typical housing; he strived to dissolve the attitude that “a building has to be recognizable as a house for it to qualify as housing.”
Secluded behind a screen of tall bamboo shoots in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, the Kings Road House is considered by many to the first home ever built in the Modernist style. It’s use of tilt-slab concrete construction and an informal studio layout, set it apart from its contemporaries; the design would set the tone for other Modernist residential design for decades.
This house, designed by Richard and Su Rogers in 1968, is one of the lesser known architectural works from the master who went on to design the Centre Pompidou in Paris with Renzo Piano. The house itself represented British Architecture at the 1967 Paris Biennale, was later lived in by Rogers’ parents.
Also known as Bonjour Tristesse, this is a social housing project designed located in Berlin. The project was Siza’s first built work outside of his native country of Portugal, and offers a meaningful precedent in urban densification demonstrating a delicate balance between contextual awareness, creative freedom, and progressive vision.
Sitting on the northern bank of Venice’s Grand Canal is a great house whose ornately carved marble facade only hints at its original splendor. The Palazzo Santa Sofia—or the Ca D’Oro (House of Gold), as it is also known—is one of the most notable examples of late VenetianGothic architecture, which combined the existing threads of Gothic, Moorish, and Byzantine architecture into a unique aesthetic that symbolized the Venetian Republic’s cosmopolitan mercantile empire.
In the quaint Dutch town of Den Bosch sits the odd community of Bolwoningen: a cluster of globe-shaped stilt houses punctuated with round windows amid a sea of wild vegetation. These oversized “golf balls” are, in fact, homes: an eccentric product of a relatively unknown architectural experiment conducted by a visionary architect. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out.
Villa Malaparte, built in 1938 by the Rationalist architect Adalberto Libera in Punta Massullo on the Isle of Capri, is widely considered to be one of the best examples of Modern Italian architecture. The house, a red structure with inverted pyramid stairs, sits 32 meters over a cliff on the Gulf of Salerno, completely isolated from civilization.
Are the rigors and tribulations of architecture school causing serious impacts on students‘ mental health? A new student survey conducted by Architect’s Journal has found that more than a quarter of architecture students in the UK are currently seeking or have sought medical help for mental health issues related to architecture school, and another 25% anticipate seeking help in the future.
The results have prompted Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor at the University of Buckingham and a mental-health campaigner, to describe the situation as “a near epidemic of mental-health problems.”
In addition to mental health concerns, the report also brings to light growing problems with student debt, excess work hours and worry that education is not properly preparing students for the real world. Read the study in its entirety at Architect’s Journal here.
The website of Melania Trump, wife of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump, has been taken down after it emerged that the claim she obtained an degree in architecture was false. (more…)
The new Industrial Engineering and Innovation Campus of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia is built beside the Forum area, between Carrer Taulat and the Ronda Litoral beltway. The Urban Improvement Plan for this sector is organized on the site around a central axis parallel to the sea, with the various campus buildings to either side. Our project centres on two of these buildings, which face each other, building C laid out along Carrer Taulat and building I on the Ronda Litoral side. Both are designed to house research areas and comprise lecture rooms, laboratories and offices. Though the built volumes of the two were fundamentally different, we decided to unify the design by organizing both floor plans according to an identical sequence of bays: a central bay for entrances and services, and two side bays of different widths, one smaller for offices and one larger for laboratories. In building C, the sequence is laid out perpendicular to the street, whereas in building I it is parallel, calling for another bay separated from the others by a courtyard that provides lighting and ventilation. Having decided the functional order of the buildings, we seek for a homogeneous façade system to meet the requirements of insulation and structure.
We therefore designed a structural façade, made of prefabricated concrete that also provides solar protection in a way similar to a brise-soleil. The glass façade is drawn back to generate an interstitial area, providing shade and ventilation. The use of mass-produced structural ribs allows a highly versatile internal division that will adapt easily to any variations of programme that may be required. This system of structural façade is used in the longer façades of the volumes, which are obviously the bearing structures. The solution used in the end walls is a unitary coating with no windows. These walls only open on the ground floor, where they are braced to create entrances to the building. These are the main entrances on the central avenue and secondary and service entrances on Carrer Taulat and the Ronda. The inner courtyards are also addressed as structural façades, allowing the building to descend a floor to the basement, where some of the more complex uses are housed.
Far from the common dismissal of Margot Krasojevic’s work as (in her own words) “parametric futurist crap,” her work has always revolved around concepts of sustainability. As she explained to ArchDaily last year, she aims to focus on the ways that sustainable technology “will affect not just an architectural language but create a cross disciplinary dialogue and superimpose a typology in light of the ever-evolving technological era.” For the second project in a series of three proposals for the city of Belgrade Serbia, the architect is proposing a “Trolleybus Garden” that functions as a waiting shelter and park while simultaneously harnessing kinetic movement to produce electricity.
Contrary to the immediate speculation of many, Krasojevic’s projects are not just media-friendly photo-based assemblages. They are founded on more tangible research, data, and inspiration. For this proposal, the architect looked at the city’s pre-existing trolleybus network. In lieu of bus transport, trolleybuses are electric vehicles which make them more environmentally friendly than fuel-burning vehicles. Her idea sprung from the way in which trolleybuses were powered: the vehicles use spring loaded poles to draw power from overhead wires. The poles work like a “current collector” which transfer the energy from the overhead wire to the vehicle’s controls and electric traction motors. Krasojevic envisions her Trolleybus Garden to work like a current collector at a much larger scale.
Just like her earlier playground proposal, the key technology behind the Trolleybus Garden is printed Piezoelectric cells, and the structure is connected to the trolleybus network’s overall infrastructure and overhead cables. Piezoelectric materials generate mechanical energy when subjected to mechanical strain—movement. From the movement of the trolleybuses through the stations, falling rain, random pulses and even passing wind, vibrational energy is harvested from the overhead cables and collected within the stations.
The station’s design also deliberately causes more vibrations to occur in the structure, which means that any mechanical input is amplified. This expands the electrical output of the structure to provide street lighting and Internet WiFi in the immediate area, a power port for charging commuters’ mobile devices and smart cars, and power for the irrigation sprinklers in the park next to the terminal.
In some ways this proposal’s overall parti is undoubtedly simple and well-articulated enough to be understood—not to mention that the project’s proposed functions would be a welcome addition to any city center. This puts an end to the common argument that Krasojevic’s work is nothing but convoluted and meaningless computer-generated forms. However, the proposal’s supporting images do the exact opposite, and this project is bound to incite irritation because it presents an outrageously altered image of everyday life in the heart of the city.
This presumed irritation, however, says more about our current predisposition to over-simplify. While new technologies are excitedly welcomed and integrated into our daily lives, we are less open to accept the implication proposed by Krasojevic: that “distractions encouraged by technology affect the way we understand our context.” This project’s visual representation is to be understood as a continuing research on relating the overwhelming information that we are exposed to in our daily lives. The work of Margot Krasojevic portrays the narrative of an architect trying to visually negotiate concepts, components, perceptions, and visions beyond architecture but doing so with the tool of the architect (the image). Architecture has always been about painting a well-crafted image, and it is precisely Krasojevic’s dizzying visual representation which confirms that she is an architect building architecture.
In her interview with ArchDaily, Krasojevic continuously stressed upon a necessary collaboration of architects with scientists, engineers, and other practitioners. The Trolleybus Garden asserts the fact that Krasojevic does not produce for the simplistic pursuit of form but goes beyond that; this is not architecture for the sake of architecture. But it remains undetermined—this is architecture for the sake of what?
Rio 2016: ahead of this year’s Olympic and Paralympic games, British photographer Giles Price took to the skies to capture the physical and social repercussions that stadiums and infrastructure are imposing on Rio de Janeiro (+ slideshow). (more…)
