Spanish architecture practice Francesc Rifé Studio used polycarbonate sheets to divide an old textile factory into offices for the chef and staff behind the world-famous El Bulli restaurant (+ slideshow). (more…)
Electric car brand Tesla will “expand to cover the major forms of terrestrial transport” and unveil autonomous buses and trucks next year, founder Elon Musk revealed in an updated masterplan posted to the company blog. (more…)
From the architect. Which are the domestic models resulting from the change of paradigm and economic collapse?
Conventional patterns according to which emancipation processes where perceived as a linear and sequential itinerary passing through training, work, leaving family house and constitution of a new family, concluding unambiguously with the strengthening of personal autonomy, are no longer a suitable paradigm to endow with legitimacy personal choices made by anyone on the constitution of his/her personal biography.
The context switching in which are inserted emerging ways of transition to adulthood constitutes a complex situation that produces a breaking of traditional biographical options that are socially accepted.
This shift is made especially relevant with regard to leaving home as an event that has ceased to be unambiguous and irreversible, and very frequently even possible.
Home Back Home is a de-emancipation agency that proposes to act accordingly to this paradigm shift not viewing it as a failure but as an opportunity that allows fostering a destandardisation of emancipation processes through the construction [made in collaboration with de-emancipated persons] of a series of tools that can be able to encourage the emergence of proactive strategies in relation to change and crisis.
Home Back Home is a platform for analysis, monitoring and treatment, through prototyping, of housing situations generated by de-emancipation and the coming back home journey, a process massively followed by people with ages between 25 and 40 years old, which passes through the re-habitation of their former rooms at their childhood family house, sharing these spaces with members of their primeval household.
As an agency for assessment and monitoring, Home Back Home develops processes of accompaniment and negotiation in which it is intended to involve all co-habitants of the de-emancipated home in the construction of a complete living prototype.
Research and registering behavior and activities derived from house changing.
To change housing is always accompanied by more or less substantial modifications of everyday living habits; with respect to coming back to parents’ house, these behaviour and habits alterations are not only affecting the “new tenant” but the rest of members of the family inhabiting the house too. That’s why Home Back Home raises the monitoring and analysis of spontaneous or established behaviour that have been instilled, in order to improve them and to avoid the creation of conflicts derived from lack of design or preparedness on this new family estate.
Design and construction of de-emancipated dwell prototypes
To de-emancipate doesn’t necessarily mean a complete loss of independency, but keeping a certain amount of autonomy may involve an effort in negotiation and the establishment of certain agreements. Home Back Home proposes to design and build physical prototypes that can become a representation of some of those reached agreements as a result of a dialogue process through operations of furniture remastering.
Thanks to a new robot named Hadrian X, we made soon be able to construct an entire brick house in just 2 days. Developed by the appropriately named Australian firm Fastbrick Robotics, the giant truck-mounted robot has the ability to lay up to 1,000 bricks an hour. Its innovation comes via the machine’s 30-meter telescopic boom, which allows the base to remain in a single position throughout the brick-laying process.
All you need to input is a CAD file of the house structure and Hadrian X does the rest: the system handles automatic loading, cutting, routing and placement of all the bricks, one course at a time. Bricks are fed along a conveyor belt that sends them up the robotic arm, where the sides of the brick are coated with clear construction adhesive. The arm then rotates the bricks and extends to drop them into place. Because they are glued together, no mortar is necessary.
The machine even has the ability to leave spaces in the brickwork to make room for wiring and plumbing, and can be used with a wide range of block sizes. The high level accuracy of the finished product means very little human intervention is necessary – simply design the structure in CAD and hit send.
The robot is the result of 10 years and £4.5 million of research and development, and Fastbrick hopes that it will be able to streamline the construction process, saving clients time and money.
Hadrian X is expected to be available on the market in a year’s time.
News via Fastbrick Robotics. H/T Sky News.
The four Summer Houses built to accompany BIG’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion have been listed for sale through architecture-led estate agent The Modern House. (more…)
From the architect. Mohican Hills is a small community in Glen Echo, Maryland within very close proximity to Washington, DC. This community boasts an unusually high percentage of contemporary and mid-century modern houses relative to most Washington, DC suburban neighborhoods. This community is adjacent to the Potomac River. Many of the lots have a steep sloping topography and share River views.
This new house, in Mohican Hills is located on one such lot. The house is positioned along the ridge of the sloping site and oriented toward distant river views. A linear composition of spaces arranged along the ridge and open to an existing clearing provides a large lawn with minimal site intrusion and preserves the vast majority of mature trees. The house is organized around a two-story living space with an open floor plan that integrates a high-ceilinged volume with intimate spaces adjacent to the double height space. A small office on the first floor is separated from the living spaces and is convertible to a fifth bedroom. A three story entry volume separates the master bedroom area from the subsidiary bedrooms.
Expanses of glass provide views into the wooded landscape toward the distant river and animate the house with light. A combination intersecting spaces insure light penetration all times of day and all times of the year.
This house employs a concrete slab throughout the main floor which provides passive solar energy assistance. The concrete is stained dark with the goal of increasing the potential solar gain and storage. Expanses of Energy Star glass provide an abundance of daylighting while solar sensitive shades mediate heat gain. Energy efficient appliances, high efficiency HVAC Equipment, wall and ceiling infrastructure with maximum insulation and a ventilated building envelope are employed with the expectation of reducing fossil fuel consumption. Large operable windows and doors are located to provide natural ventilation and direct access to the outdoors. Thermally modified wood siding is employed as an alternative to exotic or expensive hardwoods. The wood is forest managed and treated, non-toxic and durable.
A bright white summer house on the Santorini coastline (pictured), the latest news from our Brexit design summit and a colostomy bag designed to suit intimate moments feature in this week’s issue of Dezeen Mail.
Read Dezeen Mail issue 316 | Subscribe to Dezeen Mail
As Seoul’s population boomed, apartment blocks became commonplace. Photographer Manuel Alvarez Diestro spent 6 months exploring the city’s new towns, aiming to “reveal in visual terms the expansive nature of urbanization and the transformation of the landscape through the construction of these new housing developments of massive scale.”
After liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, people migrated to Seoul from all parts of the country. City officials were unprepared to deal with such rapid expansion and urban squatter settlements developed next to the city’s four gates. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that authorities cleared urban slums and developed a coherent city plan that featured 21 medium-density self-contained communities just outside the city limits.
Soon enough, the sprawling new towns merged, with ever more dwellings needed. Seoul’s authorities revised the 1966 plan and the first high-rise buildings mushroomed south of the Han River. Nowadays, new towns continue to grow on the city’s outskirts in order to decongest Seoul and keep pace with the population growth that has accompanied Korea’s economic success.
As Joochul Kum and Sang-Chuel Choe explain in Seoul: The Making of a Metropolis, “the physical growth of Seoul and its present social arrangement resulted more from accidental growth than rational, forward-looking political plans and decisions. Although there have been continuous government attempts to control and guide the process of growth, the overall growth of the city was largely based on the accumulated growth of many districts, sprawling one at a time.”[1]
High-rise buildings around Seoul are mainly developed by privately-owned companies. There is little coherent planning of the new towns, and public infrastructure fails to keep up. This in turn increases commuting time, and leads to self-containment on the city’s outskirts. But despite the lack of amenities and connecting infrastructure, residents still spend their days in central Seoul, with these “new towns” functioning primarily as bedroom communities.
For his photoset, Diestro went to the final station of each of the 18 subway lines across Seoul’s metropolitan area. Using his bicycle to explore large areas of land, he captured buildings whose surrounding earth was still stripped bare and churned from recent construction work. In his pictures, the new buildings float on the disturbed earth, disconnected from any surrounding urban structure: a poetic way to point out to the lack of coherent planning in Seoul’s urban development and the lack of connection to the rest of Seoul’s urban landscape.
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Architects Stanton Williams and Asif Khan have been selected over teams including BIG and Caruso St John to design a new building for the Museum of London, after being described by competition judges as “a clear winner” (+ slideshow). (more…)
Stanton Williams and Asif Khan have been announced as the winners of the competition to design the new Museum of London at West Smithfield. Beating out 70 entries from top firms and a shortlist including BIG, Caruso St. John and Lacaton & Vassal, the winning proposal was selected for its “innovative thinking, sensitivity to the heritage of existing market buildings and understanding of practicalities of creating a great museum experience.”
As part of London’s Smithfield Market, the museum will consist of a combination of new construction and adaptive reuse. Emphasizing the need for preservation, Stanton Williams and Asif Khan will work with conversation architect Julian Harrap and landscape design consultants J&L Gibbons to ensure the integrity of the historic site is maintained.
“Encountering the historic market spaces for the first time in early April this year, we were ‘blown away’ by the power and physicality already existing, and knew then, that whatever scheme we developed, this physicality needed to be harnessed, and not lost, and that initial observation has inspired our initial design proposals,” said Paul Williams, Director of Stanton Williams. “This project will engage a broad community well beyond London.”
Early concepts for the design show a crisp and contemporary vision with a strong respect for the existing spaces of the West Smithfield site. New elements will include a landmark to dome draw light into the museum entrance, innovative spiral escalators to transport visitors down into the exhibition galleries, large flexible spaces for events and debate, and a sunken garden and green spaces to provide pockets of respite.
“We all know the power of public spaces in changing our city and our individual lives, and this is what drives us. We want the Museum of London to be a museum where everyone belongs, and where the future of London is created,” added Asif Khan.
Evan Davis, Chair of the Jury, said of the decision: “Stanton Williams and Asif Khan offered some really innovative thinking, and managed to combine a sensitivity to the heritage of the location, with a keen awareness of the practicalities of delivering a really functional museum.”
The winning team will now work with the museum and stakeholders to develop final proposals for the site, with a planning application scheduled to follow in 2018.
