Milwaukee firm The Kubala Washatko Architects has renovated a Frank Lloyd Wright house near the city, adding a pool house that was informed by the home’s original site plan (+ slideshow). (more…)
Bing Thom Architects have released new images for Hong Kong’s Xiqu Centre, designed in collaboration with Ronald Lu & Partners. Currently under construction, the building is scheduled for completion in 2017, becoming the first venue to open within the new West Kowloon Cultural District. The Xiqu Centre will serve as the home of the Chinese Opera, as well as play host to an array of cultural events.
Conceived as a cultural sanctuary containing spaces for theatre, art and contemplation, the project draws inspiration from “the soft glow of a lantern behind a beaded curtain,” lighting up the street through four main openings and a series of lightboxes on the building’s elevation. The center’s form reinterprets the traditional Chinese motif of the Moongate to become the gateway into the cultural district – master planned by Foster + Partners – and expresses the concept of “qi” or flow through its curvilinear paths and elements.
To enable the ground floor to become an open plaza space, Xiqu Centre’s main theater has been lifted several levels into the air, a move that also isolates the theater from the vibrations and ambient noise from the metro station below the site, creating a quiet space suitable for an opera house. The acoustics within the theater itself have been carefully designed to support the human voice by finely tuning reverberation time and targeting audience seating areas. Transformable acoustical devices including curtains and banners have also been added to ensure high clarity of sound for various types of performances.
The theatre’s lobby space is flanked by two outdoor sky gardens, and will feature panoramic views of nearby Victoria Harbor and Hong Kong’s iconic skyline beyond. Additional spaces within the structure include rehearsal rooms, classrooms, administrative offices, a teahouse theater and retail areas around the building’s central courtyard.
Graduate shows 2016: Royal College of Art graduate Tessa Silva-Dawson has used cow’s milk to create a natural alternative to plastic (+ slideshow). (more…)
From the architect. Harasic y López Law Office is an open 500 square meters floor plan used by the law firm. The office is located on the 19th floor of a prominent building in Nueva Las Condes, a financial highlight district of Santiago. With this Project we explore different concepts such as integration into rigid spaces, lenguage of conservative spaces, hierarchies, recycling and expression of materials.
Working as a lawyer: Because the way of working, lawyers require, isolated spaces for concentrated work. Meetings are less common. This is very typical in both, large and small law offices. This frequently translates into a lot of rooms, corridors and disconnected spaces. In this proyect, to balance out this effect, we thought of a unique central space in which all the offices are organized within it. With this distribution we concentrate walking areas, force and promote encounters between people, and subsequently revitalize the common areas. The layout has a main and wide corridor that goes from north to south, receiving all day the sun from the north. The main meeting room is placed in the north at one end of the corridor, with views on to the Araucano park and theAndes mountains. Inmediately continuing are located partners offices, all of them with the same size and orientation, then associated lawyers and in between some minor meetings room that allow meetings at several points of the office. On the other side of the corridor are reception, library, secretaries desks, attornys, accouting office, dinning room and baths. Despite having different hierarchies of work, all converge inmediately following the personal office door in the same space.
Recycling and expression of materials: The project was executed over a recent rehabilitacion which was no more than three years old. Given the waste generated construction projects, we kept or recycled some elements. For example, the tile floor was in excellent condition and was neutral, though it existed only in the half of the office we decided to keep it and complete the rest of the floor with the same flooring. The same with some parts of the ceiling and columns: in the past, part of a recreation of classic architecture, moldings included, now abstract block covered in wood. To generate a warm environment, we chose a second main texture-material, imbuía wood. Main walls and columns were recovered with dark imbuía wood. Also, frames, doors and furniture were treated with the same materiality. From it, the project has a neutral reading between these two materials. There is a constant dialogue. The reception walls are threated with travertine marble in planks cut with water and mate finishing. The decision of chosing marble was to reinforce the texture of the floor and not to add a third material. The decision of cutting the travertine into planks was exploring excercise to obtain a warm effect, and to give a different scale to the space that was treated mainly with these two neutral materials. To add a hand made finish we keep a space in the middle for fresco paintings.
Into the program there was a special requirement to have bookshelfs for more than 1350 archives plus kardex organizers. In the former office of this firm, these were located in the access wall of each office, hiding the entire interior. To give some transparency and publicity of interior acts we decided to put them in the middle of the back side corridor, designing a bookshelf wall. This bookshelf has a few small windows in between the doors that allows to see through to the other side of the corridor and to have an awareness of the space behind it. The neutral space is also a stage for sculptures and paintings of national artists in strategic points, such as the reception, corridor and main meeting room.
Graduate shows 2016: architecture graduate Kit Stiby Harris has proposed relocating the “fake” Parthenon from Athens to the British Museum in London. (more…)
Penda has released plans for a series of stacked villas that will bring gardens high into the skies of Hyderabad, India. The complex is the second stage of the Magic Breeze project for Pooja Crafted Homes – the first stage featuring a landscape design inspired by Indian stepwells and water mazes. The 450,000 square foot (42,000 square meter) development will include 127 duplex sky villas, ranging in size from 2,600 to 4,000 square feet (240 to 370 square meters), each separated by a double-height private garden terrace. The structure will be integrated into the landscape design, turning the park on its side to continue vertically up the side of the building.
In designing the sky villa complex, Penda looked to the architectural typology of “private house with a garden,” surrounding each 2-story unit with a 500 square foot (46 square meter) balcony containing a ribbon of lawn and a modular planter system. By giving each villa a spacious green-space, even when the units are stacked, the complex retains a sense of lightness and openness. Each planter can be filled by the owner with plants of different sizes and species to create a natural backdrop, or to serve as a garden for vegetables and herbs.
The gardens also work as an effective passive cooling system for the building, providing natural ventilation throughout the complex and shielding residents from the hot Hyderabad climate. This in turn will save up to 60% of the energy consumed by a typical condominium building, reducing the project’s overall carbon footprint.
The entire complex was designed in accordance with the traditional Hindu architectural system of Vaastu, which prescribes principles of design, layout, orientation and spatial geometry, as well as an importance of creating architecture in harmony with nature. Vaastu remains an esteemed practice in modern Indian real estate development, being employed by famed Indian architect Charles Correa in many projects throughout his career. Penda responded to this need by giving as much space as possible back to nature in the form of garden terraces.
The complex is set to begin construction in the fall of this year.
Our US job of the week on the new and improved Dezeen Jobs website is for an architect to work on affordable housing projects at New York-based Dattner Architects, which designed the mixed-use 425 Grand Concourse residential development in The Bronx (pictured). Visit the ad for full details or browse other architecture and design opportunities on Dezeen Jobs.
Traditional wilderness huts inspired this bar and kitchen in Adelaide, designed by local office Sans Arc Studio to slot into a narrow alleyway. (more…)
From the architect. The “Maracaná” is a football stadium built during the years 2013-2014 in the popular El Chorrillo neighborhood in Panama City, Panama. The structure replaced an old sports field, baptized by the locals with the name of the legendary Rio de Janeiro stadium. The new building has capacity for five thousand spectators, and is the end point of a recent phase of the linear park that winds along the city’s coastline. El Chorrillo has a longstanding football tradition, and currently has two professional teams in the first division league. The construction of the stadium was part of an effort to provide this dense, low-income neighborhood with more public space and with attractions of metropolitan appeal, in order to better integrate it to the rest of the city. The building is used by a variety of professional and amateur leagues.
The structure is composed by four straight segments of stands, covered with vaulted roofs, and four “cubes”, one on each corner. Access for the public is located under the stands in the eastern and western wings, while the lower levels of the north and south wings house the locker rooms and office spaces, respectively. The access wings include the general lobbies, commercial stalls, and VIP boxes. The public restrooms are located inside the cubes. The structure combines steel and reinforced concrete columns, and includes a roof structure of steel trusses and semi-structural metal sheet.
The eastern and western wings are built over artificial earth mounds, one level above the northern and southern wings. This solution creates different heights for the roofs of the paired sides of the structure, thus generating a welcome dynamism to an otherwise symmetrical building. Architectural movement is also provided by the curved fronts of the eastern and western facades, which contrast with the straight fronts of the north and south wings, and by the curved outer edges of the four roof segments.
The four concrete cubes are the only “solid” components of the exterior facades, and are painted blue or red, in alternating fashion. For their part, the central sections of each facade are clad with rectangular, perforated steel sheets. The color of each cube is “pixelated” towards the center of each façade, transitioning into white before picking up the color of the cube in the opposing corner.
The perforated sheets and the raised roofs lend the building an open, light, and translucent appearance. Between the stands and the roofs, great views are opened and framed towards the bay, the city, the bridge over the canal, and the famous Ancón Hill. At those times of the day when the sun is close to the horizon, a spectacular light effect created by the perforated sheets animates the access lobbies. At night, the interior stadium lights turn the east and west facades into huge lamps of textured light.
In this movie, Karen Hennessy of the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland reflects on the achievements of the Irish Design 2015 initiative, which promoted the work of Irish architects and designers around the world. (more…)
