Ledgewood Residence is a home designed by LDa Architecture & Interiors. It is located in Weston, Massachusetts, USA. Ledgewood Residence by LDa Architecture & Interiors: “LDa is often asked by prospective clients to evaluate a site for design potential before making an offer to purchase. We first met the client for this project in the Town of Weston to help them envision the potential of a challenging site that included..
The Sieff Hospital / Weinstein Vaadia Architects
© Amit Geron
- Architects: Weinstein Vaadia Architects
- Location: Tzfat, Israel
- Architects In Charge: Shereen Ghanem, Eyal Gvirsman
- Area: 7000.0 sqm
- Project Year: 2016
- Photographs: Amit Geron
© Amit Geron
© Amit Geron
From the architect. The site of the Sieff Hospital, amidst the majestic Galilee landscape, presents an unparalleled opportunity for incorporating Nature into the fabric of the building.
We perceived the location of the hospital as an opportunity to design a building that can benefit from the unique therapeutic qualities that only contact with nature can give.
© Amit Geron
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The project was shaped by two primary aims: clarity, simplicity, and quality of environment.
A building that is easy to understand conveys calm and peacefulness.
The patient’s rooms are arranged in a logical sequence along the main public area to create a clear and simple hierarchy for the users.
The organization of the building and its relationship with the landscape creates an environment for the patients and staff that are harmonious and coherent.
© Amit Geron
© Amit Geron
The variety of views and their relationship to the various activities of the hospital offer therapeutic benefits and a working environment filled with natural light and a sense of space.
The public spaces of the building are open inwards onto peaceful, internal landscaped court, affording privacy and relaxation.
The patient’s rooms are oriented outwards, opening to views of mountains, cliffs and valleys.
© Amit Geron
Plan
Introducing Volume #48: The Research Turn
© Volume
Volume #48: The Research Turn is comprised entirely of interviews and conversations. We wanted to learn from those who have been instrumental in shifting the boundaries and shaping today’s landscape of creative knowledge production. The issue also includes the catalogue for BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions by Malkit Shoshan, the Dutch contribution to the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale.
Over the coming weeks Volume will share a curated selection of essays from this issue on ArchDaily. This represents the continuation of a partnership between two platforms with global agendas: in the case of ArchDaily to provide inspiration, knowledge and tools to architects across the world and, in the case of Volume, “to voice architecture any way, anywhere, anytime [by] represent[ing] the expansion of architectural territories and the new mandate for design.”
Today it’s not so important what you know but rather how you think. Progress, in this sense, is predicated by critical reflection on ways of knowing and disciplinary traditions of thought. This issue of Volume – the second in our series on learning – is dedicated to mapping the contemporary field of research that is pushing processes of knowledge production forward in architecture, art and the social sciences.
© Volume
Research Horizons / Nick Axel
Buildings get built, inhabited, and begin to come undone. Political regimes rise, have their fun, and fall. The knowledge that goes into and comes out of such processes lives a different kind of life, though. Ideas are birthed, yet their death is an impermanent state of forget. Buildings can impress and politics can mobilize, but knowledge is wild; there’s no telling just what it will do. With immateriality comes a certain type of power, which industrialism has taught us can be wielded to virtuous effect of both benefit and harm. All it takes is setting our mind to it.
The topic of urgency haunting creative practice today cannot be seen if not in light of the knowledge economy and the question it poses of an idea’s relevancy. In spite of the immateriality of its resource, the knowledge economy—as an economy—is subject to traditional market logics such as competition, appropriation and exploitation. Whereas commodity value is basically determined by supply and demand, the valuation of knowledge is determined by potential. It is something that needs to be ‘applied’, though the meaning, mechanism and site of such application is radically contingent. The value of knowledge is thus inherently speculative, which as we’ve seen over the past decades couples quite nicely with finance.
© Volume
In 2012 alone, industries that produce or use intellectual property contributed over five times as much value to the United States economy—$5.06 trillion—as did the construction industries. In a strange sense, there is an enormous amount of investment being made into the future. Yet whose future, and of what kind? “Research and Development” has become the general economic category for processes of knowledge production. R&D has always been an imperative for market economies, yet the extent to which value is placed on knowledge today forces us to reconsider its social role and our relation to it.
Research is conducted and used in countless ways, yet it tends to draw from the space it is performed within. Research produces knowledge, but often speaks to and acts upon disciplinary traditions of knowledge production. Take architecture, for instance: both Le Corbusier’s research into the architectural application of industrial processes and, following him, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s research into American pop architecture led to radical transformations in the thought and practice of architecture. What we can witness in these two examples, which are just two of a countless many, is the way research reconfigured the relationship between what was considered to fall on either side of Architecture’s disciplinary border.
© Volume
The historical trajectory of architecture is affected by changes that, albeit taking place within the worlds where it operates, lay far beyond its grasp of its creative agency. In this sense research presents an opportunity for architecture to control the affect of these changes. To return to the examples above, Le Corbusier responded to the nascency of industrial society, whereas Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour responded to the aberrancy of modern urbanity. These two examples, whose research effectively laid the grounds for modern and postmodern architecture, respectively, were able to carve out spaces of creative autonomy by regarding social history with critical sensitivity. As an act of responding, research is ultimately determined by its position.
This issue of Volume – the second in our series on learning – is dedicated to mapping the contemporary field of research in architecture and beyond. Conditions of knowledge production are infrastructural. It’s for this reason that we felt it appropriate to give a survey of research over the past two decades the name of a ‘turn’. We expanded our gaze and looked to contemporary art and the social sciences in an attempt to learn from fellow discursive practices. What follows is an issue comprised entirely of dialogues—a first for Volume—whose character ranges from interviews to conversations. We wanted to learn from individuals whose stories and experiences we understood as being instrumental in shaping the contemporary field of creative knowledge production. The survey we took is in no way comprehensive or exhaustive, but it does begin to reveal the contours of the ground and identify landmarks in the today’s discursive landscape.
© Volume
Interviews
- You Only Walk This Way Once / Anthony Acciavatti & Vere van Gool
- Upgrading the Architect / Dag Boutsen
- Participatory Validation / Lex ter Braak
- Excavating the Forgotten / Beatriz Colomina
- Ulterior Motives / Reinier de Graaf
- Molding the Future / DUS Architects
- Pursuing Truth / Tim Ingold & Judith Winter
- Rearticulating the Problem / Adrian Lahoud
- Worlds within Worlds / Chus Martínez & Sofia Lemos
- Insert: BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions / Malkit Shoshan
- Seeing Architecture / John Palmesino
- For and Against Service / Stephan Petermann
- The Archaeology of Research / Sarah Rifky & May al-Ibrashy
- To Encounter the Contemporary / Irit Rogoff & Füsun Türetken
- Make Friends Not Art / Ruangrupa
- Exploring the Frontier / Rural Urban Framework & Land+Civilization Compositions
- Think Through Tank / Supersudaca & Francisco Díaz
- After Bologna / Henk Slager
- Recomposing the Planet / Territorial Agency
- Platform Policy / UNStudio
- Provoked into Being / Eyal Weizman
- In the Mood for Brick / Jan Peter Wingender
Volume is an “agenda-setting” quarterly magazine, published by the Archis Foundation (The Netherlands). Founded in 2005 as a research mechanism by Ole Bouman (Archis), Rem Koolhaas (OMA*AMO), and Mark Wigley (Columbia University Laboratory for Architecture/C-Lab), the project “reaches out for global views on designing environments, advocates broader attitudes to social structures, and reclaims the cultural and political significance of architecture.”
Volume #48 launched at the Dutch Pavilion of the 15th Venice Biennale with a breakfast roundtable discussion dedicated to topics dealt with in BLUE. The discussion included Malkit Shoshan (FAST, curator of BLUE), Kai Vöckler (Archis Interventions Berlin), Reinier de Graaf (OMA), and Ethel Baraona Pohl (DPR-Barcelona).
The latest issue can be purchased here.
Traditional farmhouse in Austria updated with contemporary extension
Hammerschmid Pachl Seebacher Architekten has added a contemporary extension to a traditional farmhouse in Austria, featuring rough-sawn spruce cladding and a folded fibre-cement roof (+ slideshow). (more…)
Racquet Club Luis Machuca y Asociados / Luis Machuca y Asociados
Courtesy of Luis Machuca
- Architects: Luis Machuca y Asociados
- Location: Málaga, Spain
- Area: 22562.93 m2
- Project Year: 2015
- Photography: Cortesía de Luis Machuca
- Promotor: Ferrovial Servicios S.A.
- Contructora: Ferrovial Agroman
- Presupuesto: 2.257.361,90 €
Courtesy of Luis Machuca
From the architect. Inacua Racquet Club is following the enlargement of the sporting Inacua sports complex in the west of the city of Malaga. Seven tennis courts and fifteen paddle courts need a house club with a lot off services where we find the main entrance.
Courtesy of Luis Machuca
For this purpose this building contains locker rooms, shop, tennis schools, tennis courts management and the restaurant, and whose connections are made outdoor thanks to the mild climate of the Costa del Sol.
Plan
Thus the architecture within its boundaries becomes a series of porches, where waiting, chat or rest is done sheltered from the sun and enjoying the sea breeze.
Courtesy of Luis Machuca
It is in these outer / inner points are where the architecture becomes richer.
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The building is arranged as a gable roof and L-shaped, whose main entrance is a large hollow by c / Marilyn Monroe and fully facing to the Inacua Pools building. Shelter in such space with separated access are the restaurant, the shop and the reception of the club, the latter preceded by a partially covered courtyard that serves waiting for visitors and players.
Courtesy of Luis Machuca
Towards the interior, the building is opened to a large courtyard, ranking well on the one side the locker room and on the other the restaurant, turning the courtyard into the social center of the whole installation.
Plan
Nottdesign Creates an Elegant Apartment in Dnepropetrovsk
Wood and Marble is a private home located in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Completed in 2016, it was designed by Nottdesign. Wood and Marble by Nottdesign: “This apartment, designed in an elegant and laconic minimalist style, is located in a new residential complex in Dnepropetrovsk. Our team managed to accommodate the spacious living room, the study, the master bedroom, two bathrooms – the master and guest, the functional and practical kitchen and..
ECOLE 42 / In&Edit Architecture
© Michel Denancé
- Architects: In&Edit Architecture
- Location: 96 Boulevard Bessières, 75017 Paris, France
- Area: 4242.0 sqm
- Project Year: 2013
- Photographs: Michel Denancé
- Project Budget: 9.500.000 €
© Michel Denancé
Plan
Ecole 42 is a new is a private French computer programming school funded by Xavier Niel
Located in the heart of Paris (in the 17tharrondissement). Its innovative approach challenges the traditional educational system by providing training that is ‘free, open and accessible to all’ and is based around Peer 2 Peer learning.
© Michel Denancé
In&Edit architecture were commissioned to imagine create an original concept for an environment which would support the needs of its unique pedagogical approach.
The site, a former government building built in the 1960s with a space of over 4200sqm was largely preserved with no change to the existing structure. Internally, the architecture responds to the need for collaborative learning spaces by providing places for interaction of various scales and atmospheres. Over four levels, the students have access to workstations configured to optimize collaboration while a series of purpose built pods offer a sense of enclosure depending on project needs.
Courtesy of IN&EDIT
The treatment of the façade was pivotal in creating a strong identity and street presence. The addition of a perforated mesh ‘skin’ creates the impression of a continuous volume from the exterior whilst improving the building’s thermal performance.
© Michel Denancé
Based on the idea that digital technology have destroyed any remaining regularity IN&EDIT has created interior furnitures far from classic geometry
Each piece has been designed and plugged in different spaces following needs and functions to be able to create a strong identity for 42 Concept.
© Michel Denancé
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Falke Svatun’s Tumble vase sits on the edge of a shelf
The R&D and innovative port of Anting International Automobile City, Site D / Atelier Deshaus
© SU Shengliang
- Architects: Atelier Deshaus
- Location: Shanghai, Shanghai, China
- Design Team: CHEN Qifeng, LIU Yichun, SONG Chongfang, WANG Longhai, FAN Beilei
- M & E Engineering: SIADR
- Client: Anting International Automobile City
- Area: 36600.0 sqm
- Project Year: 2015
- Photographs: SU Shengliang
From the architect. The R&D and innovative port of Anting International Automobile City, which is situated northwest to the suburb of Shanghai, is a project mainly programmed for the research and development of automobiles. The total construction area is over 150,000 sqm. Atelier Deshaus undertook the design project for the site D out of the five parcels of the site.
Site Plan
© SU Shengliang
An overall plan for the project has detailed a general arrangement for the parcels and outline and floor numbers for each individual building. However, the program was ambiguously set, without specification for use, that two major functions are roughly presented in the program, workshop for pre-manufacturing and offices for research and development, without any other specified use envisioned. The site, characterized by nothing but anonymity, provides no reference for the design. A sense of alienation haunts the site, just like any other new towns developed in the suburb. In an effort to get rid of that sense of alienation, we intended to bring a sense of belonging to the “home” for the researchers, engineers, apart from fulfilling the functional needs and flexibility for various modes inhabitation.
© SU Shengliang
That intention constitutes the basic point out project revolves. The basic strategy is to define the project as settlements with luxuriant ecological hierarchy. Each piece of settlements consist of two overlapped parts. The upper part, ranging from 2nd floor to 4th floor, accommodates the office units for research and development., a bar plaza in the middle has the focus of the whole settlements comprising piles of office units. Units was intentionally set back layer by layer thus a gesture embracing the sky comes into being, a third dimension besides the depth and width was constituted. That artificial topology of terrace is also integrated by the outdoor staircases, as the extension of the inner court yard, or plaza if you would like. It is thus a place for rest ,chat and events intended for the staff.
© SU Shengliang
Crawling on the ground floor are the pre-fab workshops, rooms of equipment and service rooms, altogether 8 volumes in various sizes. Organized around the inner courtyard, detached from each other by a 4-meter aisle at minimum for logistic circulation, the corner-rounded glass rooms are sandwiched between the earth and the platform overhanging, in a space strongly identified with the horizontal dimension. The upper part bright, explicit, organized, opening up to the sky while the lower part dark, ambiguous, subtle and crawling over the ground. Thus a sense of verticality comes into being in the settlement , initiating an explicit respond from earth to sky.
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© SU Shengliang
Martin Heidegger suggested in “the origin of the work of art” that “to be a work means: to set up a world”. As architectural work is concerned, to set up a world could be materialized as to set up a place. In this case, the quantified fulfillment in the material level is no longer the whole matrix of Function, rather a functioning in which the users may feel esteemed should be involved also. Following that to create a sense of belonging becomes the key to the very functioning.
© SU Shengliang
Ambiguous program settings and anonymous sites have altogether formulated a typical tone of Chinese contemporary architecture practice in the radical urbanization. Apart from fulfilling the functional and regulatory requirements, is there any possibility, in a common project like this, to create a sense of belonging wherein the users feel esteemed and rooted? This constitutes the basic proposition the project tries to respond, with phenomenological reflection.
© SU Shengliang
Act for Kids / m3architecture
- Architects: m3architecture
- Location: Townsville QLD, Australia
- Architect In Charge: m3architecture
- Project Year: 2014
Floor Plans
From the architect. This project acts as a strong, fort-like home for abused children.
The Act for Kids project at James Cook University in Townsville looked to the context of architect James Birrell’s late 1960s foundation buildings found on the campus. Some of these in off-form concrete and grey face concrete blockwork, with simple geometries and plasticised forms.
In the public realm, these are fine qualities – firmness with an overriding sense of delight. These were thought to be suitable qualities for the new building accommodating administration, day care and most importantly, a suite of therapy spaces.
The design is conceived as a concrete block perimeter, with therapy rooms in the inner sanctum, sculpted around two stands of trees, in response to the well documented benefit that landscape brings to therapy.
The new project takes Birrell’s approach in a new direction. His buildings are of a scale and gravitas suited to their role as major public buildings. The new project asks what a public realm agenda for children might be like – and not just any children, but those who are in the kind of circumstances so as to require this facility.
A bull-nosed concrete block was used as the standard unit. This was laid to achieve two patterns – a double stretcher stack bond, and a double stretcher-stretcher bond. The former is used on the front façade where the unit by unit construction of the building can be felt. The latter is used on the side walls, chasing the contours up the hill. The two courses meet idiosyncratically at the acute corner of the site.
Other materials, forms and spaces hybridise the world of kids and ‘high architecture’.
In response to its function, the building has taken the foundational approach established by Birrell and with further simplified geometries and means, resolved a building with a balance of firmness and delight.
