© Imagen Subliminal

• Architects: Manuel Ocaña
• Location: Calle Torrejon de la Calzada, 28052 Madrid, Madrid, Spain
• Promoter: Isabel Ocaña del Valle
• Project Team: Manuel Ocaña del Valle, Miguel Molins, Yolanda Herranz
• Area: 51.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2016
• Photographs: Imagen Subliminal

• Production: Manuel Ocaña Fast&Furious Production Office
• Budget: 5.000 €

© Imagen Subliminal

One. It is a refurbishment work  for an especially dear, single woman. The apartment is located where the sun sets in Madrid. The space is interior, configured by three bays of 17 m2.  

© Imagen Subliminal

Two. She is determined about what she wants. Authentic wood pavement, geometrical floors, a tatoo as Beyonce´s and gentrifying environment with all the clichés that it involves.  

© Imagen Subliminal

Three. We decide three things. First, there should not be conventional partitions nor doors. Second, never reaching the ceiling with anything opaque. Third, and most difficult one, getting disoriented in 50 m2.  

Diagram

Four. Spatially. Compartimentaticion is made only by furniture disposition or glass partitions. A mirroring volume with 500x221x221 cm. dimensions allows hiding, misleading and amplifying the space.  

© Imagen Subliminal

Five. Materiality. IKEA furniture is packaged into formwork board boxes. The structure of glass partitions is made out of crude steel material, 10.10.1 mm. “U” shaped profiles and 30.15.1 mm tubes. All 166 glass pieces embedded in those air-walls are all the same size, fixed with old black putty glazier. They are 3 mm. thick, which increases transparency and anti-reflection issues that are not achieved with common and thicker laminated glasses.  

Plan

Six. Three sixes, Three Facts.  At this housing scale is better not to project installations along the ceiling, but getting them through the floor and out on the  walls. The encounter between baseboards bouxes and these hydraulic tiles with geometric and coloured patterns has to be mirrored, anyting else just doesn´t make sense. And once again, it is confirmed that a centered column into a space is always desirable and useful.

© Imagen Subliminal

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© Kei Sugino

• Architects: Alphaville Architects
• Location: Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan
• Area: 3000.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2014
• Photographs: Kei Sugino

• Structural Engineer: Takashi Manda (Takashi Manda Structural Design)
• Site Area : 52.93 sqm
• Total Floor Area: 84.86 sqm

© Kei Sugino

From the architect. The current wooden house system based on bearing wall calculation hardly fits in with the ‘eel’s bed’ or the elongated housing lots typical of Kyoto, an old capital of Japan. While the width of lots has been segmentalized  to provide minimal daylight, ventilation and access over a long period of time, the only option today of opening up the frontage is either steel structure or specialized wooden frame structure.

© Kei Sugino

This project’s tiny site west of the Imperial Palace requires enhancement of spatial connection in terms of both plan and section. We therefore opted for the wood structure: integrated the structural body with partition walls, assigned the stairs that comprise the minimal surface element connecting different floor levels to be the bearing wall, and let the braces be a pair of tension members that traverse the building’s entire frame work from the first to the third floor. As these two braces also serve as columns supporting the beams at the end of each floor slab, their motion within the three dimensional space are reflected to the form of the slab.

Floor Plan

These braces are also meaningful because they are one medium of inviting carpenters to the small-scale housing projects, a trial that is unusual in other similar residential projects. As for the low budget and convenience, most small-scale houses in Japan use locally pre-fabricated timber materials. However, this house’s 3-dimensional shapes and the use of unique braces required the craftmanship of Japanese carpenters. The architects are making an effort to merge traditional values of craftmanship and contemporary advantages of industrial technology here.

© Kei Sugino

Furthermore, this project’s main focus lies on the concept to integrate public and private space and furthermore 3-dimensional gradation of them within the house. Due to the elongated housing lot, most houses in this old urban fabric may feel isolated even though these lots are suitable for the privacy respect. One way to solve this issue is to preserve the maximum transparency of the interior space and structure to connect public area in the front and the private courtyard in the back. The partial slabs that do not block one’s view from front to back like usual whole-covered floor slabs successfully integrate public and private in this house.

Axonometric Structure

Long Section

Space composed of just two brace columns, skipped floors and openings to south and north is a three dimensional development of the traditional wood structure consist of floors, pillars and openings to road and garden. This is to propose a  prototype of a wooden structure housing in Kyoto where grids are broken down into strip-shaped housing lots.

© Kei Sugino

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© Hiroyuki Oki

• Architects: MIA Design Studio
• Location: 28 Hiep Binh Chanh Ward, khu phố 3, Hiệp Bình Chánh, Thủ Đức, Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam
• Area: 266.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2015
• Photographs: Hiroyuki Oki

© Hiroyuki Oki

From the architect. It is not so easy to find a comfortable workspace in Saigon. Most people have to work in the cramped urbanscape; everything becomes stifling and polluted atmosphere, where there is less and less open voids, green parks & community spaces becoming very rare in the city.

© Hiroyuki Oki

Conceived from cool canal systems, the movement of life, which looks like the blood veins of Saigon, is slowly being bridged and land filled by the lack of vision of hasty development. However, those  very few remaining inventory of the river are saving the urban gaps in Saigon. Contrary to the current focus on central cities, we ease the spatial orientation, improve peripheral development to find more porous gaps of the municipality.

© Hiroyuki Oki

Vietnamese Southern Culture has been growing up by the river side, we always look forward to release along with the headroom gush endless flow of the Mekong. Since then, the office MIA Design Studio has been formed.

Section

To renovate the Office  from a building in an available row of villas in Binh Thanh District, MIA Design Studio has selected land, which is adjacent to the river, to have a strong connection between the workspace and riverside landscape. The design idea is not so special, we just try to make working space simple and convenient enhance the adaption to the surrounding landscape, blur the boundary between inside and outside. A workshop and a conference room are more than enough for a studio; we do not want to limit the space around the wall, only the decorative bulkhead with high usability for the models and materials, let the other things possibly become idyllic. That is a liberal or a link between inside and outside.

© Hiroyuki Oki

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As part of ArchDaily’s coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.

As an architectural device the pool represents a physical edge but it also expresses a social and personal frontier. This is explored through the narratives broadcast in the exhibition space for which we have selected eight storytellers: Olympians Shane Gould and Ian Thorpe; authors Anna Funder and Christos Tsiolkas; musician Paul Kelly; environmentalist Tim Flannery; fashion designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales from Romance Was Born; and Indigenous art curator Hetti Perkins. Their interviews reveal stories of fulfillment and accomplishment, of segregation and inclusion, of learning from the past and reflecting for the future, all through the lens of the pool. 

The Pool – Architecture, Culture and Identity in Australia. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu

“As access to a public pool in the post-WWII decades came to be regarded as a right and not just a luxury, their potential as sites of safe swimming but also generators of social capital became the subject of parliamentary debate.” 

– Hannah Lewi, from ‘More than just a hole in the ground’, in Celebration: The 22nd Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia 

The Pool – Architecture, Culture and Identity in Australia. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu

A setting for life

Mysterious and familiar, tame and wild, natural and man-made, a pool is where the communal and the personal intersect. The pool is a vital force in Australian life, not only as the setting for formative childhood memories, family gatherings and community events but also as the stage for sporting feats that fuel the nation’s pride. A backdrop to the good times, the pool is also a deeply contested space in Australian history, a space that has highlighted racial discrimination and social disadvantage.

The Pool – Architecture, Culture and Identity in Australia. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu

Architecture, culture and identity

The Pool uncovers a vast commentary about Australia and our values as Australians, and explores how this intersects with our architecture. Few spaces can represent so simply and wholly the identity and passions of a nation and inspire such a complex narrative. By celebrating the cultural signifcance of pools in Australia, we seek the critical engagement of architects in a broader public debate about the civic and social value of the spaces we create.

The Pool – Architecture, Culture and Identity in Australia. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu

Social infrastructure

For all their immediate appeal, pools in many communities in Australia are facing signi cant challenges as social institutions. High maintenance costs and labour-intensive operations mean that the pool does not resist the scrutiny of economic rationalism. Improving the economic model of a pool is certainly an issue worth addressing, however the social capital of the pool needs equal consideration in this equation: it is more than a place to swim, it is a place for people to gather and share experiences, highlighting signi cant community value.

The Pool – Architecture, Culture and Identity in Australia. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu

Architecture for the many

The stories of The Pool are unapologetically personal, subjective and anecdotal. They are a selection of many possible narratives that acknowledge the breadth of our audience and of our contributors. Using The Pool as a platform for the sharing of stories, we have created a space for discussion that is accessible to all. A place where we can all participate, observe and learn. 

The Pool – Architecture, Culture and Identity in Australia. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu

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© Hiroshi Ito

• Architects: Furuichi and Associates
• Location: Sapporo, Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan
• Structure: Umezawa Structural Engineers lab
• Project Year: 2002
• Photographs: Hiroshi Ito

© Hiroshi Ito

From the architect. This architecture possesses two functions: a confectionary shop and a concert hall. Both exterior and interior can change their atmosphere according to the two different functions as well as acoustics. In other words, this architecture has a “double face”. Also the client wanted use wood for the interior design to enhance the image of the shop, since Hokkaido is a leading forestry area. 

© Hiroshi Ito

Axonometric

© Hiroshi Ito

A major concern is the acoustic effectiveness. Wood is excellent as a sound reflecting board. Therefore, sound reflectors were designed using the local timber. When it is used as a concert hall, the reverberation time becomes long. On the other hand, when used as a confectionary shop, the reverberation time has to be shortened. In this project, unique ideas such as movable tapestries on the walls and reflective flaps hanging from the ceiling overcome this concern. Within only three hours, furniture must be re-arranged when this architecture changes its face from one function to the other.

Sketch

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