Courtesy of Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer

• Architects: Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer
• Location: Chiloé Archipelago, Los Lagos Region, Chile
• Area: 180.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2015
• Photographs: Courtesy of Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer

• Architects: Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer
• Location: Chiloé Archipelago, Los Lagos Region, Chile
• Collaborating Architects: Francisco Torres Rojas, Tal Sustiel
• Owners: Mario Makuc, Cecilia Aguirre
• Area: 180.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2015
• Photographs: Courtesy of Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer

Courtesy of Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer

From the architect. This project is located in the north of the big island of Chiloé, in an area called Huei hue, where the sea penetrates the land as a stretchmark, weaving a close relationship between land and sea.

Courtesy of Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer

The terrain is located in a sort of a peninsula from where it strategically dominates the relations with its surroundings: on the one hand, the inland entries of the sea that come from this arm, and on the other hand the immeasurable Gulf of Ancud, having as its backdrop the detachment of the Andes and its volcanoes, generously receiving the light from the east, north and west, and thus exposing itself incidentally to the strong winds and rain coming from the northwest.

Courtesy of Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer

These natural conditions combined with a specific assignment for a joined but dispersed single family housing, suggest that the project has the capacity to consider its different uses constantly. An elderly couple with grown children, grandchildren, and friends, where all need their space and where the house is not always used simultaneously. The house must adapt as much as to two people and fifteen people alike, always practical and comfortable in its different functions.

Ground Floor

Section

2nd Floor Plan

Thus, the proposal arises with a strong image of the Chilotes rural settlements, of clustering, of summation of volumes, where they are deployed in different orientations, taking advantage of the views, topography and sheltering each other from wind and rain.

Courtesy of Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer

In this way, a greater volume arises, the main house, which organizes roofs, terraces and two attached volumes, joined by a large terrace. These volumes emplaced each guest’s and children’s bedrooms with their own bathrooms by way of another independent houses, which is enabled only when used. That way the house is inhabited by openings and enclosures, like floodgates, which open depending on the number of members, accommodating itself to the needs and requirements in their specific times.

Courtesy of Eugenio Ortúzar + Tania Gebauer

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Many technological advancements have changed the way we design in the past 150 years, but perhaps none has had a greater impact than the invention of the passenger elevator. Prior to Elisha Otis’ design for the elevator safety brake in 1853, buildings rarely reached 7 stories. Since then, buildings have only been growing taller and taller. In 2009, the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, maxed out at 163 floors (serviced by Otis elevators). Though a century and half separates those milestones, in that time elevator technology has actually changed relatively little – until recently.

The past few years have seen many new elevator innovations. While existing elevator cables maxed out at approximately 500 meters in length before becoming unsupportable, UltraRope, a cable technology by Finnish elevator manufacturer KONE revealed last year, allows elevators to travel up to 1 km without stopping, double the current distance. To increase elevator capacity, German company ThyssenKrupp has developed their TWIN technology, which stacks 2 elevators within the same shaft (with an extra stop below the lowest level and above the highest floors, so one cabin can park at this spot to give access to the desired floor to his twin cabin). The company is also currently working on MULTI, an elevator system that eliminates the need for a cable, allowing elevators to travel independently, both vertically and horizontally through shaft loops within a building.

Additionally, mechanical companies have begun utilizing the internet of things the improve on the functionality of their elevator systems. ThyssenKrupp, in collaboration with Microsoft, have launched a system known as MAX that provides real time feedback from elevators to service technicians, allowing the technicians to know which parts will need to be repaired or replaced before they break down, reducing the out-of-service time that currently slows down many elevator systems. Most recently, Schindler Transit Management Group has released an app called myPORT that increases the interactivity between building and person. Users can set their destination and travel preferences, so an elevator will automatically be called to arrive precisely when you do. And since the elevator will only be called for people granted access, the building will enjoy increased security.

All of this leads to the question of how this might impact the buildings we occupy. With MULTI, it is easy to imagine buildings that no longer need to revolve around a core of elevator banks, enabling easy circulation through buildings like OMA’s CCTV tower, or even more outlandish forms in tall buildings. With less space dedicated to circulation, more floor space can be freed up for unique spaces on each floor of a building, and pencil towers with tiny footprints (such as those gaining popularity in Manhattan) can be designed more efficiently.

ThyssenKruppe's Test Tower in Rottweil, Germany, is currently under construction. It will be the test site for the MULTI system when complete in 2016. Image Courtesy of ThyssenKrupp

The improved security and reduced wait times resulting from internet of things technologies also means greater accessibility to higher floors, potentially bringing public spaces higher into the sky. And since that may in turn demand housing on higher and higher floors, we now have access to strong enough cables to make the trip without sky lobbies. With increased density becoming more common in the world’s major cities, buildings will need to become more efficient and purposeful on all of their floors, and these elevator companies may provide us with the technology to do it.

As Rem Koolhaas describes in his seminal Delirious New York, the elevator has allowed architects to design buildings “able to support newly discovered territories.” With the new technologies now available to us, we can continue to explore the best way to occupy our aerial terrain.

TWIN elevator at ThyssenKrupp Headquarters Essen. Image Courtesy of ThyssenKrupp

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© João Morgado

• Architects: PF Architecture Studio
• Location: R. de Santa Teresa 40, 4050-294 Porto, Portugal
• Area: 110.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2013
• Photographs: João Morgado

• Engineering: ASL&Associados
• Construction: Homereab

© João Morgado

From the architect. Santa Teresa is a street located in the heart of the reborn Oporto downtown, A big urban area that slowly got abandoned and grew older in the last thirty years, but has recently been subject of a radical change, either social, cultural, economic and architectural consequently

© João Morgado

With in this dynamic, very driven by tourism, we were invited to refurbish the Santa Teresa building :a house of the nineteenth century, on a typical batch builtin to many of the quarters of Oporto. The plant is a rectangle (5.50×20,00m) with centred but a symmetric stairs,which has undergone several use changes over the century. XX,coming to us in a state of pre-ruin.

Plan

The challenge: create the largest possible number of small apartments for temporary lease, city breaks.

© João Morgado

The proposal is assumed in response to this program, in which the existing guide serves us for a timelines dialogue, and based on a simple principle: re-inhabit the space respecting the two moments: the past and the present, the existing and the new. The solution comes ironically from Malvina Reynolds Little Boxes song.

© João Morgado

The principle of preserving the entire building structure, floors, walls, ceilings, doors and windows with their formal characteristics and unique tectonic, and integrate small white, unpretentious and abstract boxes that house the new program elements such as kitchens and homes bath, formally defining the existing and the new.

Section

The result are nine purged apartments, where the light plays a fundamental role in the space design. The building’s shape made possible on the ground floor an attic apartments, the design of different typologies through the use of mezzanines and outdoor spaces.

© João Morgado

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You don’t get to pick your parents, and you don’t get to pick your project managers. If you’re lucky, you’ll work with a project manager who will help you learn the things that schools don’t teach. If you’re not lucky — and based on the comments we get on our Facebook page and on our site, most of us aren’t — all you will get is fodder for complaining about your job.

Hopefully you can find comfort in the fact that you’re not the only one being derided at work. From what we hear from fans all over the world, the experiences of working in architecture are pretty much the same everywhere.

View more Architexts comics, here.

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