© Art Gray Photography

• Architects: Patrick Tighe Architecture
• Location: Redondo Beach, CA, United States
• Project Team: Evelina Sausina, Michael Ho, Michael Nesbit
• Area: 3800.0 ft2
• Project Year: 2015
• Photographs: Art Gray Photography

• Structural Engineer: MMC Associates
• Glasswork: Altered Glass
• Upholstery Workshop: Modern 2 Los Angeles
• Furniture: David Dunn Interiors & Architecture
• General Contractor: PA Design

© Art Gray Photography

Plan

The 3,500 sq. ft. home is located in Redondo Beach, one block from the Pacific Ocean. The simple massing is accentuated by articulated openings, situated and designed to frame views of the surrounding mountains and ocean. The geometry used to create the system of apertures continues throughout the interior. Surfaces of pattern and openings define zones of circulation and living spaces.

© Art Gray Photography

The home consists of three stories and is designed with an open floor plan. The living spaces open to several private outdoor terraces including a roof top garden that takes advantage of the surroundings. The home is environmentally sound. Sustainable strategies include photovoltaics for power and a solar hydronic system for the heating of water. The latest in green technologies, materials and building systems are used throughout. The distinct form of the building optimizes airflow, natural light and sun protection. The landscape is in keeping with the native coastal vegetation.

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© Art Gray Photography

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© Anthony Cotsifas

On the eve of the Venice Biennale, The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman sits down with Alejandro Aravena in an intimate profile for T Magazine’s Beauty Issue. Visiting a number of projects by the architect and his office, Elemental, Kimmelman experiences socially minded architecture in an age of informal growth, income inequality, and mounting threats linked to climate change, all while learning about Aravena’s own path and growth as a practitioner. Although told by colleagues that he might be standoffish, Kimmelman finds Aravena to be “earnest, open, a little nerdy –– and deadly serious.”

Describing the work of Elemental, Aravena asserts, “We don’t think of ourselves as artists. Architects like to build things that are unique. But if something is unique it can’t be repeated, so in terms of it serving many people in many places, the value is close to zero.” Instead, the office has made a reputation on what is called “incremental housing,” building hundreds of two-story, two-bedroom homes with roofs, kitchens and bathrooms, each with an unfinished second half, left indeterminate in order to keep costs low. Once settled, residents can assess their needs and finances, and are able to build out the house’s other half “if, when and as they can.” Visiting Elemental’s Villa Verde project, Kimmelman encounters residents who are grateful for the opportunity to own a home and embracing of the incremental building philosophy.

© Anthony Cotsifas

Attending Universidad Católica de Santiago in the years of Chile’s dictatorship in the 1980s, Aravena earned an education steeped in practicality. “Our professors were practitioners, not theorists, who taught how to get buildings built,” says Aravena. Attesting to this pragmatism, Kimmelman notes, “His conversation tends not toward architecture and aesthetics but towards practical affairs –– negotiations, economics, materials, numbers –– which for him can be a source of wonderment.”

For more about Aravena, Elemental, and what it means to be an architect practicing at the vanguard of the field, find the complete article for T Magazine, here.

Aravena will take T Magazine through the Venice Architecture Biennale before it opens to the public — live at http://ift.tt/27QfARB, this Thursday, May 26, at 12pm EST.

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© Invisible Gentleman

• Architects: D.A ARCHITECTES
• Location: 33600 Pessac, France
• Area: 7498.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2015
• Photographs: Invisible Gentleman

• Graphic Designer : F.Cochet, Y.Orlic
• Engineering : Clima+(technical)
• Label: LEED GOLD

© Invisible Gentleman

Plan

From the architect. Liryc is a research, treatment, innovation and teaching institute, completely dedicated to the study, diagnosis and treatment of cardiological disorders. 

© Invisible Gentleman

A particular site.

Clear, punctuated by slender trunks of pines and oaks, striped by their shadows, lined with heather and thorn brush; it is this atmosphere of golden light filtered through the foliage that we wanted to fully understand the daily life of the researchers.

Model

This is why we proposed dividing the Liryc program into three entities: the first dedicated to reception and communication; the second to offices and the third to experimentation. This fragmentation of the project allows nature to interplay within the spaces, giving each a particular view, which can be contemplated from the balconies or terraces. The three buildings that host the workspaces are in concrete, solid, durable. They are connected by wooden galleries which open at regular intervals, highlighting the motions and flows that punctuate the movements within the institute. Raw materials (concrete and wood) were used purposefully, providing a simple architecture, which assumes and displays the nature of the construction materials, limiting composite materials and accessories.

© Invisible Gentleman

A barrier of large vertical blades in gilded wood encases the three buildings to the South, filtering the light, limiting the space without suffocating it. 90 meters in length, it marks the threshold and distinguishes the institute providing its scale within the landscape.

© Invisible Gentleman

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© Leigh Simpson

• Architects: BBM Sustainable Architects Ltd
• Location: Hadlow Down, Uckfield, East Sussex TN22, UK
• Area: 459.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2015
• Photographs: Leigh Simpson

• Site Manager: Chalmers & Co.
• Contractors: Chalmers & Co.
• Craftsmen: Inglis Hall & Co.
• Construction Time: 20 months
• Build Rate Approx: £3000/m2 (house only)

© Leigh Simpson

From the architect. BBM were commissioned in 2008 to propose a sustainable master plan for a country estate in East Sussex. Our client wanted us to consider the viability of developing a derelict 1940’s dairy, retrofitting and extending a 1970’s house and a 19th Century Oast House situated next to each other. Working with Studio Engleback, who produced a parallel strategy for the surrounding landscape, the challenge was to create a low energy development from a brief that is traditionally extremely energy hungry, i.e. a new heated swimming pool with steam room and sauna, an external ‘natural pool’, and a high specification country house set in 275 acres of Wealden countryside that includes a lake and 150 acres of standing coppice woodland.

© Leigh Simpson

Plan

BBM & Studio Engleback came up with a low carbon strategy for this normally high carbon programme. It was agreed that local construction materials would be used, that the buildings would be extremely well sealed and insulated, and that a mixture of heavyweight and lightweight materials would be used to make the most of their abilities to store heat or insulate.

© Leigh Simpson

Our clients’ woodland is also the source of woodchip for the new biomass boiler that provides energy for heating the whole site. Nearby woodlands have also provided timber for cladding the dwelling and pool house inside and out, as well as providing joinery. Waste timber also forms the majority of the external wall and roof insulation. Designing a heated pool house plus sauna and steam room predominately out of timber products was particularly challenging, and we think, successful.

Pool

Local authority Planners asked that the pool house kept the form and volume of the derelict diary it replaced. However the new house was allowed to be a lot more expressive, responding to its site and orientation, its proximity to the double Oast House that its Northern roof and three story ‘light canon’ begin to emulate. The form of the roof attempts to reconcile the orientation of the building that faces South East: the roof is lifted up and twisted around to face due South allowing solar PV panels to benefit. It also expresses the main entrance of the dwelling viewed from the East, as well as reflecting the form of the neighbouring Oast House beyond. This undulating form is reflected in the first floor ceilings that also express this functionality. This expressive roof form collects rain water for use on the site, harnesses solar energy and controls natural light allowing it to penetrate the centre of the plan to express the treble height of the stair case, the north light over the living room and perhaps most poetically at different times of the day via the light canon over the meditation room.

© Leigh Simpson

The new house was designed to relate to the surrounding landscape in a number of ways while the pool house is broadly North-South facing with its straight- forward solar and sedum roofs. Each elevation of the house is quite different, responding as it does to orientation to the Sun and major views out towards the lake and beyond, as well as to the need for solar gain in the winter and shading from the Sun in the Summer.

© Leigh Simpson

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