A little over a month since Rotterdam-based practice MVRDV announced a new temporary urban structure—a 180-step staircase, 29 meters tall and 57 meters long—for the heart of city of Rotterdam, the project has been officially opened. Those who ascend the staircase will find a temporary observation deck looking over Rotterdam Centraal, a rooftop bar, and the temporary reopening of the Kriterion cinema that was last active in the 1960s.
The building at the heart of this installation is the Groot Handelsgebouw – one of the first major buildings to be erected following the extensive bombing of Rotterdam in World War II. According to the practice, the scaffolding system used to construct the staircase represents “a nod” to the 75th anniversary of the rebuilding of the city following this disaster.
Since the practice first revealed the project they have conceded that West8—another practice based in Rotterdam—created a temporary staircase, also built from scaffolding, which led onto the roof of Las Palmas – a different historic building in the city. MVRDV, who acknowledge that “there are similarities between the two stairs,” have offered credit for the idea to Adriaan Geuze and West 8.
The project to build an extension on to the nursery school in Zubieta (Ikastola Zubieta) was designed at the request of Donostia-San Sebastian City Council, given the need to increase the number of classrooms and solve the construction and quality deficiencies displayed by the various prefabricated modules where classes were being given on a temporary basis and where the dining room was located.
The challenges that the project needed to address were as follows: to integrate the intervention into the existing building and the rural landscape in which it is located; to improve the functionality and energy efficiency of the building; to provide the whole with an image allowing it to be easily identified as an ikastola (Basque-medium school) or school for children; to limit the completion of the work to one school term.
Plan
Section
The solution proposed called for an adjoining timber unit positioned along the length of the existing building with a profile of one floor only. The arrangement of pitches for the roofs and the combination of windows on the façade at various heights, and in various sizes and colours in shades of green and the timber finish were the tools that succeeded in turning the idea of the project into reality.
The design and layout of gaps addresses the aim of providing a high degree of natural light, and splashing the timber volumes with elements of colour at different heights allows the children to have lines of sight through them. The exterior cladding of the roof comprises light-grey metal sheets, thus giving the roof a sense of lightness and light and providing it with a neutral character within the urban environment. The porches at the entrance to the buildings are formed by the roof itself as it continues its own fractured profile, and by the two vertical wall sections where the slats of the timber panels open, thus creating a visible filter.
The distribution proposed for the ground plan allows systematised, off-site construction to be carried out to address the need to complete the works as quickly as possible, between September and December. That is why, apart from the foundations, nearly all the units of the works are prefabricated, with the use of prefabricated CLT panels a distinctive feature. These panels form façades, interior partitions, roofing and exterior cladding. They are made to measure off-site, which means that the actual on-site execution can take advantage of easy assembly and be carried out in a fast and systematised way.
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The Burj Kahlifa has been the world’s tallest building since 2009, and last year the Dubai-based supertall broke another record by implementing the world’s largest LED-illuminated facade. Building on these accomplishments, Minus5 Architects in collaboration with Studio Mr. White, has proposed using LED technology to create scale silhouettes of architectural monuments from around the world on the facade, including the Empire State Building, Beijing’s CCTV Tower, London’s Shard, Toronto’s CN Tower, Taipei 101, the Petronas Towers, and others.
Courtesy of Minus5 Architects and Studio Mr. White
The silhouettes would slowly scroll across the facade to show viewers the heights of other buildings and structures compared to the 828 meter tall (2717 foot tall) tower. According to the designers, “with this visual concept, Burj Khalifa elegantly shows admiration to all construction marvels, while reasserting its position as the ‘big brother’ tallest building in the world.”
Courtesy of Minus5 Architects and Studio Mr. White
Courtesy of Minus5 Architects and Studio Mr. White
Courtesy of Minus5 Architects and Studio Mr. White
Courtesy of Minus5 Architects and Studio Mr. White
Courtesy of Minus5 Architects and Studio Mr. White
Courtesy of Minus5 Architects and Studio Mr. White
Courtesy of Minus5 Architects and Studio Mr. White
Student Team: Fernando Marín, Constanza Muñoz, Paz Muñoz, Camila Arroyo, Daniel Ruiz, Gabriel Burgos, María Teresa Castro, RocíoBunster, Katherine Poblete, Juan Leiva, Felipe Aravena, Cinthia Rojas, Diego Mora, Daniela Maliqueo, Priscila Lagos, Paula Hernández, Marisela Herrera.
Construction: República Portátil en colaboración con estudiantes de la Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño de la Universidad del Bío-Bío, Escuela de Diseño de la Universidad de Talca, Escuela de Diseño Duoc UC.
Associated Offices: Estudio invasivo, integral diseño.
Client: corfo, copeval
Construction System: wood structure made of trusses, 1”x5” pinewood. cladding: 1”x4” pinewood. – lighting: Lighting system based on fluorescent tubes for the central space and halogen lighting for the interior corridor.
Lighting: Lighting system based on fluorescent tubes for the central space and halogen lighting for the interior corridor.
It is a transportable building made of wood and located on Independence Square in the city of Concepcion, Chile. Commissioned by the development corporation CORFO Chile, it involves creating a pavilion that can accommodate activities and exhibitions related to the productive and creative sector of the city. Taking into account that this is an emerging sector and one of its main problems is the lack of connection between them, we propose a space able to gather, receive and visualize this meeting in a high concurrency urban place. Having completed its period allotted in the public space, the pavilion will be dismounted and transported to the Concepcion Municipal Center of creation and collaborative work C3, for other program activities and use of this space.
To generate visibility through the pavilion, we chose the corner located at the intersection of Caupolicán y Barros Arana streets in the busiest square of Concepcion, a popular place loaded with historic urban objects, the scene of political and religious manifestations, a public space of social contrasts frequented daily by hundreds of people.
A temporary wood building installed in the busiest city center, is without a doubt a foreign object for those who pass through there. Thus, the natural reaction of the passerby is to ask about the purpose or reason for such a structure, moreover, there is a spontaneous effort to try to unravel its meaning.
Model
From this perspective, a number of interpretations and spontaneous explanations on what the meaning of this object as a public fact are generated. From the image of an inverted speaker, a space satellite, which refer to the form and turn the construction into an object. Even the naive interpretation of children as they run inside speak of a home to rest and a circle to play with reference to the wood edge that separates the center from the exterior of the pavilion. But it is the most recurring idea, which has drawn our attention: the one that refers to the hut, the vernacular building of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Most particularly in this partnership is that it is not directly formal, because the hut is a construction with an oval plan, closed on its borders with only two entrances, and a fire inside that expels smoke through two small openings at the top. Thus it obviously contrasts with a pavilion open with 10 entrances, made entirely of wood and open to the sky in its center.
In our culture, a wood construction generates closeness, moreover, a truss made of timber is a sign of precariousness and self-construction. These elements are the manifestation of an intervention with fair resources, which seeks to explain the precise development in synthetic construction processes stripped of ornaments and superfluous and unnecessary elements when materializing a building of this kind. These elements are interpreted as something close, related to the primitive. Those who enter imagine that they could make this with their own hands, with no fancy or foreign technologies. It seems that everything before their eyes is nothing but the reinterpretation of constructive ways that have always been present in our culture.
Model
Pre fabrication
The construction process of the project consists of the development of a series of precast elements made of smaller pieces. These composite elements are: trusses, floors and wall cladding, as well as a series of individual pieces like diagonals and beams. For the construction of the trusses, floors and cladding we developed a series of large scale arrays on which all the prefab elements were serially made. The benefits generated by production based on matrices results in a mechanical process that decreases assembly time and does not require specialized labor for its implementation.
Diagram
Once the prefab units are built, the pavilion is mounted, the fit of each piece is verified and at the same time the process of labeling its parts is done, so that it can be disassembled and stored for transfer and subsequent installation in its temporary destination located in the center of the city. After approximately 30 days the pavilion returns to the C3 creation center and stays there indefinitely.
Foster + Partners has received permission from the San Francisco Planning Commission for the practice’s Oceanwide Center. The 2.3 million square foot (215,000 square meter) development is part of the Transbay development plan, to provide increased density to the city’s South of Market district (SOMA). The plan calls for two buildings, the 605-foot Mission Street Tower, with a hotel and residences, and an 850-foot office and residential tower along First Street. In addition, the project creates new public spaces and pedestrian connections at the base of the towers, simultaneously restoring and revitalizing two historic buildings on the site.
Courtesy of dbox & Foster + Partners
Being adjacent to the Transbay Transit Center, the Planning Commission noted, “[Oceanwide Center will] add employment and housing opportunities within an intense, walkable urban context.” This will reduce dependence on automobiles and simultaneously activate an already walkable area with increased pedestrian activity. The two main towers have been “lifted up” by almost five-stories, creating what Foster + Partners has described as an “urban room” for the neighborhood. The existing network of streets and alleys, friendly to pedestrians, is augmented and enhanced by over 22,000 square feet (2,000 square meters) of ground-level public space at Oceanwide Center. The outdoor areas will be programmed with art installations and include landscaping by Kathryn Gustafson.
Courtesy of Foster + Partners
Courtesy of Foster + Partners
“We are delighted that our plans for the new Oceanwide Center have received planning permission,” says Stefan Behling, Senior Executive Partner at Foster + Partners. “This development will be the new exemplar of urban living with exciting places to live and work right alongside the central transport hub. The new ‘urban room’ at ground level with pedestrian routes cutting across the site will catalyse the public realm in the neighbourhood, with shops, cafes and green spaces for residents and employees to enjoy. We look forward to the next stages of the project with great anticipation.”
Courtesy of Foster + Partners
The groundbreaking for Oceanwide Center is scheduled for November 2016.
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We wanted to achieve a vernacular building in the sense we wanted a discrete interaction with the context. Our oeuvre sensitivity to context does not result in a nostalgic historicism or critical regionalism. It is rather a unique approach to a universal language transformed to respond to a specific local situation.
Courtesy of BAarqs
This small medical facility and office space is located in a small town in the extreme North of the Santa Fe province, Argentina. The city of Las Toscas has 12.000 however is a nodal city for the region. The city lies on a brunch of the Parana River and the climate of the region is wet subtropical.
Courtesy of BAarqs
The city’s economy, originally based on agriculture and trade, has diversified into the service sector in recent decades. The Provincial government has decided to set one of the regional public hospitals in 2009.
Plan
The specific site was donated by the city in an agreement with our client and with the objective of setting a “stepping stone” in order to increase the contextual flow and also to help to re develop the eroded central context. Our client required for one big office space and three doctor’s offices, administration and waiting room. There were also two basic conditions we understood from the beginning. In this particular region, there is an extremely wet and hot weather condition, 110 F and on the other hand, it is extremely difficult to find good labor except for the basic brick craft workers.
Courtesy of BAarqs
Objectives
We understood our strategy, on the one hand, would had to fill the city’s expectations of intensifying public accidental interaction and on the other hand would had to fill our client’s programmatic requirements.
Courtesy of BAarqs
One of the main objectives in our proposal was to reinterpret the function of the patio derived from “chorizo house” [a typical Argentinean immigrant house *1] as a social hub.
Section
Section
The site is located in a corner close to the center of the town. Building floor area allowed for 50% occupancy, which triggered a “cloister” kind party strategy of two perpendicular bars, one containing the medical facility and the other one holding the office space. This allowed for the settlement of a social space, the ‘patio” facing the main orientation [North] connected to the street corner by the building promenade, triggering an accidental social integration between public and private space. We proposed to build the whole building made out of brick and through out some research we founded a company who just launched a new volcanic stone mix brick whose properties allow for heat absorption.
Courtesy of BAarqs
Performance
In terms of performance we wanted to balance our small budget to the way in which the building would be “responsive” to its programmatic function, to its capability for an environmental adaptation, to its social interaction, and finally to its technological implications functionally and intellectually speaking. The building façade is a composition of two layers, one enclosing and filtering through out a scatter brick pattern and the other one made out of operable “blindex” glass. The scatter strategy was thought not only as an interaction between interior and exterior but also as a way to “punctuate” the body in a more responsive integration to different programs and their performance. Natural ventilation and different vanishing points were balanced to create a soft articulation in the way in which a repetitive unit [brick] could also perform aesthetically. Facing the patio there is a glass envelope allowing for a more dialectic interaction between interior and exterior in a continuum. In the end what this building proposed is just to emphasize what is already inherent to the local culture: natural and accidental social integration and interaction.
