From the architect. There is a noble Shinto shrine on the southeastern side of the site.
I thought about how a house confronts with the forest of the Shinto shrine. At first I divided a building into four boxes to assume it a scale smaller than the Shinto shrine. Four boxes are pent roof, and the continuity of the roof harmonizes with the mountain range of the northeast side.
The plan of each box is the trapezoid. With the inclined ceiling, the wall widens or narrows for the Shinto shrine. The windows facing the Shinto shrine have various forms as follows. Picture window, sliding door, corner-less window, bay window, window with louver, window over terrace. The form and opening rate of the window is decided depending on the degree of the privacy of the room.
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Thus, I have made a variety of facing the shrine. Options of the choice of the comfort increase by doing it.
Adversely there are sightlines and lines of flow which go through four boxes. You can look around the whole house and a parking lot and a garden from the kitchen. I thought that rich space is born by making a diagram and breaking it on purpose.
From the architect. This project is the logical extension and contemporary version of the long architectural history of city halls. From the common houses of the Middle Ages to the birth of town halls (with the 1884 law on municipal freedoms) and up to recent times, the problem of the square is systematically tied to that of the city hall.
Despite this long history, architects have not developed a true typology, only an eclectic formulation of a certain number of elements: the square, the fountain, the city council hall which looks out onto the street via a small gallery called a “bretèche” or an “oriel,” a ground floor that leads to a large vestibule and serves as a hall, and so on.
Our proposal contains these elements. We believe that the unifying element is a sense of the contemporary, and for us, being contemporary means above all minimizing impacts, developing potential, and predicting the unforeseeable. This is why the building and the square become a single entity, and why the upper square (the roof of the PAE and CCAS) becomes a belvedere facing Blvd. Roger Dodin and rue André Malraux that leads intuitively to the marriage hall. Because of its horizontality, the building also reveals the hedge from rue André Malraux.
Lastly, when viewed from the route de Redon, it appears as a line that underlines and frames the entire complex. The future City Hall is the last element in the ZAC Morinais mixed-use area that opens out onto the city. With its two squares, it is readily identifiable from the heart of the Morinais area as it is from the route de Redon. The principle of its functionality is based on the clear visibility of its various services, the obvious location of the reception areas surrounding the naturally lit patios, and a spatial organization revolving around the central hall.
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The central hall on the ground floor contains the city’s public service offices, while the access from the upper square leads to the council and marriage hall; if necessary, this upper entrance can also serve as an entrance or exit for public officials. The Council Hall, located on the 1st floor, opens widely onto the western square. Its independent access helps manage traffic flows more easily, whether for a city council meeting or a marriage. When marriages are being performed, the couple and the guests will access the hall directly form the square, just as on days of city council meetings, thereby providing at once an indoor and outdoor reception area to participants. e general administration services are located on the upper floor. e o ces are all placed around the technical core. They respect a 1.35m framework, which will allow for adaptations to changes in the bureaucracy’s organization. e Mayor’s O ce is at the very western end of this floor, and extends to the outdoors with a loggia that overlooks the city hall main square.
The façades are de ned by their two layers, each one answering different needs and complementing the other perfectly. The first is a light and delicate skin of steel, which creates a sensation of visual penetration. is layer provides protection from the sun and it covers the second, “thicker” façade, which meets the building’s thermal performance needs. Within this structure, everything is about overlap, reading a distance, transparency, counter-light, and reflection. Everything is about light and character.
From the architect. The design starts from the use of the brick as central decorative element, which is also representing a connection between the Italian and Chinese cultures.
Decorative brick patterns on walls, as a direct result of the “Hutong Materials Catalogue” research that designers are carrying on the contemporary use of traditional building materials in Beijing. For the project, traditional grey bricks have been collected in the old Hutong districts, cut into slices, painted white and randomly embellished with different colors.
For the winebar’s name and logo, the clients, a mixed Chinese and Italian couple, asked us to play with the idea of mouth (“bocca” in Italian) as element referring to both food and eroticism, and to use therefore a yellow resin floor. It was a challenge since “yellow” traditionally fights with the “idea” of wine. This suggestion became a pretext to play with some opposite elements: warm and natural versus young and pop, traditional bricks versus polished resin. Reclaimed wooden tables, along with the grey and black hues of customized furniture fabric, are helping mitigate the bright and otherwise shocking color of the floor.
Courtesy of RAMOPRIMO
Mouths also became a graphic decoration on custom-made rice wallpaper inside the bar and on the façade. Designers added some personal touch to the space by painting themselves a large stencil art work on canvas and two discs with acrylic colors.
Courtesy of RAMOPRIMO
The bar counter is a long sculptural box made of white Corian, floating on the yellow resin and running through the whole space as a backbone. It connects visually the kitchen to the other parts of the bar: wine tasting corner; main dining area; lounge area on elevated platform that is extending outside becoming a yellow colored public bench on the street.
Axometric
These three parts reflect the request from clients to have a flexible space throughout the day: a breakfast bar in the morning, a cozy place for lunch, and a fine wine bar in the evening.
Concrete ceiling, walls and existing building pipes have been cleaned and kept exposed to underline a sense of urbanity and re-appropriation. The new insertions are clearly demarcated by using black iron plates, which create zig-zag shaped shelves to display wine bottles, and bend to form a staircase bringing to the private office room above the kitchen.
Courtesy of RAMOPRIMO
To strengthen the vibrant atmosphere of the space, two large geometric custom-made chandeliers evoke the surprise and festivity feeling of the town festivals in south of Italy. At night, when dimmed low, they turn the ceiling into a romantic sky dotted with stars, while during the day they introduce a sense of spatial tension by imposing their geometric and contemporary presence.
Italian architect Piero Lissoni has won a speculative competition for a site on New York‘s East River with his proposal for a submerged circular aquarium. (more…)
The Architectural League of New York has announced the winners of its thirty-fifth annual Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers. First launched in 1981 and selected by a committee of former recipients and League Program Director Anne Rieselbach, the Architectural League Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to young architects, who are recognized for their talent and forward-thinking ideas. This year’s theme for the competition, “(im)permanence”, asks how time plays a role in architectural style, means of assembly, and its relationship to program which ultimately alters expectations of architecture in an “impermanent environment.”
Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, DESIGN EARTH, Cambridge, MA and Ann Arbor, MI
Courtesy of DESIGN EARTH
DESIGN EARTH’s work “engages the geographic to open up to a range of aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism.” This summer, the firm will participate in the Venice Biennale of Architecture in Kuwait’s pavilion.
Juan Alfonso Garduño Jardó, G3 Arquitectos, Querétaro, Mexico
Courtesy of G3 Arquitectos
G3 has embarked on an ongoing investigation which “seeks to encourage citizen participation in citymaking by inverting the existing neoliberal model for another one based in the reactivation of the collective realm.” G3 creates designs, of programatic spaces and pavilions constructed in underutilized areas across Querétaro that are approved by the respective communities.
Neyran Turan and Mete Sonmez, NEMESTUDIO, San Francisco, CA
Courtesy of NEMESTUDIO
NEMESTUDIO engages in work ranging from installations, to buildings, and landscapes. Its “speculations draw upon the capacity of architecture to define a new relational aesthetic, one that is invested in questions of form and representation while being extremely rigorous about architecture’s relationship to the city, the environment, and geography.”
Founded in 2011, this studio is dedicated to “reconciling and empowering the role of architecture within the transforming, evolving, fluctuating, and indeterminate conditions of the city, its public sphere, and its ecological context through reevaluation of Umberto Eco’s concept of The Open Work.“
The Montreal-based studio is “specifically interested in the relationship between the abstract concepts of architecture and their material incarnations.” Recently, Pelletier de Fontenay, in collaboration with Kuehn Malvezzi and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte, was named one of the winning teams in the international competition to design educational buildings for the ”Espace pour la Vie” museum campus in Montreal and their design is expected to be completed in 2017.
Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest, Ultramoderne, Providence, RI
Courtesy of Ultramoderne
The office, which was founded in 2013, is “committed to creating architecture and public spaces that are at once modern, playful, and generous.” In 2015, Ultramoderne realized Chicago Horizon, the BP Prize winner in the Chicago Lakefront Kiosk Competition, designed for the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
The jury for the award consisted of Mimi Hoang, Paul Lewis, and Anu Mathur, along with committee members Jason Austin, Gerald Bodziak, and Rychiee Espinosa. The winners, as a part of their prize, will exhibit their work at the Pasrons School of Design and present lectures.
Practice descriptions have been culled from the Architectural League, to learn more about the competition and its winners visit the organization’s website here.
Milan 2016: Italian furniture company Arper has highlighted the new colours and materials within its range by styling furniture and props into single-hued scenes. (more…)
Photographs: Courtesy of Blaze Makoid Architecture
Builder: Jim Morrison Construction
Interior Design: John Giacomazzi
Courtesy of Blaze Makoid Architecture
From the architect. Martis Camp is a 2,200 acre multigenerational ski and golf club located between historic Truckee, California, and Lake Tahoe. Over 600 one to five acre single family lots are planned with small groups of lots being released at a time. This 6,000 square foot development project is sited on an acre of steeply sloping, wooded terrain, with phenomenal views of the Carson mountain range to the north and west. The placement and footprint of the house preserves the natural site features through minimal grading and tree removal.
Courtesy of Blaze Makoid Architecture
Accessed from the lower part of the site, the house is a simple ‘L’, with the two wings linked by the double height glazed entry and stair hall, located at the intersection of the two geometries. A stone plinth mediates the steep pitch of the site creating both a cloistered parking court as well as a base on which the two story house rests. High stone retaining walls along the high point of the site combine with a dramatically cantilevered roof to provide extensive, sheltered outdoor patio space that includes outdoor cooking, dining and living areas. These program elements surround the open plan great room that contains living, dining, and kitchen. The den to the northwest projects out beyond the stone base, creating a secluded, glazed refuge and serves as a balance to the roof projection on the opposite side of the house.
Courtesy of Blaze Makoid Architecture
Plan
Courtesy of Blaze Makoid Architecture
Black stained cedar siding allows for the house to blend with the landscape during the summer and fall, and pose as a dramatic counterpoint to the snow cover through the winter months.
Yad Vashem, Har Hazikaron, Jerusalem, 2005. Image Courtesy of Timothy Hursley
Moshe Safdie will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2016 National Design Awards of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. The museum states, “The Lifetime Achievement Award is given in recognition of a distinguished individual who has made a profound and long-term contribution to the contemporary practice of design.” Safdie and his fellow recipients will be honored at the 17th annual National Design Awards gala in New York in October.
The Lifetime Achievement Award honors recipients in a range of design disciplines, but has previously been won by architects, including James Wines of SITE in 2013 and Michael Graves last year. In describing Safdie’s merits for receiving this year’s Award, the museum said:
Over a celebrated 50-year career, he has continued to explore the essential principles of socially responsible design with a distinct visual language. His humanistic philosophy on architecture and urbanism focuses on the design of the public realm and the essence of place. Beginning with his architectural thesis at McGill University in 1964 and his first built project, the seminal Habitat ’67 in Montréal, Canada, a national Heritage site, Safdie’s catalogue of work and contributions to the dialogue on sustainable urbanism are unsurpassed in contemporary practice. Safdie has been widely recognized for his enduring influence on the built environment and was recently awarded the 2015 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie surveys the evolution of his creative process and design philosophy, and is currently on view at the Boston Society of Architects through May 22.
Safdie’s projects can be found across the globe, and span a wide range of typologies, including airports, museums, performing arts, libraries, housing, mixed use and master plans for entire cities. Many projects have become revered regional and national landmarks, including Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, Jerusalem; United States Institute of Peace Headquarters, Washington, D.C.; Khalsa Heritage Memorial Complex, the national museum of the Sikh people in India; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; and Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort, Singapore. He continues to inspire through new high density mixed-use and urban housing with current and recent projects around the world, including Singapore; Chongqing, China; Cartagena, Colombia; Colombo, Sri Lanka; and Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina.
