Milan 2016: this year’s Dutch Invertuals exhibition in Milan featured tactile objects designed as physical representations of emotions, beliefs and even galactic phenomena (+ slideshow). (more…)
From the architect. The Cut-away Roof House is an addition to a semi-detached interwar house on Sydney’s lower north shore. Sited in an undulating suburban landscape of tile and tin roofs, the project is a contemporary timber clad 2 storey addition.
The original semi-detached house is left intact while the rear addition comprises an unconventional pitched-roof form. A large section is cut-away from the roof bringing light deep into the house, leaving a simple C-shaped plan with a courtyard in the middle.
The living dining and kitchen spaces are arranged around the courtyard on the
ground floor, while the bedroom looks over the roof to the garden beyond. The spaces around the courtyard each differ in section and volume. The play on suburban shapes and language creates a spatially diverse array of rooms, each with a different orientation to the courtyard.
The roof and walls are clad entirely with AFS certified north coast mixed hardwood timbers, designed to operate as a ventilated facade with excellent
thermal performance.
The carefully designed, light filled spaces provide a backdrop for the lives of the inhabitants. The spatial layout is both efficient and functional, providing a careful balance between communal and private zones.
Responding to the surrounding context of hip and gable roofs, the profile of the addition appears both traditional and contemporary at once. Viewed from any angle it never looks out of place, yet retains its own unique architectural language.
The client’s brief was for an enduring and functional house, compact in plan, but spatially interesting. Our response captures these attributes while making the most of the site’s ideal private, north orientation to the rear. The additional floor area provided much needed functional space for a growing family, without any excess or waste.
Vo Trong Nghia Architects (VTNA) has unveiled a proposal for a Green City Hall in Vietnam’s Bac Ninh City. Designed as a vertical park, the 36,000 square meter proposal is meant to serve as a new symbol for a traditionally agricultural, but rapidly industrializing area of Northern Vietnam. The VTNA proposal is part of a larger plan to develop a new urban area on the edge of the old city, and is designed to be a catalyst for future green developments in the area.
The building is composed of two volumes that lean towards each other – think shuffling cards with a riffle or dovetail method – in a gesture that is meant to symbolize a unity of citizens and government.. Cultural facilities in the structure’s base give way to government offices in one tower with party offices and a citizen center in the other. The two towers culminate in an observation deck.
Milan 2016: from the end of the fame-chasing student, to the rise of creative directors at furniture brands and the future of the kitchen, Dezeen editor Anna Winston highlights eight trends from this year’s Milan design week and Salone del Mobile that could have much wider implications for the industry. (more…)
Milan 2016: German designer Ingo Maurer turned Milan’s Torre Velasca into a glowing red beacon with a lighting installation for car brand Audi during Milan design week (+ slideshow). (more…)
Placing a building in the centre of a small town asserts our desire to heighten urban density and to take part in livening it up and improving its appeal, instead of choosing a plot on the outskirts. The project itself is an alternative to spreading urbanization. The building fits into a hollow between two existing buildings. It is composed of a mixed program of offices (for architecture) and private flats (one 6-room and two 3-room flats). The L-shaped construction surrounds an open courtyard on the back street and vertical circulation gives access to its half-levels.
A public pedestrian path was made along the west side of the property, connecting the residential north street to the many services and shops on the avenue du 15 septembre.
The main volume comprises an architecture firm at garden-level and ground-level, and a 6-room family flat on the first and second floors. This volume opens widely to the south. Aligned with the street, the north volume includes a technical room in the basement with collective wood-pellet boiler-room, storerooms for the flats and three open garages on ground-level. Two 3-room flats for rent are located on the first and second floors. An underground tank collects rain-water for bathrooms and gardens.
Opinion: three years ago Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs wrote an impassioned article complaining about the frustrations of visiting Milan during its annual design week. This year he found more to smile about. Here’s his take on the 2016 fair. (more…)
Vo Trong Nghia Architects has designed a city hall for the Vietnamese city of Bac Ninh comprising a pair of planted towers, which lean together at the centre to frame a series of elevated viewing decks (+ slideshow). (more…)
The EFC cabin, a respectful intervention, is situated in the context of the cold and foggy mountains of Dota, over a hill surrounded by a small forest of oak trees that make up the scenery for this dichotomous project.
The visuals, the landscape, orientation, winds and access points were key for the distribution of the program.
EFC is an answer to the study of the stereotomy and the tectonic. The project involves a central volume equipped with all the serving spaces required for the adequate functioning of a home: kitchen, bathrooms and laundry room. That is, there are a series of wet spaces focused in the nucleus of the cabin, in such a way that there is efficient use of the resources and installations, and the space for the served areas is liberated. Here the outdoors are integrated with the indoors, being merged together and becoming one. It arises as a stereotomic mass, solid, rocklike, heavy and monolithic that sets itself above ground as if it was born out of it: a continuous, monolithic system that is perforated and sculpted to allow light in the space and its habitability.
Next to this volume, the served spaces, living, dining and bedrooms, are directed to both sides in such a way that they open on one face to the valley and mountains and in the opposite direction to the oak forest. The interior/exterior relationship makes the environment the main protagonist of the space. It is projected as a tectonic architecture, meaning of assembly, open and light. It is an architecture articulated between pieces of radiata pine wood, plywood and metallic structures that look for support and cling to the mass, a combination of materials that bring warmth to the space within an already cold context.
It is a frigid environment that generates a harmonious contrast between the cold and the warm, the stereotomic and the tectonic, the natural and the man-made, the serving and served spaces to be discovered, inhabited, experimented and lived in by the user.
Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has announced a new project in Moscow, winning a competition to design the Sberbank Technopark at the Skolkovo Innovation Centre. This is the firm’s first announcement of new work since the untimely death of Zaha Hadid late last month. As the market leader of the Russian banking and economic circulatory system since 1841, Sberbank’s new 131,000 square meter facility will accommodate 10,000 to 12,000 workers in the sectors of marketing and information technology.
The project developed out of ZHA’s analysis of the working processes and arrangements of Sberbank’s technology and marketing departments. Elaborating on this, Christos Passas, Project Director at Zaha Hadid Architects, said, “The necessity to innovate and collaborate is fundamental to Sberbank’s operations. Our research into interconnected, multi-function environments has driven the Sberbank Technopark design. It responds to the bank’s requirements for enhanced communication, interaction and diversification. The design reconfigures working relationships and adopts a holistic approach to creating an engaging environment that offers a diversified range of facilities both internally and externally.”
The ZHA design beat out competing proposals from SPEECH, Foster + Partners, Eric Owen Moss Architects, and Fuksas. The project is expected to begin construction in approximately 18 months and will take another two years to complete.
