From the architect. Boutique resort and villa design developments on the island of Bali are well-known for their extravagant attempts to stage a lush tropical getaway embellished with reproductions of craftsmanship associated with the exotic ‘Balinese’ atmosphere. Against this backdrop, D-Associates’ pursue of a humble sense of home away from home in Bali is a rare undertaking. The brief is simple, to design a villa for an extended Indonesian family in Sanur, one of the most iconic Southern Balinese settlements and the island’s most established tourist destinations. Not dealing with the Western world’s imagination of a somewhat ‘Balinese’ exoticism, here we are encountering a more subtle appreciation of the calm tropical landscape of Sanur. The villa is envisioned as a family retreat set in a tropical landscape, a contrast to their Jakarta living, while learning from a particular aspect of spatial configuration of Bali’s indigenous dwelling architecture: an emphasis in breaking up the volume of a house and in blurring the inside and outside spaces.
On a long rectangular shape 1277 M2 site, the main structure of the two-storey villa is located near the long southern side, while creating a generous open area of pool and lawn on the northern side. This configuration allows all the rooms in the villa — four bedrooms each equipped with its own bathrooms, living, dining, and kitchen to all be opened on both their south and northern sides (avoiding the direct east west sun direction of the tropic) with the lawn and the pool becoming the main focal points throughout the villa. From the neighbourhood street, the considerably tall massing of the main volume of the villa is set back and scaled down through a strategic configuration of the front part of the site where an enclosed carport area, a landscaped front yard (with a pond) and a foyer pavilion with a flat wooden roof act as a humble entry court to the house. Further toning down the volumetric composition, each of the structural elements are covered by a distinct natural building material — the heavy grey river stonewall as the carport enclosure, the timber columns and screen of the foyer, the unfinished concrete pathway softened by the landscaped garden and the pond.
The foyer pavilion is a reference to the aling-aling element in Balinese dwelling compound, a transitional screen element where the act of entering one’s house is emphasised as a kind of procession that marks where the private space of a house begins. In this project, D-Associates spatialises this traditionally surface like architectural element into a small foyer space enclosed and supported by a row of recycled ulin timber (previously used as railway track sleepers).
Section
The main structure of the villa inside is divided into two volumes of space: the upper level area is configured as a floating dark wooden box sheltering over the lower level area, a contrastingly open and light transparent volume that acts as a platform of family living activities. This strategy again tones down the massing of the villa in order to maintain a sense of home and human scale. The heavy tone of the dark coloured ulin timber and plywood finishing of the upper volume introduces warmness into the villa from the strong tropical sun. The lower volume appears more as a platform of space that merges with the pool and the garden due to the lightness of its enclosing elements: the pilotis like row of thin round concrete columns painted in white and the floor to ceiling panels of glass windows that can be thoroughly opened. This configuration is also a modern articulation of the rumah panggung (wooden house on poles) typology, a common vernacular dwelling type built in tropical region in Southeast Asia.
An anchor to the whole composition is a two-storey height sheltered terrace breaking the long massing of the villa in the middle. This tall terrace space is a spatial bridge that connects the upper level (which contains all the private bedroom units) and the lower level (which contains all the living spaces), the internal living spaces and the surrounding landscape. It amplifies a sense of lightness and openness into this otherwise large structure (with a total floor area of 1013 M2). By using the same finishing materials indoor and outdoor, the boundary between the inside and outside is blurred, maximising the family’s experiencing of retreating into the landscape of Bali.
From the architect. Our has completed recently a building with the architectural elements same to had been used at our previous project Dayang Sanghoi at Pyeongchang-dong introduced on this korea magazine in September of 2014.
However, this project isn’t a series of the project at Pyeongchang-dong.
Saying that we has concentrated on the world of Lee U Fan’ artwork, a master of Monoha which gives object fundamental existence and emphasizes relation between object and object, object and human, by presenting the materials such as wood, stone, clay, steel sheet and paper as we are without touching them.
Lee U Fan’s viewpoint on the object is just relation between object and world.
Just as Lee U Fan’s artwork ‘Relatum’ thrown unintentionally forms relation with objects placed around it such as steel and glass, this project looks like several stones thrown unintentionally on the site of Seoul.
Section D
It is new attempt proceeded by Tune Planning through its own approach, as an artwork of Lee U Fan forms relation with world though minimum intervention.
Client had a plan to build a building for rental at the area around Hongik University, and proposed that all the accesses to each floor are separated in order to be used independently because it might be rented by different tenants respectively.
Model
Spaces of each floor with private stairway and terrace are not the interior of building but the separate space for forming relation with its surroundings.
Portuguese photographer Nelson Garrido has used both a handheld and drone-mounted camera to capture the zigzagging paths of the Paiva Walkways, an eight-kilometre-long trail through the wild mountain landscape of Arouca, Portugal (+ slideshow). (more…)
Located on the top level of no. 23 at 389 Lane, East Jinling Road, the Dream Reformer’s Tower House was originally a water tower constructed in the 1920s and rebuilt in the 1980s. It had a total area of 39m2 and two floors connected by a ladder, which was occupied by the kitchen. The house had been in such a bad state of disrepair that it almost seemed a ruin.
Diagram
The architect regarded the Tower House as a spatially complex system consisting of a new house stuck in the old structure. Based on the ergonomic module system of the six homeowners, the designer reorganized the functional layout of the interior, striving to create new spaces with maximum economy and comfort. The designer dismissed the idea of a supposedly convenient, “Transformers”-inspired approach, but instead tried to simplify every design to serve a single functional purpose; when joined together, such singularities would constitute variety.
The interior variety is first embodied in functional aspects. Combining the owners’ requirements with unexpected details developed from them, the designer came up with a wish-list program of more than 140 items. Specifically, he avoided infringing upon the owners’ wishes by the excuse of his own aesthetics. Next comes spatial variety: taking advantage of the L-shaped staircase, the designer allows a spatial and local narrative to unfold on seven different levels. He deliberately discards uniform visual control and the so-called architectural logic, but instead creates dramatic scenarios on various nodes, forming rounds of climaxes. Rather than being fabricated, such dramatic scenarios are derived from interviews with the owners. Finally there is variety in the owners’ life, as well as in the new possibilities that the complex system provided by the designer would stimulate him to develop. Though small, this complex system may expect to have a more enduring lifecycle guaranteed by variety and certain self-organization.
Section
Diagram
The complex system has a blurry boundary, and, due to its commanding height in the old neighborhood, each window presents a borrowed view to the interior. Carefully devised skylights, deliberately treated maple-leaf wall and the kid’s room with painted walls break the definite climate boundary. Such indefiniteness is ultimately embodied in the patio that is conceived as a vertical garden, and in the flexible climate boundary formed by the facade. As a result, the interior of this complex system is more like a sophisticated world rather than an ordinary architectural interior.
Still, this complex system is subject to regulations in terms of the boundary between itself and the community outside. According to the suggestions of the administrative department, no alterations should be made to the external profiles of the Tower House. Following these profiles, the designer carefully renovated the exterior walls, patio and roof, reorganized the drainage system and painted the whole house together with the rooms downstairs. On the other hand, the designer was free to redesign externally inaccessible areas such as the interior elevation of the patio and the attic facade. They are skillfully concealed in the second layer behind the renovated profiles, making the exterior elevation and the interior space appear to have two design logics, when in fact they are but different aesthetic variations of the same design logic derived from the old building’s intertwined structure. Apart from basic functions for living, the design explored more uses that are beyond the owner’s expectation, such as the kid’s room, the exterior-like communicational space, etc. The renovation features comfortable spaces with pleasant scale.
The small, complex system of the Tower House forms a response to the other un-renovated households in the water tower, while the repainted tower in its turn forms a response to the whole neighborhood. As the architect insists on a light intervention with the urban interface, the completed work of renovation remains unperceived by the residents after having redefined the relationship between the house, the water tower, the neighborhood and the city.
All the deliberately reserved design ambition is ultimately fulfilled in the roof plan, a surrealist scene of a silver roof floating above a sea of red roofs, which greatly transformed the negative impact of this old neighborhood. A tower house within the view, the renovated building constitutes a view in its own right.
The new episode Dream Home Renovation (season two) produced by Shanghai Oriental TV Station is a renovation project of a residential water tower on East Jinling Rd. The tower used to be a tube-like building for storing water, with elevations no wider than 4 meter. Under the tower is the main channel for the residents of the housing estate. After the Cultural Revolution, the tower is transformed into a civilian house to improve the residents’ livelihood. Columns are built up on the ground floor so that the upper floors can be extended southward. Since then, the eight columns have supported the four families living above, each family occupying a floor.
In the water tower home lived the grandparents and their granddaughter. Their biggest hope is that the son and daughter-in-law can also live here after the renovation. Clothing, living, food and transportation, all basic necessities are contained in this 39-square-meter-space.
The architect added a mezzanine to the original two floors. Seemingly the space is squeezed, but because of the split level, rooms with different function actually become alienated, creating longer “journey” between each space..
“Squeeze”, namely the establishment of the split level, breaks the original gathered space into scattered individual space, Meanwhile, privacy is guaranteed in each individual space. But this is not enough, the architect wants to create “journey” between different rooms, and enhance the experience of the transaction between “indoor” and “outdoor” space within the house. For example, the corridor with red maple leaf wall, is a combination of the interior façade design with skylight facing the aquarium and bay window of the children’s room. It produces a sense of living in a series of small houses connected by outdoor environment, instead of living in a closed chamber.
The owner wanted to have a roof garden on the sloped roof. However a vertical garden was placed on the balcony instead, considering the safety problem and uncertainty of the future. The proper reconstruction of the outer facade is also a kind of attitude of the designer. Even if it is to change a small individual, a positive response is still necessary for the negative urban space.
Designer Marc Fornes has completed his first permanent installation in the US: an arching structure made of more than 1,000 perforated aluminium shingles (+ slideshow). (more…)
Milan 2016: London design studio Oeuffice has updated its collection of stools based on Greek column capitals with white marble versions, and displayed them in a black courtyard in Milan (+ slideshow). (more…)
The building has been conceptualized around a series of courtyards, giving private outlook and amenity to staff and patients, whilst creating calm and tranquility in an otherwise busy and high volume practice.
A colonnade representative of a “steel forest” defines the edge of the building providing an architectural veil separating the predominant glass façade and interiors from the urban fabric. Structurally, the roof form consists of simple “A” frame trusses inverted to form a flat roof, each truss individually supported by a steel column. The combination of the column repetition together with the inverted trusses, forming a metal clad raked soffit, generate the main facades of the building. The exterior contrasts with the glazed curtain wall and interiors which consist of cedar and ply.
Sited behind the town’s main street and bound by Ormuz Avenue on the North, and a lane (Lampkin Lane) to the West and South boundaries. The western boundary has an industrious outlook, as well as an angular alignment triangulating the alignment in relation to all other boundaries.
Plan
The building is sited hard on the western boundary treated with a highly articulated boundary wall occasionally interrupted by courtyards screened from the adjacent building fabric.
The practice of eye care requires a consultation that is extensive in time together with a procession of consultative engagements in any given visit. The building functions to accommodate this procession of events simplifying the movement and workflow in a logical sequence from arrival to completion of the consultation. Fundamental to this workflow for patients, is to provide a non-institutional caring environment, with privacy and intimacy. This is achieved by creating a number of smaller waiting areas adjacent to the relevant function. These waiting areas form the core of the internal spaces, with outlook to the landscaped courtyards, and featuring an abundance of natural light through the roof light well that occupies the entire space.
The brief required additional commercial space and this has been generated along the main street frontage for maximum exposure and viability, with the specialist Clinic accessed via a cloister revealing the quantum of the “inverted truss”.
From the architect. Following the partial demolition of a social housing units, this project expresses a link between the historical district and the vale of “Dervallières” while re-introducing an appropriation of the nearby green spaces.
Diagram
The volumetric aspect consists of a new building attached to a larger old building complex. The project thus sets up in the axis of the composition of the original plan, in order not to obstruct the East-West perspectives of the neighbourhood, and make the project fit in the important site topography. Stretching eastward, the project conveys the will to anchor the building over the vale and the Renoir street, major axis of the revival of the eastern part of the district.
The project results from the combination of three entities. The perception of the five-storey apartment block facing Callot street is radically scrambled by its shortening, and the visual separation of its lower floors. These levels now establish a base fitting into the landform, an intermediate building with lively terraces facing the pedestrian path. The new eastern construction extends the composition with a simple volume, a five-storey apartment block standing on a base.
Elevation South
Elevation North
The design of a light metallic framework, inspired by the composition grid of the old building and the close ones, enables a consistency of the whole building complex. Stretching the silhouette of the new building to the lower floors of the old building, this structure accommodates new functions.
The combination of steel and wood for the new building and the refurbishment of the old lower floors conjures up a shared imaginary realm of gardens and parks, in close relation with the near green spaces.
The unvarying and monochrome coating of the Callot building makes it easily understandable, while giving it back the elegance of a simple horizontal building.
I can’t start this evening without a mention to Zaha. When we got the news last week, we just couldn’t believe it. Or maybe we didn’t want to believe it. As Rafael Iglesia, an Argentinian architect who also died too early of a heart attack, last year, said once, “It is always very sad when a person who still has a lot to offer, dies prematurely.” From here we send our condolences to her relatives, friends, and colleagues.
Zaha received the Prize in 2004 acknowledging the fact that her work has been a great contribution to architecture. Her work, as well as the work of the other laureates, many of them in this room tonight, is celebrated by this Prize as the highest level that architecture has been able to achieve. The sum of their work builds an incredible body of knowledge that I as a student only dreamt – and I’m not saying even to produce – only dreamt, from a distant Chile, just to experience in person and not just through the pictures of the very few magazines that made it to that corner of the world. At the time, we studied architecture in Chile, by looking at pictures and photographs. Pritzker Prize winners for us in the mid-eighties were not architects; they were myths. That is why I did not see this Prize coming at all, not for a second.
It was actually a Saturday morning when I got a text message from Martha Thorne [Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize]. I don’t work on weekends so under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have responded until the coming Monday, but I was finishing a text for the Venice Biennale and I wanted to get rid of it to be able to enjoy the weekend. Martha’s message coincidentally started like this, “Alejandro, hi! I received a message from the Biennale and need your advice on the matter. Are you available for a brief phone call?” I thought, no, what now! Not another problem to solve. I had so many fronts to take care of for the Biennale. I answered, “Okay, let’s talk now.” The phone rang and she said, “Hi Alejandro, I don’t want to take too much of your time, I have three questions about the Biennale.” Okay. “Would you accept to be the 2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate?” For a couple of seconds, if not for an entire minute, I couldn’t understand what that question had to do with the Biennale. My brain was hitting a wall, I couldn’t make sense out of it, trying to understand the connection which there was not. That is how unexpected it was. When I began to process it, I began to cry. The rush of emotion was just too much. Too much life compressed in an instant. For as much as ten minutes we had a non-conversation over the phone. More than speechless, I was thoughtless. My mind was absolutely useless. I could only feel, not think.
The kids were playing around in the living room and saw me crying. “What happened?” they asked. “Nothing, but it’s a good thing,” I said. I went upstairs, my wife was still sleeping, woke her up and said, “Me gané el Pritzker!” And for one hour or so, we looked at each other speechless, thoughtless. And to tell the truth, I still can’t today. But as days have passed, my feelings began to evolve in three different directions: gratitude, when looking backwards; freedom, when looking into the future; and joy, when in the present.
So I thought a lot about the fact that the ceremony is at the United Nations. What a great place to deliver a message about how architecture can contribute to improve the quality of the built environment and by doing so, correct inequalities and improve people’s quality of life. For looking into the future, there will be time tomorrow here at the U.N. too, when in conversation with previous Pritzker Laureates we will debate about the challenges ahead. So today will be about the present and how I got here, it will be about joy and gratitude.
First of all, I would like to thank the Pritzker family for their vision and understanding that an award may be a powerful tool to influence the development of the built environment in the right direction. You have done this not only with generosity, but also and mainly with quality. You have done it just right. And this is a very powerful contribution to improve people’s quality of life.
I would also like to thank the jury, and I want to think of the words of the citation as a brief, as a navigation chart, a path to follow, more than facts about our work. We will keep your words in our minds.
This prize is for a body of work. And the work in architecture is a collective task. To start with, it is not that I wake up in the morning with an irresistible desire to do, let’s say, an office building. In architecture, somebody has to need something and desire something first. Only then can we start working. Architecture takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money and energy, so we are very thankful to all the clients that have trusted us with a great amount of resources, private and public, to translate those needs and desires into buildings.
In our particular case, not only is the starting point outside ourselves, but the ending point too. Many of our projects are not finished by us, but by the families themselves. So we are really thankful to those families that have completed and added their resources, ideas, and dreams to the walls and roofs that we have set only as a frame.
Architecture is about a lot of disciplines coming together concurring with the knowledge and expertise to get a building built. I would not know how to do it on my own and yet an architect has to be able to discriminate among which of the approaches is better than the other. Good will and professional flexibility is crucial to negotiate all the forces pulling in opposite directions in a single building. But in addition we architects do not build our projects with our own hands; we rely on the skills of many crafts, but even more, on the physical strength of workers. To all of them that withstand tough work on the construction site, we’re very grateful as well.
In our particular case at ELEMENTAL, projects, ideas, solutions and visions only appear while thinking out loud in-group. It is a team creative process. This is not just a saying or a politically correct statement. It’s a fact. That is why I believe the partners of ELEMENTAL are as much winners as I am of this Prize; so I would like to ask to stand up — Gonzalo Arteaga, Juan Ignacio Cerda, Victor Oddo and Diego Torres. Each of them is brilliant and could have had their own practice, but chose to stay at ELEMENTAL. Thanks for that.
But we went through hard times; choosing to stay was not evident at all. It meant a decision that involved each of your families. So I want to acknowledge the importance of wives and spouses to have supported our work: Andrea, Isa, Ale, and Sole. Finally, to all the people at the office who may be following this on streaming in Chile: Cristian Martinez, Su Yin Chia, Matias Magnelli, Clemence Pybaro, Pedro Hoffmann, Euge Morales, Francesca Moroni, and all the interns at the office, thank you to you all.
Some of our projects require a dedication and a level of innovation that the market and governments are not willing nor prepared to support. It was in 2005 when after a successful first project in Iquique, the Quinta Monroy, we had seven other projects in different stages of development throughout Chile, some under construction, some still fighting to get building permission, when we ran out of money. For a year we had to work for free, because we couldn’t abandon the families halfway in the process. We had very little to show and even less proof that we would succeed. That is why we are so thankful to the Angelini family, Roberto and Maurizio, who trusted us and had the confidence that we would use architecture to produce a public good. That is when ELEMENTAL became a company, to make our contribution to people’s quality of life a sustainable endeavor. Thank you.
Those who had the idea to contact them were Jorge Bunster, Arturo Natho, and Alejandro Hormann, the last two, here in the room and on our board still today. They still contribute with brains and strategies and financial and administrative questions that I still don’t understand, but that might be correct since we have never needed extra money since 2006.
Before becoming a company, ELEMENTAL was an academic initiative. It all started when I was invited to teach at Harvard, and that was Jorge Silvetti’s call. He may have seen something that not even I myself was able to see. At the time I had just one building built and a book written. I actually arrived at Harvard having no idea about what to teach and eventually used my own ignorance and self-embarrassment as an asset. In a country where 60 percent of what is being built used some kind of subsidy, I had no idea what a subsidy was. It was embarrassing.
When you don’t know about something, there are two possibilities: you study or you partner with somebody who knows. I did the latter. At a dinner party in Cambridge I met a transport engineer who was doing his Masters at the Kennedy School of Government: Andres Iacobelli. He was kind of famous because he combined two attributes that are rarely found together – he was brilliant and he was a nice guy. So the conversation started with him saying, “So, seems that Chilean architecture is doing really well, isn’t it?” And I say, “Well, kind of, yes.” “A lot of awards, eh?” “Yes. A lot of international recognition, eh?” “Yes!” And I was kind of growing in pride about an engineer acknowledging an architect. And he said, “But if Chilean architecture is so good, why is social housing so bad?”
That hurt. But immediately afterwards he proposed, why don’t we do something with social housing? In my architect’s mind, “do something” meant a book, a seminar, an exhibition, and in my wildest dreams, a 1:1 full-scale prototype of a unit. In his engineer’s mind, “do something” meant a company that should start building at least 100 units accepting every single constraint of the existing policy – budget, size, time frame – and prove the market wrong within its own set of rules. That is how ELEMENTAL started as a “Do Tank” and not as a “think tank.”
But I learned many more things from him, like think well about people. If somebody is successful, it’s because he or she did something good, not something wrong. This is not even close to being the prevailing attitude. I don’t know if it’s a Chilean thing or an architect’s thing, but suspicion and envy are so much more common. And this is something that until today is at the very core of the spirit of ELEMENTAL. Don’t waste time fighting or even paying attention to the bitter ones; celebrate and learn from the proactive ones.
Talking about learning, I had the fortune of having very good teachers and very good classmates at the Universidad Católica where I studied architecture. I owe a lot to my professor Fernando Perez. He not only taught me how to think carefully and how to respect the accumulated layers of knowledge of architectural history, balancing how to be humble and self-confident at the same time, in front of that knowledge. He also gave me the first opportunity. He bet on me to do my first ever project: the Mathematics School at the Universidad Católica. Given where I come from, I would have never had the possibility to get any kind of commission if it were not for the blind trust of somebody.
In addition to that, I had to survive university. You may not get this here in the U.S., but at the time I studied in Chile, only one out of four students finished. Nobody survives alone. That’s why my classmates became lifetime friends. Claudio, Alfonso, and Charlie – we encouraged each other, night after sleepless night, working on each other’s projects. Back then I knew collaboration in its most pure and disinterested form.
Making it to the university in the mid-80’s in Chile was very hard. If you didn’t go to a private high school, the chances to study at the university were extremely low. And this is where family made a difference. My parents, Carmen and Gaston, both school teachers, worked extremely hard to allow us – my brother Cayo and my sister Loreto and me – to have the opportunity to study. To pay for education did not leave a lot of money for leisure and entertainment. That is how we learned to take pleasure in very simple things. Playing on the street with whatever may explain why we created such a primitive bond with my childhood friend Coné. Over time, we have become an extended family – Sole, Teo Noé, Simon, Elo – thanks for joining.
So after having moved backwards I would like to come back to the present, which is almost entirely taken by my wife and my children. What I have achieved in architecture has allowed me to pay attention to the other dimensions of life. Instead of developing the professional dimension to unheard, unseen levels, I have been trying all this time just to have a balanced life. Xu, Americo, Malu, and Rita. You are my grounding cable; dedicating a lot of time to our everyday life and ordinary activities is a great antidote to prevent one to be too full with oneself. You have introduced the absolute present in my life. Right here, right now. Niños, ustedes me enseñan cada dia a distinguir lo que importa de lo que no importa. Since you were born, to distinguish what matters and what doesn’t matter in life became self-explanatory. Xu, you have been generous and illuminating. If it was not for you, my life would be poorer and less fun. You have forced me to develop. Thanks to my family, I have dedicated less time to architecture and more time to life.
But to come a bit back to architecture, what we architects model is not bricks or stones or steel or wood, but life itself. Architecture is about giving form to the places where people live. It is not more complicated than that but also not simpler than that. And life ranges from very basic needs to very deep desires, from ordinary activities to extraordinary events, from the self to the collective. So I guess that is why we should have a life in the first place; to know the subject we are trying to host, take care of and enhance, is a must.
Sorry for having taken so long but I guess I was trying selfishly to make this marvelous present moment to last. Thank you very much. Gracias.
