Some of the most integral parts of a building are related to light and air. Windows, for example, can help transform a project into a more liveable or better space, providing natural light or connecting the building’s users with their surroundings. 

From windows inserted into historic structures, to windows meant to give the building a distinct, landmark look, these nine projects utilize windows as a primary feature. View the nine creative uses of windows after the break.

1. Flower + Kindergarten; Seoul, South Korea / Jungmin Nam

© Kyungsub Shin

Located in a high-density area of Seoul, Flower + Kindergarten seeks to provide a dynamic physical environment for children, while simultaneously using its distinct shapes to provide a local landmark in a homogenous neighborhood.

2. Hadaway House; Whistler, Canada / Patkau Architects

© James Dow / Patkau Architects

The Hadaway House’s massing was developed from the allowable footprint and building height, combined with the sloped snow-shed roof, creating a sculptural quality for the building that is reflected additionally in its windows.

3. Jaffa Apartment; Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel / Pitsou Kedem Architect

© Amit Geron

Set above the harbor and facing the Mediterranean Sea, the Jaffa Apartment is a restoration of its historic building site, and features large windows in its original arches.

4. Gablepack; Gyeonggi-do, South Korea / AND

© Kyungsub Shin

Working from a site requirement to include a gable, the Gablepack mixed-use building incorporates the gable into not only its structure, but also its windows in both the commercial and residential areas.

5. Vila Franca de Xira Municipal Library; Portugal / Miguel Arruda Arquitectos Associados

© Fernando Guerra | FG+SG

Located on the site of a former rice factory, which inspired the name, the “Factory of Words,” Vila Franca de Xira features a large triangular window, shared by all of its floors.

6. The Crystal Cathedral; California, United States / Philip Johnson

Courtesy of American Seating

Completed in 1980, The Crystal Cathedral utilizes a glass enclosure to ensure that the church is open to the sky and surroundings.

7. The Big Little House; Australia / Nic Owen Architects

© Christine Francis

The Little Big House is a renovation and extension to the rear of a heritage Victorian terrace in Melbourne, and includes four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a study, all of which respects the neighboring historic structures.

8. V House; Mexico / Abraham Cota Paredes Arquitectos

© Cesar Bejar

In the V House in Mexico, a large window frames the exterior while still preserving privacy. Furthermore, the center of the house is occupied by a patio, which helps facilitate the exchange of light and air throughout the space.

9. Mountain Restaurant Björk in Hemavan; Sweden / Murman Architects

© Ake E:son Lindman

Located along the top tree line of slow-growing birches in Sweden, this restaurant seeks to emphasize the relationship between the building and nature, with panoramic views of the mountains, as well as a valley to the South.

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© Dano Veselský

• Architects: Architekti Šebo Lichý
• Location: Nová, 747 92 Háj ve Slezsku, Czech Republic
• Project Team: Mgr. arch. Igor Lichý, Ing. arch. Drahan Petrovič, Ing. arch. Tomáš Šebo, Ing. arch. Katarína Uhnáková, Ing. arch. Emanuel Zatlukaj
• Area: 1868.0 sqm
• Project Year: 2014
• Photographs: Dano Veselský, Triaska Stefanovic

• Investor: ITB development a Imagine development
• General Contractor: Me&Co
• Statics : Konstrukt+
• Electrical Installations: Legrand
• Sanitation: Kolo
• Heating / Ventilation / Air Conditioning : Korad Plan VKP
• Lifts: KONE
• Other Installations: Electric door opener – Siedle, Emergency lights – Helplux design
• Land Area: 2.206 m2
• Utility Area: 6.504,51 m2
• Building Volume: 19.513,53m3
• Construction Cost: 6.180.000 €

© Dano Veselský

An extraordinary residential house NEW GROVE was designed by the architectural studio Šebo Lichý in cooperation with acclaimed Slovak architect Drahan Petrovič, who worked for several years in Vancouver. In this project they have applied the principles of the Canadian housing and created a very first project of its kind in Slovakia, which gives clients the opportunity to design and customize their  own apartment. The architectural concept is based on the principle of flexible housing units to produce a virtually unlimited number of variations.

© Triaska Stefanovic

The result is a fresh, modern and original construction, which revives the locality, improves family living in the largest Slovak housing estate and elevates it to a new level. Clients can choose the number of bathrooms, number of rooms, open and connected living room with kitchen, design a loft or partition the space. Flexible concept also allows to change living space in the future. But what makes this project even more interesting is that clients can design their own interior as well as exterior. By the beginning of the construction it was possible to select either the number or size of windows or balconies. This created a distinctive facade design with various balconies and loggias, which looks very clean and pleasant.

Section

NEW GROVE consists of two residential towers connected by a common footstool, which is composed of smaller retail outlets. It is rather a chamber project with 72 apartments, one- to five-room. 83 parking spaces are located on one above ground and one underground floor. There are also storage spaces for each apartment. Entrances from the street and to the garages are barrier-free. Access to the apartments is provided by two core units with stairs and lifts.

© Triaska Stefanovic

The project is situated in a location with good public facilities, shops, schools, densely covered with public transport and various options for leisure-time and recreational activities. There is a racecourse, Danube embankment and park. Architects decided to elevate this exceptional natural environment and planted the building elegantly in the surrounding greenery. The entire base is lined with facing panels made of natural material, the balconies as well. Architects have managed to not only visually link the housing with the surrounding greenery, but let in sun and light to the whole neighborhood. As a result, there are pleasant sunny, airy and spacious apartments with spectacular views. Architecture of the apartment building NEW GROVE is unique, pioneering and especially based on real needs and wishes of future apartment owners.

Plan

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© OUALALOU+CHOI

The Pavilion of Morocco at the 14th Venice Biennale, Fundamentals, focused on territorial speculations in the Sahara: Inhabiting the Uninhabitable. For the exhibition, which was the country’s first representation at the Biennale, Paris-based practice OUALALOU+CHOI proposed an urban structure for this desert territory – “a means of putting down roots, implanting urbanity and civilization. The Sahara, with its extreme geography and climatic conditions, remains unexplored territory for architectural speculation.”

© OUALALOU+CHOI

From the architects. The sea of sand turns the desert into a territory without a ground. Constantly shifting, the ground is never a point of reference; like sailors, the inhabitants of the desert rely on the constellations as the only stable geographic guides. This project proposes a city above and below the ground: a suspended city and a buried city. Beyond its allegorical and critical dimensions, the idea that a city be experienced in its verticality rather than its horizontality is strange and powerful. The interiority that is created between the city during the day (below the ground) and the city at night (under the sky) becomes the heart of the public space. It is an inhabited land that allows the landscape to pass through it.

© OUALALOU+CHOI

Human settlement has always derived from the tension and balance between the geography of the vast territory and a geometry that confronts, measures, and contains it. The project is composed of a series of rings that grow smaller as they approach the upper city or descend towards the lower city. The articulation between these layers, which turn like a helix, produces the urban voids that grow increasingly thinner from bottom to top and from top to bottom. In this way, a vertical gradation of public, communal, private, and intimate spaces control the level of sunlight and ventilation in this urban void.

As a Masonic figure, Dantesque allegory, and ‘carceral’ fantasy, this urban structure encloses as much as it is enclosed. The city becomes a pioneering adventure in a new world; in a groundless territory without end, the city attempts to anchor a human presence, to give it a comprehensible scale. The city is in the world; it becomes the world. 

© OUALALOU+CHOI

Moroccan Pavilion Milan Expo 2015 / OUALALOU+CHOI
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© Pedro Pegenaute

• Architects: Magen Arquitectos
• Location: Calle El Tambor de Hojalata, 50019 Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
• Architect In Charge: Magen Arquitectos
• Design Team: Jaime Magen, Fco. Javier Magen
• Area: 1808.99 sqm
• Project Year: 2013
• Photographs: Pedro Pegenaute , enVuelo

• Collaborators: Maria Tejel, Beatriz Olona (architects) Gabriel Fraj (quantity surveyor); Rafael Gonzalez (engineer)); Jose Sainz (structure)
• Budget: 2.498.759,66 €
• Developer: Government of Aragon

© enVuelo

From the architect. Valdespartera Ecocity is a newly built neighborhood located in the residential expansion south of Zaragoza. Ordination, which includes the construction of nearly 10,000 housing units, meets certain energy efficiency criteria. The plot is located on the southern boundary of the district, next to water tanks and the ring highway Z-40.

© Pedro Pegenaute

Given the proximity of these elements of territorial scope and serial volumetric rotundity of residential buildings as well as the total area of ​​60,000 m² of initial solar, for all scholar needs, and the topographic elevation of almost 20 meters in existing plot, it was difficult to relate the location with the scale of the main users of the future center: children. Therefore, the origin of the intervention is in the will to prepare and define the scope to hold the project, the notion of enclosure and its configuration, and the idea of ​​building a place.

Floor Plan

The organization of the center was also conditioned by the general criteria of preferred orientation south of teaching areas, with the provision of classrooms into the hillside, and the only possibility of access from the north side of the site, in the lowest point . The first task was to model the topographic slope in staggered horizontal platforms parallel to the ground, connected to each other, adapting to the slope to minimize earthworks and coinciding with individual outdoor access, play and relationships. The 9-units Kindergarten and the Dining Room are located at the bottom, closer to the access, while the future of Primary Education Center and sports courts are located in the upper bounds.

© Pedro Pegenaute

The need for a covered ramp to link the level of children’s classrooms and the dining room becomes the chance of the project, to allow this element to complete the perimeter of the enclosure of the courtyard, which is not usually possible relying solely on the program of the center and south orientation of the 9 classrooms.

Diagram

The configuration of the playground as an open from above and closed by their sides space, their oval and concave shape, is in answer to the idea that the project is initiated by setting a center around which the school is organized to serve the plot, and the creation of an inner and protected unit, independent from the outside, in contrast to the volumes of the residential blocks.

© Pedro Pegenaute

The project is characterized by its horizontality, by the definition of the platform floor and the importance and extent of the roof, which forms a broad continuous porch into the yard, supported structurally in tension with cantilevered decks at the top. When projected to the outside by the porch continuum becomes more intense the horizontal relationship with the outside center.  The roof becomes a planar, homogeneous and continuous, with a significant presence, which channels the vision outward, beyond the classroom, as a link with the landscape. 

© Pedro Pegenaute

The presence of the building material with a coating of aluminum extruded tubes in different colors, like a fence that suggests the idea of ​​school as a continuous wall with child and the entire center and an area set up outside, sheltered and protected, located inside the enclosure: the courtyard. The height of the enclosure rises in the lobby and dining room, identifying the entrance to both buildings. Inside, linoleum floors in the classrooms and resins pavement in the areas of movement and sound-absorbing ceilings laminates characterize the finish, looking for the continuity of the horizontal surfaces without joints, like the concrete on the floor and ceiling from outside.

© Pedro Pegenaute

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