Another supertall tower for Manhattan is going ahead, now that legal proceedings stalling KPF‘s 1,501-foot skyscraper beside Grand Central station have been abandoned. (more…)
Tel Aviv‘s apartment buildings are being transformed with contemporary interiors by a wave of local architects and designers. We’ve rounded up five of the best new apartment designs in the Israeli city, including a renovated space with a dramatic steel staircase and a penthouse with an infinity pool on the roof (+ slideshow). (more…)
The place
Las Gaviotas is a small seaside resort on the coast of Buenos Aires located between the forests of Mar Azul and Mar de las Pampas. A virgin territory of fixed dunes with planted acacias and poplars to which is overlapped an orthogonal trace that defines lots suitable for construction of multifamily developments.
In this case it is an atypical parcel, of just 15 m at the front, with a dense and young poplar plantation, located 300 meters from the beach.
The commission
It’s a set of studio apartments for vacation, with a small administration and a house for the owners, in charge of the units’ exploitation. With a change of ownership involved, this property became a new two-room unit. The square footage to be built would be the maximum allowed under code.
The proposal
The project should fulfill the premise that the resulting volumetric accentuates the set idea by proposing common spaces and making imperceptible the individualization of each unit, without thereby resenting intimacy and privacy. So that each house should have two access and with its own expansions, and controlled views to and from common spaces as well.
It was proposed a three-dimensional grid developed on two floors alternating covered, partially covered and open spaces of different scale and use, keeping all the trees from being affected by the proposed construction. In this way the views from the units would be a cutout from the original green landscape of the lot and its vegetation would also serve to achieve privacy between the houses of the assembly and in relation to their neighbors.
The functional organization
Passing through the courtyard entrance you access the set by a semi covered directly related to the administration. The ground floor units are reached through a free path through the common areas and you access them by their private expansions. From the two main courtyards and through their own stairs you enter the upper floor units that have private terraces as expansions, which are created as a result of occupying the space reticule.
Each unit consists of a single room with two distinct areas: the sleeping room with a bathroom and a storing sector, and dining and sitting room with an area for cooking.
The construction
The work was done in exposed concrete, a material that unifies in a single element structure and finishing. H21 concrete was used with the addition of a fluidifiant so that this mixture, with little amount of water to harden, results very compact and doesn’t require sealing. In the bathroom and kitchen areas was chosen to solve them with dry construction: galvanized pipes structure and pine boards on the exterior walls, and plasterboard on the interior. The floor cloths are also from concrete screed divided with aluminum plates. The openings are of dark bronze anodized aluminum. Electric floor heating is used as heating system combined with salamanders.
The furniture
Except the beds, couches and chairs, the rest of the equipment of this house is solved in concrete.
The Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) Competitions division and Islington Council have announced that Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects has been selected as the winners of a design competition for the new Finsbury Leisure Centre at St Luke’s Area in South Islington, London. The winning proposal, chosen from a shortlist featuring 5 top architects including Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Grimshaw Architects, will reinvigorate the site with new council homes, improved public space and a new civic building that will house recreation, childcare, healthcare and energy facilities all under one roof.
The five shortlisted designs had been anonymously displayed at the Finsbury Library until May 23rd, giving locals the opportunity to share their comments on the schemes. Ultimately, the council judging panel though Pollard Thomas Edwards’ solution provided “the most creative and forward thinking ideas for the new civic building.”
The new development will feature an engaging street presence, offering views into recreational and leisure facilities, while the recreation center’s sawtooth roof will allow natural light to fill community spaces.
The architects will now continue working with the community to finalize strategies and implement the design.
“It’s a real honour for Pollard Thomas Edwards to have won this competition,” said Teresa Borsuk, Senior Partner at Pollard Thomas Edwards. “We are really delighted and are very much looking forward to working with the council and local community to deliver what will be a special combination of leisure, health, childcare facilities, and new homes for Islington, as well as a civic legacy for Finsbury. We pass the site daily with new excitement.”
More information on the competition can be found at the Islington website, here.
News via RIBA Competitions.
American firm Sparano + Mooney Architecture has covered a family home in Utah with hundreds of weathering steel plates to give the exterior a textured appearance (+ slideshow). (more…)
Comments update: angry readers took to Dezeen’s comments section this week after we reported on the Kardashians’ penchant for Modernist architecture, but could exposure to wider audiences actually be a good thing for the profession? (more…)
A Dalston based creative workshop has been completed for Sweetdram, a new distillery collective, in collaboration with young architecture practice SODA.
Sweetdram’s first ‘permanent’ home is in a former printworks in Dalston and has been designed to be as flexible as possible – everything within the studio can be easily dismantled, moved and adapted to the needs of the company.
SODA’s approach has been to use a limited, modern materials palette to inform a ‘kit of parts’ to design practical, minimal interiors, which reinforce Sweetdram’s contemporary take on liquers for modern tastes.
Cork is used for worktops and a bespoke storage wall that doubles as a partition of the space, separating the main workshop area from the office. SODA have specified tailored copper detailing as the backdrop to a feature display of bottles and liquids and as a reference to the copper still.
The project brings together the endeavours of several young and entrepreneurial studios. In addition to SODA and Sweetdram, Walthamstow-based cabinet maker David Vivian has helped create additional bespoke elements for the interior. SODA have also referenced graphic motifs taken from Sweetdram’s new brand identity, developed in conjunction with Spring Studios Creative Director Andreas Neophytou, which also informed the industrial bottle design by Felix de Pass for Sweetdram’s first release, Escubac.
Co-director of SODA, Russell Potter said: ‘There are some projects that are too good to turn down. When Andrew and Dan approached us about a technical workshop and events space we were interested. When they said they were happy for us to take the design of their branding and graphics and run with it to create a physical version, we were really excited. When you add bespoke liquers into the mix too! What’s not to love?”
Co-founder of Sweetdram, Andrew MacLeod Smith said: “The approach SODA took made us feel like we were in constant collaboration, which enabled them to get underneath the brand’s skin. As a result, they have managed to create a workshop that not only balances function and aesthetic but also acts as an extension of Sweetdram and a showcase for what we do. More than being just a nice place to work, the space becomes a highly unique, dynamic marketing tool, and for a small brand in a competitive industry, that’s invaluable.”
World Heritage Corb: the lakeside home Le Corbusier designed for his parents is next up in our series in which we take a closer look at the 17 projects recently added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List. (more…)
In this video, Ben Uyeda of HomeMade Modern demonstrates how to build a sleek, contemporary spiral staircase using just a standard schedule steel post, plywood and a CNC router (along with a healthy amount of wood and construction glue). To build the staircase, Uyeda uses the CNC to cut out 12 shapes of incremental size from a plywood sheet, which he then stacks and fits around the post to secure into place.
HomeMade Modern has also made the CAD files available for free, so handy woodworking types can attempt the construction themselves.
Uyeda estimates that each full step requires approximately 1.25 4 foot by 8 foot sheets of ¾ inch plywood, which cost him about $40 a sheet. Add in the cost of the steel ($450) and screws and glue ($200), and the finished material cost rang in at a price significantly lower than the prefabricated metal spiral staircases available on the market. But with a construction time of about 2 hours per stair, the material savings does not come without a rigorous amount of labor.
HomeMade Modern is also beginning a partnership with AutoDesk to utilize their brand new BUILD Space (BUilding, Innovation, Learning and Design), a state-of-the-art coworking and shop facility dedicated to exploring the potential of digital fabrication technologies. Located in South Boston, Massachusetts, the 34,000 square foot space contains workshops for metal fabrication, CNC & manual machining, woodworking, water jet cutting, large format routing, laser cutting, composites, glass, robotics and 3D printing.
Find full CAD files and instructions for a wide variety of DIY projects on HomeMade Modern’s homepage, here.
Matter Design’s “Helix” Stair Takes Concrete to the Next Level
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The house is placed in Challabamba’s sector to a few minutes of the downtown of Cuenca; the area for this project thinks to a few meters of the Rio Tomebamba, the same one that he presents green spaces accompanied of vegetation of fall, average and high density, giving a natural environment of importance to be taken this way.
For before exposed as point of architectural item in the offer for the production of the design and planning of the house, one sought to provide the major entail of the interior space with the exterior natural space.
To obtain the result to this item, in the offer of his front towards the area of the river one proposed the use of big vain glazed (floor – ceiling) with the minor possible carpentry, obtaining a transparency from the house towards this natural space creating the visual interesting one; with the use also of vain these also he took advantage of the natural lighting to the interior inhabitable spaces, reducing this way the use of artificial lighting.
This building was planned for a family composed by 4 persons, the parents and his two children, this one has an area of construction of 349 m2 in two plants, having in his ground floor what consists of social common areas as room, dining room, kitchen, study and an area of exterior cover is (deck), and while in the high plant one finds the area deprived of the family since it are the bedrooms and zone of being or of television.
In his formal part the house is composed by simple linear elements that with the use of materials in each of them as the stone, the natural wood, the white cloths and the big vitrales bring together a game of volumes and textures that they harmonize with the place and give sobriety to the building.
