The apartment of Carole and Robin is located on the ground floor of a mansion of the XVIIth arrondissement in Paris. Taking advantage of a private garden with terrace, when the family grew, Carole and Robin preferred to buy the apartment on the 1st floor to accommodate the children’s room rather than move.
The main challenge of this renovation was to find the place of a staircase as discreet as possible. The work was delivered as a screw-in kit. This technique allowed us to produce in the workshop a
thermolacquered paint, much more resistant than a painting done on the spot. The use of metal offered a light writing to the work with whose thickness does not exceed 25mm!
The partnership architect / artisan / engineer allowed to realize a technical feat by suspending the staircase to the upper floor! As often in Paris, space is precious. Although they are appreciable, the storage spaces cause loss of habitable surface. We imagined a large piece of furniture. 7 meters long for 60 cm deep, and suspended at 2.10 meters from the ground. It thus occupies no square meter!
In the child’s room, the distinction of two spaces allows the two brothers to define their respective territories. This old bourgeois building is composed of architectural elements: solid wood doors, enamelled handles, moldings, rails, rosettes. We have tried through our project to conserve and magnify these elements. For example, the blue partition in the children’s room is not continuous up to the ceiling. It ensures the separation between the rooms and the staircase. It houses a glass floor that allows daylight on the steps. It allows to preserve and to stage the old molding making the turn of the piece!
In June last year, PARTISANS published Rise and Sprawl: The Condominiumization of Toronto with architecture historian and critic Hans Ibelings. An effort to contextualize the role of the condo in Toronto’s unprecedented and intense growth over the past ten years, this thoughtful, if provocative, work offers a scathing criticism of the architecture (or lack thereof) deployed in much of the recent residential constructions in the city. It is a formal demand that the city be built more thoughtfully.
Alex Josephson is a founding partner of PARTISANS, one of Toronto’s youngest and more innovative architecture practices. Only in its fifth year, PARTISANS has already earned accolades and awards from the American Institute of Architecture, the Ontario Association of Architects, Architect Magazine, Interior Design Magazine, and the World Architecture Festival (WAF).
Randy Gladman, Vice President of Development at Toronto-based Triovest Realty Advisors, sat down with Alex in his Yorkville apartment, which overlooks some of Toronto’s architectural masterpieces—Hariri Pontarini’s McKinsey & Company Headquarters, Robert Stern’s One St. Thomas, Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto-Dominion Centre, and the University of Toronto’s MacDonald Block—to probe some of the criticisms offered in Rise and Sprawl and explore why PARTISANS felt the need to publish a work sure to infuriate precisely the developers they desire as clients and the city planners they need for project approvals.
Courtesy of PARTISANS Projects
This interview with Alex Josephson has been conducted by Randy Gladman. It has been edited by Nicola Spunt and abridged for publication by ArchDaily.
Randy Gladman: Rise and Sprawl bills itself as “a call to action for how we can become better city builders.” Generally speaking, I agree with the underlying thesis, namely that condo tower development in Toronto can, should, and must be done better than it has been until now. The book criticizes the “sheer ubiquity and relative uniformity of towers—from their glass facades and anemic colour schemes, dominated by grays, greens and beiges, to their rectangular volumetrics and rigid floor plans.” But is this unique to Toronto?
Alex Josephson: You’re right, it’s not unique to Toronto. Similar condominiumization crazes have struck other cities, like Vancouver and Hong Kong. The tower shaped in the form of a question mark on the cover of the book is something we call the “WTF Tower.” It’s a rhetorical gesture: What the fuck are we doing to our skylines? It absolutely applies to other cities; we just happened to be getting PARTISANS off the ground during a moment in history when it was happening to Toronto, so it made sense to adopt our city as a lens through which to explore the phenomenon. The main difference is that the quality of the condos we’re building here is inferior, from an aesthetic and performance perspective, compared to those being built elsewhere. Take SHoP’s proposed design for Brooklyn’s first supertall skyscraper. It’s gorgeous. Nothing we’ve done here even comes close to that kind of beauty and rigor.
RG: Can you elaborate on what you mean by “performance”?
AJ: We have to stop building towers that are the equivalent of radiators in the sky. We do not create proper thermal breaks between our balconies and the actual floor plates of buildings, so our condos gush heat. We’re using window wall systems that have an 18-year shelf life—less than the average lifespan of a condo’s mortgage amortization—after which they will start to fail. Even the buildings that are being marketed to the one-percenters—ostensibly the developments that could afford to set a higher bar—aren’t well-proportioned or made from durable materials. Why aren’t we demanding better? I always think of the Athenian Oath. If you were a citizen of Athens 2000 years ago, you had to pledge to leave the city more beautiful than when you arrived. The city came first. The collective good came first. This ethos drives the work we try to do at PARTISANS.
Courtesy of PARTISANS Projects
RG: I’m still trying to understand if this is a Canadian phenomenon, though. The book describes Canadians as people who like to play it safe, which “stym[ies] our appetite for innovation.” Is a desire for safety and safe thinking necessarily at odds with forward-thinking design? Aren’t the Nordic European countries, which are known for their more ambitious architectural thinking and design, also known for their risk aversion?
AJ: This idea of risk management and safety as distinctly part of the Canadian brand isn’t entirely new, but I think it’s become more prominent since 2008. After the global economy collapsed, we patted ourselves on the back and said, “Ha, look at us, we didn’t allow subprime.” The rest of the world thought our rules were the epitome of conservative stability. When it comes to the Scandinavian countries, the main difference is that they have design economies. Look at Denmark, Holland, Norway, Japan… not only do they value design, they export their talent. Denmark has a significant design GDP and takes its design history very seriously.
We absolutely don’t see that in Canada. Case in point: The Province of Ontario recently released a new Culture Strategy that initially didn’t even mention architecture and design whatsoever. When enough people made a fuss, they were finally included at the eleventh hour. It’s sad because when it comes to architecture, you’re fundamentally talking about real estate, one of the most important enablers of growth. As a country, we simply have not yet embraced architecture or design as important drivers of culture and economy.
Courtesy of PARTISANS Projects
RG: The book describes condo towers as “spreadsheets in the sky,” the “material manifestation of the developer’s profit margin.” But surely this is not just a Toronto phenomenon. Aren’t the majority of cities developed with a close eye on profit?
AJ: It isn’t just a Toronto phenomenon, agreed. Again, we’re using the city as a lens because we’re seeing firsthand the extent to which we’re abusing the sky and the streets here at home. But the answer comes back to density. The cost of building increases with every storey you don’t give to a developer. Anything above twenty stories is inconsequential from street level. So whether it’s twenty or a hundred storeys, I’m mostly indifferent. We are so obsessed in Toronto with height. But height equals money. If we can figure out a way to allow for more height in exchange for better design, we’ll end up with better buildings. But that kind of logic is just not embraced by the city planning culture here.
RG: So you’re suggesting that the City should allow developers to go nuts on height as long as they use the extra revenue from that height to improve the design? Isn’t the city already doing that through 1% for Art and Section 37, which allow developers to negotiate extra height in exchange for paying back into infrastructure, public art, parks, and affordable housing to improve urban culture?
AJ: I would ask this: Why are the projects themselves not the site of culture? Architecture itself should perform as public art. These municipal strategies have become an apology for offensive architecture that doesn’t give back, for podiums that don’t provide a fine-grain pedestrian experience. Everyone—the City officials, the developers, and the community members—should be thinking more dynamically. We can’t just use one speed. We need more subtlety, more thoughtfulness.
Courtesy of PARTISANS Projects
RG: But apart from the rare vanity project or institutional edifice, how are these things to be funded if not by some form of profit motive?
AJ: The profit motive will always drive the project, there’s no question. But let’s be honest here for a second. It’s a known fact that Canadian architects get paid less than anywhere else. A respected architect just told me that after Mexico City, Toronto pays its architects less than any other OECD country in the world. It’s not a joke. We’re in a race to the bottom of the fee barrel here in Ontario. To make architecture fees as much as 25% higher would amount to a rounding error on the proforma of most of these bigger condo projects. Buildings don’t get better because of a huge increase in capital expenditure. They get better because an architect has time to work the design out and is paid properly to do so. I mean what do you think? Do architects get paid enough to do what they do?
RG: As a developer managing large and small projects, that’s tough for me to answer because I only see the landlord side of the equation. We are incentivised to build high-quality products on a reasonable, market-driven budget. So yes, on the one hand, part of me feels that architects are paid enough to do what they do because their rates are determined by market forces and I believe in market efficiency. When proposals and invoices come in from the architects on our projects sometimes we’re surprised at how high they are. For example, my team may request what would seem to be a pretty simple change order and the next thing we know we’re being billed for 40 hours of design time. Did someone really spend an entire week making this change? But on the other hand, as someone who pours a lot of professional and personal time into trying to make Toronto a better city, I do wonder if buildings could be better if architects had more time and resources to think through their designs. But that’s a tough sell for developers.
Courtesy of PARTISANS Projects
AJ: One of the arguments we make in the book is that it’s a mistake to believe beauty and profit are mutually exclusive. What do you think about that proposition? How can we work out the math so that it supports more beautiful, higher performing condo design?
RG: I think it’s up to the architect to delineate the value proposition. I interpreted Rise and Sprawl as your attempt to educate developers (and others) about how our buildings are failing in comparison to the achievements seen internationally. So maybe it’s not a math issue but rather a requirement to clarify the value of the design ethos to which you refer. But I don’t think it’s entirely fair to lay it all at the heels of developers. You write about how the “[d]evelopers, architects, city officials, and community groups alike are engaged in a broken process that simply isn’t promoting innovative or notable urban design.” Can you talk about how you see the process as broken?
AJ: One of the big problems in Toronto, among other things, is that we have architecture without architects. The difference between a mediocre building and a great one is not as stark as some believe it to be. It’s about thoughtfulness. Fundamentally, the reason these buildings look the same is because they’re being repeated and recycled. The same window wall systems, the same curtain wall manufacturers, the same balcony designs. It’s also partly due to a kind of stalemate among the key players. The perception is that the city planners are overwhelmed, the developers want height, height, height, but don’t really care about design, and the communities are angry and always poised to say no. So you have this general misalignment even though we are all fundamentally trying to build a city together. The problem is we’re doing it on a site-by-site basis. What’s the bigger vision for the city? Rise and Sprawl puts all these projects side by side, including their marketing slogans and elevation designs; it is quite fascinating what results. They are practically identical! Things need to change.
Courtesy of PARTISANS Projects
RG: “The advent—and virulence—of the condo tower has enabled the vertical urbanization, and arguably, suburbanization, of city centres.” As a native Torontonian, I see a direct correspondence between what you guys call “condominiumization” and major improvements to the city’s urban and cultural fabric. How is intensification “suburban”? Does culture not follow from density?
AJ: There’s a subtle but critical distinction I think some people are missing about the book: We are not criticizing condominiumization; we are criticizing condo architecture. We support density and we support condos. Toronto has become a much more vibrant city as a result of the condo boom. But the values that are driving the designs are suburban. The virulent spread of homogeneous design? That’s practically the definition of suburban. The radiator balconies I mentioned? They’re the result of a hard-wired fantasy that, as Canadians, we all have some kind of God-given right to an outdoor space, namely a back or front yard. And parking lots. Why do we still own and drive cars in the downtown core? This is a serious problem totally born out of a suburban driving mentality.
Then there are the pools, which, in our climate, are barely open four months out of the year. Pools are a suburban luxury. It also bears remembering that between the passing of the Greenbelt legislation and changes to planning laws, which started to encourage taller buildings, developers who once made their fortunes on low-density suburban tract housing rebranded and became players in the downtown core. But they’re essentially doing the same thing they did before: producing low-quality, fast and dirty extrusions that obey the same logic as a horizontal series of streets that sprawl. But like we say in the book, they’ve turned the sprawl on its side and shot it vertically into the air. The retailing logic is also similar to the ways they negotiate leases and designs for suburban shopping malls. They make covenants with anchor retailers like Shoppers Drug Mart or Loblaw, and we end up with curtain or window walls that bear no resemblance to the rest of facades and fine-grain retail on the rest of the street. All of this is what we mean by suburbanization.
Rise and Sprawl. Image Courtesy of PARTISANS Projects
RG: “The proliferation of insipid towers is essentially the mass production of vertical housing that, with the help of patent brand strategies and faux fancy amenities, masquerades as an aspirational lifestyle choice. Marketing materials target and then attempt to seduce very specific demographics. Ultimately, condos are like any other commodity—mass produced, financially ratified products that preempt choice and manufacture desire in the same turn.” I find some of the language you guys use sometimes borders on snobbish elitism. Many of the amenities actually are “fancy.” Contemporary art in the hallways, heated indoor pools, well-appointed skydecks—these are luxury amenities that many Canadians aspire to have. I grew up with and work with many people who are very proud of living or owning in these kinds of buildings. They feel like they own a piece of the Canadian dream. Are you sure these buildings are masquerading or are they truly aspirational?
AJ: From a Canadian perspective, yes, some of these buildings might be wonderful. But we have to judge ourselves by the standards of great architecture in the rest of the world. I have to go back to performance. If you are driving a 1975 Volvo because you’ve never seen a 2016 Audi A6, and then you learn about the Audi and discover you’ve paid the same amount, how would you feel? You’d be pissed. I can understand that our perspective may come across as snobbish, but the conclusions are informed by experience and research from around the world. We are trying to tell Canadians they are not living the dream. It’s bullshit. The finishes are cheap and the buildings are not going to last; the architecture isn’t going to prove to be timeless. We are not assailing the Canadian dream. We are just trying to encourage everyone to look around! In Scandinavian countries they are already building 20-storey towers made of wood. We can’t build that in Canada. There’s a 17-storey condo being constructed of wood in lower Manhattan right now. In Norway and Denmark there are 20-storey wood towers going up. We are one of the most prosperous forest-based economies in the world and what are we allowed to build out of wood? Six storeys. It makes no sense. We’re not living in high-performance buildings on ANY level. It may seem like we are, but that’s only because we’re not used to seeing the alternatives here. You’re buying a 1975 Volvo for the price of a new Audi A6 when you could have had a fucking A6. I guess, at least, a 1975 Volvo is cool.
Courtesy of PARTISANS Projects
RG: Beyond a brief list of 11 recommendations, the book doesn’t really offer a sustained discussion about how things can be done better. “Building density is critical, but doing so in responsible, diverse, and beautiful ways using sustainable materials needs to be the rule, not the exception.” Great! What are those ways? What are the long-term cultural and economic benefits of design and how should they be implemented into high-density residential development going forward?
AJ: There was a big internal debate at PARTISANS about how the book should be structured. We were faced with a conundrum: either we could make distilled, point-form recommendations, as we did, or we could go long-form and really dive deep into the details. Ultimately, we decided that the latter would have made for a more boring book, and we wanted Rise and Sprawl to spur a conversation. The eleven points at the end have clear ramifications; they don’t pull any punches. They may seem cute, but if you think about them deeply, we believe they are hugely meaningful.
RG: My larger critique of the book is that it seems like it’s really just the first chapter of a much larger investigation that you need to write.
AJ: Yes, agreed. The whole point was to write something that would get people talking. I mean look, you and I are discussing it right now! Books are incredibly important, but they can become static and irrelevant unless you continue to find ways to keep the story alive. This is precisely the way we see the conversation continuing to unfold—through dialogues with different people in different formats. Maybe it’s super idealistic but, hopefully, some real change can come out of that. We’ve already started working on another book on the relationships between architecture, time, culture, and politics. It will take another couple of years before that’s complete. But Rise and Sprawl is part of a much bigger project that our studio will remain interested in: how we can build better cities and culture through better architecture and design.
From the architect. It is a 16th century Palace in which different architectural stages and building overlaps are distinguished to the present day. The building is cataloged according to the PGOU of the locality with in the Catalog of Protected buildings, elements and urban groups of interest.
Site Plan
The Palacio Portocarrero, together with its Spanish-Mudéjar style botanical gardens surrounded by Almohade walls from the 11th-12th centuries, forms a spectacular complex that is located in the heart of Andalusia, between Cordoba and Seville. It is an architectural jewel that was hidden and in ruins and after years of careful restoration it shines again.
A beautiful architectural monument cataloged BIC (Well of Cultural Interest) that owns a very rich history millenary mixture of civilizations that goes back to year 105 d.C. In Roman times. The Palace Portocarrero offers its Roman legend, archaeological remains both Roman and Arab and a building with areas of the fifteenth and sixteenth century mainly.
Elevations – Sections
First Floor Plan
Touring the palace and strolling through its gardens, we are surrounded by its grand and magical atmosphere, an exclusive look at the Spanish culture and an aristocratic way of life through the centuries. A walk through time. Today, regained its former splendor, is available to organize any type of event.
For 25 years now, the owners, Moreno de la Cova-Ibarra, dedicate their efforts to the restoration of the palace, devastated during the civil war, to achieve the reality that today we can contemplate and enjoy.
Throughout these years, projects, formalizations, actions and interventions have been carried out, which have been collected with their corresponding projects.
From the architect. An existing single-story, semi-detached house from the 1950’s was remodeled and added a second story to accommodate a family of five.
The house, which follows the shape of the plot, is long and narrow, and apart from the entrance door the street façade is almost windowless. Toilettes on the ground floor and a deep balcony on the first floor buffer between the house and the busy road.
Relocating the main entrance from its previous position on the long façade enabled us to plant a large garden and outdoor living area, visible and accessible via large glass sliding doors, which extends the living space outside.
In order to maintain sufficient privacy, the master bedroom is located on the ground floor and the children’s bedrooms on the first. The master bedroom is located behind the kitchen, and faces away from it, to a private small garden of its own.
Structural reinforcements form an architectural language through which the house’s history is revealed: addition to the ground floor is in exposed concrete, and the stairway opening cut from the existing ceiling is supported by steel columns.
The steel stairway, consisting of Z-shape elements, is the dominant feature in the living room. The stair railing continues upwards and merges with the first floor balustrade.
Ground Floor Plan
First Floor Plan
The ground floor is paved with gray stone, which is used also as cladding of the bathroom walls, while the children’s area is dark wooden floor. All carpentry elements are painted white.
From the architect. The public competition for Gordan Lederer Memorial was announced in 2014 by Croatian Radiotelevision – HRT as part of a plan to mark all the locations where HRT cameramans and photogaphers were killed during the war in Croatia in the 90’s. Gordan Lederer was killed on 10th of August 1991. by a sniper shot while filming on Čukur hill in Bania region in Croatia.
Competition was won by NFO architecture studio and sculptor Petar Barišić with a proposal called ‘Broken Landscape”. The memorial was unveiled in august 2015 on the 24th anniversary of Lederer’s death.
Gordan Lederer Memorial emerged as a multidisciplinary process between architecture and sculpture. This duality developed a project that combines different approaches to the same subject matter, understanding the problem through a number of aspects.
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From the very start it was clear that the base of the project was already given by Lederer himself selecting the location for his final session. The challenge of the location, Čukur hill, which offers amazing view of the Una river valley, became the starting point of all concepts, more or less successful. Discussions and sketches that have marked most of the creative process led to the concept that eventually remained clean and striped of unnecessary layers of meaning or expressiveness but still with opportunity for individual interpretations.
Memorial ‘’Broken Landscape’’ consists of access path and a broken camera lens. The path, designed as a pathway of Lederer’s life, is encrypted in the concrete slabs laid on the grass. Coding is performed in such a way that the concrete slabs are ‘’chained’’ in black steel frames, each engraved with the year of Lederer’s life in negative as an interpretation of film frames. The path goes tensely through natural terrain leading to the last slab, a memorial plateu, without a number, representing the year of his death. Bench on the memorial plateu is reduced to the maximum and is really just a part of the path that gently raises from the ground indicating the end of the path and a final view in real and figurative sens. Through the text placed on the memorial plateu: ‘’ … now that August mornings are peaceful and at ease, a bright melancholy in Gordan Lederer’s eyes beams through the dawns of Banija…’’ visitor enters the contemplation and observes the Lens.
The Lens alone, thrown in the grass in front of the plateau directs visitors view to the valley looking at “the last shots” that Gordan Lederer took. The glass membrane pierced with a shot from a sniper, stops visitors glance for a moment and confronts them with the reality of events on that location. In the same time perfect stainless steel circle suggests the continuity of life, framing view of the same landscape filmed 24 years ago at the same place. Viewed from the River Una Valley, Memorial is dematerialized as a sun glint reflected on the broken lens surface.
Floor Plan
Project is nominated for European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2017!
Product Description:The access path consists of concrete slabs, framed with black steel frames laid on the grass. Each slab is engraved with the year of Gordan Lederer life. Lense itself, placed 10 m from the memorial plato is made out of three layers of laminated safety glass, in total 4 cm thick. The middle one was pierced by a sniper shot with the outer glass layers holding it together. Lense frame is made out of stainless steel ring (74×59 cm) wiht outer diameter 4,4 m. Lense is placed on the grass with total height of 4 m.
From the architect. Located in the North of Israel along the Lebanese mountain range that defines the boarder, Kibbutz Cabri has always served as a haven for the Arts and for artists. Over the years it has been the home to national artists such as Ori Reisman & Yechiel Shemi, and has established a regional school dedicated to the arts, as well as, a print studio that has attracted international renown. The Gottesman Print Center is composed of a large area dedicated to print making, substantial exhibition spaces and important storage facilities. The building is typified by its minimal yet pronounced presence within the landscape. It enjoys panoramic views of the surrounding landscape.
Energy neutral, the print center gains its energy from the solar panels that line the roof surface. And is laminated throughout the day by defused natural light that is indirectly dispersed thought the space.
Etching, like architecture, is dependent upon a complex translation process. The quality of the steel or copper plate, the sharpness of the tools, the concentration of the acid, the aquatint, the moister and type of paper, the pigments, as well as, the press, are all a part of the creative and translation process.
Many years ago, there was a conference at the Print Center that included 10 artists and 10 brain researchers. The topic of the conference was “creativity” and what noteworthy was an observation by one of the scientists that artists need to create problems in order to solve them. Beyond the specific aesthetic qualities of prints, many artists love printmaking because of the challenges in the realization process… and also because it offers the artist the gift of Time, an opportunity to escape the “immediate.”
The world has become a very fast place, especially when one is discussing images. Just to underline this point, in the last 2 years, more digital images have been produced than all the images created in human history.
Floor Plan
The creative process has become a little too easy; to immediate. Cabri offers an alternative scale of judgement that goes beyond mega bits. There is an insistence on a form of expression that has depth. Creating prints is a slow process. It requires skill and judgement. Originality is not enough and neither is just a good concept.
Originally, Kibbutz Cabri hoped to build a large museum, and we designed accordingly. In our utopia, we planned a space for Yechiel Shemi, another for Ori Reisman, a print studio and an extra space for changing exhibitions. Yet in spite of all our efforts, the project could not be realized in its full splendor.
At the end of 2003, Yechiel Shemi passed away and it became clear that a more modest project should be envisioned. We opted to expand and transform the haphazard print workshop that was housed in Ori Reizman’s studio into a state of the art print center with accompanying exhibition and storage facilities. Even
Section
before the building was completed, artist Jim Dime came and opened a Masterclass which brought some of the best artists in Israel to Cabri and together, they all worked under a tent and produced amazing prints which became the first portfolio created in the new print centre.
The print enter’s exhibition space draws visitors from all over the world It enables visitors to learn a little about printmaking and occasionally catch an artist at work.
Although we did not succeed to build the large museum, Shemi’s studio has been transformed into a wonderful place, where in parallel with the print centre, several exhibitions are shown every year.
Site Plan
Shemi’s sculptures have become a part of the inter-connecting landscape and art pilgrimages walk from Shemi’s studio to the Print Studio and visa versa.
What is still missing is a real space for the wonderful works of Ori Reisman.
Product Description.This was a pretty low tech project. it is important to note that the building was constructed while the old print center was still being used and that in transforming from the old to the new we only closed the print center for several weeks. The basic construction is concrete “in situ” casting and concrete block construction. What was slightly different was the roof construction that needed to be extremely light and straddle the existing center without creating either temporary or permanent internal supports. The entire roof structure is supported by the external walls which means that in some cases the spans can reach 20 meters.
This was achieved by creating a light weight steel roof covered by Paltiv’s Double layered Polycarbonate panels. Internally we constructed a plasterboard ceiling with particular detailing for the filtration of natural light and indirect lighting. As an additional layer of insulation & waterproofing we opted for Solatics solar membranes that come integrated to a flexible PVC sheeting that can be welded together to offer a continual and waterproof surface.
No.12 Middle School is one of the best schools in Beijing. There is a strong need from the neighborhood to have the School incorporate kindergarten education in their curriculum. The kindergarten of the school strives for building the best school of the neighborhood, and the architecture of it reflects its ambition. On top of that, the architecture aims for shaping a unique character for the school while enlivening the area of the city.
This is a rehabilitation project. The structure sites at the expending area of the city. Surrounded by residential blocks, the site is in need for human scale culture facilities. The architecture design tries to create a pure and simple paradise with memorable spaces for children. The kindergarten is composed by clean lines and shapes of primary colors. By looking through the lens of a child, the purity of childhood is well preserved in the architecture.
Our project begins with converting the scale from a grown-up to a child. We use building blocks as the inspiration, by incorporating the openings of the original building, we create large color blocks that pop-up from the facade as gigantic building blocks for the neighborhood. The simple color block stands out from the vernacular housing construction, and creates a dialogue with the children of the neighborhood.
Facade Isometric Diagram
Facade Analysis
Our use of primary color starts with the understanding of perception in a child. As the vision of a child starts to mature gradually after six, children’s understanding of color is not as completed as the grownups. So we use a variety of colors in the elevation as well as the interior and exterior environment to stimulate the senses of children and encourage them to explore in the spaces and shapes. Thus their role play in the space would be more memorable. We use blue for nursery, green for toddler and orange for preschool kids, with different emphasis on keeping them calm or making them more activated.
By combining the brilliant colors, we also try to bring some vividness to the city of Beijing—the city de-saturated by winter smog. In perspective, the architecture creates a surreal image of 2-D cookie cutter in the concrete forest of modern city. The two sides of the pop-up volumes are lighting panels. The lighting design makes the pure color block looks richer at night. It turns the architecture into a gigantic modern art of light and color.
The little_BIG house is located in Cleveland, Ohio’s historic Little Italy neighborhood, known for its rich culture and artisanal background. The husband and wife client, both industrial designers, commissioned the project to create a studio for their work and a home to raise a growing family. The residence is located on a dense and constrained urban street away from the idyllic neighborhood center. The site is narrow and bound by three “shot gun” homes to the North, a retaining wall to the East, and a multi story condominium to the South. A former open framed steel warehouse, now used as a covered surface parking structure, is to the west, obstructing views from the site. The imposition of these structures help to inform the design approach.
The architecture emerges from the reconciliation of inherent contradictions embedded within the site and program. The client desired an urban presence, while also creating private exterior space secluded from the surrounding context. The couple asked for flexibility to “split” the property into independent homes in the future. In response to these constraints, the massing of the house became parsed into two distinct volumes, pushed to the extreme boundaries of the site, connected by a covered bridge. This organization creates a communal courtyard from the residual space between the volumes. A monumental stair connects the various programmatic elements. The stairwell folds upon itself overlapping and separating, creating a visual connection between levels. The movement of the stair is evident on the metal surface of the exterior envelope, a folded logic that unites the parts into a cohesive wholeThe material palette is simple and elegant. The exterior facade is black stucco concrete in concert with a color matched metal folding wall and roof. Patterned corten panels provide privacy from the street and the adjacent properties through their use as entry gate and perimeter fencing. The interior is composed of hard troweled concrete floors with white walls, floor to ceiling book matched and sequenced statutory marble slabs in the bathrooms, and richly colored bamboo for the architectural millwork and stairs. Additionally, the monumental stairwell is veiled in white perforated steel panels. This textured strategy is implemented on select glazing units through etching. The perforation pattern was developed through a series of photo manipulations of light passing through a bamboo forest. A transposition inspired by the materiality of the millwork and stair.
Product Description.The concrete stucco allows the form to be sculpted and the complementary metal panels wrap and defines the space within and around the building.
In the first installment of her series, “Cities and Memory – the Architecture and the City,” architect Marta Vilarinho de Freitas created a set of intricately rendered architectural fantasy worlds that straddled the line between realism and abstraction.
Now Vilarinho de Freitas has returned with an additional 7 illustrations, this time experimenting with planimetrics and new cityscape scenes.
In her drawings, she explores the relationship between detail and perception of the city, where negative space becomes as important to an architectural element’s presence and what is drawn.
From the architect. The project is an urban housing for a family with three girls in Salto, a city located on the eastern bank of the Uruguay River.
The construction of 255 square meters on two levels is located on the obligatory frontal limit of 3 meters from the street, leaving free the largest patio area for the North sun.
The land where the housing is implanted has a public pedestrian passage to the west, on this side the land narrows with a curve in the middle of its depth. This singularity is solved by the garage and a storage room, thus regularizing the patio.
The project is defined from the choice of the construction system.
The city of Salto has an interesting history of works of architecture in brick seen of great quality. Since the 1970s, Eladio Dieste’s buildings, among others, have masterfully used the structural and formal qualities of brick.
Scheme Structure
The provision of specialized workmanship and first quality raw material allowed using the constructive system of load bearing wall of exposed brick and concrete slabs in an effective way.
The brick walls in English rig are arranged orthogonally and without voids. In the open spaces are located the openings from floor to ceiling.
The four bedrooms with dressing rooms upstairs are used to modulate the structure. In ground floor the living room, dining room and kitchen are articulated in a free light of 5.70 meters.
Lower Floor
Upper Floor
The shape responds to the constructive system with continuous walls. The textures of the external partitions are achieved with protruding bricks and open joints to ventilate the chambers of ventilated facades.
The house is closed to the south and to the street, opens to the north and the patio where eaves are used to protect against the strong summer sun and allow the entrance of solar radiation in winter.
Longitudinal Section
It also regulates humidity and heat through cross ventilation in all spaces, using banners on the doors and making in summer the fresh air of the south façade in shade runs through the house.
Sig Nordal 