After two years of intensive planning, Trinity ChurchWall Street revealed the design for its new building at 74 Trinity Place, in the Financial District of New York City. New York-based firm Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects designed the building to serve as both a ministry and community center for the church. Using open public spaces and multipurpose rooms, the structure will connect neighbors, workers, and families — reflecting the church’s aim for community engagement.
Our building is a statement of Trinity’s dedication to serving the people of this community, this neighborhood, and the city of New York for a fourth century, said Reverend Dr. William Lupfter of Trinity Church.
With 26 floors located directly behind Trinity Church, the project reconciles the churchyard and church by forming a larger public setting. Its design is also reminiscent of the original church —glazed panels within metal framework resonate with Trinity’s ancient stonework. Although the base will be reserved for the Parish Center, the rest of the 160,000 square foot office tower is devoted to commercial space.
The Parish Center will have two lobbies: Trinity Place Lobby, a large space for congregating and art exhibits, and Greenwich Street Lobby, an amphitheater type space where smaller performances could be held.
Seating up to 300 people, the Parish Hall will be designed for banquets and theatrical performances. In addition, the structure will include a parlor Library with full-height windows facing Trinity Church, and educational spaces for Sunday school and seminars. A gymnasium with 22′ ceilings and terraces outside of the Parish Hall add to the building’s amenities.
In their press release, the architects write – The addition of office space reaffirms Trinity’s commitment to Lower Manhattan, which the Church views as an investment in continued economic development and job creation in the Financial District.
Near Pondicherry in Southern Indian is Auroville, an experimental township devoted to the teachings of mystic philosopher Sri Aurobindo. The 20 square kilometer site was founded in 1968 by Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa. Otherwise known as “The Mother,” she saw Auroville as a place “where men of all countries would be at home”.
Today, Auroville has roughly 2,500 residents and continues to sustain itself, albeit to mixed results. On one hand, the Mother’s utopian vision has somewhat fallen short, with murders, suicides, visitors warned not to go out alone at night, and the questionable control of money in a theoretically “money-less” society.
On the other hand, Auroville is a hotbed of creative eco-experimentation, with the transformation of once-desert land into forest, solar panels powering much of the town, organic farming, and sustainable construction. This experimentation fits under Auroville’s charter as a “site of material and spiritual researches.” [1]
It’s not surprising then, that the architecture of Auroville is too, is an experimentally mixed bag. There are modern Kahn-like standalone houses, vernacular huts with thatched roofs, homogeneous clusters with names like “Aspiration” or “Solitude” and eco-friendly public centers dedicated to earth building, all around a central, gold, monumental building.
Below are just some of the buildings that make up Auroville’s unique built environment:
1. The Matrimandir Temple, designed by Roger Anger
Quite literally the heart of Auroville is Matrimandir, a golden temple that sits at the centre of a galaxy-inspired master plan. Although Anger designed alongside the Mother upon his commission in 1965, the temple was not complete until 2008, taking a total of 37 years to build. Anger noted Le Corbusier as inspiration, for “genius in his use of form” and how he was “single-minded, bold in his conceptions.” [2] The contradiction between this top-down design inspiration and the Aurovillean ideals of equality is yet another paradox of the town.
2. The Auroville Visitor Center, designed by Suhasini Iyer-Guigan
Departing from Anger’s sculptural dictation, Iyer-Guigan is an architect drawn to self-building, prefabrication and alternative building technologies. Her Auroville Visitor Center is an expression of this, built in 1998 from compacted earth bricks and prefabricated ferrocement. It doubles as both a reception center and a demonstration complex where villagers can learn and hone their earth building techniques. [3]
3. The Vikas Settlement, designed by Satprem Maïni
Specializing in compressed stabilized earth blocks (CSEB), Maini headed the design of the Vikas Settlement, a four-story building built using CSEB. The blocks can be said to be more sustainable as they can be fired at 700-900 degrees Celsius instead of the 1,200 degrees required by concrete. The building’s incorporation of renewable energy sources and wastewater management system earned it a place as a finalist for the World Habitat Award in 2000.
A resident of Auroville for the last 25 years, Doctor-Pingel considers sustainability as “a way of life and not an add-on.” Central to her design philosophy is Bauibiology, or Building Biology. This considers electromagnetic fields, natural materials and earth energies in a design process that seeks planetary harmony. The Temple Tree Retreat is reflective of these respects, fusing greenery into its structure of terracotta blocks and cuddapah floor.
References:
1. Kundoo, Anupama. (2007), Auroville: An Architectural Laboratory. Archit Design, 77: 50–55. doi:10.1002/ad.557 2. Desai, Madhavi. Women Architects and Modernism in India: Narratives and contemporary practices. Routledge, 2016. 3. Miles, Malcolm. Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of Alternative Settlements. Chippenham: Routledge, 2008.
The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) first opened in 1941 in the oceanfront La Jolla home of philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps. In the half century that followed, the museum saw three distinct expansions; now, as it turns 75, MCASD anticipates its latest addition, a flexible new multipurpose design by Selldorf Architects that will quadruple the current gallery space.
Courtesy of Selldorf Architects
There is a spirit that is made up of all different things, from the collection and the location to all the people that make it a very special place, there is work to do and I think the rewards are going to be tremendous said Annabelle Selldorf, founding principal of the New York-based, 65-person firm. Inspired by San Diego‘s diverse cultural influences, Selldorf hopes to make the original Scripps house, designed by Irving Gill, the centerpiece of the area.
Courtesy of Selldorf Architects
The addition, which is conceived as a series of smaller volumes, aims to create a more welcoming entry to the museum and blend it more cohesively to its coastal site. In a harmonious contrast with the stucco finish of the current building, the addition will be composed of cast concrete, travertine panels, and aluminum brise-soleils. The new buildings will provide spaces for both the permanent MCASD collection and changing exhibitions, as well as public programs, performance art, and other educational activities.
The museum will close next January to prepare for construction, which is projected to begin in the second half of 2017. The building is expected to reopen in late 2019.
The Klinker Cultural Centre was given a lively exterior to reflect the expressive nature of its programs. Its central location in Winschoten makes it easily accessible to the residents who can enjoy the cultural offerings of the theatre, arts centre, radio studio and library, or savour a coffee in the theatre café. In this way, residents themselves actively contribute to their city’s cultural life.
Site Plan
Cultural icon in Groningen region The striking carved exterior of the centre is designed without front or back facades in order to better engage its surroundings on all sides. This also maximises and accentuates its footprint on the site, while the gentle angles of the continuous facade play with the laws of perspective and shorten visual distances. The horizontal sections, curved edges and overhangs recall 1920s Expressionist architecture in Groningen. The building anchors itself in Winschoten by echoing the morphology of its surroundings. It functions as a juncture between the small-scale buildings of the historic inner city and the larger scale of post-war developments and renovations. The adjacent city centre is characterised by double-storey masonry houses made of local Groningen clay. The reduced scale is emphasized by the horizontal bands that split and join as they move around the building. Major characteristics of the building are its richly detailed vertical masonry and deep, sloping window recesses which lend the building a strong and bold appearance. Different types of bricks were specially designed for the project and produced in traditional orange Groningen clay. The technical zones in the plinth also reflect a connection to the surroundings. The raw, brown/orange ends of the building feature CorTen steel surfaces perforated with the contours of Groningen’s landscape.
Façade The main innovation is the fact that the facade is entirely sculpted from brickwork. A very specific production process enabled the use of deep reveals around the window frames. These are composed of six separate elements poured into one single structure in the factory and installed as one piece on site in front of the windows.
Courtesy of Atelier Pro
The prefab facade is completely constructed without traditional sills or eaves/overhangs. Water that runs over the window frame is discharged through the drainage cavity. In principle no additional drain is necessary. In case of excessive leakage it was decided to implement gutters under every frame to reduce the risk of damage and make maintenance easier. For extra reassurance, the gutters catch excess water and drain it away through the sewage system.
In spite of the prefab wood elements used in this construction, this private house on Steigereiland in IJburg conjures up the idea of an outsize, five-storey wood-carving. Maatworks architects were commissioned to fill the entire building envelope with a town house inspired by the clients’ beloved Scandinavians houses. As in previous projects in IJburg, the architects used one material in particular: pine wood.Here that material was even painted bright red for the facade. Behind that eye-catching facade lies a prefab system based on glulam building components that allows the architect to connect nearly all the components both structurally and spatially. For example, the wall of the staircase are both banisters and walls for the adjoining rooms. Via a large skylight and several small openings in the stairwell, daylight penetrates deep into the house, an effect that is further enhanced by the floor-by-floor widening of the stairwell as it rises.
The house required minimal detailing because the dimensionally accurate prefab internal walls allowed for plain connections, while all the ducting and recesses for wall sockets were concealed during prefabrication. Pine’s tendency to yellow has been counteracted with a coating of lye. Maat architects avoid monotony in the interior with whitish-grey doors and cement covering floors, with integrated floor heating, finished wit fair-faced concrete.
Floor Plans
The house was designed in accordance with the passive solar energy principle: large expanses of south-facing glass ensure that solar heat floods the house in winter, while architectural solar shading in the form of balconies and a roof overhang above the terrace prevent overheating in summer. Surplus heat is expelled via the skylight above the stairwell. In combination with the material properties of this “wooden house”, this provides for a pleasant indoor climate and Scandinavian-style domestic bliss in the middle of the big city.
Product Description.The wood construction of the house consists of prefab cross laminated elements. The elements were made by the german company Züblin. Due to the precision of the product, we could even use it for the interior, for example the stairway in this house.
Situated in the Sakarya region—some 170 km east of Istanbul, in Turkey’s Hinterland–S2OSB is a pioneering management building, headquarters and conference hall, of our client, Sakarya 2nd Industrial District’s Board of CEO’s. Uniting the vision of their management and engineering teams, it is also an iconic structure in the area, engaging people into a new way of looking.
A new way of looking leads to a new way of knowing as it can reflect the core concept of industrial development. A new and unexpected presence creates a unique character for the area and provokes people’s thinking: they become curious about the end product: How did this structure come about? What is the story behind it? What collaboration took place behind the scenes?
The façade is very important in triggering these questions. The façade is the interplay between exterior and interior; it opens one world into another. The envelope is how a building performs, how it expresses itself, similarly to how a garment makes a fashion statement: it is the building’s character. S2OSB’s façade expresses not only the building’s character but also its function.
The façade, made of thoughtfully crafted metal, wraps around the building and helps communicate the structure’s multi-faceted purpose: from head offices to the conference hall (170 seats). At the conference hall, the geometrically textured shell starts with mostly solid panels followed by perforated panels, increasing rhytmically until they detach as a double facade that filters controlled daylight to the offices. The interior is camouflaged by the exterior whereas the users can see outside. Daylight continuously changes the look of the anodized, satinated, folded, and mathematically orchastrated metal exterior. At night, the lighting design reiterates a dual purpose: at the solid facades, lighting is integrated into rhytmically distributed perforfated panels, which then gets fully perforated at the offices where the internal lighting expresses an alternative perception of the facades’ pattern. Thus, the façade is dynamic and expressive of the building’s purpose in an artful way.
The interior consists of two separate foyers: one serves the offices and the other—the auditorium. The grand canopy allows access on both sides, which provides a semi-enclosed space for larger activities or programs. The conference hall fits inside the solid panels: the inner shell is made of acoustacilly engineered, geometric, laminated wood panels. The natural stone and wood create a warm atmosphere inside, in contrast to the cold metal exterior. The offices are designed specifically for executives and engineers who are in charge of the industrial district and its shared facilities. The building serves the day-to-day needs of the industrial complex but also becomes a bridge to public use by inviting a global audience to its conference hall, for the exchange of knowledge.
The building’s mission is the convergence of various industries and people. Such convergence, on the one hand, opens people’s minds to the great potential that industries hold, and on the other—shows the important role of design and architecture in beginning to realize that potential in Turkey’s Hinterland.
Product Description.Principle material used for the project’s façade is aluminum. Specs of the metal is 3mm aluminum sheet, alloy 5754 & tempered H22. Façade panels making process consists of 1500×3000 mm sized sheets being satinated, folded and anodized.
From the architect. NEXT architects are working on a unique series of bridges all over the world. This time, their latest design isn’t an intriguing bat bridge (nominated for the 2016 Dutch Design Awards), but an iconic bridge in China: the Lucky Knot. The new steel pedestrian bridge in the Chinese mega city Changsha is 185 metres long and 24 metres high and fits perfectly in the sequence of extraordinary bridges that characterise NEXT’s practice; by explicitly engaging with the local context, the bridge designs offer new perspectives.
The eye-catching Lucky Knot has down-to-earth Dutch roots: NEXT architects holds offices in Amsterdam and Beijing. In 2013, after the completion of their breathtaking Melkwegbridge in Purmerend, NEXT was invited to take part in an international competition to design a new bridge to be constructed over the Dragon King Harbour River in Changsha’s rapidly developing ‘New Lake District’. For this special commission, the teams in Amsterdam and Beijing joined forces to come up with the unique, winning design: the Lucky Knot. Combining the Dutch team’s expertise in infrastructure and water management and Chinese team’s perseverance and knowledge of the local context was a crucial part of the process. The bridge has already become an icon, and was selected by CNN as one of the “most spectacular bridges that break the mold.”
“NEXT’s designs for both international and national clients distinguish themselves for their singular relationship with their surroundings, their enhancing of the experience of the specific location, and their added value to the site. This is also the case in Changsha. The city is growing and changing rapidly. This context called for a unique gesture to inspire passers-by,” comments Michel Schreinemachers, partner at NEXT architects Amsterdam.
The bridge is a key project in developing the area’s public space, and was designed with recreational, ecological and tourist activities in mind. The bridge connects multiple levels at different heights (the river banks, the road, the higher-placed park as well as the interconnections between them). The final shape of the bridge is the result of -literally and metaphorically- knotting all these routes together. “The shape of the Lucky Knot was inspired by the principle of the Mobius ring, as well as by the Chinese knotting art. In the ancient decorative Chinese folk art, the knot symbolises luck and prosperity,” says John van de Water, partner at NEXT architects Beijing. The bridge owes its imaginative appeal to the combining of tradition and modernity.
Section
“The Lucky Knot is more than a bridge and a connection between two river banks. Its success lays in bringing cultures together, and in the fusion of history, technology, art, innovation, architecture and spectacle,” adds NEXT architects Beijing partner Jiang Xiaofei.
The Lucky Knot connects, illuminates and entertains. The bridge offers a spectacular view of the river, Meixi Lake, the city of Changsha and the surrounding mountain range. Thanks to its remarkable LED lightshow, the bridge is set to become a landmark attraction in the light route that traces the path of the Dragon King Harbour River.
Inspired with paper patterns created by fashion designers for garment making to interpret their imagination, this interior design, taking silhouettes from such patterns, starts dialogues with the young residence owner, a French educated female fashion designer. Just as dress drawings, folding and twisting in pattern making are transformed to clean-cut presentation of sharply defined copper tubing of pendant lamps hanging down from ceiling and wires braided on the glass bookcase.
Fabrics are what it takes to make garments. Prompted by silks and lace, the translucent texture is reinvented as metallic mesh and glass in the bookcase to reflect see-through effects as well as the contrast between the glossy glass and the unadorned slate wall creating an artistic taste with converted optical illusion showcasing the owner’s keen interest in reading fashion books. With the figurative banking out to the minimal abstract design elements of the bookcase incorporate forms and shapes of bow ties and belts from garment accessories and art deco is exhibited as delicate details within bookcase interior.
Inspired by artworks of René Gruau, a well-known fashion illustrator, colors employed in the space take on the look of a French-style vividness and audacity. The study in warm orange, the living room in tranquil blue and the kitchen in sumptuous gold complement and contrast with one another. The thick yet bright colors in large areas bring in a taste of rhythmic and geometric montage collocating the elegant charm of linear adornments.
With a look suggesting a sewing machine the tailor-made base of the dining table breaks through hedging-in traditions of balance with asymmetric fashion deconstructing and echoes Experimentalism in the fashion design trend.
In this project, the architect was facing two challenges. First of all, he needed to bring up the video company’s nature within very low budget. Second, the historic building was a former residence of a KMT General, which cannot be changed easily.
According to the local regulation, the illegal structures around General’s former residence built before a certain point are allowed to exist in silent acquiescence. But it is not allowed to build more, and once these illegal structures were removed, new buildings are not allowed to replace them.
The architect ignored different material and building time, painting all parts of illegal structures in black, including canopy. Black unified the differences in detail, made allocated units become background of the main building and highlighted the main building. The historical expression of the site was divided into two parts, the white parts are official history while the black parts are the unofficial history. Same design philosophy was applied on the yard, old bricks were relayed, and new bricks were added. As the old bricks and new bricks were in different sizes, a gap was leaving between two sets of bricks. The architect used grass to emphasize the gap, rather than to bury it.
The biggest move was applied on the porch which is opposite to the door. The architect used two circle to change the façade, the intersection part of two circles is like the third eye. In Chinese fairy tale, the third eye stands for supernatural talent, with which you can see what normal people cannot see. The third eye represents the video company’s pursue of discovering the unusual things that people cannot find in daily life. The architect used two blue glasses on the intersection. The blue stressed the symbol and activated the black to response to people’s moving. The sun shines through the blue glass, leaving a mystery shadow on the floor. The shadow brought life into the yard.
“The brief for this project was to design a beautiful addition to a heritage listed Bowral cottage – one which was private and allowed the existing cottage to appear unchanged from the street. The clients were passionate about restoration of the original parts of the building, and replacing the dysfunctional 1980’s addition to the rear of the building.
The additions were to maximise the solar-passive performance of the house, create a large entertainers kitchen in the heart of the home, allow for a new living and dining area, provide for a new sunken media room and guest accommodation. The client was keen to explore a contemporary approach to the new work, allowing for the new addition to juxtapose with the original weatherboard cottage. Most importantly, the house had to ‘work well’ from an environmental performance perspective.
The new additions have been detailed to eliminate thermal bridging, create a well insulated and airtight envelope and to maximise passive solar heat gain and natural cross ventilation. The house has been designed to capture the sunlight in winter, and to exclude it from heating up the spaces in summer. A geo-thermal heat recovery system heats the pool, floor slab and domestic hot water and 35kW of solar panels provide more electricity than the occupants are likely to use (feeding the surplus back into the grid). A charging station in the garage powers an electric vehicle.”
Product Description. Windows and doors- ThermalHEART range. ThermalHEART™ window and door systems are thermally broken to deliver improved energy efficiency for building. The thermal break in ThermalHEART™ windows and doors is created using a polyamide strip between the aluminium exterior and interior elements. The thermal break minimises the transfer of heat and cold through the aluminium window frame, giving the thermally broken aluminium window excellent insulation properties.
Sig Nordal 