109 Architectes has released its proposal for the Beirut Museum of Modern Art (BeMA), for which a competition was recently held. The proposal was shortlisted, but did not ultimately win. In this proposal, BeMA is a box—“a generic form that belongs to everyone”—based on a scene in The Little Prince, where a traveler is asked to draw a sheep. The Prince rejects each sheep drawing until the traveler draws a box, inside of which a sheep is hidden. “The cube is a neutral form in the Little Prince’s search for identity. Within it, he sees what he wants to see.”
Within this generic box, visitors will thus be able to project their views of Beirut—the city’s chaos, diversity, creativity, history, streets, people, and more.
Courtesy of 109 Architectes
The box portion of the Museum stands alone in the heart of the plot, surrounded by event space, and facing the National Museum of Beirut so that the two buildings are linked by an open plaza. The building is separated into two halves by an inner street, representing the concept of the box “cracking” after failing to contain Beirut’s intensity. This central space will additionally act as a gateway to the Museum, as well as eventually to the city.
Courtesy of 109 Architectes
The inner street is present on each floor of the building, connecting exhibition spaces on both sides via bridges, and contrasting with the outer portion of the building in its transparency.
Courtesy of 109 Architectes
Courtesy of 109 Architectes
In a second phase, ground floor development and a network of streets and plazas will activate the space, turning BeMA into a place to gather and socialize, and allowing the Museum to connect more with its surrounding neighborhood.
iPabo University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam trains students to become teachers in primary education. Mecanoo designed the comprehensive building overhaul and extension needed for the substantial increase of students expected in the coming years.
Plan 1
Part renovation, part new build
The existing iPabo building’s core dates from the 1960s. The adjustments and enhancements made in last few decades resulted in a fragmented building that lacked clear organisation and had limited ties to the surrounding area. Renovation of the school coincided with iPabo’s quest for a new identity to express their independence. Mecanoo worked with the board of iPabo to realise inspirational, transparent environments where there is space to meet in a building that is part renovation, part new build.
Courtesy of Mecanoo
Learning landscape
The building is designed according to the principle of a learning landscape and the emphasis is on the integration of three different zones: knowledge-sharing in classes and project rooms; enhanced concentration in offices and quiet areas; and social interactions in the entrance hall, restaurant and atrium. The atmosphere is warm, comfortable and inviting – people are connected with each other and their surroundings. The renovated building encourages planned and spontaneous meetings amongst users. It surprises, but it is also transparent and feels safe.
Courtesy of Mecanoo
Three-storey central atrium
The new entrance hall, with its large glazed facade, has a strong visual connection to the neighbourhood, making the school a part of the community. The entrance hall offers views of the three-storey central atrium which connects two building wings, creating circulation routes in place of previously dead-end passageways. An auditorium and restaurant are located on the ground floor of the atrium. Freely cantilevered above are the library and study areas.
Courtesy of Mecanoo
Clear identity
The facade consists of vertical wooden slats mounted on a black surface, providing an interesting visual unity between existing and new build parts. The atrium borders a patio on one side and an educational courtyard on the other. Large quantities of daylight filter through the glazed facade, blurring the difference between inside and outside. To reinforce this experience, the wooden slats of the facade continue inside. Natural and easy-to-maintain materials such as wood, glass and aluminium create a pleasant interior with a human touch. Combining renovation and new build gives iPabo a clear identity, befitting a college that educates the teachers of tomorrow.
The following essay by Kazys Varnelis was first published by Volume Magazine in their 49th issue, Hello World! You can read the Editorial of this issue, Going Live, here.
The relevant revolution today is the current electronic one. Architecturally, the symbol systems that electronics purveys so well are more important than its engineering content. The most urgent technological problem facing us is the humane meshing of advanced scientific and technical systems with our imperfect and exploited human systems, a problem worthy of the best attention of architecture’s scientific ideologues and visionaries.
—Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas
It is almost always relevant to put the emergence of significant architectural discourses in perspective of other contemporary societal events, particularly since the latter tend to become a pre-text of the former. But what happens if such events fail to meet their own expectations? We might then find ourselves in front of a sign of the times yet to come, or a Zeitgeist in the making.
In parallel to the release of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s revelation of the Information Age’s consequences on both the built environment and modern ideologies, the then-promising field of artificial intelligence (AI) fell into an ice age for almost a decade. Researchers were facing the very problem of not being able to realize their own ambitions, both conceptually and technically. The great initial excitement of both researchers and financial backers brought about by the developments of neural nets, for example, was abruptly interrupted by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert’s 1969 book Perceptrons, which revealed important limitations on what and how a machine, as one could be conceived at the time, could actually learn. Most of the barriers encountered were directly related to the challenge of processing vast quantities of data. Problems such as memory or processing speed and the necessity of having datasets to learn from were all linked to the same issue of acquiring and processing a constantly increasing amount of data. Most of those issues were overcome in the 1980s by new generations of computers, models and methods for neural nets such as the Neocognitron and Backpropagation, but these developments remained intimately linked and limited by the ability to process and evaluate increasingly larger datasets. A symptomatic form of this phenomena can be seen in the overwhelming communication system described by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour as Las Vegas’ architecture and urbanism: “It is an architecture of communication over space; communication dominates space as an element in the architecture and in the landscape.”
It is very rare that architectural thinking finds itself ahead of its own time. But with regards to the “humane meshing of technological and human systems” they were clearly addressing the tip of a crisis we have come to face only now. The then-symbolic crisis they addressed was one of the earliest symptoms of a general crisis of knowledge impairment. Las Vegas served as a tangible proof that, with the evolution of human activities, communication would come to dominate space in an ambient manner, conveying increasingly vast quantities of data from which the production of knowledge would become increasingly difficult. Machine learning – the mechanization of knowledge acquisition from experience – has come to act as a response to this issue, but rather than considering a “humane meshing”, tends to work as a substitution for human cognition. Total knowledge – how to do, to live and think – has nowadays fully achieved its mechanization. And such an integral mechanization has also generated a progressive dependency towards technology as well as a general incapacity to understand technological environments. The Las Vegas citizen’s car became essential to navigate through the symbolic and sign systems made for high-speed recognition, and both rendered the unmediated person impaired to experience and understand his immediate surroundings. Spatial alienation due to lack of mediation became the pervasive architectural paradox of Las Vegas, and eventually, our daily lives. Such foresight was already manifest of a new kind of knowledge impairment, one that is conveyed through the mechanization of acquisition and production of information. But could this substitution mechanism be approached from a new angle, this condition of impairment seen in a new light?
Delays in AI-related technological developments offered a time window for the development of an extended architectural thinking of such progressing events. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, published two books at around the same time as Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s study of Las Vegas: The Architecture Machine in 1970, and Soft Architecture Machines in 1975. Negroponte laid out an anticipatory plan to technological advancements and a synthetic approach for architecture. One of the many critical aspects of this work has been to highlight the ethical and ontological issues faced by AI research: the discrimination between artificial and natural cognition. “To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture”, Negroponte autographed the first book. Within these two books is a progressive roadmap for a collaborative environment between humans and machines, where one cognitive system does not necessarily discriminate against or substitute the other.
At around the same time, in 1976, one of the first significant pieces of writing on AI ethics was published: Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation. This influential work was the first to propose a comprehensive ethical differentiation between decision-making and choice – with the former defined as the product of computational activity and the latter of human judgment – and would eventually pave the way for the evolution of artificial knowledge. But this very discrimination, which is still operative today, remains an obstacle to truly envision a positive outcome of integral mechanization, as human cognition and knowledge production remain separated from each other and mediated by artificial knowledge.
In 1965, scientists discovered peculiar types of neurosignals involved in the process of decision-making. Then, at the beginning of the 1970s, novel methods to monitor the electrical activity of the brain like ElectroEncephaloGrams (EEG’s) became more portable, allowing them to expand from the fields of psychiatric and medical research and eventually deliver the first brain-computer interfaces, paving the way for neuroprosthetics. With the invention of brain-computer interfaces, electric signals could convey information between biological and mechanical material, constituting a symbiotic technium in favor of human re-capacitation. Neuroscience and neurotechnology could then combine human and mechanized cognitions to reproduce an interface necessary for a body to interact with its environment, acquire information and produce knowledge. Here, one can realize that within the field of neuroscience the developments of cognitive science and artificial intelligence are deeply linked. But aside from medical applications, where disabilities tend to be immediately observable, not a single positive integrative approach has emerged from new technological developments to propose a solution to general knowledge impairment. Rather, the most effective applications have been for military or marketing purposes. But just like how the mechanization of labor in the automotive and airspace industries served as productive models for the development of modern architecture, perhaps the medical industry can now serve as a model for the cognition of architecture: a heuristic graft for new values of knowledge (as is the function of neuroprosthesis).
In the medical realm one can observe people subject to such successful surgical operations regain lost control of their motor skills and psyche. Scientific research has developed applications capable of returning haptic control to those who had lost it, not just with bionic devices but also by assisting in the progressive reconstruction of motor nerves and the deceleration of neurodegenerative diseases. Human re-capacitation is a process of re-valuing knowledge of the human body and the way it interacts with and controls its environment. Augmented by the computational powers of AI and other artifacts of integral mechanization, the re-capacitation of human knowledge seems approachable, now more than ever. And such a graft, previously applied to bodies only clinically diagnosed as disabled, should be considered in general more seriously.
One peculiar justification for cognitive computing today is to propose an extension to human cognition. But the current state of scientific research rather tends to develop applications of the opposite scenario, where human cognition helps and extends the artificial one (such as in the case of ‘attribute learning’, where attributing values to symbolic systems still remains as a highly demanding and complicated task for cognitive machines). The curiosity of such a common statement cannot be undermined while human cognition is just about to reveal an extraordinary potential to positively relink with automation. Whether the evolution of architecture lies in tangible artifacts or extremely simulated environments, the next steps of extended, augmented cognition should be integrated with human cognition, as in neurotechnologies, in such ways that maintaining a humane meshing along with technological shifts would allow for the construction of novel types of knowledge and development of new creative processes. From the Miocene to the Anthropocene, the human brain, along with the human body and its sensory organs, has had about eight million years to evolve. Elements of that process of evolution, such as visual cognition, which serves as a mentoring model for machine vision and data compression, are being factored in to the development of artificial intelligence. When thinking about the future of knowledge and the evolution of architecture we should learn to see ourselves as a more integral part of the machine learning agenda and consider factoring it into human evolution with greater care and creativity.
A narrow site high up on a precipice overlooks the inner Stockholm archipelago to the south. It meets a dense row of pine trees to the west and a softer grove of deciduous trees to the east. One enters the site from the north, where a generous staircase mediates the initial steep south-facing slope. The stairs follow a concrete wall that forms the spine of the structure, and lead the visitor downwards between the concrete wall on the one side and a wooden volume on the other. The staircase leaves the visitor at a gap in the concrete wall, providing a glimpse of the garden on the other side. The promenade continues along the closed wall, towards the view and the water, now flanked to the west by the row of pine trees. A second opening in the wall presents the entrance to the house and extends a passage through and across it, into the garden.
Inside the house, the concrete wall winds its way further down the narrow site towards the water, and forms itself into bathrooms, storage space and a fireplace. Gathered around this concrete spine, wooden volumes hover just above the ground. They reach out into the garden, pushing the interior spaces into the cultivated landscape and creating exterior spaces protected from the wind. The interior space of each wooden room reaches upwards out through a skylight.
For 48 years La Garenne zoo had occupied a site below the village of Le Vaud .In 2013 a project took shape to move the entire zoo to a much bigger neighbouring site. A new concept was developed, featuring an educational trail that links up the various aviaries and enclosures, moving from a pastoral landscape to an alpine setting and ending with a treetop walkway among the trees of the local forest.
LOCALARCHITECTURE was commissioned to design an entrance pavilion for the new zoo. The key challenge for the architects was therefore to incorporate into this setting a built structure that would provide the necessary entrance functions and define the new identity of La Garenne zoo.
Right from the start of their research the architects focused on the question of limits and boundaries – an inherent aspect of a zoological park: the park perimeters, access ways and entrances, public areas, barriers formed by plants and by built structures, etc. The entrance pavilion itself is a boundary, aligned as it is with the natural border formed by the strip of woodland along Route Du Bois-Laurent at the lower end of the site. The pavilion building is the only way of accessing the site, acting as a filter between the outside world and the reinvented natural world of the zoological park.
The indentations of the building’s design are used to define the two key public spaces: the entrance forecourt on one side and the zoo’s central hub on the other. Crossing this building signals to visitors that they are entering the zoo – and they do this at the centre, the narrowest point of the structure. Arriving through this restricted channel gives visitors the feeling of gaining direct, immediate access to the world of the zoo.
The pavilion’s primary functional elements are incorporated successively along its length. The ends of the building open out to create spaces at either end: for the reception and shop on one side, leading to the restaurant, and for a multi-purpose event space on the other.
The curved building volume is defined by the wide roof structure, which is extended by overhanging eaves connected to the ground by angled wooden verticals. This non-rectangular supporting structure references organic, natural forms, while at the same time creating an alternating effect between the infilled triangles, which bear the load of the building, and the glazed, transparent triangles which open up views of the entrance area and the park interior.
Detail
On the other side this ‘interwoven’, alternating structure becomes the roof structure that shapes and defines the interior spaces, making optimal use of the surface area and ensuring that the pavilion retains its functional flexibility over time.
The construction concept is rational and economical, based as it is on the repetition of a regular grid scheme. The elements are largely prefabricated, permitting rapid, efficient construction. The choice of this kind of structure also makes the building easy to de-construct and facilitates recycling. The building uses materials of controlled and certified provenance. All the structural timber is FSC-certified or equivalent.The building as a whole earned Certificat d’Origine Bois Suisse accreditation for its use of Swiss wood. Timber construction represents 157 m3 of the built volume: in other words, 97% of the building materials used are Swiss in origin.
Because the new structure sits on a raft at ground level – the level of the entrance forecourt – and did not require any excavations, it was fully prefabricated and the prefabricated elements were assembled on site, minimising the construction period. Each triangle of the façade represents a finished prefabricated unit which simply needed to be installed on the site. The triangle structure has a timber frame and the roof comprises a system of prefabricated wooden box units. The design is therefore deliberately lightweight – easy to dismount and to adapt as necessary over time.
The building derives its faceted appearance from the vertical fold-lines incorporated in the window panels. The structure as a whole breaks down into equal arc segments, creating the basis for a system of repeated structural elements – including the prefabricated wooden panels, the glazed triangles and the metal fascia elements on the roof.
“Among a strong group of projects Grace Farms emerged as a clear winner for the clarity and consistency of its architectural solution,” said Stan Allen, MCHAP Jury President.
“The jury was struck by the radical way in which the line between architecture and landscape is blurred by the ‘River’ building. The firsthand experience of the building reveals a confident realization and the immediacy of its detailing. Finally, the Grace Farms project uniquely demonstrates architecture’s capacity to make a place for an innovative new institution.”
Grace Farms’ building, which spreads beneath a long, undulating roof, follows the landscape and floats in the center of the site. Winding and crossing the hills freely, this wood-frame structure, now known as the River, creates numerous covered outdoor spaces while also forming courtyards. Since opening to the public in October 2015, Grace Farms has functioned as both a peaceful respite and a place of vibrant activity. The River building draws people in to engage with the site’s natural landscape and serves as the springboard for Grace Farms’ mission and programs. Within the first six months, approximately 50,000 people visited Grace Farms to participate in architectural tours, community dinners, lectures and discussions, concerts, athletics, and worship services—or to explore the 80-acre site on an individual basis.
New Canaan provided a context in which Eliot Noyes, Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson, and others helped to rethink residential modernism in the United States. Mies was a direct influence in New Canaan through his influence on Johnson, and the architectural design for Grace Farms builds in part on Mies’s legacy, including his 1928 vision of a skyscraper with curved glass. Although Mies and Johnson were not direct models, they helped set the aspiration for transcendent lightness: a structure that would float on the landscape while also being fully integrated with it.
SANNA Founders Kazuko Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa were recognized with the MCHAP Award, the MCHAP Chair at IIT Architecture Chicago for the following academic year, and $50,000 in funding toward research and publication.
Also announced was the winner of the newly established student award, MCHAP.student. The award, given to “the most outstanding project by a 2015/2016 graduating student that addresses the metropolis through an architectural proposal,” was presented to “(a)typical office” by Tommy Kyung-Tae Nam and Yun Yun from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.
The full jury for the 2014-2015 MCHAP Americas Prize composed of Wiel Arets, Dean of the College of Architecture and Rowe Family College of Architecture Dean Endowed Chair at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago Florencia Rodriguez, architect, critic, and Founder and Editorial Director of Piedra, Papel y Tijera publishers in Buenos Aires, Argentina Ila Berman, Dean and Edward E. Elson Professor, University of Virginia School of Architecture, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA Jean Pierre Crousse, Principal of Barclay & Crousse Architecture, co-founded with Sandra Barclay in France in 1994 Associate Professor of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru and Stan Allen, registered architect in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and former Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University.
In making their decision, the jury travelled to each of the finalist sites to experience the projects firsthand.
“There may be a global architecture culture today, but each place we visited had its own identity and every project responded to a specific context. As a jury we also observed common themes: All of the projects, even those in urban areas, engage with landscape they all embrace architecture as a force for change and finally, all of them find a delicate balance between innovation and the history of the discipline,” remarked Allen.
You can learn more about the MCHAP Americas Prize at the IIT website, here.
Stories have a way of clinging to places, charging buildings and spaces with an effect only perceptible to those who know what they once staged. Film is the most visual storytelling medium, and their environments often play memorable and vital roles in creating the movie’s character and identity. The popularity of film tourism is testament to this phenomena. While the bulk of film tourism stems from blockbuster movies and their exposure and celebrity, the blog Filmap takes a more humble approach in highlighting the stories of everyday places.
For the past three years, the blog has laboriously tracked the locations of hundreds of movie scenes using Google Streetview, pairing stripped-back street views right next to their cinematographic counterparts. The resulting contrast elevates the everyday while also grounding fiction to our very streets, a reminder of the built environment’s role as a vessel of imagination.
A selection of Filmap’s posts are shared below – how many movies can you recognize from their real-life settings alone?
An easy one to start with – Alnwick Castle is the familiar backdrop of where Harry and his friends had their first flying lesson, and also where many Oliver Wood childhood crushes first developed.
Tatooine is a place on earth – in the Tunisian desert at least, where the original Lars Homestead can still be found. When filming wrapped up, the economy boost lingered on as a newfound tourist attraction. However, changes in political climate and dropping visitor numbers have caused the neglected set relics to begin to decay.
Not all McDonald’s are exactly the same, and definitely not all were graced by a wig-donning Karen Mok in a classic Wong Kar Wai scene. Though the interior has now been modernized, the entranceway remains almost the same as in the iconic 1995 scene.
Add a few flying animated birds, Hall & Oates background music and a crew of choreographed dancers and you’ll recognize this fountain as the backdrop to fictional architect Tom Hansen’s post-coital parade.
The modular blockwork of Aries Mateu’s Marker Hotel and Daniel Libeskind’s shard-like Bord Gáiis Energy Theatre created the perfect backdrop to mark the protagonist’s return to the city, following time with a guerrilla gang of loners in the woods.
Before Pirates of the Caribbean, Keira Knightley played out an earlier love triangle alongside football, with Parminder Nagra and Jonathan Rhys Meyers at the unassuming Yeading Football Club.
Another unassuming location, this drycleaner once had a customer who was definitely not unassuming – that customer being Patrick Bateman and his “cranberry juice” stained sheets.
This superbly soundtracked movie made use of the Pontsticill Reservoir in Wales as one its many scenes that featured semi-abandoned locations, letting the movie’s central couple indulge in their own company alone.
The island in question may appear familiar as the same island that appeared on the maps of a doomed Japanese class of high school children in the 2000 dystopian thriller. The fact that the island, Hachijō-kojima, is volcanic and uninhabited makes it unnerving not just in fiction but also reality.
One of the most recognizable posts on Filmap is the Parisian Pont de Bir-Hakeim bridge. It was here that Ellen Page, as a fictional architecture student, practiced her dream-designing abilities alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.
It was on a bench in this park square that we all learned that “life is like a box of chocolates.” Visitors to the park hoping to share the same bum-print as Tom Hanks however, should be aware that it is not original bench from the movie, which has since been moved to the Savannah History museum.
Check out many more iconic film settings at Filmap’s website, here.
From the architect. The Zhuhai National Park is located in the region of Chishui, in Guizhou province, in South-West China. The 10,000 hectares park is characterized by the unique presence of the so-called Bamboo Sea .
The park gateway has been designed by West-line studio architects as a dense assembly of vertical lines. The gate is hidden in the Bamboo Sea and interacts with the particular weather conditions of the area (sun, thick fog, rain, wind and snow) which make the architecture unstable and flexible. The gate aims to ‘activate’ the bamboo being at the same time hidden into the forest but also creating an iconic entrance for the park.
The support system is made of concrete with bamboo (10cm diameter – 11m length) hung on the roof. Even with the presence of the glass roof, which protects the bamboo from rain, architects had to deal with problems of high humidity and fluctuations in temperature, which characterize the area of Chishui. Because of the presence of oil inside, a mixture of water and sugar, the bamboo has been steam-treated to take out the oil and avoid decay. Since the local equipment only allows the bamboo to be steamed to a maximum length of 6m, it must be divided in two parts, 5.5m each.
A water pond, built under the gate, helps create fog due to the differing temperatures, especially in the early morning and sunset or during winter and rainy days. When sun and fog happen at the same time the gate looks completely embedded into the Bamboo Sea. The architecture is based on a full understanding of the character of the Bamboo Sea and aims to play with weather elements.
From the architect. This house in the upscale neighborhood of Jubilee Hills in Hyderabad is characterized by its accentuated and cantilevered timber clad trapezoidal roof forms that hover above the main spaces. A series of staggered rooms with slopes in different directions orient towards the privacy of an internal garden.
Courtesy of Khosla Associates
The spatial layout maximizes the use of the linear site by dispersing the built form and greenery in equal measure along its length. The family required a segregation of public and private spaces and that was achieved in the vertical section of the house. Public spaces such as living, study, dining, puja, kitchen, guest room and home theatre are housed on the ground floor while the first floor has a master bedroom, two children’s rooms and a family area.
Sections
Entrance is via a sun drenched tropical court, which extends into a light filled foyer and then flows into the living room. The living room is a glass pavilion with a hovering timber clad sloping room orienting itself into a tropical garden. The living extends into an ample L-shaped wooden deck that overlooks the central garden.
Courtesy of Khosla Associates
Experiments were carried out with the roof forms in this project. In order to create the vast cantilevers and shapes for each of the roofs, we had to create an elaborate tubular space frame truss structure, clad it with cement boards from the underside and then apply a final layer of thin slatted timber to it. Insulated white metal deck sheets that help reflect the fierce sun in the region protect the tops of the roofs. We worked with inverted trapezoidal forms for the study, living, master bedroom and kids room roofs, manipulated their angles, as well as playfully staggered their heights.
First Floor
The Materials used in the house were an intentional departure from the luxe and bling textures that are typically the preference of people from Hyderabad. A natural earthy palette of local Kota stone was juxtaposed with polished cement, grey sadharhalli granite and teakwood. A bright use of colour on the furniture in hues of reds, yellows and blues contrasts with greys of cement and kota and the warmth of timber.
Courtesy of Khosla Associates
The furniture and lighting are a judicious mix of locally crafted custom design pieces interspersed with big brands such as Moroso, B&B Italia, Poliform, Moooi and Dedon. Artwork is by Contemporary indian artists Tauseef Khan, Om Surya and Paribantana Mohanty amongst others and vibrant tribal Kilim rugs sourced from Turkey and Morocco.
From the architect. Ibis Styles Hotel Macpherson- Giving new life to a forgotten building.
Built in the 1970s, the former Windsor Hotel underwent its fair share of changes and renovations that did little to engage its surroundings and the community. Located at the prominent intersection of MacPherson and Aljunied Roads, the hotel anchors the MacPherson Industrial Estate and landed residential estate. The existing 3-storey introverted and opaque shopping podium was unfriendly to its neighbours. Above this podium was a 6 storey 200-key hotel, with an inefficient H-shaped plan on a 7.2m grid with 2 room bays per grid. We were presented with the extremely challenging task of making this property relevant, with a fresh lease on life. For the project to be economically viable for international operators, the hotel had to be reconfigured to increase the room count to 300 keys.
Rebuilding was an obvious option, but an A&A to the existing building was an overall leaner solution with a shorter execution period. However, that meant that the increase in the hotel rooms had to be done within the same foot print with the constraints of the existing structure, since the 3-storey podium floor areas needed to be fully used for strata shops. This resulted in a very narrow room bay of 2.8m which was incompatible to the structural grid, creating many different small room layouts and situations where existing columns appear in the rooms. We overcame this challenge by making the hotel guest rooms open plan and with a system of multi-functional modular furniture adaptable to all 28 room configurations.
The new ground level frontage is more welcoming and accessible to the pubic with a large entrance, F&B spaces and more porous pedestrian connections to the external walkways. The façade was designed as a porous veil stretched over the existing building. Openings were cut out for views and entrances as well as a large opening on the 4th level to frame the lush pool garden terrace.
Sig Nordal 