From the architect. The villa was originally built in the early 19th century and is located on the banks of the Mandovi River in Goa, India. The design brief entailed retaining as much of the original structure as possible and adding a new wing as an extension.
The exterior of the old house has been meticulously restored to its original character involving extensive research on the building style of the period. Rather than emulating the design style of the original villa for the new wing, it follows a contemporary design language so that a degree of lightness and modernity is introduced into the house. The intent was to create an interesting aesthetic with the juxtaposition of new against the old.
Plan
The villa has an unassuming entrance off a main road through the original structure and it slowly unfolds gradually increasing in transparency as one moves through the house closer to the river. The interior design includes a blend of modern furniture and found pieces. Careful planning and craft have produced a house that has both, the nostalgia of the past, and the practicality of the present.
Park Street is a simple and robust dwelling built to accommodate a young family and their evolving needs. Natural material choices, a limited palette and inter-linked garden spaces combine to create a calming backdrop and engaging living experience in the daily lives of the occupants.
A former tennis court site, shaped like a ‘battle-axe’, presented a unique opportunity nestled within the middle of a typical suburban block. The program was based on the client’s desire for tranquillity and seclusion from the street while balancing occupant amenity and privacy from the site’s 11 surrounding neighbours. Key to the design response was the inter-linking of house and landscape spaces to create the sense of living within a hidden garden.
This vision was achieved through the use of three distinct yet inter-linked garden spaces framing the building to create spatial variety and interest. Living spaces are located on the ground floor with connecting vistas through to the garden and central courtyard. Bedrooms are located on the upper level of the house and have operable shutters to ensure privacy and control views and outlook to the surrounding landscape.
Section
Section
Sliding glazed walls on the ground floor enable the occupants to adapt the living areas into large open spaces or smaller, intimate settings with a high level of connection to the garden so that sitting within the house is like sitting within the landscape.
Off-white concrete bricks, concrete floors, white stained cladding and naturally oiled timber, were chosen with the desire to create a generous home – one that would provide maximum living comfort for its occupants, with minimal long term maintenance.
This simple dwelling creates a peaceful and engaging living experience.
The recent trend in timber-framed architecture may just be beginning.
SOM’s Timber Tower Research Project has passed a major milestone as the structural system has successfully completed strength testing that validate initial calculations. Launched in 2013, The Timber Tower Research project was established with the goal of developing a new structural system for skyscrapers that uses timber as its primary material. Using these techniques, the research team estimates that the embodied carbon footprint of buildings can be reduced by 60 to 75 percent when compared to a benchmark concrete building.
Courtesy of SOM
The proposed solution, called the Concrete Jointed Timber Frame, utilizes mass timber as the main structural elements, reinforcing weak points at connections with reinforced concrete. To validate the system’s potential, SOM partnered with Oregon State University to put the system through a rigorous testing program that has involved nearly 20 tests of varying sizes and configurations. After successful testing of the final full-scale mock-up, SOM has concluded that there is “strong evidence that the timber-concrete composite system can satisfy code requirements and compete with traditional construction methods.”
Courtesy of SOM
The 36 foot by 8 foot specimen, modeled after the typical size of a structural bay, was constructed out of a Cross-Laminate Timber (CLT) deck topped with a thin layer of reinforced concrete to “enhance the structural, acoustic, and fire performance of the system.” Specially designed connections were developed to join the two materials together. Around the CLT beams, the topping slab was thickened to create a rigid connection between decks, allowing floors to span between beams with a minimal cross-section.
Courtesy of SOM
Courtesy of SOM
Courtesy of SOM
The system was tested for 2 hours using a hydraulic actuator while being measured using 48 different sensors. Pressure was increased until the system failed at an ultimate load of 82,000 pounds – about 8 times higher than required by code. Stiffness also proved to meet code standards.
Courtesy of SOM
Courtesy of SOM
SOM Associate Benton Johnson remarked that the successful test “highlights the real benefits of the composite timber approach. We took a small amount of concrete that was necessary for acoustic and fire performance and used it to enhance the structural performance of the floor. This move allows mass timber to reach its full potential, allowing it to compete in the market while also reducing the carbon footprint of cities.”
The system will now undergo further testing for other issues, including fire resistance, as it looks to be approved for use in high-rise buildings.
Experience of a induced way The design of a new inner space understood as a scene for the action, within a forced perspective, where the visitors walk along inside it becoming unconscious forward movement: to make an induced way experience a reality.
The Light Box is a place for lighting encounters and has been designed with the clear intention of addressing the users into the last room like a fine-drawn fishing net. The lines of action show a way by using visual and haptic perception together, across the set, becoming our physical movement of displacement: the bent reception furniture, the curved ceiling from left to right, the folded right wall to the left, the three glass surfaces advancing like pieces of smaller width while you approach them…
Diagram
White color: Symbol of conceptual cleanliness. It constitutes a deep investigation on the infinite shades of white and its different textures (glossy porcelain, smooth matte painting, satin-gloss lacquered DM, white led light, white fluorescent light).
The past ten years have seen a new twist in tall building design: buildings that rotate as they rise, either for engineering or purely aesthetic purposes. Inspired by this recent trend, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has produced a new graphic entitled Tall Buildings in Numbers “Twisting Tall Buildings” to analyze the “recent proliferation of twisting towers creating a new generation of iconic buildings throughout the world.”
The infographic compares the buildings by height, along with the tightness and total degrees of their rotation. Continue after the break for the full graphic and links to the projects on ArchDaily.
Twisting Tall Buildings is also included within 2016 Issue III of the CTBUH Journal, which also includes a case study on Evolution Tower, Moscow – the seventh tallest twisting tower in this study. You can purchase a copy of the journal here.
The RH House is located around Puyehue Lake – X region, Region de los Lagos, at the south of Chile. It is a place full of vegetation, with a great panoramic view of the Osorno, Puyehue and Puntiagudo Volcanoes.
This house is located on a small hill on the inside of the ground. From there we looked for the way to emphasize the panoramic views of the place, with large glass panels on its façade towards the woods, framing the Puyehue Volcano with a large window at the dining room, and the Osorno and Puntiagudo Volcanoes from the bedrooms.
The main requirements were to design a house for a numerous family, with wide spaces and well illuminated. Our main objective was for people to be able to be either on the inside or on the outside of the house, since the weather is very variable during the day. The house considers a second stage with three extra bedrooms and a terrace expansion, which complete the projected volume.
The program is divided into two “volumes” that intersect each other in a “T” shape. With this we manage to rescue the views of the landscape and nature around in all its dimensions.
One of the volumes comprehends all the bedrooms in general, and in the other we can find services and public areas. The materiality used to construct this house are Volcometal (a mix of iron and zinc), covered with oregon pine wood dyed white. Drawing on the resources of the area, demolition larch shingles were rescued as a coating for a wall in the living room, and on the exterior we used a dark dyed norway due to low maintenance costs and durability.
The design of the house was thought with the intention of maintaining the southern Chilean typical architecture elements such as: perimeter eaves, gabled roofs and wood as the main materiality; with a more contemporary look with simple lines.
When it comes to skyscraper architects, the first name that comes to mind is often Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. No firm has completed more supertall buildings than SOM, and to this day, they remain a leader in the field, designing both the western hemisphere’s and the world’s tallest buildings in One World Trade Center and the Burj Khalifa. Yet, arguably, the height of their powers came in the 1970s, directly following a lull in skyscraper construction that allowed the Empire State Building to retain the status of world’s tallest building for nearly 40 years.
It was then that Falzur Khan, a SOM architect and structural engineer, came up with the structural innovation that revolutionized the skyscraper industry, leaving lasting impacts on the construction methods of supertall buildings today.
Drawing from a recent story published by Mental Floss on the designer, we’ve come up with a list of facts about his life and role in the world of architecture.
Continue reading for the 8 things you should know about Falzur Khan.
Khan was the lead structural engineer on two of the tallest skyscrapers of the 1970s, both found in Chicago: the John Hancock Center (1969) and the Sears Tower (1973, now known as the Willis Tower)
He didn’t see his first skyscraper in person until he was 21 years old. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the tallest building in his hometown measured only 3 stories.
Khan was the first to discover that building a skyscraper in the the shape of a tube could greatly reduce material size and weight. His buildings were supported not by an inner grid of concrete and steel, like the Empire State Building, but by their facades.
For the Hancock Center design, Khan introduced SOM to computer modeling techniques for the first time, hiring two programming experts to calculate difficult equations in record time. The engineers left soon after to work on another revolutionary project, Star Wars.
To understand how wind and building sway would affect users in the upper floors of his skyscrapers, Khan placed test subjects into a bathtub placed on top of rotating platform designed to mimic the oscillating motion of a Maytag washing machine.
His strategy for visualizing structural diagrams bore a striking similarity to method acting: “I put myself in the place of a whole building, feeling every part,” Khan said in an interview with Engineering News-Record. “In my mind I visualize the stresses and twisting a building undergoes.”
Khan died of a heart attack in 1982, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where today, construction is underway on the Kingdom Tower, which will become the world’s tallest building upon its completion in 2020.
Founded in 2004, The Fazlur Khan Lifetime Achievement Medal is awarded by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat for individuals who have “demonstrated excellence in technical design and/or research that has made a significant contribution to a discipline for the design of tall buildings and the built urban environment” throughout their careers.
Collaborators: Eduardo Micha, Fabio Correa, Gabriel Merino, Oscar Osorio, Patricia Pérez, Christian Rodriguez, Miguel Angel Chiney, Armando Hernández, Mario Moreno, Maricruz Pérez, Daniel Reyes, Eduardo Acosta
From the architect. ColiRoma OneHundredTwentyEight is part of the urban fabric of the Colonia Roma Norte in Mexico City. The district’s features and use of public space offers a unique perspective on progressive neighborhood living within the city, and as such, reflects contemporary society, where life and living happens not only in our private spaces but also in our nearby public spaces.
Activities, like those of the Condesa-Roma Cultural Corridor, generate vibrant personal relationships with neighbors that allow for living together in the public space. This is how the concept of livable space and lifestyle has a direct impact on this residential project.
Diagram
The building is configured using conceptual elements of public-private space. First of all, the building and its urban setting lead to spatial permeability between the two through an “urban pit stop”. This is a flexible space of public-private interrelationships, located a half-level below the sidewalk, that can become a gallery, forum or place for interacting during the Cultural Corridor, etc. It can also be a common area for building residents, turning into an exclusive space for gatherings if required, allowing for flexibility in use and reaffirming the impact of neighborhood living on the area.
Additionally, a public bench is built around an existing tree outside the main façade, where bicycles can be parked or where pets and people can sit and mingle freely.
Section AA
Section BB
On the other hand, from a residential perspective, the building consists of 8 apartments, 2 town houses, 2 penthouses, a roof garden and 2 subterranean parking levels. The apartments have a linear spatial configuration, generating a sequence of interior cubes of light and natural ventilation across their inner walls. This affords street views and views toward the inside and back cubes, which produce spatial transitions along the linear path of the apartment, exposing light, shade and indoor and outdoor environments.
There is an apartment on the first level configured as a studio-loft. Another of the apartments on the fourth level plays with the open space by preserving the living room-dining room as an open terrace of double height, and the top of an existing tree relates spatially as an element of nature. The townhouses and penthouses have two levels, two overlook the street and two overlook the rear light and ventilation cubes, maintaining the spatial transition and revealing the indoor and outdoor environments. The roof garden has 6 private areas and a spa in the common area, encouraging and facilitating interaction among neighbors.
The balconies and the spatial configuration of the apartments are visible from the main façade. In the center are the 2-storey blocks. The studio-loft appears as a pewter cube with urban phrases, which calls attention to the vehicle and pedestrian access. At the top, a 2-storey cube with pewter details highlights the apartment with the open terrace. The existing tree and the public bench also interrelate well. Everything is a communication of components and elements, permeability of spaces, interaction of public and private use.
Parking Plan
The overall finishes are exposed: the structure is based on metal columns that are painted black, with exposed intermediate floors made of corrugated metal; the flat slab support system uses reinforced concrete which holds an exposed concrete ceiling; the general interior installations are exposed, except for the service areas, the window frames are black aluminum with clear glass. The main façade has pewter details and sliding panels of perforated laminate.
The international practice GRAFT is known for its experimental and interdisciplinary designs as well as for its strong social commitment. The publication documents projects characteristic of this social responsibility portraying architecture as an active tool for driving the development of places worth living in. One key project is the Solar Kiosk, a high-output, which is already used by many communities in Sub-Saharan Africa.
– Foreword by Cameron Sinclair – Introduction by Lats Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz, Thomas Willemeit
Relief and Affordable Housing
– Make It Right / Rebuilding the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans, USA, 2006- – Affordable Housing Namibia / Attack Ownership Barriers, 2014- – Heimat2 / Dignified Solutions for Refugees in Europe, Berlin, Germany, 2016- – Eckwerk Holzmarkt / Affordable Urban Living & Working, Berlin, GErmany, 2014-
Energy Autonomy – Solarkiosk / Reducing Energy Povertry, Botswana, Ethiopia, Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Tansania, USA, Vietnam, 2009- – Holistic Living / Mobility Plus House, Berlin, Germany, 2013-2015
Healing Architecture – Two Icu Rooms in Berlin / Linking Design and Healthcare in a Research Project, Berlin, Germany 2011-2013
Cultural Campaigning – Platoon Kunsthalle / Temporary Buildings and their Impact on the Built Environment, Seoul, South Korea / Berlin, Germany, 2009, 2012 – Art Cloud & Unity Flag / Leading Campaign for Change, Berlin, Germany, 2006, and diverse places, 2006
– GRAFTIES Members of staff – About GRAFT – Illustration Credits
For Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki and David J. Lewis, the section “is often understood as a reductive drawing type, produced at the end of the design process to depict structural and material conditions in service of the construction contract.” A definition that will be familiar to most of those who have studied or worked in architecture at some point. We often think primarily of the plan, for it allows us to embrace the programmatic expectations of a project and provide a summary of the various functions required. In the modern age, digital modelling software programs offer ever more possibilities when it comes to creating complex three dimensional objects, making the section even more of an afterthought.
With their Manual of Section, the three founding partners of LTL architects engage with section as an essential tool of architectural design, and let’s admit it, this reading might change your mind on the topic. For the co-authors, “thinking and designing through section requires the building of a discourse about section, recognizing it as a site of intervention.” Perhaps, indeed, we need to understand the capabilities of section drawings both to use them more efficiently and to enjoy doing so.
The book starts by highlighting the uniqueness of section as a representational tool. Section allows us to understand a project’s materials, structure, and tectonic logic. The vertical cut, combined with the representation of people, helps to identify scale and proportion. It simultaneously reveals a project’s neighboring urban context (the outside), its envelope and internal structure (the cut), and interior ornamental or material visual qualities (the inside). The authors also remind readers that sections and detailed sections help to solve thermal, technical and structural issues.
But the most fascinating suggestion of the text is the authors’ categorization of sections into 7 types that allow readers to engage critically with the section as a design tool. These types are “intentionally reductive” to facilitate their recognition and dissociation. “Extrusion,” “Stack,” “Shape,” “Shear,” “Hole,” “Incline,” and “Nest” each highlight a different design strategy that is exemplified by enlarged sections from well-known built projects of the 20th and 21st century. Hybrid cases are also described, showing how to combine various section types within one building. The authors manage to balance clear and informative projects with more intricate and creative ones, thus offering a good overview of section design strategy.
Interestingly, readers can assess the quality of each design in relation to vertical cuts only. The authors have avoided using plans, elevations and renders, and the use of photographs is kept to a minimum. All 63 projects are represented in one-point-perspective section, with the same standardized view and graphic representation to allow for a strictly architectural (as opposed to representational) understanding. This in turn brings complex structural systems into focus, along with sophisticated spatial hierarchies and interplays between the interior and the exterior.
To represent these sections, the authors used an incredible amount of documentation ranging from historical photographs and detail drawings to primary documentation from contemporary architecture firms. Each section also comes with a full description, and if you’re attentive to details, you’ll even find consistency in the furniture items; don’t miss the Thonet chairs and Charlotte Perriand’s design in Le Corbusier’s work.
Finally, Manual of Section also includes a short and cohesive “History of Section” that brings perspective to the historical development and recent use of sections. The text notably sheds light on the emergence of section in the early fifteenth century, explaining how sections first appeared as an “analytical device” to depict Roman ruins. Only later did the section progressively become a “generative instrument” for architectural practice, in the works of Palladio, Etienne-Louis Boullée and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc among others.
As history shows, section has always been considered as a representational method first, and its input on architectural discourse is still largely undermined. Manual of Section successfully attempts to reintroduce sections within theoretical discourses; a new reference book for architects.
Manual of Section by Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis published by Princeton Architectural Press (2016) is released on August 23rd.
Manual of Section by Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis published by Princeton Architectural Press (2016). Image Courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press
Sig Nordal 