Since 2015, Gramazio Kohler Research has been in the process of developing “Mesh Mould Metal,” a project that studies the unification of concrete reinforcement and formwork into a single, robotically fabricated material system. The project is based on their first phase of research, Mesh Mould, which spanned from 2012 to 2014, and developed a robotic extrusion process for a polymer mesh.
Now, as a second phase, Mesh Mould Metal “focuses on the translation of the structurally weak polymer-based extrusion process into a fully load-bearing construction system” by replicating the process in metal. Specifically, the current research delves into the development of “a fully automated bending and welding process for meshes fabricated from 3-millimeter steel wire.”
According to Gramazio Kohler, central to the original research for Mesh Mould was the fact that standard robotic extrusion processes have a low loadbearing capacity, but a “high capacity for precise spatial coordination.” Therefore, “an optimal use of the machine requires construction processes with minimal mass transfer and a high degree of geometric definition,” they explain.
Courtesy of Gramazio Kohler Research
For the switch to a stronger metal mesh with real-world structural applications, Gramazio Kohler abandoned the standard extrusion machine used for the first stage of the research. Instead, alongside the Agile & Dexterous Robotics Lab of Professor Jonas Buchli, they developed a specialized robot capable of automatically bending and welding the metal.
Learn more about the Mesh Mould Metal project here.
For religious societies, heritage and traditions play an important role in maintaining identity, culture and allowing for the community’s self-improvement, both spiritually but also in a spatial sense. Therefore, the way people occupy the place in which they live leads to the material fulfillment of religious aims.
With the creation of a place that follows their sacred order—the Jetavana—the community can be enriched while performing their traditions and rituals in a specific and proper way through architecture.
Created for a religious community with poor economic resources, this project designed by Sameep Padora & Associates achieves this purpose and delivers a space with great spiritual significance and value through the reincarnation of materials, minimal intervention in the natural environment and by gathering a community’s traditions. In the following text, the architects elaborate on some of the factors that made this ArchDaily‘s Project of the Month for July.
The primary driver was a monetary and material frugality, but ease of access to construction material as well as their maintenance over time were important concerns. The seasoned wood for the roof structure came from ship breaking yards; the fired mangalore roof tiles from older dismantled buildings and the rammed stone dust walls from a basalt stone quarry nearby. The design process became almost reactive, responding to our fast-changing understanding of context, an understanding that evolved in tandem with the construction of the project. I think the significance of the project lies in this.
Courtesy of Sameep Padora & Associates
Almost all of our assumptions about locally sourced materials are challenged in this project: rammed earth needed too much cement for stabilization, bamboo and thatch for construction were both of poor quality. This light-footed, nimble and reactive process, divorced from the weight of a fixed and preempted solution, enabled a response that is both appropriate and rich.
Courtesy of Sameep Padora & Associates
Stone Dust: What features does this material have in comparison to concrete? What other possibilities can this material give to local design?
The extremely hot and dry climate of Sakharwadi required a material that would insulate the interior from the heat. As opposed to concrete the thick rammed stone dust walls keep the interior extremely cool.
Courtesy of Sameep Padora & Associates
The aim of the stone dust rammed wall construction was also to turn the project into a demonstration of how local material which is traditionally seen as waste could be used to catalyze a new form of indigenous construction. We hope that it kickstarts a new “local” technique, not one based in nostalgia but specific to its time.
Courtesy of Sameep Padora & Associates
How is the Buddhist spirituality reflected in the architectural design concept and program?
The center is built for the local neo-buddhists, the “Baudh” community, but is open to all religions.
Courtesy of Sameep Padora & Associates
The opening of the center included religious leaders from the Christian, Muslim and Hindu communities as well. The Baudh community has traditionally been an economically disadvantaged section of Indian society and while they do have a substantial political presence in the country the center attempts to fill in the gaps of spiritual programs like meditation and yoga as well as vocational training for the youth. Therefore, the two largest spaces within the precinct house a meditation hall and a workshop.
Courtesy of Sameep Padora & Associates
The primary directive was to do no harm to a single living thing, hence the center is split and fragmented between trees rather than being a consolidated singular block. Not a single tree was cut during its construction.
Courtesy of Edmund Summer
The repetitive rhythm of the wooden structure, used to bring focus to a deity statue, references the stone ribbed interior of the Buddhist cave architecture. Some of our early study models also alluded to the vaulted section of the cave roof, but the logic of visually connecting to the foliage of the trees outside we felt was eventually the more dominant and desirable experience.
Richard Meier & Partners has completed their first project in South America, a 7-story, sustainable office building in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Leblon. The building will feature concrete, glass and vertical gardens, and will serve as the new international headquarters for top Brazilian investment firm VINCI Partners. The structure consists of open office spaces looking out onto several private interior courtyards and a series of terraces that create a connection with the main urban thoroughfare of Bartolomeu Mitre Avenue.
Courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners
The building contains 7 floors and 6,500 square meters of leasable floor space, as well as 3 underground floors for private parking and additional office space. A spacious lobby anchors the building to the street, as a louvered facade rises from the ground to shield the building’s western elevation from sun and for privacy.
“The design of the Leblon project does not contextualize itself with its material palette, but rather through its articulation and layering of the primary façade with a screen,” explains Bernhard Karpf, design partner-in-charge. “This enables the building to recede from the city while maintaining a street front. It offers its inhabitants the desired privacy and protection from the sun while maintaining a visual connection to the street and the sense of transparency.”
Courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners
Courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners
The building’s eastern section has been pulled back from neighboring buildings to create the internal courtyards and allow natural light to penetrate into each office space from multiple fronts. Lush vertical gardens act as the skewer, connecting the open-air atriums and the building’s exposed concrete core.
“Looking at the context has always been something that is very important in our work,” says Richard Meier. “We look at how that project not only fulfills the functional requirements of what it is, but how it responds to where it is and how it enlivens the community. Brazil’s architecture celebrates natural light, openness and nature’s intimate relationship with the built environment, and these are elements that we have integrated in the design of the new Leblon Offices.”
Courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners
Courtesy of Richard Meier & Partners
The firm hopes the office project will become a significant architectural contribution to Rio de Janeiro’s rich heritage, while providing needed climate-designed office space for the city.
After training at the prestigious Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Israel and moving to New York in 2000, Eran Chen founded ODA Architecture, a boutique architectural firm based in NYC. Chen has quickly become a recognized name associated with creating buildings that are not only innovative but also ecologically responsible. ODA has participated in high profile projects such as the “super-skinny and super-tall” Manhattan Tower and “a city within a city” in Brooklyn.
In the video above, Chen shares howODA has been very active in the reconstruction, reimagining, redesign of NYC. He explains how architecture in the city is about the interstitial spaces, voids, gaps and land in between skyscrapers. Chen explains that the way we inhabit the built environment is a combination of physical and mental experiences.
New York City is faced with a bleak future of imposing walls, streets, and interiors (…) as an alternative to this future, we propose a network of spaces in which human scale inversely governs building scale, which in turn promotes socialization and community shared Chen with his social media followers.
In the second part (below) of the interview with ArchDaily, Chen discusses how well-designed outdoor spaces brings value to our lives and that by making this his main element during the design process, architects can leave room for compromise on other things. In his latest project, Chen explains a new concept of filling in the gaps and creating what is essentially a house with a backyard in a dense, vertical city like Manhattan.
From the architect. Ideally located, this project is structure around dynamics flows organized mainly by the surrounding of the highway and the SBB tracks. The main areas characterized by their big space, are visually connected through the main public area, which allow to look at the same time towards the sports room and the pool.
The observer recognizes the spatial duality already seen outside, with two bright lanterns hanging from the façade. The expression of the project shows the different nature of the inside areas. The high metallic structure volumes can be reveal from the outside through the polycarbonate skin, and becomes the expression of the building. This metallic structure leans on the large concrete base which define de areas. With a sober design, made of reinforced concrete, the building was realised in a little more than a year.
This is a country house located in the Catalan Empordà. Although it’s surrounded by fruit trees and fields, it isn’t completely alone, as it shares a wall with another house of smaller size.
The house is the result of a series of extensions that happened over time giving answer to both residential and agricultural needs. When we first arrived we discovered different volumes in three levels, with a myriad of enchained rooms, with some of them lacking light and ventilation. The central part of the house was the most obscure part of it as it was far from the windows.
The main intervention consists in introducing light and fresh air in the core of the house creating exterior areas of relation. We take advantage of an existing ground floor patio, and we open up a new and larger one in the first floor. This last one puts in relation the more public areas of the house, and is where the pool is.
We exposed all the stone walls, removing minor walls, allowing new circulations that foster the labyrinthine character of the house, and paradoxically improving its use.
All the new steel structure is based on the rhythm of a series of 100×100 steel columns that are repeated in different parts. The new structure, as well as the new doors and window frames, is painted burgundy to easily make the distinction between what is new and what was already there.
The stone volumes are painted off-white so we achieve a neutral, natural background where the new materials play an important role in space definition. Thus, the brown colour glaze tiles are the common thread that walks the inhabitant all the time in contrast with the antique terracotta tile floors.
Model
The result is a country house plenty of living and dining rooms where the family and their frequent guests can work, rest, eat, sleep and swim.
From the architect. This house was built in the newly-developed subdivision surrounding new housing. While planning a design with client many times, we hit upon a keyword: “comfy house” so we considered how to make a welcoming atmosphere with lots of light.
With a vault –shaped opening in the simply laid-out compartment, the space is designed to be airy and rhythmical. The light spilling through a large curved window will encompass the room in a comfy manner.
From the architect. Located in west China, Dazhou city has a population of around 580 thousand. Dazhou Public Library serves as the collection center of literature information resource, as well as the communicating/service center of the city. It is a significant symbol of Dazhou’s culture development.
The project site is quite narrow with a height difference of about 4 meters from north to south. The main volume consists of a 2-storey underground garage and a 5-storey building with an open layout aboveground. The building Includes exhibition, classroom, café at the first floor, main entry, lecture hall, kids’ reading room at the second, open reading space at level three to four and the curator office at level five.
Utilizing relative altitude of the site, the design placed main entry on the second level. Lecture hall was placed to the north of the main volume, separated from the south-part reading space. The reading space was composed around a skylight atrium, from which one can take in the whole reading room in a glance. Readers can reach each floor with the stair in the atrium. The changing direction and altitude of the stair expressed an image of ‘mountian road’, which indicated Dazhou’s mountainous geographical environment.
To avoid the bad influence of direct sunshine from both east and west, the long side wall of reading room consists of two layers of glasses, the outer Ceramic Fritted glass and the inner frosted glass. The double glazing provides a stable diffused light environment which meanwhile insulates noise from street, thus making a high-quality reading environment. The staircases and washrooms are placed to the west so as to insulate heating in the afternoon, saving energy for air conditioning. This kind of distribution also liberates whole floor space for arranging reading function freely.
From the architect. The house is located in Nha Trang, a city in central Vietnam surrounded by the beautiful ocean and mountains. The client wanted a large house with a large garden. Answering to this request, a single roof is designed as a hanging garden to plant numerous trees and plants on it. The local building code, however, requires almost 50% of the roof area to be covered by gray or orange-color tilings and to be sloped. To obey this rule but maximize the green area atop, the roof is divided into parallel bands of greened roofs and tiled roofs in an alternating sequence.
The interior spaces of the house are structured by this system of parallel bands. Under the tiled roof are the living, dining and bed rooms, while service spaces, such as bathrooms, storages and circulation spaces, are located under the greened roof, where the ceiling height are limited because of the deep soil layers for trees atop. A void and three patios are designed within the system of bands to enhance natural lighting and ventilation.
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The house is one of the latest variations of the serial house project called ‘house for trees’. The large single roof is departing from the scale of private house. It is more like an infrastructure or a pocket park open to the neighbors. Gently sloped, this roof-landscape is visually connected to the surrounded mountains. In the shadow of trees, the residents can enjoy the views and spend their life with full of greenery.
From the architect. Set in the dry and arid industrial context next to a busy state highway, the structure is a small and sole workspace of a young CEO at the threshold of his vast industrial estate. The proposed design is an attempt to represent the client’s aspiration to reach out to the world for his business expansion while marking his presence amongst his competitors. Key aspect here was to provide high standards of comfortable work environment to its main user and to his esteemed visitors.
The challenge was responded with a simple unified form floating above the ground housing a reception, a conference area, CEO cabin and private rest area. The workspace is designed to specifically suit the industrial functionality of the client’s nature of work with visual connectivity to his entire unit at all times. Built with a concrete frame structure the building is partially cladded with the yellow colored local stone – ‘Ita Gold’ to add a sense of vibrancy to the main recessed reflective double glazed façade. The dark colour on the exteriors and extended floating plinth helped to achieve an urban contemporary edge in the overall appearance of the building.
The plan organization driven by ‘Vastu’ (Indian Vedic Science of Buildings) is a linear arrangement of spaces connected by a corridor. The materials used for the interiors is a combination of traditional and contemporary materials. Contemporary finishes such as monolithic concrete MicroTopping Floor, rusty ironic paints, back painted glass and stainless steel compliments the natural materials like customized hexagonal pieces of Ghana teak as backdrop wall, Bidasar stone (local stone) mosaics and finger-joint wood (discarded residual wood) to create a juxtaposed collage of different materials.
Sig Nordal 