From the architect. A small office, white walls and low white ceiling. This was the place we had to put down to find what was behind all that painting. During the entire process we were inside, It was a demolition process where we were curating what we wanted to see, deciding what should go and what should stay. Through the process we found the concrete under that painting, all kinds of bricks, the concrete slab on the ceiling. When we could finally see all that together, we started to choose how to show them according to the briefing we had.
Floor Plan
We decided to show all the structure and its materials of the original building (concrete, bricks and slab) combining with steel. Everything new, we made out of steel. Since the bar is very small, we decided to make storage on an iron mezzanine hanging from the concrete beam.
That way we clear the main floor from any structure that we would need to have a mezzanine. The bathroom door we also made of steel. One wall was made of hollow bricks, that didn’t look as good as the older bricks because it was totally broke from the demolition, lots of holes on it. But it was a important wall to hang frames, records and the speakers so we reinforce it with a metallic screen that works as an independent structure to hang all they need.
From the architect. This project is renewal the entire building to a serviced apartment of Asian international students. This building is built 40 years ago.
Section
Structure of concrete to be felt of aging is not hiding. Interior space is filled with a soft light , served the base material of the timber.
Lighting surface with a window is covered with a fabric shiny, back is a plasterer finish. Natural light will create a screen of multi-layered light, such as the aurora appears by irregular reflection of light in the Between.
Plan
( Type – I ) Illumination light covered with fabric brings soft light such as natural light. The wall that separates the common space and private space is a plywood base material. Door that is aligned with the wall has created a sense of unity as a facial expression, such as the wall. The time you open the door, sunlight from the outside to enter the common space.
In the case where not attach the ceiling, Exposed piping equipment is spread around on the ceiling. This ceiling was to devise a way of wiring the piping equipment. Focusing on the beam sleeve existing precursor, To verify the wiring routes, dealing with equipment piping by installing the equipment for the mall as a representation, such as the structural beam. Placing the illumination light from on the wiring mall running the ceiling depending on the layout of the furniture.
Plan
Piping is to be a representation that was regarded as the structural beam, was intended to be a finish that felt sense of unity the ceiling surface.
From the architect. The brief was to create a robust home for a young family capitalising on the stunning views over Lake Hawea to the mountains beyond.
The design uses the topography of the site to create a split level configuration with garage at ground floor level, the main living spaces at a half level higher and the guest bedroom spaces a half level higher again positioned over the garage space.
Floor Plan
These levels are linked by short flights of steps, giving a barely noticable transition. The entry approach is a series of steps and landings guiding the visitor up to the entry foyer without the sense of ascending a flight of stairs.
The crank in the plan form provides some privacy to the front deck from the western neighbour. This provides an interplay between the two wings and allows opportunities for curved elements at the junction point. This in turn creates a sense of drama in the entry foyer with a curved cedar wall leading guests into the living space. The vertical timber elements on the bedroom wing provide privacy from the living space and help to break up the two storey volume of the garage/bedroom wing.
Section
Lake Hawea is known for its wind so the creation of a series of outdoor spaces and a sheltered rear courtyard was essential. This courtyard opens off the living room and offers views to the lake beyond. The dark ribbed cladding and the large aperture through to the lake is reminescent of the bellows and view finder of an old camera. An appropriate metaphor in this timeless kiwi holiday destination.
French architect Patterlini Benoit has imagined a mixed-use building to be wrapped around one half of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Completed in 1836 as a memorial to the victories of the French armies under Napoleon, Paris’ triumphal arch is one of the most iconic and visited landmarks in France and the world over. But Benoit argues that its status as a tourist destination has removed it from the authentic cityscape that is used by everyday Parisians. His proposal attempts to reclaim the monument for the city by dividing the arch with an enormous mirrored plane – visually competing the monument from one perspective and providing new function from another. In this way, Benoit claims, the structure can be “brought into modernity without denying history.”
The proposal consists of a series of stacked glass boxes, bracketed around the monument and connected via a glass elevator. The boxes would have their own independent structure, so they can float around the Arch without compromising the memorial. Each box would contain different programmatic elements: a museum to French history and nationalist, an art gallery, a panoramic restaurant, and a cafe-style lounge, where tourists and locals could interact.
Benoit also addresses the issue of accessibility to the site. Located in the center of the world’s most famous roundabout, the Place Charles de Gaulle, access to the monument currently demands navigating across 12 lanes of traffic or walking through an underground tunnel. Benoit’s proposal calls for a new landscaped bridge connecting the monument to the neighborhood of Neuilly. The bridge would accommodate both pedestrian and bike traffic, becoming a new green corridor of the city.
The remaining half of the Arch would remain undisturbed, with the large mirrored surface visually completing the symmetrical structure. On the other side of the mirrored wall, a digital billboard would be erected to announce events and Parisian news.
Obviously speculative, the project’s true goal is in in questioning whether our landmarks and icons can contribute to the public realm in more pragmatic ways.
The main idea was to bring together living-room, entrance hall and kitchen in an uninterrupted space, giving access to other compartments through a single indoor hall. The elimination of the maid’s room also enabled increasing the kitchen and the reorganization of the bathrooms.
Plan
That allowed the creation of a suite freeing the use of the other bathroom by the rest of the apartment.
A set of black lacquered panels transforms the bounce generated by the stairwell into an architectural element, which not only hides the counters as well aggregates the social space of the apartment.
SADAR + VUGA and local partner PRG°B R Architektur have been awarded first prize in a competition for the new Headquarters for the Supreme Court and School of Magistrates in Tirana, Albania. The winning proposal, selected from a pool of over 30 international firms and from a shortlist of 5 finalists, renovates an existing 3,000 square meter Italian Rationalist structure while adding four light-filled courtrooms and a new educational block.
Courtesy of SADAR + VUGA
The design is a product of its site along the periphery of the Grand Park Tirana, drawing inspiration from the tranquility of the forest and the strength of the existing structure, characteristics that create what SADAR + VUGA refer to as an “urban oasis of sorts.” The renovation and addition enhance these natural qualities while introducing a lively spirit to the site through the creation of an animated urban square, an independent educational facility, intelligently organized administrative spaces for judicial staff and four transparent, tectonic courtrooms that feel open, yet secure.
Program pieces have been dividing into unique architectural objects, arranged to give the complex a campus-like feel. Outer walls of the court complex are constructed of a light tubular steel structure and floor to ceiling glazing. Green roofs also feature throughout the addition, pulling the park into the building.
Courtesy of SADAR + VUGA
Courtesy of SADAR + VUGA
The educational center takes on a more stoic personality, featuring a conventional concrete shear wall structure, and is set across from the existing building to create a public plaza for the complex. Additional program pieces include classrooms, a conference hall and cafe.
From the architect. The Mezzanine House is a single family house, located within a dense single house residential area in Ljubljana. It was completed with collaboration between elastik and Hikikomori. The design for this house deploys a split level device, which organizes the daily experience by deploying split level compartments around the central space of the kitchen and living room.
Section
This organisational principle vertically connects the family activities from half basement, to ground bounded living zone, towards kids’ rooms in the mezzanine level. Master bedroom and guest rooms top the highest floor sector, while offering a connection with the roof terrace. The cantilevered en-suite bedroom provides a shelter for the terrace extending from the living room.
The volumetric compactness of the Mezzanine House is facilitated with the internal split levels that create a landscaped, continuous living space, compartmentalized around the vertical axis.
The challenge was to create a low energy house with high living standards using standard materials like brick and concrete and glass, but not to compromise on architectural design. The house only consumes 19.8 kWh/m2a for heating and cooling that makes her A rated house. The house is equipped with heat recovery unit and collects rain water from the roof. the plot is only 400m2 so it was positioned with a lot of care not to cast shadows onto neighboring buildings and to avoid shadows from them. Passive insulation was used in the best possible way.
AD Classicsare ArchDaily’s continually updated collection of longer-form building studies of the world’s most significant architectural projects. Here we’ve rounded-up ten groundbreaking residential projects from this collection, ranging from a 15th century Venetian palazzo to a three-dimensional axonometric projection. Although some appear a little strange, all have been realised and have made lasting contributions to the wider architectural discourse. You can study residential cubes, spheres and inverted pyramids—plus projects by the likes of OMA, Álvaro Siza, and Richard and Su Rogers—after the break.
Looming over the small Bavarian town of Hohenschwangau are the turrets and towers of one of the world’s most well-known fairytale castles. Schloß Neuschwanstein, or “New Swan Stone Castle,” was the fantastical creation of King Ludwig II – a monarch who dreamed of creating for himself an ideal medieval palace, nestled in the Alps. But the structure and engineering prowess of this grand residence for a waning monarch isn’t what you might expect.
On the 29th December, 1940, at the height of the Second World War, an air raid by the Luftwaffe razed a 35-acre site (known as the Barbican) in the heart of the City of London to the ground. Following the war, the City of London Corporation—the municipal governing body for the area—started to explore possibilities to bring this historic site into the twentieth century. This is what they ultimately commissioned.
Much of the spatial composition of the Villa dall’Ava was influenced by its site: in a garden, on a hill. The clients commissioned OMA to design a house with two distinct apartments—one for themselves and another for their daughter—and made one very specific request for a swimming pool on the roof, with a view of the Eiffel Tower.
A popular tourist attraction and bizarre architectural experiment, the Kubuswoningen is located in the Oude Haven – the most historic section of the port of Rotterdam. Known for his desire to challenge conventions, Piet Blom did not want the Kubuswoningen to resemble typical housing; he strived to dissolve the attitude that “a building has to be recognizable as a house for it to qualify as housing.”
Secluded behind a screen of tall bamboo shoots in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, the Kings Road House is considered by many to the first home ever built in the Modernist style. It’s use of tilt-slab concrete construction and an informal studio layout, set it apart from its contemporaries; the design would set the tone for other Modernist residential design for decades.
This house, designed by Richard and Su Rogers in 1968, is one of the lesser known architectural works from the master who went on to design the Centre Pompidou in Paris with Renzo Piano. The house itself represented British Architecture at the 1967 Paris Biennale, was later lived in by Rogers’ parents.
Also known as Bonjour Tristesse, this is a social housing project designed located in Berlin. The project was Siza’s first built work outside of his native country of Portugal, and offers a meaningful precedent in urban densification demonstrating a delicate balance between contextual awareness, creative freedom, and progressive vision.
Sitting on the northern bank of Venice’s Grand Canal is a great house whose ornately carved marble facade only hints at its original splendor. The Palazzo Santa Sofia—or the Ca D’Oro (House of Gold), as it is also known—is one of the most notable examples of late VenetianGothic architecture, which combined the existing threads of Gothic, Moorish, and Byzantine architecture into a unique aesthetic that symbolized the Venetian Republic’s cosmopolitan mercantile empire.
In the quaint Dutch town of Den Bosch sits the odd community of Bolwoningen: a cluster of globe-shaped stilt houses punctuated with round windows amid a sea of wild vegetation. These oversized “golf balls” are, in fact, homes: an eccentric product of a relatively unknown architectural experiment conducted by a visionary architect. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out.
Villa Malaparte, built in 1938 by the Rationalist architect Adalberto Libera in Punta Massullo on the Isle of Capri, is widely considered to be one of the best examples of Modern Italian architecture. The house, a red structure with inverted pyramid stairs, sits 32 meters over a cliff on the Gulf of Salerno, completely isolated from civilization.
Are the rigors and tribulations of architecture school causing serious impacts on students‘ mental health? A new student survey conducted by Architect’s Journal has found that more than a quarter of architecture students in the UK are currently seeking or have sought medical help for mental health issues related to architecture school, and another 25% anticipate seeking help in the future.
The results have prompted Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor at the University of Buckingham and a mental-health campaigner, to describe the situation as “a near epidemic of mental-health problems.”
In addition to mental health concerns, the report also brings to light growing problems with student debt, excess work hours and worry that education is not properly preparing students for the real world. Read the study in its entirety at Architect’s Journal here.
The new Industrial Engineering and Innovation Campus of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia is built beside the Forum area, between Carrer Taulat and the Ronda Litoral beltway. The Urban Improvement Plan for this sector is organized on the site around a central axis parallel to the sea, with the various campus buildings to either side. Our project centres on two of these buildings, which face each other, building C laid out along Carrer Taulat and building I on the Ronda Litoral side. Both are designed to house research areas and comprise lecture rooms, laboratories and offices. Though the built volumes of the two were fundamentally different, we decided to unify the design by organizing both floor plans according to an identical sequence of bays: a central bay for entrances and services, and two side bays of different widths, one smaller for offices and one larger for laboratories. In building C, the sequence is laid out perpendicular to the street, whereas in building I it is parallel, calling for another bay separated from the others by a courtyard that provides lighting and ventilation. Having decided the functional order of the buildings, we seek for a homogeneous façade system to meet the requirements of insulation and structure.
We therefore designed a structural façade, made of prefabricated concrete that also provides solar protection in a way similar to a brise-soleil. The glass façade is drawn back to generate an interstitial area, providing shade and ventilation. The use of mass-produced structural ribs allows a highly versatile internal division that will adapt easily to any variations of programme that may be required. This system of structural façade is used in the longer façades of the volumes, which are obviously the bearing structures. The solution used in the end walls is a unitary coating with no windows. These walls only open on the ground floor, where they are braced to create entrances to the building. These are the main entrances on the central avenue and secondary and service entrances on Carrer Taulat and the Ronda. The inner courtyards are also addressed as structural façades, allowing the building to descend a floor to the basement, where some of the more complex uses are housed.
Sig Nordal 