design – Page 280 – Sig Nordal

MDS / Corben Architects

July 29, 2016signordalLeave a comment

Architects: Corben Architects
Location: Sydney NSW, Australia
Architect In Charge: Mohit Keni
Design Team: Philip Corben, Mitchel Ovens, Amy Beech-Allen
Area: 550.0 sqm
Project Year: 2015
Photographs: Justin Alexander

Structural Engineer: Acor Consultants
Hydraulic Engineer: ITM Design
Landscape Architect: Spirit Level Designs
Interior Design: Elizabeth Hattersley Design
Builder: Living Constructions
Joiner: Debrich Custom Joinery

Set on a battle-axe block above a beach adjacent to a nature reserve, this three level house is large and expansive yet articulated to provide intimate spaces designed to maximise its unencumbered sweeping water views from every level.

The brief from the client was to provide an interior that was modern but warm with a casual elegance free of unnecessary embellishment or decoration.

The resultant home is filled with natural light and has been thoughtfully designed to highlight spatial vistas and the breathtaking water views, whilst maintaining privacy from surrounding homes. It provides sophisticated open plan entertaining spaces and relaxed family areas that can be cleverly opened or closed off as required to suit the needs of a growing family. The design also includes secluded spaces of refuge to enjoy spectacular sunrises and sunsets, cool breezes in summer and the warmth of the sun in winter, a particularly important requirement of the client. Time was also spent fine-tuning the design and spatial planning to accommodate the specific needs of the family to ensure the home is not only beautiful but also highly functional.

The journey from the street begins down a gentle stair in the landscaped access handle shared with the driveway, past a double garage door integrated with wall cladding leading to a custom finished front door. The entry on middle level welcomes one with its light filled double height volume and a striking off-form concrete wall with a timber clad cantilevered stair. The living space beyond, with its centrepiece of beautifully crafted marble kitchen island, is large and expansive yet articulated to provide intimate spaces and framing the panoramic water view.

The upper level consists of the main bedrooms with the private master suite and the ensuite commanding the unencumbered sweeping water views. The lower level consists of guest bedrooms and Rumpus Room that combines with undercover BBQ terrace and swimming pool to provide a private sanctuary with a tranquil resort feel.

In contrast to the geometric building, the landscaping consists of a series of free-form terraces working with the site contours and integrating natural features. Extensive native planting is used to complement the adjacent nature reserve and integrate with its natural context.

The materials palette used throughout the home is dominated by natural products, with extensive use of timber, stone, glass and steel. Furniture and soft furnishings continue the natural theme with leather, timber, marble, wool and linen featuring prominently. The beautifully hand crafted joinery also incorporates solid timber and timber veneer, marble, slate and steel. The material selection was purposely limited and repeated throughout the home extending from inside to outside providing a harmonious overall ‘look and feel’ to the architecture and design.

The project has been an excellent example of a successful and trusting client/architect/interior designer/builder partnership resulting in a detailed contemporary residence from the initial purchase to completion in approximately two years.

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Blossom Pavilion / Atelier Deshaus

July 28, 2016signordalLeave a comment

Architects: Atelier Deshaus
Location: No.570 West Huaihai Road, Shanghai, China
Design Team: Liu Yichun, Wang Longhai, Ding Jieru
Area: 96.0 sqm
Project Year: 2015
Photographs: Chen Hao – Zhou Dingqi

Cooperation Artist: Zhan Wang
Structure Design: Zhang Zhun

From the architect. Blossom Pavilion is a cooperative spatial device with artist Zhan Wang, which is also one of the spatial art pieces project of Shanghai Urban Space Art Season 2015 1+1 (artist + architect).

Zhan Wang’s representive project is his rockery sculpture made by stainless steel. The most recent investigate, casted stainless steel, leave a deeply impression on me. Artist leaves a flat, thin and polished stainless steel piece on natural ground or other texture. Then carefully cast the texture on stainless steel by soft packaged hammer. In this way, an industrial material is left with nature information and artificial trace, which is also represented by the specific material behavior.

Supporting and coverage is human being’s most primitive spatial construction form, which could shelter oneself from suffering weather conditions. In the evolution of mankind construction, the principle is tending to be rational and scientific. Engineering gradually become the core of construction technique. The structure of Blossom Pavilion has been scrupulously calculated. The overall overage area is 12metres plus 8 metres, which consist of two types of thickness (8mm and 14mm) steel plates in the 800x800mm grid according to the allowable stress. The height of 14mm thickness cloud-shape ribs above the steel plate stay a range of 50-200mm, which shaped as a natural topographic slope. The chambers among the ribs were used as the pots for flowers on the roof of Blossom Pavilion. The steel plate is supported by 6 places’ single or A-shape solid steel columns, witch size at 60X60mm. A Mies style minimalism construction has been formed like this.

The most rational structure mechanics is not the principle when architect decide where to put the supporting point. A space divided by ‘sliced rockery’ is the main picture in mind. As the concept of artist treat stainless steel slice, the rockery spatial concept has been brought in into engineering supporting structures. Architect divided and translated artist’s stainless-steel-rockery sculpture into a space with rockery concept. Artist chose the hill stone cast texture steel as the façade of sliced side. The surrounding plants and trees has been engaged into the Blossom Pavilion with this method.

Because of the involved artist, architect engaged with primitive spatial rhetoric by a contemporary method.

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Pyrmont Fire Station Restoration / GroupGSA

July 28, 2016signordalLeave a comment

Architects: GroupGSA
Location: 147 Pyrmont St, Pyrmont NSW 2009, Australia
Architect In Charge: Janine Graves
Area: 720.0 sqm
Project Year: 2016
Photographs: Tyrone Brannigan

Director Architecture: Michael Mandl (Group GSA)
Project Manager: NSW Public Works
Structural Engineer: Birzulis Associates
Services Engineer: Erbas Associates
Bca: Certis
Acoustic: Acoustic Logic
Access: Morris Goding Access Consultants
Contractor: Artel Constructions
Client: Fire & Rescue NSW

From the architect. Between 1890 and 1911, Government Architect Walter Liberty Vernon designed and delivered over fifty projects in NSW, some of which are still standing and in use.

One of those is the Pyrmont Fire Station located on the corner of Gipps and Pyrmont Streets in Ultimo, Sydney. It was constructed in 1906 to address the compounding fire danger posed by an intense growth in industrial development in the area during the first decade of the 20th century.

The original building is Federation Free Style and constructed of red clay face brick in English bond with lime mortar over a rusticated sandstone plinth and has decorative sandstone detailing emphasising door and window openings and other features. The colours and textures of the brick and sandstone are in stark contrast. While the Pyrmont and Gipps Street facades have a strongly defined “base”, “middle” and “top” and feature several asymmetrical features.

Inside, the building originally consisted of two engine bays with attendant stables, a family size officer apartment and single men’s room on the ground floor. There were also apartments for six families on the second and third floors with a laundry, drying yard and watch tower at roof level.

The Station was staffed until 1945 when it was closed. It then reopened in 1960 and remained active until 1994 when it closed again for minor renovations.

The fire station reopened in 2007, however for over 40 years the two upper floors of the fire station have remained unoccupied and had been subjected to squatters, theft, water damage, fire damage and vermin.

In 2013, Fire and Rescue NSW commissioned Group GSA to refurbish and extend the operational Fire Station and derelict upper floors to improve conditions for the fire fighters and to provide office accommodation for Fire and Rescue NSW staff as part of their relocation program from their current head office in Elizabeth Street, Sydney.

Major works included upgrading the buildings structural integrity to a Category 4 seismic stabilisation. This was achieved with a meticulous design by Birzulis and construction by MAXBuild installing new steel portal frames to shore up and protect the existing heritage envelope including the prominent bell tower on the corner of Pyrmont and Gipps Streets.

Twenty-four cubic metres of concrete was used to form 1.5 metre deep footings which extended down in to existing bedrock. This formed the foundations for tonnes of structural steel that protect the building from lateral movement.

The portal frames span two floors and tie to reinforced joist flooring which is braced to the frame with a series of flat bar cross-bracing. The external façade is then tied to the perpendicular walls with a Helibar system.

Architect, Janine Graves believes “The upgrade of the locally listed heritage building is a win for urban development within Pyrmont. The Vernon building will continue to be a landmark building for many years to come”.

A new extension was also added to the building over the 3 floors. The contemporary addition is inspired by design methodologies adopted a century ago – Innovation, decoration and social creation.

The choice of interfacing materials between the heritage building and the extension produces a strong connection between the old and new. The materials complement each other and flow between internal and external spaces in an asymmetrical fashion much like the building before it.

Original concrete floors have been topped with a white concrete, marking the extent of the original building footprint and in contrast, grey concrete floors segregated by a subtle shadow gap defines the extended premises.

Vertical circulation zones are clad in Zinc, linking all 3 floors and the diverse departments of the organisation together. The zinc cladding also located around landscaping to the level 1 terrace compliments the aged red brick and the new glazed façade encasing the rear of the original building.

Recycled bricks from the site’s dismantled outbuildings were used for infills and repairs.

Janine Graves states, “The major renovation presented many challenges through the construction process. These were overcome by the team’s passion for restoring a standout piece of historical architecture and providing state of the art facilities for the service men and women who risk their lives daily to instil a sense of safety and security within our communities.

Artel Constructions worked collaboratively with the consultant team to deliver a successful renovation within the constraints of the brief and site.”

In addition to the retention of the original envelope and the incorporation of an extension to the Vernon building, another challenge involved retaining and repairing details and material such as the pressed metal ceiling above the existing interior engine bay. In order to install the joist flooring without damaging the ceiling, the builders removed the existing floor boards above the ceiling, cleaned and stored them, and then re-laid them on top of the new joists.

The original walls and rusted tin roof of the ‘fodder’ room, used for the horses in the early 20th Century, has also been retained and can be viewed from the level 2 void along with some original art works preserved behind fixed picture frames.

It is Janine’s view that “GroupGSA and the professional team of multidisciplinary consultants have ensured that the work of the former Government Architect Walter Liberty Vernon, continues to function as it was intended but now more aligned with contemporary work processes”.

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Obamas Select South Chicago Site for Presidential Library

July 28, 2016signordalLeave a comment

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama have selected Chicago’s historic Jackson Park as the site of the Obama Presidential Library, the Chicago Tribune has reported. The park is located in Chicago’s South Side, the first lady’s childhood home and where Obama was first elected to office. Located at the eastern edge of the University of Chicago campus, Jackson Park beat out nearby Washington Park for the honor of becoming the library’s home. The design commission was awarded to Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects earlier this month.

The Obama Foundation took a different approach to finding a site than past presidential foundations have taken, deciding to build in an up-and-coming part of town as opposed to an established city center. Jackson Park is surrounded by the neighborhoods of Woodlawn, a predominantly African American community, and Hyde Park, which is already in the throes of gentrification.

The selection has not come without controversy, however, as opponents believe the Library could have provided a greater impact at the Washington Park site, which is currently surrounded with several vacant sites. Friends of the Park, the park advocacy group that recently succeeded in driving the Lucas Museum from its proposed lakefront Chicago site, also expressed their disappointment that the library will be built on park land. Both Jackson Park and Washington Park were designed by 19th-century landscape designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

The Obama Presidential Library is scheduled to be completed by 2021 and will cost an estimated $500 million. The project will feature the library housing the presidential archives, a museum and headquarters for the Obama Foundation.

News via The Chicago Tribune.

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Casa del Fuego / Cazú Zegers

July 28, 2016signordalLeave a comment

Architects: Cazú Zegers
Location: Maihue Lake, Los Ríos Region, Chile
Collaborators: Francisco Chateau. Andrea Pesqueira
Project Area: 860.0 m2
Project Year: 1997
Photographs: Guy Wenborne

Construction: Teobaldo Soto y familia
Structures: Ruiz y Saavedra Ingenieros
Technical Inspection: Francisco Flaño
Other Crafts: Alejandro Pastene
Fireplace: David Jolly
Furniture: Ramón Salazar
Client: Carmen García D.
Budget: UF 20/m2, € 492
Site Area: 2.5 ha
Construction Year: 1996 – 1997

From the architect. The purpose of this house is to build a family gathering place that could host during one month up to eight families concurrently or receive a single person alone in winter.

Previously poetry says Casa del Fuego, because it is founded on a territory of ancient volcanic eruptions: it is a land of volcanoes, ancient and powerful. Moreover, the first architectural order was given around fire. The clan gathers around fire, and builds the hut. The architectural response is a family lodge, structured based on two houses. The main house and the annex or children’s house.

The program is divided into three connected parts and developed together by a generating center that determines the entire space. In this center of the house are the fires, that organize the family gathering place; from there the shells peel off in centripetal form accommodating the rest of the program. The image generated by this scheme is that of the Spiral Galaxy rotating in space, which emerges from the ground and is drawn back into it; speed follows shells that bind the three bodies of interior space.

The site is the side of a hill facing lake Maihue and laterally facing a natural golf court; the slope can generate uneven floor heights.

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Home Back Home #03 Ana Mombiedro / Enorme Studio

July 28, 2016signordalLeave a comment

Architects: Enorme Studio
Location: Madrid, Spain
Project Year: 2016
Photographs: Javier de Paz García

Initial Project: PKMN Architectures
Enorme Studio Team: Carmelo Rodríguez, David Pérez, Rocío Pina
Sponsor: IKEA España
Participants: Simon Geneste, Matteo William Salsi, Giovanni Zabanoni, Celia Gómez, Irene Ayala, Adrián De Miguel, Alba Peña, Mariate Ovejas , Omar Santiago
Home Back Homer: Ana Mombiedro
Place: IKEA Lab / COAM / Instituto Do It Yourself

From the architect. Which are the domestic models resulting from the change of paradigm and economic collapse?

Conventional patterns according to which emancipation processes where perceived as a linear and sequential itinerary passing through training, work, leaving family house and constitution of a new family, concluding unambiguously with the strengthening of personal autonomy, are no longer a suitable paradigm to endow with legitimacy personal choices made by anyone on the constitution of his/her personal biography.

The context switching in which are inserted emerging ways of transition to adulthood constitutes a complex situation that produces a breaking of traditional biographical options that are socially accepted.

This shift is made especially relevant with regard to leaving home as an event that has ceased to be unambiguous and irreversible, and very frequently even possible.

Home Back Home is a de-emancipation agency that proposes to act accordingly to this paradigm shift not viewing it as a failure but as an opportunity that allows fostering a destandardisation of emancipation processes through the construction [made in collaboration with de-emancipated persons] of a series of tools that can be able to encourage the emergence of proactive strategies in relation to change and crisis.

Home Back Home is a platform for analysis, monitoring and treatment, through prototyping, of housing situations generated by de-emancipation and the coming back home journey, a process massively followed by people with ages between 25 and 40 years old, which passes through the re-habitation of their former rooms at their childhood family house, sharing these spaces with members of their primeval household.

As an agency for assessment and monitoring, Home Back Home develops processes of accompaniment and negotiation in which it is intended to involve all co-habitants of the de-emancipated home in the construction of a complete living prototype.

Research and registering behavior and activities derived from house changing.

To change housing is always accompanied by more or less substantial modifications of everyday living habits; with respect to coming back to parents’ house, these behaviour and habits alterations are not only affecting the “new tenant” but the rest of members of the family inhabiting the house too. That’s why Home Back Home raises the monitoring and analysis of spontaneous or established behaviour that have been instilled, in order to improve them and to avoid the creation of conflicts derived from lack of design or preparedness on this new family estate.

Design and construction of de-emancipated dwell prototypes

To de-emancipate doesn’t necessarily mean a complete loss of independency, but keeping a certain amount of autonomy may involve an effort in negotiation and the establishment of certain agreements. Home Back Home proposes to design and build physical prototypes that can become a representation of some of those reached agreements as a result of a dialogue process through operations of furniture remastering.

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This Brick-Laying Robot Can Construct an Entire House in Just 2 Days

July 28, 2016signordalLeave a comment

Thanks to a new robot named Hadrian X, we made soon be able to construct an entire brick house in just 2 days. Developed by the appropriately named Australian firm Fastbrick Robotics, the giant truck-mounted robot has the ability to lay up to 1,000 bricks an hour. Its innovation comes via the machine’s 30-meter telescopic boom, which allows the base to remain in a single position throughout the brick-laying process.

All you need to input is a CAD file of the house structure and Hadrian X does the rest: the system handles automatic loading, cutting, routing and placement of all the bricks, one course at a time. Bricks are fed along a conveyor belt that sends them up the robotic arm, where the sides of the brick are coated with clear construction adhesive. The arm then rotates the bricks and extends to drop them into place. Because they are glued together, no mortar is necessary.

The machine even has the ability to leave spaces in the brickwork to make room for wiring and plumbing, and can be used with a wide range of block sizes. The high level accuracy of the finished product means very little human intervention is necessary – simply design the structure in CAD and hit send.

The robot is the result of 10 years and £4.5 million of research and development, and Fastbrick hopes that it will be able to streamline the construction process, saving clients time and money.

Hadrian X is expected to be available on the market in a year’s time.

News via Fastbrick Robotics. H/T Sky News.

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Mohican Hills House / Robert M. Gurney

July 28, 2016signordalLeave a comment

Architects: Robert M. Gurney
Location: Glen Echo, MD, USA
Architect In Charge: Sarah Mailhot
Project Year: 2015
Photographs: Hoachlander Davis Photography

Owner : Withheld
Contractor : Steve McCaughan
Engineer: D. Anthony Beale LLC
Landscape Architect: Kevin Campion, Campion Hruby Landscape Architects

From the architect. Mohican Hills is a small community in Glen Echo, Maryland within very close proximity to Washington, DC. This community boasts an unusually high percentage of contemporary and mid-century modern houses relative to most Washington, DC suburban neighborhoods. This community is adjacent to the Potomac River. Many of the lots have a steep sloping topography and share River views.

This new house, in Mohican Hills is located on one such lot. The house is positioned along the ridge of the sloping site and oriented toward distant river views. A linear composition of spaces arranged along the ridge and open to an existing clearing provides a large lawn with minimal site intrusion and preserves the vast majority of mature trees. The house is organized around a two-story living space with an open floor plan that integrates a high-ceilinged volume with intimate spaces adjacent to the double height space. A small office on the first floor is separated from the living spaces and is convertible to a fifth bedroom. A three story entry volume separates the master bedroom area from the subsidiary bedrooms.

Expanses of glass provide views into the wooded landscape toward the distant river and animate the house with light. A combination intersecting spaces insure light penetration all times of day and all times of the year.

This house employs a concrete slab throughout the main floor which provides passive solar energy assistance. The concrete is stained dark with the goal of increasing the potential solar gain and storage. Expanses of Energy Star glass provide an abundance of daylighting while solar sensitive shades mediate heat gain. Energy efficient appliances, high efficiency HVAC Equipment, wall and ceiling infrastructure with maximum insulation and a ventilated building envelope are employed with the expectation of reducing fossil fuel consumption. Large operable windows and doors are located to provide natural ventilation and direct access to the outdoors. Thermally modified wood siding is employed as an alternative to exotic or expensive hardwoods. The wood is forest managed and treated, non-toxic and durable.

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Seoul’s Dramatic “New Towns” Are Captured in this Photoset by Manuel Alvarez Diestro

July 28, 2016signordalLeave a comment

As Seoul’s population boomed, apartment blocks became commonplace. Photographer Manuel Alvarez Diestro spent 6 months exploring the city’s new towns, aiming to “reveal in visual terms the expansive nature of urbanization and the transformation of the landscape through the construction of these new housing developments of massive scale.”

After liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, people migrated to Seoul from all parts of the country. City officials were unprepared to deal with such rapid expansion and urban squatter settlements developed next to the city’s four gates. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that authorities cleared urban slums and developed a coherent city plan that featured 21 medium-density self-contained communities just outside the city limits.

Soon enough, the sprawling new towns merged, with ever more dwellings needed. Seoul’s authorities revised the 1966 plan and the first high-rise buildings mushroomed south of the Han River. Nowadays, new towns continue to grow on the city’s outskirts in order to decongest Seoul and keep pace with the population growth that has accompanied Korea’s economic success.

As Joochul Kum and Sang-Chuel Choe explain in Seoul: The Making of a Metropolis, “the physical growth of Seoul and its present social arrangement resulted more from accidental growth than rational, forward-looking political plans and decisions. Although there have been continuous government attempts to control and guide the process of growth, the overall growth of the city was largely based on the accumulated growth of many districts, sprawling one at a time.”[1]

High-rise buildings around Seoul are mainly developed by privately-owned companies. There is little coherent planning of the new towns, and public infrastructure fails to keep up. This in turn increases commuting time, and leads to self-containment on the city’s outskirts. But despite the lack of amenities and connecting infrastructure, residents still spend their days in central Seoul, with these “new towns” functioning primarily as bedroom communities.

For his photoset, Diestro went to the final station of each of the 18 subway lines across Seoul’s metropolitan area. Using his bicycle to explore large areas of land, he captured buildings whose surrounding earth was still stripped bare and churned from recent construction work. In his pictures, the new buildings float on the disturbed earth, disconnected from any surrounding urban structure: a poetic way to point out to the lack of coherent planning in Seoul’s urban development and the lack of connection to the rest of Seoul’s urban landscape.

References:

Joochul Kum and Sang-Chuel Choe, Seoul: The Making of a Metropolis (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1997)

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Stanton Williams and Asif Khan Selected to Design Future Home for the Museum of London

July 28, 2016signordalLeave a comment

Stanton Williams and Asif Khan have been announced as the winners of the competition to design the new Museum of London at West Smithfield. Beating out 70 entries from top firms and a shortlist including BIG, Caruso St. John and Lacaton & Vassal, the winning proposal was selected for its “innovative thinking, sensitivity to the heritage of existing market buildings and understanding of practicalities of creating a great museum experience.”

As part of London’s Smithfield Market, the museum will consist of a combination of new construction and adaptive reuse. Emphasizing the need for preservation, Stanton Williams and Asif Khan will work with conversation architect Julian Harrap and landscape design consultants J&L Gibbons to ensure the integrity of the historic site is maintained.

“Encountering the historic market spaces for the first time in early April this year, we were ‘blown away’ by the power and physicality already existing, and knew then, that whatever scheme we developed, this physicality needed to be harnessed, and not lost, and that initial observation has inspired our initial design proposals,” said Paul Williams, Director of Stanton Williams. “This project will engage a broad community well beyond London.”

Early concepts for the design show a crisp and contemporary vision with a strong respect for the existing spaces of the West Smithfield site. New elements will include a landmark to dome draw light into the museum entrance, innovative spiral escalators to transport visitors down into the exhibition galleries, large flexible spaces for events and debate, and a sunken garden and green spaces to provide pockets of respite.

“We all know the power of public spaces in changing our city and our individual lives, and this is what drives us. We want the Museum of London to be a museum where everyone belongs, and where the future of London is created,” added Asif Khan.

Evan Davis, Chair of the Jury, said of the decision: “Stanton Williams and Asif Khan offered some really innovative thinking, and managed to combine a sensitivity to the heritage of the location, with a keen awareness of the practicalities of delivering a really functional museum.”

The winning team will now work with the museum and stakeholders to develop final proposals for the site, with a planning application scheduled to follow in 2018.

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