From the architect. At the beginning of 2016, BlueFocus Communication Group decided to develop a series of venues in multiple locations across Mainland China. The first was then established in Beijing, at the same location used for the Group’s Headquarters, a former Panasonic factory complex of recent renovation. Such a decision is an unmistakable reflection of the company’s priorities, to evolve in China from a manufacturing power into a creative force, under the leadership of its charismatic Chairman Mr. Zhao Wenquan.
For this end, BlueFocus selected a 700-sqm industrial building, with a free height of 8.50m, established in a north-south orientation, to be renovated and become the venue for the group’s events. The “MeePark” concept provides a space to host events for a diverse group of clients, ranging from local entrepreneurs and SME’s to multinational corporations such as PepsiCo and Volkswagen.
The design strategy divides the space into two main zones: the F&B service area located in the north and the events zone located in the south. When a guest uses the main entrance on the north side, the F&B service zone functions as a reception area, providing diverse facilities such as a wardrobe, signature tables, washrooms and an area to take pictures. On the second floor, guests can find a casual dining area facing towards the vast space provided by the double height of the entrance.
Diagram
Diagram
The events zone is an 8.50m high space where pre-existing trusses have been left visible as a heritage from the old factory, now reborn as a multifunctional space. The main area is equipped with all sorts of elements than can transform the space in a matter of minutes: a big LED screen descends from the ceiling; the stage area appears from the left side wall; benches open up to create a sitting area on the right. All these artifacts provide a transformative space that successfully deals with different activities and events: from product presentations or debates to live music concerts.
The material selection ranges from concrete and wood for the flooring to polycarbonate, glass and steel for the walls. This selection highlights the technological nature of the space, with a series of eye-catching LED screens that allows different presentation formats.
Material
MeePark will become an ideal platform for people to meet, socialize, hold activities and share innovative ideas. The space is a symbol of the narrative of China as a country: evolving from being the factory of the world to promoting local consumption of its own products.
From the architect. Equivalent to the brownstones of New York, this interwar duplex is a humane scale solution to housing in the Sydney city fringes.
Sketch
Shoulder to shoulder with other apartment buildings, the original 1920s two-storey flats were transformed into a four storey block with a basement carpark and cellar, a ground floor garden apartment and a two-storey penthouse.
Just forty-percent of the existing structure was demolished, mainly the dysfunctional rooms at the back of the property, which were replaced by a modern four-storey structure.
Ground Floor Plan
1st Floor Plan
2nd Floor Plan
The front of the property, with its original Queen Anne leadlight windows, liver toned brickwork and timber shingles, was left intact to preserve the building’s consistency with the prevailing style of the street. No one would believe that behind those refined front rooms the apartments would morph into modern open living spaces with generous terraces that allow the inhabitants to admire the views of the city, populated with skyscrapers designed by Renzo Piano, Sir Norman Foster and Ingenhoven Architects, and enjoy glimpses of Sydney Harbour beyond.
The duality of the design also reflects the personalities of the residents: urbane and loaded with old world culture and family history, yet passionate about modern art, architecture and urban living. Here the interior architecture plays greater role than in a more spacious suburban setting.
The use of every millimetre has been carefully planned to condense the content of a large house into this city pad, with an eclectic collection of furniture and art; the skilful joinery design by Project Architect, Jane McNeill aimed to provide as much storage as possible for the owners, while lending elegance to the interiors in touches such as the dressing table in the dressing room.
The cultured owners could not part with their books, so Jane created for them a library and study area with room for a comfortable arm chair, tucked beside the Jacobs Ladder stair that climbs to a glazed roof hatch and a landscaped roof terrace and a spa pool with a city skyline backdrop.
Sketch
Product Description.The JWI vertical louvre system has been used on the rear northern extension of the building which faces both Sydney city and harbour views and an adjacent laneway-like road. The primary purpose on the louvre system is to provide a controlled method of adjusting levels of privacy and light, whilst allowing glimpses of harbour and city views. The louvres set up a horizontal band of anodised aluminium matching the finish of the window frames, and gives the northern facade a dramatic contrast of textures.
From the architect. Aedas Interiors transforms VMS Investment Group Headquarters into an art gallery.
When relocating to a new office there is a golden opportunity for a company to transform their culture and ethos. Aedas Interiors, when working with VMS Investment Group on their relocation to a whole floor in Exchange Square, was tasked with this transformation process and to create a new workplace environment that showcased the multi-faceted and versatile nature of the firm.
Our concept of forming an ‘art gallery’ look and feel provided the backdrop to house VMS’s various operations, extensive client areas and their growing art collection. Our device of framing key views, aspects and elements elevated them to being artwork in their own right. A strong hospitality element was created by positioning their café in the most prominent location at the entrance, providing immediate social connection to clients, visitors and staff.
The material palette is a selection of warm and natural materials creating a comfortable and inviting environment, while accent colours, furniture and unique artwork provide the drama and excitement.
Doblado House is a project which originates from exploit a existing construction of approximately 75 m2 on ground level contained in an area about 260 m2. The architectural program express a housing for a couple and is distributed in service, kitchen and living room on ground floor; and at first level: it contains a studio, bedroom and bathroom. The existing construction is reinforced with a steel structure to load the new floor of the first level and a perimetral facade wall rises with a pedestrian access articulated to the house and another vehicle access on the opposite end. Finally the rest of the area is regenerated like lawn garden for outdoor activities.
Floor Plan 01
The premise of the project aims to preserve an austere facade by the street, using apparent materials and avoiding refined finishes. The renovated and extended volume is intended as a dark monolith respecting the main existing ground level openings and generating enough more for the new level, seeking to avoid a concern in the composition of windows. In the interior is intended to use refined materials and finished as the wood and the plaster together with the use of clear and warm tones. This way an experience is described from exterior at the street with apparent and coarse materials up to a more sophisticated and cozy interior.
The project – a Maritime Research Facility located beside the Lower Harbour in Cork – involves a tall element housing research spaces and a lower tank hall containing testing facilities. Conceived as a stone outcrop on the edge of the water, subject to the action of wind and sea, the plan form is driven by the size and relationship of the four testing tanks, used alternately still or agitated with paddle mechanisms and profiled floorplates to simulate wave action, coastal erosion, ocean floor modelling.
Model
A large volume, long span space is required to facilitate a slow balletic movement of heavy lifting gantry cranes, instrument bridges, access gangways, suspended camera equipment, people and forklifts moving independently over each other and travelling along and across each tank – thus a series of 45m long trusses swing across the volume supporting a folded roof. Workshops cluster along the east side of the tank hall, indented for natural ventilation like gills of a fish or barnacles on a rock outcrop, while larger indents give access for deliveries (east) and people (west). Research spaces are stacked to the sea, open to light and views northwards. Continuing the indented nature of this addition on the edge of the Harbour, surfaces of the research tower are eroded deeply on north and east facades, analogous to the action of wind and water on driftwood, generating a series of indented planes on the elevation to the sea for windows and balconies.
The roof is geometrically resolved as a series of mathematically generated planes triangulated into different slopes, reflecting the Z-shaped swing of the trusses over the tanks mapped onto the fixed points of the workshops. Tension between the folded form above and the captured volumes beneath present an oscillating rhythm which intersects the serrated edges of the plan in a range of relationships.
Dunelm House and the adjacent Arup-designed Kingsgate Bridge are considered among the highlights of the legendary engineer’s career, alongside such feats as the Sydney Opera House. The building sits on a steep bank on the River Wear, with multiple terraces facing out towards the river, while Kingsgate Bridge crosses the river at a slight angle to meet the with the building’s entrance. Arup, who was born in the nearby city of Newcastle, was so fond of the two structures that he even requested for his ashes to be scattered from the Kingsgate Bridge after his death in 1988, while a bust of Arup sits near to Dunelm House’s entrance.
In explaining its decision to replace the building, the university cites an estimated repair cost of £14.7 million and states that “Dunelm House is not able to accommodate new uses” as part of its university estate masterplan. However, a petition launched by a group causing itself Save Dunelm House argues that a simpler solution to this problem is simply to revise the masterplan – while pointing out that recent new buildings constructed by Durham University have not shown themselves to be better value for money than the expected repair cost.
“Dunelm House has a gross internal area of 3,980 square meters, making the refurbishment cost an estimated £3,600 per square meter,” explains the petition. “That seems like a lot of money, but it is cheaper than the cost of Durham University’s new Ogden Center for Fundamental Physics (the new abstract timber building) which is costing £11.5 million for 2,478 square meters – that’s a whopping £4,640 per square meter! Refurbishing the building could be cheaper than building new.”
At the time of publishing, the petition has collected over 1,200 signatures. Visit the petition here to add your name.
From the architect. House built for a couple with the idea of providing a contemplative and reflective space. This theme was addressed in two ways:
A more intimate, where the whole house is organized around a small patio and differences in levels. This internal patio allows a visual contact between the surroundings of the house, bringing the residents’ life together. Nature, on this small scale, can be observed according to the variations of the seasons.
The theme was also approached on the scale of the landscape. The land has a wide view of the Serra da Mantiqueira. Thus, starting from the most intimate dimension, traveling almost a spiral, one can climb up on the landscaped roof and observe the landscape amplitude.
The levels were chosen so that it could be observed over the house of the left lateral neighbor, increasing still the perception of the amplitude of the Mountain range.
For these purposes, the house, the inventiveness of solutions and details allow a simplicity and objectivity of the project, privileging comfort and not the spectacle.
This 2016 has been a hectic, frenetic year with complex geopolitical, social, and cultural issues placing our world at a crossroads of an uncertain future. Do we look back into the nostalgia of a safe past, or do we step up and be an active part of a hopeful future?
As architects we have a tremendous responsibility in this scenario; historically, our profession has shaped the collective ideas of the future, generation after generation, by weighing-in on the crises that arise in our societies. In the absence of clear leadership to guide us towards an inspiring future, this is our opportunity to serve as agents of change for the future we deserve.
ArchDaily’s role is to provide inspiration, knowledge, and tools to the architects who will face the hyper-urbanization currently underway in our world. And I am happy that the orchestrated effort of our global team is working towards this ambitious goal, reaching more than 500,000 daily readers in our English, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese editions, taking advantage of the Internet to connect architects from every corner of the world and bring architectural inspiration and information exchange in an unprecedented way.
As we turned 8 this year, we unveiled a new site design and an improved building products catalog, both of which are under constant improvement thanks to the data we gather from more than 3 billion monthly events and interactions created when you use ArchDaily. One example is the “Recommend For You” widget that we launched in the sidebar of projects and articles, crafted specifically for each user and based on a recommendation engine built by our engineers and data scientists. We will continue to diligently focus on similar projects during 2017 by developing more data-driven solutions to help you navigate the vast amount of projects and knowledge that we have amassed in the “ArchDaily Iceberg.” We’re also dedicated to improving what we expect to be a useful tool in your daily design workflow, the My ArchDaily platform—a service already used by hundreds of thousand of architects to save and sort projects.
Our growth has also helped us connect directly with you, our users, in different ways. Reaching 2 million fans on Facebook and 1 million followers on Instagram has given us more robust settings to transmit knowledge and inspiration. Even live!
We are also teaming up with some of the world’s most important construction materials manufacturers—such as Saint Gobain, CEMEX, Hunter Douglas, Equitone and more than 300 companies worldwide—to bring you compelling content and the latest industry news. By connecting the projects that we publish with invaluable data about the products used to realize them, we hope to enlighten architects about the palette of materials available to them.
Aligned with the initiative to provide more immersive content we launched our VR for Architects section.
And we will continue to work hard with our global team to bring you a curated selection of projects, together with news and articles that add value to the architects in their day to day efforts to build the future that we deserve, as you can see in our Best of 2016 section.
From the architect. This small mosque of 100m2 included a renovation of an existing masonry cross-vaulted space and the addition of a minaret, grafted onto the existing structure as a symbolic landmark, next to the 18th century old palace. A new civic plaza was created in what was before an adjoining parking space, turning the frontage of the mosque into a public square with seating, water fountain, ablution space and shading under a newly planted fig tree.
Diagram
Given the non-alignment of the existing structure with the required directionality to Makkah, the design approach was first set to correct the orientation though a series of physical transformations and additions. The directionality towards Makkah became the only tool/language mobilized to shape the new mosque and its surrounding, at all scales, from the interior of the mosque to the outdoor plaza
On the architectural level, the mosque’s new slender minaret is linked horizontally through a gently concave canopy to a curved wall at the plaza level, delineating a portico for the mosque below and creating a transitional space between the interior of the mosque and the street as well as adding privacy for the mosque from the outside.
The envelope of the mosque is strictly formed of thinly sliced painted white steel plates, faithfully angled in a parallel direction to Makkah. When looked at obliquely from an angle, the steel plates stack to compose a complete and comprehensive volume of the mosque. Looked at frontally, the mosque’s volume, through its thin planarity, disappears and blends with its visually rich historical backdrop, momentarily suspending belief in its actual presence.
Diagram
Rather than the traditional inert Cube/Dome/Minaret volumetric expression of normative mosque architecture, the design offers a lighter reading of the typology, an ephemeral tectonic presence. The concave/convex planar surfaces of the new mosque brace the outside plaza and street in an extroverted geometry, and link it to the interior religious space which would have been usually hermetically enclosed. As we now know, these two spaces (the religious space within and the public space of the street without) were hybridized in the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings where the public space of the city intersected the public space of the mosque.
Atop the minaret, the word Allah (God) is folded bi-axially from the minaret’s elements, becoming an integral structural element that is reinforcing the fragile steel armature, rather than being just an ornamental applique. The minaret becomes a frail element that without this calligraphy would fail structurally and break apart. Seen from one side, Allah is read in an affirmative solid form, a modern interpretation of calligraphy. Seen from the other side, Allah is read as a void, a doubtful absence, but also emanating the immaterial and ineffable idea of God, in reference to the lack of representation in Islam. It is also a deconstruction of the word from a metanarrative to a text that can be interpreted, through the creation of a physical rather than an optical lenticular. Here, the text is literally a construct, and writing/reading happens between the lines. The Minaret itself is the same height as the surrounding trees; and when seen frontally becomes transparent to blend with its context.
Below, at the curved wall entry to the mosque, the pixelated and equally structural word Insan (Human) is added to the steel plates, to create a Hegelian dialectic of God/Man. The juxtaposition of both renders the idea of humanity as an integral part of the equation with God, placed in a new dialectic, and becomes a reminder of the humanistic tradition of Islam, as referenced in noted Islamic theologian Mohammad Arkoun’s book Humanisme et Islam – Combats et Propositions (Paris, Vrin, 2005) which places Islam at the origin of the18th century Enlightenment project.
Diagram
Insan becomes the epicenter of the ground plane of the plaza.
As one moves around the mosque, the planar reading of the mosque formed by the steel plates becomes transparent, while the two words (Allah/Insan) becomes more apparent, and vice versa. The overall lightness of the mosque’s tectonic sits also in a relational contrast to the heaviness of the Moukhtara’s palace stone volumetric.
A fig tree shades the new plaza, and creating a book end along with the existing Olive tree on the other side of the street, alluding to the ‘Fig and Olive’ verse (souret at-teen) in the Quraan and referencing the importance of both trees in Christian tradition as well. At the threshold, the entry to the mosque’s hall, which accommodates both women and men in the same space, is articulated with a chiseled glass façade holding two wooden doors that float within it.
On the inside of the existing structure, the minimal intervention involved a ‘white-out’ of the concave surfaces of the vaults, using special Lime mix brought from Aleppo in Syria, as well as the introduction of a new skylight that cuts the vaulted space to register the direction of the Quiblah wall towards Makkah, and bring light towards the Mihrab space.
Through the skylight, one can see the minaret in a visual looping of exterior back to the interior, linking visually the disassociation in typical mosques between the sound and the vision.
Ground Floor Plan
Similarly, the Mihrab is articulated with a concave reflective polished stainless steel arched wall that, though pointing towards Makkah, implodes this axiality by merging it visually with the wider context, bringing outside in, and distorting the interior spatiality of the mosque.
Towards the back of the mosque where the actual reading of the Quraan would happen, a wooden wall with the word iqra’ (read) is articulated in relief. It references the Islamic scholar Youssef Siddiq’s argument and interpretation that the first word in the Quraan, iqra’, of which the Quraan word is a derivative, argued for a critical and contextual reading of the Quraan as a post-structuralist ‘text’ to be read critically, and not as a meta-narrative to be recited blindly.
The call to prayer, in collaboration with artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Nisrine Khodr, was re- interpreted along the same lines as a variation on the normative call to prayer by the idea of having it spoken rather than sung, in a return to the words where the listener focuses on the meaning rather than the melody.
Model
Overall the design of the mosque is a celebration of the ethos of modernity as it relates tectonically to the notion of abstraction, of ephemerality, and representationally to the continuity of the humanism tradition in Islam. It represents a part of a cultural war of ideas that needs to be fought against the fundamentalist forces across religions, a war where architecture is a weapon.
Iran-based BMDseign Studios has unveiled Concave Roof, a double-roof system with steeping slopes resembling a bowl for the purpose of rainwater collection in arid climates like Iran, where a lack of water could lead to mass displacement in the future.
Because precipitation in this area is less than one-third of that of the world average, and evaporation is more than three times higher than the world average, the concave roof system is designed to “help [make] even the smallest quantities of rain [flow down] the roof and eventually coalesce into bigger drops, just right for harvesting before they evaporate” explained the architects.
Courtesy of BMDseign Studios
Courtesy of BMDseign Studios
The outer shell of the roof system not only collects rainwater but also provides additional shading and allows air to move freely between it and the inner shell, acting as a cooling mechanism for both roofs.
Courtesy of BMDseign Studios
At a school with 923 square meters of concave roof area, it is expected that 28 cubic meters of water could be collected, with an efficiency of about 60 percent. Further research for the system will focus on maximizing this efficiency.
Courtesy of BMDseign Studios
Reservoirs connecting to the collection systems will be placed between building walls, allowing for further control of temperature fluctuation of indoor spaces due to the heat storage capacity of water, all of which will “[lower] the overall carbon footprint of much-needed air conditioning in this harsh environment.”
Architects: BMDseign Studios Location: Jiroft, Kerman province, Iran Architect in Charge: Babak Mostofi Sadri Design Development: Dena Bakhtiari Design Team: Babak M Sadri, Dena Bakhtiari, Nazanin Esfahanian, Negar Naghibsadat Structural Engineer: Sina Rostami
Sig Nordal 