A new collection of five minute-long Tall Stories—developed by the team behind The Urbanist, Monocle 24’s weekly “guide to making better cities—guide the listener through the condensed narratives of a series of architectural projects from around the globe, encompassing their conception, development, use and, in some cases, eventual demise. We’ve selected eight of our favorites from the ongoing series, ranging from London’s Casson Pavilion to Honolulu’s Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial, and the Estadio Centenario stadium in Montevideo.
Let’s face it, becoming a licensed architect is not for everyone, and is certainly not necessary to having a fulfilling career. Becoming a licensed architect is not easy. For many, it’s not a decision; becoming licensed has always been the plan. For others, there are lots of factors involved that make pursuing licensure a difficult decision. It’s an important decision to make, and will affect your life, personally and professionally. Professional support for pursuing an architecture license may vary from firm to firm, but it is very important that everyone who wants to be licensed get some form of support from their employer. From the smallest firms to the largest, architecture as an industry has a responsibility to architects of tomorrow to do their part to achieve that ultimate professional goal of becoming an architect.
In our webcomic, Architexts, the character Scott decided it was time to get licensed, and started taking the Architect Registration Exams. Over the course multiple comics, you can follow Scott’s path to licensure; from making the decision to take the exams, studying, taking the first exam, waiting for results, studying, studying, studying… all the things that every licensed architect takes. Can you relate to Scott’s experiences? Let us know, we’d love to hear from you for our next book project, Architects, LOL.
The main objective of the project is to provide natural light to the entrance hall and the corridor and to bring closer the kitchen and the living room.
Floor Plan Before
Floor Plan After
The kitchen becomes a space of social character linked to the entrance of the house, extending its use beyond the mere act of cooking and eating. The project promotes a domestic space of relationship while linking visually and programmatically the hall and the kitchen.
A 45 degrees oriented bedroom introduces a new direction in the use of the apartment, articulating the hall and the kitchen. This movement is reflected in the way the apartment is used, in the arrangement of the pavements and in the treatment of the vertical surfaces.
Axonometric
The kitchen ceramic tiling folds out to the entrance area, defining a space “in between two” uses, “in between two” materialities, bringing natural light up to the entrance door of the apartment. The same material is also used in the bathrooms, with variations in the joints colors: grey in hall and kitchen, red and blue in bathrooms.
The courtyard natural light enters into the hall through longitudinal voids made in the top of the walls. Plywood details are given special attention, making visible the assembly of the elements, defining the transitions between materials and planes through the graduation of shades and thicknesses.
From the architect. Nestled in the privacy of a hemlock forest, FAHOUSE presents an amazing building that seems to emerge from a children’s story. Exploiting the contrasts between opacity and light, the architect Jean Verville develops a graphic assemblage, which rises like two giant conifers, intensifying the dreamlike aspect of this architectural proposal. Derived from the archetypal figure of the house, the double triangular prism perfectly illustrates childhood characterizing the whole development of this project.
Conceived for a couple of young professionals and two children, the cottage revisits the family home settings to explore an imaginary closely linked to the site, its occupants and their actual way of living the family life. The close complicity with these clients during the design process, and the playfulness distinguishing their parent-children relationship, empower the architect to design a new way of living their reality. Throughout the construction, the collaboration between the architect, the family and the entrepreneur promotes a shared enthusiasm resulting in building quality and flawless finishing.
The two houses profile emerges. The architect emphasizes the elongated shape of the land by a promenade along the blind wall of the first volume. A wide exterior staircase revealing the natural slope leads to the ground floor and welcomes newcomers under an imposing cantilever defining the covered terrace. The large opaque door opens into a vibrant lobby that extends to the mysterious forest. The living area enjoys glass walls, which seem to dematerialize and eliminate the boundary between architecture and landscape, allowing nature to fabulously slip inside. Already the house comes to life and the magic of the place operates.
The architectural deployment of the staircase articulates the ground floor while governing the access parade to the perched areas of the two houses. The first, the toddlers’, nestled in the enchanted forest, displays a large bunk bed welcoming friends to share fantastic nights. A few stairs jump leads to the second, the parents’ house, which looks like a beehive composed of a succession of cells each offering a distinctive ritual. In a surprising mirror effect, the bedroom doubles as a bathroom offering two simple and soothing volumes suspended between earth and sky. In contrast, the graphic display of the impressive family shower room promises a different experience for daily ablutions. The upper floor evokes the lair of the whale to brighten the imagination and allow for a colorful world of unbelievable adventures.
Design: Donn Holohan – The University of Hong Kong
Location: Peitian Village, Fujian Province, China
Construction: Peitian Community Craftsmen
Funding: Supported by the Gallant Ho Experiential Learning Fund, HKU
Project Team: Jiang, Hejia (Team Leader) Man Ho Kwan, HKU Architecture Students
Cost: 85,000RMB
Area: 20.0 sqm
Project Year: 2016
Photographs: Courtesy of HKU
Courtesy of HKU
From the architect. Situated on the outskirts of Peitian Village, Fujian Province, China and designed to be constructed without the use of mechanical fasteners, “Wind and Rain Bridge” is a reciprocal interlocking timber structure which draws on the long tradition of wooden buildings native to the region. Each of the bridges’ 265 elements is unique and integral, assembled under the supervision of traditional carpenters, who number some of the few remaining exponents of their craft.
Site
Plan
Peitian is one of a number of isolated rural villages distributed throughout the mountainous regions of southern China, which, following severe flooding in early 2014 saw much of the infrastructure linking its disparate communities destroyed. This project aims to reconnect Peitian village to that historic network of routes that link these isolated settlements.
Courtesy of HKU
The bridge creates a community space, located in the heart of the village’s fertile farmland, where local people can socialize and exchange. Opening outward towards the village, the bridge negotiates the variable terrain and provides a place of respite from Peitian’s changeable climate.
Courtesy of HKU
This project seeks to offer an alternative mode of community redevelopment that references local crafts and traditions, and utilizes sustainable materials and methods, to create both social and physical infrastructure. Critical to this process is the integration of digital design methodologies, which allow for the planning and testing of complex assemblies. The high level of training and labor associated with these assemblies has been a barrier to the continued viability of complex, long-span, timber structures in China and other developing and transitioning economies.
BB Section
Courtesy of HKU
CC Section
Supported by the Gallant Ho Experiential Learning Fund, and integrated within the University of Hong Kong’s introduction to architectural design course, The Peitian bridge project took 70 students to southern Fujian to aid in the construction of this community structure.
Architects In Charge: Frits van Dongen (van Dongen-Koschuch Architects and Planners), at that time: De Architekten Cie.
Design Team: Jason Lee, Jan-Willem Baijense, Rui Duarte, Laura Mezquita Gonzalez, Nam Dong Ho, Mathew Winter, Sasha Hendry, Andrea Sooyoun Kim, EunSong Park
Landscape Design: Frits van Dongen (van Dongen-Koschuch Architects and Planners) at that time: De Architekten Cie.
From the architect. In the hills of the Gangnam district south of the city centre of Seoul is a residential area of 1500 households realized. The initiative for the housing complex of 180.000m2 was launched by the Korea Land and Housing Corporation (KLHC) in April 2010. The objective of the KLHC was providing affordable public housing for low income families with the focus on providing a new public housing prototype in Korea.
Van Dongen-Koschuch Architects has developed an urban plan for the Gangnam District that is based on the topography of the landscape of the site. Within the sloping green hills of Gangnam lies an ensemble of urban blocks, a layout that is not seen often in the housing market of Seoul. The design of the urban block is a new typology called ‘Tower Block Hybrids’, conceiving not only housing units but also public roads and private inner courtyards.
The design of the Tower Block Hybrid proposes not to be another housing tower of just suburban ‘Sleeping City’ but to be a real neighborhood: a community which is connected to Seoul but largely self-sufficient. The existence of a community is based on the possibility for social interconnection and the sense of ownership, a pride of place. To achieve this the Tower Block Hybrid has a clear distinction between public and private outdoor space. Each individual block has its own courtyard that serves as a communal space with sport facilities, playgrounds and gardens. The housing units have a range of different typologies, serving a variety of income levels, households and lifestyles. Each house has a broad view over the landscape providing not only far reaching views but also regulating behavioural control within the block.
From the architect. Lily Nails is a nail and eyelash salon that owns numerous chain stores in Beijing and Shanghai. To meet the needs of environmental upgrade of the brand, Arch Studio was commissioned to do the design for the brand’s new store in Yau Tang Shopping Centre, Beijing. The store is a rectangular space with an area of more than 60㎡.
The design gets rid of the symbolic method of over deco which was typically used while designing this type of store. The starting point of this design is to create a relaxed, cozy and natural experience environment, where customers can relax themselves and feel like being in a garden. A circle of 8mm thick white perforated steel plate extends from the mall corridor to the inner store; this helps to create a soft and pure curved space.
Different from seat arrangement of traditional nail salon, the six seats here ares enables customers communicate happily while doing their nails.LED light film together with spiral steel plate creates soft and well-distributed interior light. As the green background of the whole space, the plant wall makes the new space full of vitality. The gap between helical curve and the original square store forms other ancillary spaces naturally such as front desk display area, plant landscape and employee service area.
An articulated two-storey framed volume is sensitively stitched to the rear original fabric, while retaining its front Federation masonry and hipped envelope as part of its environmental, economic and planning values. It has a sectional split-level relationship to the original house that harnesses the fall of the site to the rear, enabling the cellular front plan to vertically and horizontally unfurl into a series of connected interior spaces that expand to its setting.
The built form and its program resolution respond to its immediate setting and the established conditions of the original dwelling. The two-storey volume mediates the scale and massing of its larger and smaller neighbours, with the existing southern setback extrapolated to the extent of a former rear wall and rear setback of its southern neighbour to mitigate adjacent impacts. An intermediary form folds from the underside of the reinstated rear edge of the old dwelling to meet the two-storey volume, serving as a nexus for utility spaces, circulation and a northern courtyard at the centre of the plan. Projecting ‘wedges’ at the rear further unfurl the envelope to provide ground floor storage on the terrace, a daybed nook within the ‘public’ living space, and a private reading space within the upper bedroom, for strengthened connections to its external environment.
Sustainability, cost and planning values entailed in retaining the original fabric are augmented by a modestly sized footprint and lightweight-framed envelope in a crafted ‘new build’ enabled at the rear. Fenestration placement allows expansive enjoyment of outdoor spaces, harnesses natural light and promotes passive ventilation. Projecting hoods and external blinds temper solar penetration, and acoustic attenuation measures for alternative air ventilation, insulation and internal linings assist the performance of the envelope in ameliorating latent aircraft noise. A central vaulted ceiling allows a volumetric expansiveness over a rigorously organised core and circulation zone, and surrendered floor area enables generously carved voids flanking an upper bridge for diverse views to sky, trees, and outdoor spaces, while encouraging a spatial interplay of public, semi-private and private rooms.
Bringing together architects, artists, chefs, designers and engineers, pop-up restaurantFood Ink. has laid claim to the title of “world’s first 3D-printing restaurant.” The restaurant utilizes 3D printers produced by Dutch company byFlow to create dishes out of hummus, chocolate mousse, smashed peas, goat cheese or pizza dough – essentially anything that can take the form of a paste. The paste can then be fed through the extruder to create culinary sculptures.
Food Ink.’s mission is to explore the intersection between dining and technology-enhanced user experience. According to their stated philosophy, the team is “putting [to] work most innovative technologies, like 3D-printing and augmented reality, in order to elaborate the most exquisite interactive edible experience.”
The restaurant hopes to inspire conversation about the future of sustainable food, nutrition, and health as well as demonstrate how emerging technologies may be changing our dietary and cultural habits.
Following a successful opening in Venlo, the Netherlands this April, Food Ink. will travel to a new location in London from July 25-27. The temporary gastropub’s new setting will allowing diners to eat around 3D printed furniture, including 3D printed stools by architect Arthur Mamou-Mani. The stools are being built using “Silkworm”; an open-source plug-in for Rhino developed by Mamou-Mani. Previous works of his using Silkworm have included a pop-up store for Xintiandi Style in Shanghai and “Cloudcapsule Columns” installed in London.
From the architect. Known as “El Coso”, the place was a great void at the back of the old part Cehegín (Murcia, Spain). After a big snow storm in the 1950s, many of the houses of this neighborhood collapsed or were damaged, leaving that big, sloped empty space. Besides this, the old part of Cehegín seemed to lack inhabitable gardens. The city needs to breathe through them.
We collect the rain water and the waste water from the sewing network in the high part of the site. The water goes along a pond network with riparian plants with the purpose of producing clean water. The result is used to irrigate the rest of the plants in the garden.
We located the “desire paths”, made by the footsteps of the neighbours, the ones who tried to walk through to the other side. By tracing the paths based on those tracks on the ground, the streets on the borders were connected by using comfortable slopes, making the paths accessible for all the neighbours. Green colour floods the hard floors and tints the facades of the adjacent buildings.
The contractor and the municipal officials were able to contract local workers for developing many of the tasks. Even several of them were former inhabitants of the dwellings that collapsed in that neighborhood.
We hid a building in a pocket of the walk path. The building gives its roof to the park’s paths network and hosts a business incubator. This way, the park will be able to produce new jobs and recycled water, two important and scarce resources, given the current situation of the town and the Region.
The result is a garden that produces water, where flora attracts fauna.
Sig Nordal 