Located at 15 East and 75th Street, the project entails combining three separate townhomes — two Queen Anne-style, and one Neo-Federal — into one large home for Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.
Courtesy of The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and Stephen Wang + Associates PLLC
About two months ago, the proposal was presented to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, but failed to impress due to several structural changes, such as the removal of party walls and the alteration of the Neo-Federal façade into a Queen Anne style, which would diminish the historical significance of the properties.
With the new plan, however, the Neo-Federal façade will experience minor changes, some party walls will be retained, and the buildings will be kept to look like three separate buildings, tied together by a sunken front yard and an iron fence.
Courtesy of The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and Stephen Wang + Associates PLLC
Furthermore, the rear of the project will feature an open glass and bronze façade, with large boulders on the lowermost level that resemble the large rocks of Central Park.
Courtesy of The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and Stephen Wang + Associates PLLC
Courtesy of The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and Stephen Wang + Associates PLLC
Architects of Invention has unveiled their design for the CORAL Hotel, an upscale lifestyle community in Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa. Located on the reclaimed portion of the main island of Seychelles, the project will feature professionally serviced apartments, a spa, several restaurants, a clubhouse, a pool, private marina and direct access to the beach.
In an effort to replicate sustainability solutions from nature, the project utilizes biomimicry and is based on the models, systems, and growth of coral. The architect states that “the structures of the project derives from the content of units in continuous movement resembling a sea creature, coral or the moving of the sea.”
Courtesy of Architects of Invention
In order to optimize ocean views from apartment windows, the apartment complex will be “arranged as single or several interlocked architectural spaces along the entire length of the parcel.” Thus, half of the apartments in the building will have ocean views.
Courtesy of Architects of Invention
Each apartment will average 40 square meters, with either one or two bedrooms, a mixed kitchen and living room, a bathroom, and a spacious terrace.
Courtesy of Architects of Invention
Courtesy of Architects of Invention
Furthermore, the ground floor of the building will house the main lobby, restaurant, bar, spa, and retail space.
From the architect. By commissioning a temporary summer pavilion by a leading architect every year, the Serpentine Galleries in Londons Kensington Gardens is known as an international site for architectural experimentation. Its Architecture Programme expands for 2016 with four Summer Houses joining the Serpentine Pavilion.
Concept
Model
Queen Caroline’s Temple, an 18th century historical “summer house” attributed to William Kent and situated in the proximity of the Serpentine Gallery, stands seemingly purposeless facing
a large meadow. A second, today extinct, Pavilion also designed by William Kent was situated on a nearby man-made mountain constructed from the dredging of the artificial The Long Water. This small Pavilion rotated mechanically 360 degrees at the top of the hill offering various panoramic views of the park and, reciprocally, different views of itself when seen from the park.
Concept
Floor Plan
It was meant to be seen in the park and was meant as a structure from which to see its surroundings. The little mountain and house disappeared at some point in history.
With this in mind (temporality and the absent house) Barkow Leibinger designed a Pavilion in-the-round standing free with all its sides visible. It is conceived as a series of undulating lines constituting bands and forming part of the structure that is reminiscent of a contour drawing (or the act of drawing a form without lifting the pencil up from the paper and only looking at the subject). The logic of generating a structure from loops of ribbon is a self-generating one and comes from a logic of making that is, by coiling material in your hands round and round then stacking the material upon itself.
Structure
The new Summer House is organized as four bands of structure beginning with a bench level attached to the ground, a second band of three C-shaped walls crowned by a third and fourth level which forms a roof that cantilevers a tree-like canopy over the smaller footprint de ned by the undulating loops of bench wood. The horizontal banding recalls the layered coursing of Kent’s Summer House albeit its idiosyncratic nature. The Summer House is constructed with plywood skin on a steel tube frame, materials intrinsically in harmony with the looping geometry of the structure.
In 2003 George Steiner—a Paris-born, American, UK-based literary critic, philosopher and essayist—gave a lecture in Tilburg, a small Dutch city on the Belgian border. His talk, which he called “The Idea of Europe,” was delivered through the Nexus Institute, making some waves in certain circles but, ultimately, was not widely discussed. I found a copy of the transcript earlier this year in Amsterdam’s Athenaeum[1], who had tucked it in the corner of a sunken room on a shelf devoted to “Brexit.” I read and read it the following day while on a journey to Brussels.
As I trundled across the Flemish hinterland Steiner’s words, delivered with judicious insight and a reassuring cautionary edge, served as a reminder of one irrevocable fact: that Europe is a continent “of linguistic, cultural, [and] social diversity;” a “mosaic”[2] of communities that have rarely been united under an institution of the same scale and ambition as today’s European Union. But before the European Union came the European café.
Cities like Paris, Venice, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Budapest, Geneva, Lisbon, and even historic Istanbul, have harbored some of the most tempestuous interiors in Europe. Within these cities were, and are, the greatest of the great cafés and coffee houses: Café Central, Café A Brasileira, and Da Florian on Piazza San Marco – “the drawing room of Europe” and the oldest café in Europe; Les Deux Magots and Café Gerbeaud. Places of political discussion, artistic argument, assignation, and conspiracy.
In their heyday they were modern agoras – settings which, in the words of Steiner, were the very “locus of eloquence and rivalry.”[3] More recent loci, such as the Café Philosophique founded by Marc Sautet at the Café des Phares in Paris’ Place de la Bastille (which ran until his death in 1998), embody this idea: places of discursive discourse and self-reflection. They have allowed people, like Steiner, to feel at home anywhere in Europe; “the price of one cup of coffee, or a glass of wine, buys you the day at the table [of a café]” – with no strings attached. It’s “the most egalitarian society in the world,” he once declared[4].
The basis of Steiner’s argument—that the grand intellectual cafés of Europe remain the hotbeds of contemporary discourse—is nostalgic – a fact which he himself recognises. They have, on the most part, collapsed into nothing more than wistful signposts to a bygone European landscape, and today they almost exclusively serve tourists. Piazza San Marco is filled, hour upon hour, by quartets serenading patrons of Byron, Proust and Dicken’s old haunt. Café Central in Vienna serves up more Apfelstrudel with lashings of whipped cream to tourists searching for the atmospheric setting that inspired Lenin, Trotsky and Loos than the waiters care to count. These places are no longer real, in the real sense of the word.
The power of sentimentality, which is exploited most superficially in contemporary tourism, should not be underestimated – there is a sinister margin to this “sovereignty of remembrance.” There are, of course, two sides to every story and Europe—above all—has born witness to some of mankind’s darkest moments alongside some of its most magnificent. “Europe is the place where Goethe’s garden almost borders on Buchenwald,” Steiner acknowledges in his lecture; “where the house of Corneille abuts on the market-place in which Joan of Arc was hideously done to death.” A literate European, he continues, “is caught in the spiderweb of an in memoriam at once luminous and suffocating.”[5]
European café culture, as a reflection from and on society, is no less contradictory. The world has globalized and European nations, some of which directly instigated this shift, have transformed alongside it. In 1998, just as Sautet’s Café Philosophique in Paris ceased to be, the Seattle-based Starbucks Corporation entered the European market through the UK. The British, who certainly haven’t cultivated a café culture in the same way as other European countries, have taken to this new, more superficial variant, like ducks to water. Significantly, however, they have been reticent to embrace it as a national trait; chains of the Costa Coffee and Caffè Nero ilk, for example, both rely heavily on pseudo-Italian branding (of an Italy which no longer exists).
The United Kingdom, as it’s citizens face the decision of a lifetime and lifetimes to come, must recognise that self-professed differences from ‘continental Europe’ are, in fact, one of our greatest assets. European café culture was, as Steiner credibly argues, a potent facilitator of social change and intellectual progress. But England had the pub, with it’s own cultural “aura and mythology.”[6] The café, like the pub, is immediately recognisable and universally understood as a public interior – at once a cloister and a marketplace; a place for introspection as much for interaction, bound by communal consumption and with infinite variety.
The European Union’s greatest test will be to acknowledge, accommodate, and develop its mosaical identity without the scourge of nationalist rhetoric and without individual states occasionally attempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Challenging times demand collective perseverance and, dare I say, a little circumspection. Striving for homogeneity in Europe is, to my mind at least, not a feasible long-term solution to the difficulties that we currently face, and will face in decades to come.
Although Steiner’s idea of Europe may partly feel a little wistful, it remains poignant and profoundly relevant. “Café culture” represents the ideological embodiment of the notion of the congregational city – of concord, discord and cohesion, even in the most fraught political conditions. If it is a paragon of the idea of Europe, then we should strive for it and accept nothing less. The United Kingdom must be a part of this shared vision and not abandon its promise.
James Taylor-Foster is ArchDaily‘s European Editor-at-Large.
Footnotes [1] The Athenaeum bookshop on Spui in Amsterdam was founded by Johan Polak, a Dutch publisher and bibliophile who, according to Rob Riemen, was a strong advocate of George Steiner’s teachings – in particular, his belief in the European ideal of civilization. [2] “The genius of Europe is what William Blake would have called ‘the holiness of the minute particular’.” Steiner, G. The Idea of Europe. Tilburg: Nexus Institute, 2012. p.32 [3] ibid. Steiner, G. p.18 [4] Steiner, G. in “The Art of Criticism No.2” – Paris Review, Winter 1995 No. 37 [5] ibid. Steiner, G. p.22-23 [6] ibid. Steiner, G. p.18
“Ario Choob” project, which is an office & show-room for presenting imported lumbering machines, is located in the industrial town of “Behsazi Sanaye Choob”. Constructions in this industrial town are usually built from prefabricated concrete panels and each block is divided into four parts, with the height of 12 meters. Unlike the common appearance of these industrial towns, this town looks like a garden and the street network is constructed carefully in order to save the trees from any damage.
The project was referred to us when it was under construction. The whole project had the same two-level type. As we discussed with the client, we detected requirements and priorities of the project and we decided to change the routine typology, which consequently changed the number of levels and the location of the administrational part.
The lumbering machines should be presented and observed from above height by costumers. Instead of defining extra mobile stairs as a typical method and solution in such showrooms, we transferred the whole project to a multi-story observation deck. Adding different bridges and stairs among defined floors and mezzanines of the project was mainly supported this idea. The negative spaces and voids enriches our concept more. Therefore we could present a constant tour for costumers among project levels.
Plan 1
Section
Plan 2
The main circulation scenario starts from manager’s office on the administration’s 3rd floor to different parts of the project, takes place through bridges which make a three- dimensional full flow to different floors, and finally accesses the sales rooms on the ground floor.
One the other hand, we had a simple cube that we could experience the space in an unlike ordinary way by defining a circulation loop that emanates from the functional scenario which provides different eye-levels and presents various visual perspectives of the space for users. It will simultaneously fulfill the functional purpose of the exhibition and make the space active and memorable.
From the architect. The house is located in a Vietnamese Central Highland district, well known for its tropical climate with a dry and wet season. Client needs an accommodation for a comfortable life of a young spousal relationship and assure the domestic microclimate, although the budget is tight.
Courtesy of Khuon Studio
An one-storey house stretches along 5-meter width and 23-meter depth boundary, in which scattered light wells and plants. These natural figures are distributed to every function area, such as planting bed under light apertures for living room, bedroom with window opens to small courtyard also with plant beds, therefore is the restroom located. From almost every interior view, natural light and green lush are to be seen.
Courtesy of Khuon Studio
Plan
Courtesy of Khuon Studio
The front elevation suffers from harsh sunlight as it faces the west, so the façade is composed of a rigid veil of patterned concrete blocks in front and glass curtain wall behind. Double skin façade reduces the heat of western sunlight, also decorates the interior with lighting dots as it passes through the patterned concrete blocks. The glass curtain wall behind can be easily opened or closed to adjust the amount of inhale wind.
Courtesy of Khuon Studio
White is the main ambient color of the house, mean to distinguish other natural colors of local materials, such as grey of concrete floor, handicrafted moulded patterned blocks, natural wood colors of furniture, lush green of plants under light well. All these simple characters mingle together for a content living space of a young family.
From the architect. The Library for a university is so self-evidently important that It is often the core, the symbol and spirit symbol of a university building. It also has a pivotal position for the new campus, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Anji campus, so at the first begining of the design, we choose the most important land in the campus for the library. And in the meanwhile, architects hope to perform and shape the core construction from inside to outside, with the most pure colors and design skills.
White is elegant and noble, so the architects make an important decision to choose white as the theme of the facade. As The library is only about 4200 square of construction area and the volume is not large, architects design a very pure and simple cube for it. Light white marble of external wall material goes so well with the simple and square building body, which creates an elegant and pure white tone character for the whole building.
On the premise of meeting the internal daylighting need, architects try to open large windows, great depth of vertical window apertures and upper inclined walls as far as possible in the facades of the reading room area which are towards southern and eastern water, which can make strong contrast between light and shadow and strengthen dimension sense, and provide a comfortable reading space for the readers as well, Merging with nature. While the vertical windows in the western and the northern facades of the stack room and offices are reduced appropriately. These two kinds of facades form harmonious combination and contrast.
The whole building is designed in the waterfront. The real building and the illusory reflection in the water are mutually extending, docking and echoing. The surface of the water is like a mirror which makes the white library more graceful and pure. The white library produces a ethereal and changable building picture with the reflection, which surprises the architects and is beyond the architects’ imagination.
The relationship of Light and interior space is also an important element of the design. The interior of the library is a L- shaped high court which connects exterior facade and leads the natural light at the top to the entire buildings. The light becomes softer through the adjustment of the atrium, and provides ample light for the stacks of each layer, corridors, and reading space of the first floor through the vertical holes of the indoor space. The matrix of the interior facade divided modulus corresponds to the arrangement spacing of the shelves in the stacks, and also “divides” the atrium light into each unit projected into the library. The entire library is such a container accommodating and guiding light.
The selection of materials and colors indoor contrast with the elegant white facade is also an important content of the design. The interior space is sedate brunet attune, and the material is local bamboo of Anji. The dark wood texture provides a simple friendly touch, and forms a kind of harmonious perfect collocation simultaneously with wooden bookshelves, desks, and the color and texture of books. All of them mixed produce a special library interior space atmosphere and a kind of artistic appeal.
Overlapped curvilinear volumes orient each of the internal spaces towards the north in response to the location of the site while creating a semi enclosed north facing courtyard between the office spaces.
The site is located in Surat city in India where temperatures are in excess of 35°C for 8 months of the year and the sun is always on the southern side.
Floor Plan
The north facing courtyard infuses the inner spaces with indirect light with vertical north facing incisions for the internal spaces thus reducing the heat gain substantially.
A curvilinear path along the courtyard links the office spaces while seamlessly integrating the internal circulation with a shallow pool of water within the courtyard.
Sketches
Built entirely in a steel frame structure with a metal roof and corten steel sheets forming the external walls, the entire office structure was completed within 3 months.
From the architect. The 1980s condominium is on Charoen-Krung Road, located along the Chao-Phaya River in Bangkok, Thailand. This old building faces the river and is set in a prime location close to the Asiatique Riverfront, sky train, highway, ferry terminal and influential node, Silom.
The original layout was simple but did not fit to the new family’s lifestyle. The owners are a mother and her youngest son, who want different things. There used to be a regular 38.5 square- meter studio unit with one bathroom, balcony and open-plan living area, where they had been living for over twenty years. They then decided to move to another unit in the same tower, where four units were combined together.
Diagram
This double-duplex sits on the twelfth floor with an upper level, and has a city and river view on each side. The design was based on the client’s requirements for separate living spaces. By rule, the main entrance and exterior facade of the old dwelling can not be changed. I fixed two bathrooms next to the main service shaft position, however the sizes were adjusted. Next to the main entrance, the staircase was demolished and relocated to the left side of the living room. A quarter of the floor has opened into a double-height, exposed living room with a dining and kitchen area. The downstairs bathroom was shrunk down into a powder room. Beneath the stair, there is an L shape concrete bench with drawers and storage spaces. The upper floor is divided into two personal living areas, connected by a single corridor that leads to two bedrooms, two shower rooms, two walk-in closets and two private balconies.
In the end, the pair still live in the same unit as before, but it is more suitable for them now. It is flexible enough to allow more family members to live there with them in the future.
Sig Nordal 