India-based Studio MADe has won the Suncheon Art Platform competition with its proposal, The Hidden Cloister. The competition, hosted by the City of Suncheon, South Korea, sought to revitalize the Old City area with an art square featuring an art center.
Through The Hidden Cloister, Studio MADe aims to create a “psychological ‘void’ in the midst of a high-density area by creating an open-to-sky quadrangle as a pure subtraction of ground.” Thus, the proposal creates a new link in the heart of the Old City by connecting the riverbank and public space.
Courtesy of Studio MADe
Furthermore, the proposal will feature a park, creating a green island and noise barrier in a largely urbanized space and promoting the “Eco-City” goal of Suncheon.
Courtesy of Studio MADe
The quadrangle portion of the proposal will be surrounded by a cloister, which will act as a threshold space between light and shadow. Here visitors can walk and access subterranean rooms carved around the periphery of the void. These subterranean rooms additionally have the potential to grow in small increments if required.
Courtesy of Studio MADe
Courtesy of Studio MADe
Courtesy of Studio MADe
“The overall built system is reminiscent of traditional Korean architecture, whilst opening up the heart of the old city to contemporary interpretation,” note the designers.
The plot for the house is situated on a very steep terrain, near one of the ski-slopes of the Ålsheia ski-center. Given the location and the steep plot it had been desirable that the house be dug into the landscape, so it would act as an element integrated into the nature, both winter and summer. From the backside, the terrain continues naturally over the roof. Likewise, the meeting of the side walls and the terrain is preserved, built up and planted in such a way that the straight modern lines find harmony and transition into the natural surroundings in an exciting way.
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Since the house is built using concrete, it will with time acquire a surface stained with water naturally running over the roof and the side walls, which have no built in gutters. Eventually it will also be grown in with moss, so that the concrete will get the same color palette as the rocky hillside around the house. From the back and the sides the house will, after some years, become integrated snuggly into the terrain and not very visible. The surrounding area, including the driveway, will appear as natural landscape – it will be only the house’s straight man-made lines of glass and concrete that will stand out.
The house has two floors. The lower floor contains a garage, storage, technical room, a sauna and a living room with a fireplace. The main floor is organized with four equivalent bedrooms around a large common room. The common living room is backed against the terrain and oriented towards south with a full façade-opening. A height difference in the floor divides the kitchen and dining space from the rest of the common living room.
In this project, there was a strong desire from the client to have a maintenance-free house, preferably built in concrete. Given the steep plot, which is also subject to landslides, and the need to build the house into the terrain, concrete was a natural choice.
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The surrounding nature is very present in the house, and it is this that prevents the concrete house feeling cold. It was also important for us to build in wooden elements into the hard concrete-palette of the house. The kitchen, doors, railings and sauna are all executed in wood to soften the impression.
Some of the main technical challenges were the soil horizontal pressure from the terrain and the large construction span over the living room and kitchen.
Solving these problems together with construction engineers was both challenging and rewarding. Norwegian Geotechnical Institute – NGI joined the project from an early phase and made a study which gave guidelines for building and dimensioning of the house. It was also important to make the elegant insulated concrete and glass elements possible. Here the glass-master was of great help. All glass elements are executed with adhesion details, in order to minimize frames and sills.
A year ago today, on June 16th 2015, the architectural community lost Charles Correa (b.1930) – a man often referred to as “India’s Greatest Architect” and a person whose impact on the built environment extended far beyond his own native country. Rooted in India, Correa’s work blended Modernity and traditional vernacular styles to form architecture with a universal appeal. Over the course of his career, this work earned him—among many others—awards including the 1984 RIBA Royal Gold Medal (UK), the 1994 Praemium Imperiale (Japan), and the 2006 Padma Vibhushan (India’s second highest civilian honor).
Through his buildings we, as both architects and people who experience space, have learnt about the lyrical qualities of light and shade, the beauty that can be found in humble materials, the power of color, and the joy of woven narratives in space. Perhaps more than anything else, however, it was his belief in the notion that architecture can shape society which ensures the continued relevance of his work. “At it’s most vital, architecture is an agent of change,” Correa once wrote. “To invent tomorrow – that is its finest function.”
Correa following the RIBA Royal Gold Medal ceremony with Prince Charles (1984). Image Courtesy of Charles Correa Archives
Throughout his over five decade-long career, Correa’s work and writings strove to prove just that. In a large, disparate country undergoing enormous change post-independence, his buildings did not just meet the pragmatic requirements of their client’s briefs – they established what it meant to be “Indian.” At the same time, his interests stretched far beyond the art of architecture and ventured into the looser and more uncontrollable aspects of India’s rapidly expanding urban centers.
This wide-ranging scope of thinking can be dsicerned even at the very beginning of his practice. When Correa returned to India in the late 1950s, after having finished his studies at the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, he observed an old civilization eager to establish itself as a new country – and one with enormous potential. Under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, architecture became one of the instruments with which the state sought to create and promote a national identity. By inviting Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh, it was clear that the principles of Modernism seemed to fit with Nehru’s vision for a modern progressive India. Brimming with optimism, and fired up with Socialist ideals, it was in this context in which Correa and his contemporaries (B. V. Doshi, Raj Rewal, Achyut Kanvinde, et al.) found the patronage to nurture their talent. Nevertheless, this first generation of Modern Indian architects did not only look toward the West for inspiration. Like Nehru, who had himself authored a seminal account of India’s history in his 1946 book The Discovery of India, Modernity and tradition were not seen to be opposing ideologies. There was a healthy appreciation for both India’s past, as well as her boundless aspirations for the future.
This duality can be seen in one of Correa’s earliest and perhaps best-known projects: the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya in Ahmedabad. Built between 1958 and 1963 as a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi the building is designed to embody Gandhi’s ideas and principles. It also displays Correa’s lateral thinking as a designer.
By combining contemporary materials with those used in Gandhi’s own house, Correa was able to look to the past and and to the future in the same expressive gesture. The entire structure, modest in scale and proportions, recalls Louis Kahn’s Trenton Bath House and consists of interconnected modular square huts that form a meandering pathway, sometimes through closed spaces and sometimes open to the sky; a feature that recurred throughout his career.
In an era dominated by the “starchitects” and their iconic structures, architecture, Correa claimed, cannot be mere “adjectives and exclamation marks.” Cities need grammar.
Most likely inspired in part by the ideas of Structuralism, the building is in many ways reminiscent of the sorts of casual movement one encounters in a typical Indian village. In a profession where practitioners generally blossom late in their careers, Correa’s monument to Gandhi—designed when he was only 28 years old—stands out as the work of a child prodigy. Its use of multiple pathways and open-to-sky space would go on to inform many of his later projects, such as the unbuilt proposal for the India Pavilion (1969) in Osaka, Japan, and Bharat Bhavan (1975-81) and Vidhan Bhavan (1980-86), both in Bhopal.
During the 1960s it was Ahmedabad, not Mumbai, that continued to prove to be fertile ground for architectural experimentation. In 1961 another seminal project arrived in the form of an open national competition to design low-cost housing. Inspired by the wind-catcher houses that can be found in Sind in Pakistan, Correa developed a low-rise high-density arrangement of long and narrow parallel units that, through their very shape, set up a convection of natural ventilation. The Tube House, as it came to be known, spoke of sustainability long before the term became fashionable. An early example of his belief that “form follows climate,” the principles of the Tube House found their application in several other projects over the following years – most notably in the Ramkrishna House (1962-64) also in Ahmedabad, the PREVI experimental low-cost housing competition (1969) in Lima, Peru, and the iconic Kanchanjunga Apartments (1969-83) in Mumbai.
During these early formative years, while Correa was refining his architectural principles, he was also becoming deeply concerned with the haphazard growth of Indian cities. Mumbai, where he lived and worked, was growing at a rate in which demand far exceeded supply for housing. As a result, squatter colonies had started to take shape all over the city.
Understanding that housing can never be conceived in a vacuum, Correa and his colleagues Pravina Mehta and Shirish Patel set out to reconfigure Mumbai’s future growth. In 1964 the trio, all in their thirties, published an alternative plan that suggested, first and foremost, the building of a new city across the harbour. Their vision, which was accepted by the government in 1970, came to be known as Navi Mumbai (New Bombay). With Correa as its Chief Architect, Navi Mumbai was designed to accommodate two million people with the hope that it would change the pattern of growth in Mumbai’s metropolitan region from a monocentric north-south structure to a more polycentric urban system around the bay.
Correa sought to develop a vocabulary for Indian architecture that was more inspired by the deep mythic and cosmological beliefs of the country itself.
While Navi Mumbai remains one of the key large-scale urban planning projects of the last century, it is also the location for another important experiment on a much smaller scale: Correa’s famous Belapur incremental housing project of 1983. Similar to his earlier schemes for affordable housing, there is a focus on the malleability of individual dwellings and user participation. But instead of long and narrow row housing, the scheme in Belapur contains a range of different sized individual units which can grow, centered around the use of open courtyards. More akin to the layout of an Indian village, the six-hectare site showcases Correa’s skills as a site-planner and manufacturer of urban patterns, with clusters of various scales repeated to form a neighbourhood with a clear hierarchy of private and community spaces.
It was around this period in which it’s possible to notice a marked shift in Correa’s thinking. Gradually moving away from Western influences, like Corbusier and Team X, Correa sought to develop a vocabulary for Indian architecture that was more inspired by the deep mythic and cosmological beliefs of the country itself.
This was partly due to his involvement as the curator of Vistara – a travelling exhibition of Indian architecture organized as a part of the Festival of India in 1986. The exhibition not only traced the trajectory of Indian architecture from its ancient origins to the present day but also showed, at each step, the beliefs and mythic imageries that determine what we build. In Correa’s work that followed, seen in both the National Crafts Museum built in New Delhi (1975-90), and the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur (1986-92), there was a conscious attempt to break away from any obvious Western influences. Instead, like the incredible temples of South India, a movement through open-to-sky pathways determines the layout of both museums. But it was the overlay of cultural motifs, use of traditional materials, and references to ancient symbols that made these projects stand out as examples of what Indian architecture could be. Whether one agrees with this second period in Correa’s work is, of course, debatable. That said, Correa’s deep understanding of both the past, and how it could inform the present, undoubtedly pushed forward the discourse on national Indian identity.
By the time India moved from Socialism to liberalization, Correa had already established himself as the torchbearer of Indian architecture. With fame and recognition also came the chance to build abroad. His last three notable projects, all built overseas, appear to break away from some of his earlier preoccupations and embody a third and important phase in his work. The Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center at MIT (2000-05), the Ismaili Centre in Toronto (2000-14), and the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon (2007-10), are all more abstract explorations but still firmly rooted in their respective contexts, climates, and cultures. They are fresh reinterpretations of some of the central concepts that had consumed his thinking and work throughout his life.
Perhaps the real genius of Charles Correa lay in his ability to foresee, rather prophetically at times, many of the problems that we face today.
Correa’s passing leaves us with a body of work and a collection of writings that stand as testament to architecture’s potential to shape society. But they are also proof of the difficulties of realizing visions. His heroic Navi Mumbai plan never garnered the full political will that was necessary to see such grand ideas through to the end. And, in spite of his life-long activism, much of what we are seeing built indiscriminately across India—and, for that matter, any major city in the developing world—is devoid of any sensitivity towards context, local materiality, and climate.
In an era dominated by the “starchitects” and their iconic structures, architecture, Correa claimed, cannot be mere “adjectives and exclamation marks.” Cities need grammar. In today’s media-savvy world, Correa stayed away from imagery and chose instead to focus on intelligent organization and use of space. His plans were not just compositions but attempts to create community. Like Frank Lloyd Wright in the USA, Alvar Aalto in Finland, and Glenn Murcutt in Australia, Correa invented ways in which Indians could live.
But perhaps the real genius of Charles Correa lay in his ability to foresee, rather prophetically at times, many of the problems that we face today. He also was able to provide solutions that were ahead of their time, yet deceptively simple. Robert Ivy, a former Editor of the Architectural Review, once remarked that he was “a man of uncommon common sense.” With the world’s urban population expected to double between now and 2050 we can only hope that common sense, like Correa’s, prevails.
From the architect. Renovation and interior transformations in a 1920ies manor house in Luxembourg City
The renovation and interior transformation works in a 1920ies manor house in Luxembourg City proved to be a challenge for everyone involved in the project, above all for the client who has been living in the house during the four months long operations. The bad condition of the second floor and mainly of the attics called for an in-depth and yet subtle and careful intervention by the architects and craftsmen. The client wanted to use the two floors as living space and to connect them. The architects chose mainly a subtle but in certain spots a more radical design approach.
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The existing openings in the roof, floors and walls were kept and enlarged where needed. The former narrow and steep stairs leading to the attic floor was demolished and replaced by wide and open wood and steel stairs, which now lead to the top through a much bigger opening in the attic floor. The new stairs not only connect both floors, but they also allow for daylight to penetrate the corridor on the second floor below, which used to lie in the dark before. To allow a maximum of daylight to enter the main staircase of the house, the light shaft has been replaced by a transparent glas slab solid enough to walk on. Centered, above and in between six large roof windows hangs the round steel fire place, the centerpiece in the new loft space. The technical and structural requirements to integrate these constructions into the existing timber frames of the roof and slab demanded a solid and yet discrete and integrated solution by architect, structural engineer and metalworker. The clear forms, lines, materials and colors were deliberately kept subtle and toned down to emphasize the owner’s diverse collections. Because the uninsulated roof was leaking, repair works had to be done prior to applying a 20 centimeter thick insulation, which tremendously enhances the interior climate.
The six large and four standard roof windows allow much more light into the new living space. The timber roof structure has been thoroughly renovated and the main posts and beams were kept visible. Furthermore all the windows in the house have been replaced by better insulated ones. The existing oak flooring was partially repaired and replaced. A new light oak flooring has been installed in the new living space under the roof to enhance the light atmosphere even more. A new sink, toilet and a floor-level shower were installed in the former bathroom. Clear lines and shadow gaps on walls and ceilings provide a contemporary look to the new bathroom and kitchen. All the old electrical and plumbing installations have been replaced by a modern infrastructure.
Despite some of the usual unexpected occurrences during the transformation works, the project stayed true to its original concept and has been executed in time.
From the architect. With its 110 metres, the AND tower rises out of the new Kozyatağı financial district located in the south of the Asian part of Istanbul. The completion of this third financial centre and further completions planned for the next twelve months demonstrate the growth of the Megacity of Istanbul: The third Bosphorus Bridge will be inaugurated in the summer of 2016, the third airport in the spring of 2017.
The positive development of Kozyatağı goes back to the previous phase of expansion of the infrastructure. The district’s location, between the southern bridge and the second airport is ideal; the new underground line connects Kozyatağı directly to the city centre.
Buğrahan Şirin, head of the office and project leader explained the design thus, “The urban context of the new building, sitting upon a plinth containing 3 storeys of retail space, helps to create the link between the emerging financial district and the adjacent residential areas”. “An attractive square has also been created on the side of the building that faces away from the E5 expressway, which can be enjoyed by residents and employees alike.”
Due to the height limitations on the site and the amount of floor area required by the client, HPP divided the tower in order to emphasise its vertical character. The arrangement of the façade contributes significantly to the visibility of the high-rise: The block-like arrangement of the triangular aluminium façade pillars, the positions of which are shifted every two to three storeys, produces changing light-and-shade effects according to the position of the sun.
With a façade grid of 1.35 metres and a construction height of 8.10 metres, a variety of accessible and potential work environments can be created. The central arrangement of the service core allows division into up to four tenant nits per floor. Of the total 73,300 square metres of gross floor area, slightly more than half will be given over to offices and retail areas above-ground, providing 1,800 work spaces. The other half contains the underground areas, which include a conference centre, a canteen for 350 people and a four-storey underground garage with 740 parking spaces.
The sustainability of the building begins with the deliberately chosen orientation: shifting the layout by 45 degrees to the north-south axis has a positive effect on the energy balance. Just recently the building was awarded a LEED Platinum certificate.
Partner-in-charge, Gerhard Feldmeyer commented, “As for the quality of the design, planning and execution, the AND tower exemplifies our understanding of architecture of lasting value. This success also confirms that it was the right decision to open an office on site in Istanbul.” “The AND tower can take its rightful place alongside buildings such as the HPP classic, the Dreischeibenhaus. Even before completion the project received many similar prizes.” The AND tower received a total of six prizes in the Cityscape Awards 2014, and the European and International Property Awards 2015.
From the architect. En means “flame” in Japanese. The restaurant is centered on the display cooking area in the kitchen. For this reason, we moved away from the traditional idea of a Japaness restaurant and revealed the kitchen and activity to the street. The design needed to be engaging because it is tucked away at the dead end of an alleyway in Ho Chi Minh’s Japanese area, Le Thanh Ton St.
In at typical Japanese restaurant you will pass through a small entrance in an unassuming façade and enter another world on the inside, greeted by a hearty “Irasshaimase!”. Just as the environment between the street outside is separated from the inside, spaces within are divided again into small pieces. Private rooms down a corridor, screens defining seating spaces, long thin counter tables skirting a long thin kitchen area. In contrast, we tried to maximise the connection with the street by bringing seating to the front façade and increasing the glazed area. As you walk up the entry stairs to the 2 tall sliding doors, you can see diners upstairs enjoying their meal as they face the alleyway. The original 2-storey building has been filled with platforms to create 3 levels of seating spaces, to stack as much activity near the entry as possible and to create a connection with the kitchen below.
To create a vertical connection and sense of volume, we hollowed out the front half of the building to connect the platform levels and the rafters of the roof above. From different seating positions you can see the flames, hear the activity around you and smell the charcoal cooking below. We not only hollowed the space, but also striped the old tube house back to its bricks and rafters. By exposing these parts of the building, we were able to reveal the building’s original materials and form. Afer removing the 2nd floor ceiling we discovered there were no walls from the ceiling level up to the pitch of the roof. The building had been relying on the abutting buildings to shield the roof space from the elements. Once the vulnerability of the existing walls and roof were revealed the workers were able to fix them and prevent further degradation. The 2 ducts from the exhaust of the charcoal grill are used as an element to connect vertically through the space.
The back of the restaurant offers more typical Japanese restaurant spaces. Compartment rooms, a VIP horikotatsu (in floor seating) and open horikotatsu rooms. A motif fitting with the “flame” cooking style was abstracted from the radiating rays of the rising sun. It has been used as a screening and decorative element throughout the restaurant. By layering the brick and rafter textures of the existing building with raw materials like concrete and timber and the overlay of this motif, we aimed to achieve a warm rich space, bringing a refreshing new experience of Japanese food in the Vietnam.
As building of kindergarten that welcomes 50th anniversary has not been earthquake resistant sufficiently, an urgent measure was required.
We decided that our main theme is to tell the children “fossil fuel and to use
what they can use carefully” from two viewpoints of urgency caused as a result of lack of the earthquake resistance and educational element of the kindergarten,
and not by using an approach where a new building is constructed usually but by constructing using a marine container, reinforcing the earthquake resistance by using the existing structure and renovating,
we realized a construction in short period, suggested to a sustainable society, reduced large volume of carbon dioxide as well as created an ecological and educational environment for the children.
The building was constructed by using the marine container, and it was constructed in the shorter period than other buildings usually constructed.
By connecting to energy saving and reduction of carbon dioxide as well as using the container that is movable without changing form and can be reused after it is not used any more, we tell the children to use the limited resources carefully.
As for gymnasium, the earthquake resistance is reinforced and renovation is made by using the existing structure. By this, we tell the children to use what they can use carefully.
As for the building, we left roughness of the container outside to make the children find the container easily whereas wood where they can feel warmness sufficiently is used inside. By this, they can feel comparison of inside and outside.
We intended to make the children find that the gymnasium was reconstructed by leaving the existing form of roof.
By opening the nursing room and teachers’ room toward outside, people can feel what is going on in the room from outside where people in the area can feel what is going on in the kindergarten when they pass.
When we worked on the measure of earthquake resistance, we designed that the kindergarten, which has been existing with the area for 50 years since its foundation, is an important part of the area where it is open to the area and people can come easily.
Signs of kindergarten name and class were made by using Japanese zelkova in the garden.
By designing the trees, which were not removed in the construction, in the place where the children can see and reusing them, we tell the children as a consideration to global environment and ecological education with continuation of memory.
From the architect. The ”SPRING HOUSE” is located in Guiren Tainan, and surrounded by farms, Taiwan traditional house with courtyard, high way and high speed rail.
1.The design combines the client’s unique personal living space and the temporary living space for her special friends. 2.Combining the steel , bricks, concrete and metal plates to form the framework of traditional architecture and spatial order as a starting point to reinterpret modern residential construction. 3. Echo the surrounding environment , with an open attitude in the face near the neighbor’s courtyard and house, defensive posture to face the high-speed road and rail . 4. Using rainwater recycling and solar power and other systems to enhance the sustainability of the building.
Background: The house is located in Tainan Taiwan, owned by a female entrepreneurs. Half of the land was originally a traditional courtyard house , and surrounded by two roads ; west side: Taiwan 39 line ( eight-lane , also passing through the high-speed rail ) ; south side: six meters roadway. The east side of the building site is facing the other half part of the original courtyard house , the north side is a complete courtyard houses. The client want to build her own house, and by realizing the global climate change, and the Japan 311 seismic events, she requested at the outset with the idea of self-supply, rainwater reuse and other types of disaster prevention architecture strategy. So we tried to response such environmental conditions with design.
Dialogue with the Land The location was formerly agriculture-based settlement, and there are many local industrial factories appeared through the changing times. After the completion of the high speed railway in recent years, it is becoming increasingly clear that the area is intertwined with old and new, tradition and technology, quiet and speed….. such contrast characteristics, these qualities create a unique geographical character. Therefore, while we follow the example of Taiwan’s traditional architecture that combined with wood structure and load-bearing brick structure, and combine them into a modern steel structure with brick, on the one hand, we use this combination to produce a unique local architectural type whereby create the symbol of the janus characteristics of the environment on the other. In addition, to response the sunshine but features hot summers at southern Taiwan, we tried to use the roof, windows, doors and other architectural elements, arranging them in specific vertical or horizontal space to create a good ventilation and shade; The roof angle is designed in order to maximize the solar power generation efficiency ( with solar energy unit).
“To interpret the owner’s living characteristics by the spatial layout.” “To build an extraordinary architectural form by using ordinary materials.”
Creative idea: (1)Spatial characteristics of solo living We use the minimum living space of one dweller as the design axis, and we define it as a minimum design area; and the non-daily use space for visiting guests is the maximum. We started with two same square as the main structure of the plan. The northeast corner square (tentatively called building A) provide the owners private space, it is a three-floors mass; the other two-floors square shape mass (tentatively called building B) is for visiting friends and family use. Where two square superimposed becomes patio, leaving only a path about two meters wide by the north side of the patio and become the only indoor walkway between two square. Basic living space such as toilet, bedroom located on the third floor of building A, reading and entertainment space on the second floor and first floor, the building B almost doesn’t need to be used when there are no visitors in this house. By using the spatial orders to express the relationship between owner’s and visitor’s living space , we tried to purify the space. For example the kitchen and dining space is nearly not required by the owner when she is alone in this house, and therefore does not need to be set in building A, but in the first floor of building B, the two average spaces become special areas for friends and family. As another example, to maintain the privacy of owner’s personal living, the bedroom is set on the third floor of building A and linked to the building B only through the north patio walkway.
Besides the residential function, we try to send a few messages through construction design, first, clear appearance of the architectural tectonic, and second, to highlight the characteristics of the material. Configured with the following characteristics: a. above the second floor, we lower and mosaic all the structural floors into the steel frame, the effect of this approach is that the exterior can be a complete presentation of pure “structure” without deliberately decoration, interior floor also rendered the existence of steel beams and form geometric patterns with wooden floors, it becomes a important feature of the second floor and 3rd floor. b. There is a secondary structure formed by square shape steel pipes and with some sealing details in the steel construction system, bricks can be integrated with these structures and mosaicked in the frame, to achieve reasonable mechanical continuity of structure system, and in the same time to achieve that the heavy material such as bricks could have a dramatic sense of lightness. c. Metal plates are deliberately mosaicked between the steel frames, so the main steel structure exposed on the facade, the smooth texture of metal plates and the rugged texture of bricks have an interesting dialog between interior and exterior. d. There are almost no decorating material covered on the structure indoor, even the ceiling is omitted, so that the entire circulation pipelines are exposed and must share the responsibility of the visual aesthetic of interior with the structure, while at the same time this approach makes a great convenience of replacement and maintenance of the building’s facilities and circulation system.
From the architect. This small house is located in a new residential area in Long Thanh District.
The owner is a newlywed with the desire of having their own house. With the limited area, the architects think that the private space should be shared to have more space for the sharing area.
The furniture is design simply and easy to make. To save the cost, the owner has bought the material and make all of them. Therefore, the cost for this part was saved significantly.
The front and back yards are the buffer space to reduce to hot from outside environment. The front yard is a relaxing area such as for morning coffee. This is the place that wind, sunlight and the shadow of the brick wall meet each other.
The ground floor is a multi-function space. It is used for both to gather friends and for a small coffee shop in the future. The mezzanine is the family space including two bedrooms (one for the couple, one for the baby in the future), kitchen and dinning table. This sharing space is designed for the user to feel the direction of the breeze and touch the shadow and sunlight while they move from the ground floor to the stair and this sharing space.
LT House is belong to the research for Affordable Houses in Vietnam of Tropical Space. The team is willing to create beautiful and enjoyable living space for middle-income labour around Vietnam
The current predicament has inspired architects Allies and Morrison to design an alternative option – one that could both save the taxpayers money and create a new greenway spanning the Thames. Many of the complaints directed toward the original design have been associated with the cost of building a new bridge that would serve limited transportation needs; Allies and Morrison eliminate this issue by simply placing a garden pathway onto an existing piece of infrastructure, the nearby Blackfriars Bridge.
Courtesy of Allies and Morrison
The historic Blackfriars Bridge has connected the north and south banks of the Thames since 1869. Its current iteration features wide sidewalks along both its east and west lanes, as well as a concrete median. The architects have combined these to create one 14 meter wide pathway on the west side, enough room for a pedestrianized garden of similar size to the proposed Garden Bridge.
The route would offer dramatic views of St. Paul’s Cathedral to the east and Westminster to the west, and existing parapets could be transformed into what Allies and Morrison describe as “lovely seating nooks, riverside alcoves for a sandwich at lunchtime, a break from a jog or a place for families to gather.” Vehicular and bicycle lanes would be shifted, but preserved, maintaining the current level of traffic accommodations.
Courtesy of Allies and Morrison
In total, the project would provide 40,000 square feet of new green space, and could be constructed at a fraction of the cost of a new bridge. Unlike the original Garden Bridge proposal, which would be closed off up to 12 days a year for private events, Blackfriars Bridge Garden would be public and accessible at all hours, every day of the year, and would be seamlessly integrated into existing circulation paths of the city.
In the words of the architects, “A garden over the Thames is a tantalising vision, but it’s one that does not require an entirely new bridge. We could simply use one that is already there.”
Sig Nordal 