From the architect. After the huge earthquakes in 2010/2011 in Christchurch, New Zealand, the devastated original home occupying this site was removed and the land was purchased by our clients.
Historically, the city of Christchurch has its roots in agriculture, so we designed an urban take on a typical English pitched-roof farmhouse. The house is comprised of four interconnected buildings, creating a series of courtyard spaces between each dwelling. Each of the four pavilions are connected by flat-roofed glass galleries, allowing large amounts of light in, and views to the courtyards out.
Materials needed to be lightweight so as not to cause safety risks in the event of more earthquakes. The buildings are clad in cedar and left in a natural state to weather and silver off. The cedar runs vertically in fixed applications, and horizontally on expressive features such as doors and ventilation panels. The vertical cedar cladding is continued internally through the gallery spaces to complete the external skin of the four pavilions, allowing them to feel as though they exist independently of each other.
Internally, the palette of materials was confined to natural cedar, oak joinery and oak and concrete floors, lending warmth and permanency to the spaces. The living room features a double-height gable ceiling, creating a sense of volume and light.
Earlier this monthThe Guardian reported that the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustav, has denounced David Chipperfield’s designs for Stockholm’s new Nobel Center (Nobelhuset) in the Dagens Nyheter(DN), a national Swedish newspaper, as both too volumetrically large and badly sited. The practice’s initial proposal, which was lauded by the awarding jury for its “lightness and openness,” is a glass and stone structure which attempts to “convey dignity” and embody the ideals of the Nobel Prize.
For the King, who personally presents the annual Nobel prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Literature (the Peace prize is delivered in Oslo), “Nobel is a name that we want to protect, of course.” He continued by arguing that “we [also] want to preserve and increase its value. The purpose is laudable. [But] the fact that the building has become so big, and has landed a bit in the wrong place – it is a shame.” The Swedish Monarch has, among other notable public statements, previously called for a global ban on bathtubs ahead of UN Climate Talks in 2015 and, more recently, offered Swedes health advice related to steak and jelly-gums.
David Chipperfield Architects’ proposal received harsh opposition from heritage protestors in mid-2014, who declared in an online petition (which has gained just under 7,000 signatures to date) that they are against “star-architects constructing their angular spectacles of glass and steel right in the middle of the protected historic environment, as monuments to themselves, at our expense and the city’s.” The City Museum of Stockholm also spoke out to argue that the design is good, but not in its proposed location.
A Customs House located along the Blasieholmen, designed in 1876 by Axel Fredrik Nystrom, sits at the heart of this debate. The structure, which represents the last remaining wooden harbor warehouse in the city, will be demolished to make way for the proposed Nobelhuset. Although David Chipperfield Architects submitted revised plans for the building in late 2015, in which the size and scale of the building were significantly reduced with “a clearer division into a base, middle and top floor that relates to the surrounding structures on the Blasieholmen peninsula,” Queen Sylvia has gone so far to suggest in the Dagens Nyheterthat a referendum would be welcomed to determine the outcome of the plans.
As reported by The Guardian, Chipperfield has spoken on Swedish radio to argue that “the size of the building is determined by what is necessary for a Nobel Center. It’s not exploiting the value of the land or something – it’s not a developer building, an office building or a hotel. I disagree with the criticism, but I respect that it is part of the dialogue.”
In response to a column in the Architects’ Journal, in which Paul Finch argued that “it is difficult […] to accept the argument that the building has to be its current size because of precise functional requirements [as] it has already been lowered once,” Chipperfield retorted: “I will indeed consider Paul Finch’s advice, although I must point out that an auditorium that must seat 1,200 people does have an objective result on the size of the building.”
Chipperfield continued: “It is our experience […] that the civility of such societies, based on a fundamental commitment to social democracy and dominated by a concern for the welfare and opinion of its citizens, tend to struggle with issues that open up conflicts and differences of opinions.” […] “It is a tribute to such societies that these things matter. Although it puts projects such as the Nobel Center […] in a precarious situation, and it inconveniences the process and our task, I retain a certain respect for this condition and the predicament that it puts the architect in.”
The new Kindergarten and nursery is placed by the sea, on the tip of Islands Brygge in Copenhagen and the architecture is designed in accordance with the surrounding existing buildings, an area characterised by small boathouses and small dwellings. While still in the capital of Denmark, the children will have a daily life filled with fresh sea air and the sound of seagulls.
Nokken houses 124 children (3 nursery groups and 4 pre-school groups), has a good indoor climate and sustainable materials.
Inside the kindergarten and nursery a multitude of colours, intricate patterns and different surfaces great the children. Decorated with colours, patterned wallpaper and tiles. This gives the impression of a large jewellery box, and creates a colourful interior as well as a fun playhouse for the children. While the floor plan is intricate and labyrinthic, the various colours make it easy to navigate around the building.
Diagram
Playgrounds
The nursery has two playgrounds. The older children have a rugged playground facing the sea, with swings, slides and climbing frames. They have the fresh sea air and views to the water. They can follow the boats, kayaks and birds, habituating with live on the sea outside the nursery.
An inner playground for the smaller children, sheltered by the walls of building itself, it provides a perfect outdoor tranquil playground. This playground also works as an outdoor canteen and communal area for all the children on sunny days. Throughout the building there are view to this inner courtyard and playground.
From the architect. The project is located in the district of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean in Brussels. It is part of the urban renewal strategy of the city and holds a strategic position, facing the town hall, at the corner of two axis, one of them has been dedicated to enhance soft mobility.
The project responds to this context and proposes a real urban articulation opening the view towards the town hall. The facade of the building is slightly folded to broaden the perspective from the Brunfaut street, and connect the public space to the main axis without generating a „backside“. A new facade is so designed facing the prospect of the town hall. The existing road widening is thus transformed into a real space in continuity with the town square, stretching it between two landmark buildings.
A careful attention is given to to integration of the project into its context. The building proposed is compact, attractive, yet sober. The design of the ground floor is a search to amplify the continuities within the public space, while for the upper floors, the specificities of the program have motivated large openings cut into the main volume. They respond to the scale of the apartements, offering outdoor spaces and structuring the organization of the rooms and spaces for each of them. At the urban scale, they give the project its expressiveness.
The building is dressed with a skin made of a folded and perforated sheet of metal, interrupted only to reveal the large and bright yellow openings cut for the terraces. The sheet is folded following a variable rythm, the perforations are random. A dynamic effect, a vibration of the facade is so realised in order to accompany the urban articulation and underline the role of the project as urban signal.
From the architect. The purpose of this renovation project of a late nineteenth century building in Kyoto is to renew the reception area of a guesthouse, Kaikoan (http://ift.tt/1Q2RRIh), and to create a new space for a costume rental shop. Due to the differences of programs, the upper level and the lower level bring distinct atmospheres to the users.
The lower level, which is used for the reception, is a public area of the building and has a more open atmosphere. The existing columns and beams, which were formerly hidden behind panels, are now exposed with a continuous white painted wall. The new wall is featured with rounded corners and wraps around the columns. This brings an ambiguous quality to the wall: it is solid but at the same time feels like fabric. Additionally, the white colour of the wall and its height at the underside level of the beams provide a strong contrast to the space. This design feature detaches the wall from the original elements, allowing the post and beam structure to retain openness.
The upper level is designed for the costume rental shop, which includes a waiting room, a changing room, a makeup and hair-setting area. In response to the white colour of the exterior wall, the existing interior finishes of the peripheral walls and the ceiling are also painted in white. With this design feature, the space is presented like a floating white volume, an intimate space as if it is scooped out from a mass. The quality of the space is further enhanced by the apertures which, in contrast to the full height openings on the lower level, are holes in the wall. The columns, beams and walls other than those on the periphery are left as they are, being treated as separate elements distinct from the white volume.
From the architect. The office site is located on the ground floor of an old building at a film production campus, north to Laohe Mountain and West Lake in Hangzhou. The exterior façade of the building is in a chaotic and disordered condition, but the vegetation around is luxuriant and with four distinctive seasons. Thus, creating an unified identity and guiding the surrounding natural sights, were dealt with at the beginning of the project.
Architecturally, the original repressive and heavy impression of the building should be decreased, and light, dynamic and lively elements need to be brought in. All the walls and structural elements are striped to the bare minimum, and the concrete surfaces are exposed. A feeling of primitive simplicity is introduced, and thus brings the intrinsic calmness and rationality of modernism of the whole building.
The depressing base of the old building is outlined by a white paint metal plate that draws out an undulant white edge to the exterior façade. The original boundary beam is extended and connected to a one-meter wide oblique beam, which is held with the secondary ring-beam and implanted into the whole surface of glass with no mullion. This one-meter extension helps to far extend the office space, and separates the surface glass panels from the pillar. At trimming, the glass ceiling is staggered with beam bottom of ring-beam and packs it inside, which eliminates the repression brought by low height of exterior façade. The exterior façade thus becomes one connected screen, and allows for a continuous reading of the surrounding landscape, both transparently viewed and reflected.
The office space and the surroundings constitute the inter-borrowing of interface, and the striking margin becomes a visual mechanism of internal and external communication instead of one single eave. Indoor light is projected into the environment by trimmings of the white margin like an canvas. The submontane four season views get across the interface and permeate into the interior space, which create lively working environment and allow for different experience of transparency.
The interior space lasts the atmosphere of conciseness and tactility of exterior façade. The large poured concrete meeting table is a miniature of the re-constructed structural feature, where a diagonal cut is made sectionally around the table and allows for a light and thin touch for the edge. The rest of the building components and furnitures adopt with white color while some of the equipment and pipes is painted red. There is harmonious coexistence between the exquisite and smooth white edges and surfaces, and the extensive concrete space, based on the integration of overall conciseness.
There is no redundant color or surface inside the office and all components connect through the most direct form. Standing in one place, one’s sight could penetrate any place. In such opposition and transparency, people are welcomed with an emotional and pristine touch with the interface and to experience with the nature, seasons, environment as well as air.
Patterson Associates have created this Summer residence on Waiheke Island. A place famous for fine vineyards with illustrious names such as Cable Bay, ManOWar and Passage Rock.
This home is located on a steep coastal escarpment above a tree fringed white sand beach on its northern coast.
West Elevation
North Elevation
The vineyards are there as a result of Waiheke’s temperate coastal climate and some rare geology seams of pyrite rock criss cross the island like veins. Its this geology that give the grapes, primarily Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Malbec, their distinctive Waiheke taste. The home uses this same local pyrite strata as a building material to create a sense of place in Architecture.
The pyrite is a dense, colourful hard stone which can be stacked, etched and layered into earthy walls and textures. The rock mass of the home is like a bridge, open both sides to exploit both the beach frontage and the afternoon sun. Under this, its main living area nestles safely into the escarpment between a spacious easterly ocean-front pool terrace and a grotto-like western courtyard to the west. The owners often use this grotto as an outdoor movie theatre.
Bedroom suites are grouped above as finely scaled, romantic and louvred lookouts in the canopy line of the trees lining the clear waters of the beach. Behind the grotto is an intimate bunkroom.
The home has been designed to be sustainably ‘green’ and uses an innovative air heating system to provide an efficient, even temperature gradient right through all levels, as well as incorporating an onsite waste treatment station and a reticulated water system with a large rain storage facility.
Location: Beijing city Chaoyang District Beiyuan North Qu Winery International Art District F1-1001, China
Principals In Charge: Xiaojun Bu Yingfan Zhang
Design Team: Kai Qin, Zhenwei Li, Dehu Du, Tongwei Liu
Area: 472.0 sqm
Project Year: 2016
Photographs: Courtesy of Atelier Alter
Civil/Structure/Mep Engineer: Jie Jin, Zhe Li, Wei Li, Ming Cheng
Landscape Architect: Xiaojun Bu, Dehu Du
General Contractor: An Hui Wan Cong Construction Services Co.,Ltd., Beijing Jingcheng Yongshun Science and Technology Development Co., Ltd.
Cost: $427,560
Courtesy of Atelier Alter
Level 1
From the architect. This rehabilitation project converts a storage space into a stone archive: to showcase the diversities of stone craft and to create a space for architects to contemplate their designs with stone.
Route-1F
Route-2F
As the most primitive construction material, stone comes with dignity and authenticity. However, as construction becomes more and more visually dominated, stones are crafted to be light and polished. The spirit within stones seems to be lost, as stones are gradually substituted by other superficial materials. This project attempts to propose a critic for modern construction.
Courtesy of Atelier Alter
Section-e
From rough to fine, stone processing begins with the moment when drill bits measure across the landscape and cut enormous cubical volumes of nature stones from the mountains. Our project departs from this notion by imagining the seven meter high storage space into a complete piece of stone. By dissecting the volume with angular plates, we create solid and void spaces: while solids are for exhibition, meeting and archive spaces, the voids become the circulation. The cutting plates are also materialized as different stone shelves for the separation and mediation between spaces.
Courtesy of Atelier Alter
Three layers of stone shelve walls array from exterior to interior to create a narration of stone processing in space. The stones used in the shelves are recycled materials from different stages of stone processing. The first layer that separates architecture from the street is a perforated stone wall made from thousands of 10cm stone cubes cut directly from left over dimension stones in the quarry. The three trapezoidal openings punched through the perforated stone walls are the entrance, the clerestory window and the opening to the restaurant. Between the perforated and existing wall, there is a garden that brings light and breeze into the space. The second layer of stone shelves sets apart from the inside of existing wall and creates a residual space that prepares visitors for entering the gallery. The outwards-tilted stone shelve in the second layer is composed by the stacking of mountain skins cut away from dimensional stones. The trace of chisel and the roughness of stone unveil the live of the material. The third layer of stone shelves is zigzag stone screen that separates exhibition space, meeting hall and stone archive within the double story gallery space. The stone screen is made of small flag stone slabs sliding between a structure net welded by steel. The space above and space below are connected and separated simultaneously by the stone screen.
Courtesy of Atelier Alter
1F Exhibition Isometric
As the material processing impacts the internal logic of architecture, architecture also becomes a reinterpretation of the material. By inventing new construction methods based upon levels of local craftsmanship, we strive to find coherence between the architecture scale and the detail scale of the work. We combine steel and stone construction in perforation, suspension and inclination to represent the authenticity of stone in a new way. Stone becomes the subject but also the background of the show.
Courtesy of Atelier Alter
Detail-The Tree Room & The Tilted Display Shelf
Small restaurant, bar and cafe is placed next to the gallery. The catering space is enhanced by a library and an internal courtyard. The furniture and lighting of the space are designed with polished slabs and super thin complex stone veneers, which represents the finest degree of stone processing. A stone carpet made from parametrically arranged slabs brings the three spaces together.
In this video, Jesús Granada takes us inside the Austrian Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale. The exhibition, titled Orte Für Menschen (Places for People), focuses on the creation of innovative housing solutions required to handle Austria’s current refugee crisis. The pavilion displays three projects currently underway in Vienna, where three architect teams have been paired with NGOs to convert abandoned buildings into temporary accommodation for asylum seekers, and later, into long-term residences.
Designed by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, the exhibition consists of three elements of equal size and proportion: a concrete platform in front of the pavilion, 20 stacks of posters depicting refugees in their current housing situation, and a long desk displaying the three housing projects.
According to the pavilion’s curators, “the objectives of these interventions are to subject the social responsibility of architecture to a reality check, to provide humane places to live for those affected and to present the results in Venice to a broader public.”
This video is part of a partnership between ArchDaily and the Spanish photographer Jesús Granada. These videos have been filmed in 4K, a level of quality that allows viewers to perceive details that don’t come across in standard video formats. Granada’s stock images of the Biennale can be obtained on his website, here; ArchDaily’s complete coverage of the 2016 Biennale can be found here.
A rare empty lot in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco served as the site for this ground-up residence. The design goal of the project was to harness natural light throughout the day, capture views of a wind-swept park, and to make a strong visual connection to the split-level road at the front of the property. At the main living level, a continuous wall of rift-sawn oak veneer cabinetry runs the full length of the building tying the living area, kitchen, and dining area into one cohesive space. Floor-to-ceiling glass at the master suite and dining area opens the interior spaces to a dramatic view of downtown San Francisco.
The living/kitchen/dining floor is located one level above the street to provide easy access from the sidewalk and garage. This places the three bedrooms on the top floor, perched above the city for inspirational views at the beginning and end of each day. A guest bedroom is located at the lower level with a direct connection to the rear yard via floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors. Given the narrow site, a simple straight-run stair is located along the north property line wall, allowing for an open floor plate and the ability to look through the building from the split-level street at the front of the property. Traditional notions of privacy between the public and residential realms are therefore challenged.
Sig Nordal 