The project was to construct an indoor sports arena in an already existing urban environment. The challenge was to find the right architectural connection and identity between the existing structures and the new building.
The functions of the new building, its dance hall, gym and lecture halls were different from that of the existing buildings and finding the right balance became a key priority. The new indoor arena is pressed into the landscape and solidly grounded in order to ensure that the structure is kept on the same horizontal level as the existing structures.
Pockets of light and air have been constructed to underline the different levels and dimensions of the surrounding landscape and the creation of layers in the façade to the Northwest is constructed in order to connect the exterior with the interior of the building. NOBIS’ façade reveals an inner secret, an inner structure and a layered structure to form an arena that serve as the surrounding structure for the game on the pitch.
Plan
Elevation
Diagram
The layered construction of the faced is made up of ‘translucent polycarbons and expanded metal that has a shading effect. The choice of materials ensures that the light in the arena is always changing and somewhat diffuse.
The arena has a uniformed façade that leaves a different visual impression depending on the amount of light both inside and outside. On the backside of the Northwest end of the façade the columns and beams are revealed. The Arena is a place made for ‘combat’ – for physical challenges and heated matches – set within raw and bare columns.
From the architect. The project is located in the city of Mouvaux in the north of France.
The multi-activities indoor hall is revealed by an imbrication of volumes. Each volume represents a specific function : the first one, on the entrance square, hosts the gymnastic room, overhung by a second volume occupied by the dance hall. The third volume, opened on the other side of the city, shows the most impressive part of the program : the multisport hall.
3D Explosed
This strong volumetric expression is sublimated by a subtle treatment of the facades.
The facades highlight the volumes. Each aims to express their own identity by the way the materials are implemented.
The dance hall is dressed with a brick moucharabieh that leaves a subtle play of movements on the outside and creates, inside the room, a light filter subdued and intimate.
The gymnastics volume, which covers the one dedicated to dance, is covered with a coat of brick implemented in order to catch the light and invite passers-by to look up. This largely closed volume is perforated with free and targeted openings, creating a dynamic relationship with the various environments present in the urban context in which the multi activity hall sets up.
The third volume in the back is materialized by a glass façade at the ground level and surmounted by a large volume of u-glass, offering a double dialogue.
From the inside, the filter created by the u-glass offers an interesting play of shadows with the surrounding trees and the life of the city. From the outside, this opalescent glass reveals the life inside the room. The part of clear glass on the ground floor allows passersby to sit in the stands integrated into the vegetation.
Nested between these volumes, is a space in the extension of the public space. This public area is dedicated to all the users of the building and the spectators. It brings together the circulation, distributes the entire program and hosts the club house of the multisport complex.
Section
Section
The materiality variations in this project reveal the importance of playing with scales and mark a sequencing of the program.
It seeks to express the dual identity of the site: on the square side, a work on the modesty and subtlety and on the garden side a play with translucency.
Our work was motivated by the intention to give a strong identity to the multi-activity hall and to Mouvaux’s citycentre.
The project has been designed in order to respect the existing context and with the conscious that an innovation in the space would serve the new urban dynamic, coherent and fully alive.
From the architect. The site sits on a higher side of a hill that gently climbs up from the Pacific Ocean near Katsuura, located in a region called Sotobo (Outer Boso Peninsula) in Chiba prefecture. The slope is not steep enough to make it a spectacular lookout point. The area has been developed for vacation homes with spacious lots. The local rule prohibits the fences, which makes the whole area look like a comfortably stretched residential quarter. In addition, as it is under a three-hour drive from Tokyo via TokyoWan Aqua-line (Trans Tokyo bay Expressway), its convenience has attracted a considerable number of retired people who decided to spend their remaining lives over here. As for my client, he has already retired from work, is enjoying an urban cultural life in Tokyo, and spending his hobby time as a ceramist in Chiba. The house has been planned as his second home.
The client didn’t ask too much: he wanted an atelier for his pottery making, a direct approach from his car to the entrance and his atelier without being wet in a rain, a calm inner environment rather than a good view, and three bedrooms. We offered 3 design plans, and he chose one which was very close to the finished design presented in this book. It was a rare experience that the client accepted our layout plan without much pondering.
The key characteristic of the plan is that there is a large gallery next to the entrance, which is the hub of the traffic in the house. The plan has been made so that the residents frequently pass through this area when they move between the rooms. The entire gallery from the floor to the ceiling is painted in madder red which is also used on the coved ceiling of each room to create an effect as if the glow of sunset is filtering through the window. The gallery is especially impressive as the entire space is filled with madder red and the ceiling is very high. It has strong energy to refresh people’s senses when they enter the house or move between the rooms.
I have had a desire to bring about the re-freshening of the senses to people by way of architecture and urban design since the time I became an independent architect around the turn of the century. After a while, I began to think that a piece of architecture is merely a fixed physical object that shows the same look every day, and there are more dominant non-architectural objects such as plants, people, and skies in outer environment, and the dwellers and the pets inside the architecture. I wondered if a piece of architecture is like an open frame which dominant non-architectural elements are unexpectedly and whimsically framed in to give fresh surprises to the residents’ lives. This hypothesis led me to write a book titled “Architecture as Frame”. The idea still hasn’t changed basically, but there is another side of me that recognizes that the architecture has some influential power.
When reviewing each of the 3 houses I designed recently, I noticed that I had put a space that brings about a strong sensuous impact, just like the madder red gallery, in the hub area where the residents pass by when moving between the rooms. Putting it in an abstract way, I tried to give versatility to the architecture by creating discontinuity to the space. What descriptor should be given to this discontinuity? The house as a whole is like a frame, open to environments inside and outside, and maintaining various relationships with them. The space that creates the discontinuity, which sits in between the rooms, is isolated and independent from the other rooms, and acting as the center of gravity and the spiritual core of the house; if an entire house is a frame, it is re-framing the frame. Therefore, the space is a reframed space.
Elevation
Let me provide brief descriptions of the 3 recent cases of the reframed space.
The first one is the “High Low House” completed in 2009. The house consists of 3 connected spaces of different types. The narrow corridor where lights pour down from the roof light (right side of the photo), the dark and low ceiling space (center of the photo), and the bright room with a high ceiling (left side of the photo). In this case, each space has distinctive character that creates discontinuity as a whole, and the space in the middle is the reframed space.
The second case is the ‘Three Corridors House’ completed in 2010. It has, as the name indicates, 3 corridors that span from the east side to the west side of the house, connecting 3 bedrooms, a tatami room, a study, a living room, a dining room, and the wet areas. Among the three, the central one has a high ceiling and creates a strong impression, hence the reframed space in this house.
The last one is the “House House” completed in 2013. 4 individual rooms are laid out closely around a white void, and the residents inevitably walk through here when moving between the rooms. The white void is distinct from the black-colored hall underneath and the grey bedrooms adjacent to it, reframing the house. Similar to the 3 spaces described here, the madder red gallery featured in this book, located in the center of the house, is also a reframed space. The common characteristic of the 4 reframed spaces is, contrary to the concept of the house of “Architecture as Frame” which indicates openness, it is the space for reflection.
For the time being, I will try to balance the power of architecture itself and that of non-architectural things in my designing.
Building Height: 100 m; 25 storeys in the SouthWest and 8 storeys in the NorthEast
Photographs: Courtesy of ZHUBO DESIGN
Completion Date: Dec. 2012
International Awards: Honorable Distinction, CITAB-CTBUH 2016 China Urban Habitat Award, Nominee at Urban Habitat Award, CTBUH 2015
Courtesy of ZHUBO DESIGN
Master Plan
From the architect. Named after its developer SHENYE TAIRAN Building stands at the focal point in CheGongMiao- industrial creative industry office district in Shenzhen, China. Balancing the duality of scales, the design achieves two primary goals- to deliver a prominent image at the urban level while remaining inviting at the local, human scale. To achieve that, Shenye Tairan departs from a typical office building typology.
Courtesy of ZHUBO DESIGN
According to the required program area and the size of the site, the standard solution would have yielded two separate 100m office towers, set back from the street by a commercial podium. Instead this building is conceived as a continuous volume along the edge of the site as close as possible to the street. The the southwest corner is extruded to its maximum allowable height in order to capitalize on proximity to Binhe Road and Shenzhen Bay. The opposite NE corner is then scaled down and lifted up from the ground to invite pedestrians into the internal public spaces.
Courtesy of ZHUBO DESIGN
Long Section
The result is a city block building with a vertical courtyard of treasures – a central communal space framed by tall mass of the building on two sides where one feels protected from both the urban bustle outside and shaded from the hot southern sun.
At the heart of the courtyard a reflecting pool frames a crystalline volume which serves as a light-filled central entrance to the underground parking. Rather than arriving into a dark parking garage and entering the building through an unassuming elevator core, it provides direct access through the interior courtyard, again modifying the typical experience of arriving and entering the office environment.
Courtesy of ZHUBO DESIGN
Typical office tower roof is removed from public realm. The roof of Tairan building is a series of accessible terraces forming the 5th facade of the building. These have been designed as a uniform landscape despite the fact that they are all privately owned and features lush gardens of curving benches, wood terraces and planting creating a unique sight from the surrounding office towers as well as from the office interior.
Courtesy of ZHUBO DESIGN
South Elevation
The facade of the building is composed of stacked elongated one floor level high units which play double function. First, the division enables to consider each office unit in singularity providing option to step the glazing back thus creating additional balcony-yet another unusual feature in a typical office layout. This “in between space” also acts as a shading device minimizing the cooling load. And finally it provides room for the individual air conditioning units without interrupting the main facade.
Courtesy of ZHUBO DESIGN
This duality is further expressed in the choice of materials. The outer layer composed of light stone is in focus catching and reflecting the rays of the sun. The inner balcony facade is lined with dark grey aluminum panels and remains in shadow hiding the ‘contents’ within.
From the architect. This is a renovation project of an apartment in downtown Tokyo.The client said unintentionally that they want to spend a brilliant time together nowhere else but in their house. Then I thought, “Indeed”. I always find that houses around us are way too far from the reality of each family life and communities, and they all look alike. It seems as if there were no identity in family life, which is ridiculous.
Family is another personality of one’s life. I would like to come and go freely between two subjects, me and my family, just like ironing my shirts while paying attention to children, gathering and having dinner all at once, humming after a song sung in another room, talking to someone lying down on a same floor, and so on. This is a value of Team Living, I believe.
Plan
Therefore, I thought it is completely different from the value they desire to give some divided spaces for an artificial family circle and privacy to each member by making ordinary LDK(typical way of planning in japan) and private rooms.
Think one’s activity as one unity, and he will find that the unity contains other personalities and the environment beside him. Let me call the unity “a team” that he can act together with. Then, the team would keep trading its member as the activity changes, and he would never be alone. Even a bench on which he is absorbed in reading, the light diffused under the ceiling, and the presence of his mother ironing that he feels slightly, all of these can be called a team. Thinking the team that contains the others and the environment as one subject in this manner, he would naturally accept his friends, children in his neighbor, and even a guest visiting his wife who is a manicurist into his team, and spend some time with them. Therefore, I thought I should make a house that produces a positive attitude as he can perceive the others a part of himself.
This house is like a whole living room but slightly divided into various environments to support each member of the family to behave in his/her own way. Literally, there appeared no private room in this house. Usually, private rooms are provided for each member of the family to place beds, desks, and closets at random, but in this house, all the space except the bathroom is shared among the family as common for everyone’s use because every function is integrated into each place. For example, beds are all in Bedroom and desks are all in a Study desk, closets are all in Family closet, and so on. As if it was a matter of course, a man is recognized, physically or socially, as an individual. However it is possibly can be said that he, as a matter of fact, always belongs to a team that is born when he accept the others and the environment as spatial resource. It is not he as individual but the very team that takes the initiative in renewing daily life.
The apartment is located near highway, and surrounded with other massive apartments also built in 70’s, and the verticalization and densification caused by this development left some parking lots in the area as its surplus. The scene, a series of building elevations repeated with windows same size as the parking lots full with cars, seems a bit plain.
It had been 20 years since this flat was renovated for the first time, so the plan I made this time is the third generation for this flat. Referring to the first and second, both are planed in a same way that is dividing the given inner space into private rooms, and the composition of internal space is unrelated to the outside.
Section
On the other hand, since this flat is on the fifth floor, I could see greens remained between buildings through the south window. Through the north window, I could hear the neighbors talking to the other neighbor walking on the ground. Soon I found the atmosphere is somehow a bit adorable. Then, I wondered if this house could be an organic space connecting a flat of an apartment to the urban space as long as it could adopt the friendly environment and phenomenon outside into the inner space, which is, so to speak, relocation in architectural composition.
According to the principle of the apartment, the openings could not be touched. Instead, triple-vault ceiling is provided in order to draw the outer environment into the inside. As dissolving a feeling of pressure that huge beams give, which is often found in the apartment in this generation, the ceiling height, originally was set low, was transformed into space with a variety of sectional figure, and thus whole space of the flat is connected, while divided.
The light from the outside is bounded on the floor and brought into the inner space by the triple-vault. The center of the flat that originally was the darkest in the flat is filled with the diffused light and wind passing through. This new linkage with the outer environment brings the flat a pleasant atmosphere. Spaces are expanded into different directions since floors go up and down and space also is slid. The house also has flat ceilings, which helps it add more various conditions, and along with that a man creates his own behaviors. Sun-living where the family takes seats at a dinning table feeling the green outside, and Raised-floor-living having obtained both intimacy and openness by a view of an entire house, and a bath-living for doing household right next to a huge void of the urban space. All of these has a high migration with more than two ways in and out, and the house became spontaneous, interacted with adjacency space.
The “Bamboo garden” is located in a typical countryside nearby the city. It is a “rejuvenation” project which implants new functions of family activity area in a dairy farm of a local dairy company. Families can experience the production process of healthy milk and get close to nature.
The purposes and strategies of this design are: architecture — land — people, natural material, hand-making construction, and simple values.
Plan
Diagram
The “Bamboo garden” is not for planting bamboo, but is considered to be an area to experiment with different types of bamboo structure. Since ancient times, bamboo has been using for artifacts, also it has been endowing with humanity feelings. The advantages of bamboo are growing fast, hardness and easy to process. That’s why we choose “bamboo” as the most important natural material. We try to find some new methods to explore contemporary hand-making construction based on traditional methods of bamboo techniques. Also we hope to develop bamboo structure as an important architectural type in country life, agriculture and landscape architecture to meet people’s requirements of back into nature.
Parent-child activity area is outside and near to the farmers’ living area. The site stretches from south to north in a long strip shape with a length of 133 meters and a width of 18-32 meters. The existing buildings are some bungalows with brick concrete structure. For space design, we adopted two strategies “retain, renovate ” and ”add, implant” to maintain normal working and living here while we rejuvenated this area by implanting parent-child activities.
In the way of “retain, renovate”: We retained the staff dormitory and guardhouse but turned four rooms of staff dormitory into sales room, dining room and restroom for visitors; Also we renovated the external space of guardhouse considering with these trees around.
In the way of “add, implant”: From south to north , the “bamboo garden” is planned to be four areas: entrance area, science education area, interactive experiences area and entertainment area. Meanwhile we added several architectures and implanted relevant cultural elements into the four areas. Corresponding with the architectures in each area are: a fan-shaped entrance; an umbrella-shaped bamboo structure, a music square and the wave-sharped bamboo wall; the verandas and bamboo walls; a grass storage.
In this design, all architectures are made of bamboo system structure and main materials are all from the nature. Through experimenting joints in different materials with different ways, finally, each architecture has taken on its richness and differences.
From the architect. HG House is a house on the beach for my parents, for them it was very important that the house could receive all the family and guests and also to function at a reduced size when they were alone.
Plan 1
“When an architect design for a relative, there is some experimental freedom, but then the next commission you must validate your work through the client.”
Under these conditions the house was conceived as the interaction between three volumetric elements: the guest’s area, service area and the master bedroom, then the gaps between these opaque and private elements accommodate the public areas such as the living room, dining room which generate the connection to the outside. The volume that hosts the guests can be closed off when the owners are alone.
The plot has great ocean view but in the front it was exposed in a corner to both streets, which is why the house protects its own privacy from outside burrowing, without losing transparency, hiding the main access, parking lots, without losing the connection with the garden, the sun and sea views.
The house is completely built in concrete with a handcraft raw table cast. Because of a condominium regulations the volume of the second floor has to be painted in white, which with the years and the humidity turn to green, so we paint it with a diluted paint so texture of the concrete allows the dirt more than a flawless white.
Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s Vara Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Biennale is described by the architects as “a series of exteriors within other exteriors.” Breaking down this crypticness, what emerges is a maze-like complex of concentric circles – ten of them – formed with steel, cement, and painted plaster, which collectively create a series of walls, but no roof, thus forming a pavilion that is open to the elements from above. The 324 square meter pavilion’s title, “vara,” refers to an imprecise and obsolete Spanish unit of measurement, that was employed during the country’s conquering of America to trace and measure cities. Each of circles of the Vara Pavilion is a diameter of the unit, ranging from two to eleven.
Ground Floor
According to the architects, “the resulting sequence of spaces can be understood both as a traditional open plan – with several accesses [but] without any shape, hierarchy or predominant direction – and also as a limited arrangement of singular segments.” The interior spaces vary from “narrow and acute concavities” to “wide but irregular convex room” and “from overexposed cores to dark corners.” The overall intention of the architects being “to produce a rather normal and familiar building; a unique place with the unintelligible capacity to become something more than what it seems to be.”
Courtesy of Pezo von Ellrichshausen
The Vara Pavilion is part of the 2016 Venice Biennale and is on view in the Giardini di Castello until November 27.
Courtesy of Pezo von Ellrichshausen
Courtesy of Pezo von Ellrichshausen
Courtesy of Pezo von Ellrichshausen
Client: XV Venice Architecture Biennale (Curator: Alejandro Aravena) Architects: Pezo von Ellrichshausen (Mauricio Pezo & Sofia von Ellrichshausen) Collaborators: Susan Conger-Austin, Diego Perez, Anton Zu Knyphausen, Iven Peh, Daniel Andersson, Teresa Correia, Sarah Biffa, Thomas Patrix Production: Solo Galerie, Paris (Christian Bourdais & Eva Albarran) Support: Knauf Build Beyond, Fundacion Chile Profundo, Fundacion Cosmos and Chilean Government (Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes) Construction: Impresa Edile Fabris Danilo, Padova
This Project was designed for a young family with two small children in Lago Sul Qi 25, in Brasília, Brazil. To meet the established program, the residence is 808 m², divided into three levels on the ground, adapting to the topography of the site.
The project enhances the access to the residence, creating a garden space of receiving people. Thus respects the public space and establishes a spatial continuity between what is public and private.
The composition of residence values the volumes defined by its uses, which are intimate, service, social and leisure. All these functions are directly connected with the social area, featured in this design as “cuore” the residence.
Plan
Section
The interior and exterior spatial integration, and recovery of sight to the city of Brasilia is data that the project strictly obeyed in its design.
All the main structure of the building is reinforced concrete, its lining rustic plaster gives the desired texture, and social area with double height, is protected from sunlight through a large panel of perforated steel, filtering the sunlight and night, with artificial lighting, enhancing the built volumes.
The three levels of the building are composed of underground services, the social, leisure and guests on the ground floor and intimate on the mezzanine.
“Immersed in reading a book it feels like [being] inside an architecture, a metaphysical space surrounded by the words,” says Federico Babina, discussing his latest series of illustrations, ARCHIWRITER. In the new series of 27 drawings, the illustrator has created “portraits” of authors by personifying their writing styles, periods, and locations as built environments made from architectural elements and words. Heightening this sense of individuality, Babina states that the resultant portraits can be “fluctuating, vernacular, itinerant, ephemeral, concentric, labyrinthine, surrealist, oneiric, and futuristic.”
Sig Nordal 