First built in the 1970’s the apartment was cramped by contemporary standards, even for Tokyo, with low ceilings and short and narrow rooms. After stripping the space down to a single room, the design takes a hint from the overlapping spaces in the city and is composed from three simple shapes.
A grey wood box houses the laundry, a concrete box contains the bath and sink, while an S shaped partition forms a closet and space for the fridge. The updated space is simple but comfortable and connects to the city perfectly.
From the architect. Moving from a nearby apartment, our clients wanted a modest home they could settle into and begin a family.
Natural lighting introduced to a dense and constrained site through strategically placed linear skylight, provides ample natural lighting and a playful shadow that shifts with the day.
Materially this project benefits from a robust and complimentarily palette. Reclaimed bricks provide a textured backdrop for matt black joinery. Overhead cabinets hover off the wall, with lighting placed to dramatise the brickworks colour, texture, and rhythm.
A sensitively placed Japanese Maple fills the tile lined courtyard addressing the main living area, bathroom, bedroom, and elevated deck. A window seat here provides for a contemplative reading space.
Ground Floor Plan
1st Floor Plan
Carved within the existing roof, lined completely in black mosaic tiles, a deck off the master bedroom creates a private space with glimpses of water views, while allowing the tight bedroom to visually extend.
A small, but well planned garden is embraced through sliding doors that pull outside the building.
O’Leary House is an example of project with a constrained site, built on a tight budget, going beyond it’s confines to delver a well considered project with a robust and balanced material palette.
Uses structure to dramatic effect,with the thin skylight blades adding a rhythm to the space.
Demonstrates how robust materials usually seen on the exterior like reclaimed brick, and concrete can be used to create a warm and inviting interior.
O’Leary House is an example of minimising material layers to include only what is necessary to craft warm, inviting, and generous spaces.
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Fundamental amenity designed into the home was able to see the concept translate from an retired couple with 6 children wishing to downsize, to a young professional couple wanting to start their family.
The single living space has been designed to allow different moments. Island bench and skylight help delineate space, while the deep timber door threshold forms a soft and warm transition to the garden.
Our clients now enjoy a home flexible enough to allow for their family to grow, without creating excessive rooms.
Location: 175 Maroondah Hwy, Ringwood VIC 3134, Australia
Area: 200.0 sqm
Project Year: 2016
From the architect. Colourful Mexican culture characterises the new Paco’s Tacos restaurant designed by hospitality design leaders, Technē Architecture and Interior Design.
The MoVida-owned taqueria is part of Eastland Shopping Centre’s new ‘Town Square’ – Ringwood’s own open-air dual community and dining precinct. The design brief provided to Technē call for the inclusion of the original yellow, bright and fun aesthetic established at the founding CBD store, combined with the feeling of an authentic Mexican eatery. Influences of the revered Mexican architect Luis Barragán are evident throughout the restaurant, which is designed to feel like an open-air piazza.
The space is attractively divided by individual height large timber and reo mesh arches that play with the scale of the 200 square metre floor plan. Banquette seating runs the length of the dining area, with different seating configurations to suit small and large parties. Block shades of pink, blue and yellow have been used in each zone between the arches, referencing the vibrant, coloured facades commonly found in Mexican architecture.
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“We used reo mesh and an abundance yellow in the space to tie to the original Paco’s Tacos site, but we have brought in an overtone of softness with the pink and blue,” says Jonny Mitchell, senior interior designer at Technē. “As with all of our projects, we have collaborated closely with the client, and the design was led by the food offering and original brand,” Mitchell says.
Technē teamed up with landscape architects Ayus Bontanical for green space and planting, maximising the opportunity to create a courtyard-like ambience. “It’s our mission to create sustainable spaces that will stand test of time, so we’ve used extremely durable materials while still making the space comfortable for patrons,” Mitchell says. Fun touches – like a projector screening old Mexican movies – mirror the playful nature of Mexican dining.
Location: Klong Wan Fishery Research Station Kasetsart University, Tambon Khlong Wan, Amphoe Mueang Prachuap Khiri Khan, Chang Wat Prachuap Khiri Khan 77000, Thailand
Architect In Charge: Markus Roselieb & Tosapon Sittiwong of Chiangmai Life Construction Co., Ltd.
From the architect. The Erber Center, sponsored by Mr. Erich Erber, the founder of Biomin, an animal nutrition company. Biomin is partnering with Kasetsart University, Thailand’s main agricultural university, on research of how to commercially grow healthy chicken without the use of pharmaceuticals. Biomin had already sponsored and built a broiler hall at Kasetsart’s huge Kamphaengsaen Campus which covers over 5,000 acres and is situated about 200km northeast of Bangkok. This broiler hall was in the middle of fields, about 5-10 km from the main campus.
Floor Plan
The brief was to design and build a facility that allowed students and visitors to study chicken rearing through the windows already provided on the broiler hall. For hygienic reasons visitors are not allowed to enter the broiler hall itself. Furthermore the facility should house a lecture hall for about 70 students, a smaller conference room for about 20 people, an office for the professors and administration as well as a kitchen and the bathrooms. All this using natural materials, i.e. bamboo and earth only. The challenge was how to adapt these materials to the functionality desired and to the aesthetic requirements of 21st century folks.
Chiangmai Life Construction’s concept of this 563 sqm facility is based on the lay-out of the traditional farm house with a square courtyard. A covered observation platform allows students and visitors to observe the broiler house activities without getting soaked in the rainy season. We hired a famous Thai spray artist to transform the boring looking windows into the eyes of a chicken. This platform connects on one side in a right angel to a meeting room and a lecture hall and on the other corner to an office for the researchers as well as the necessary infrastructure – kitchen and bathrooms. These two legs of the institute are connected in the front by a traditional “moon gate”.
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This layout of a central open-air space encircled by a shady arcade with lounge like informal spaces which again is surrounded by rooms filled with activity not only refers back to the roots of agricultural life but also immediately creates an intimate space conducive for exchanging ideas and concentrated learning in an otherwise vast open expanse of fields. This design brings traditional agricultural architecture to today’s students who grow up in concrete bunkers.
The connection to agriculture is further enhanced by the materials used – mainly earth and bamboo. The walls are made of adobe bricks which were produced on site or rammed earth and the roof is made of Borax salt-treated bamboo.
These materials create very comfortable and cool spaces, and when used correctly can last for centuries as seen in earth buildings all around the world.
They reduce the carbon footprint by an estimated 90% without any loss in modern day comfort or increased cost.
This is in line with the purpose of the building – how to enhance agricultural or architectural outputs without damaging the natural environment.
REX has released designs for 2050 M Street, an office building in Washington DC’s Golden Triangle Business District. The 41,800 square meter (450,000 square foot) building evolves and merges two existing typologies in the US Capitol: heavy masonry or concrete buildings, with high relief facades and punched windows – in styles ranging from Beaux Arts to Neoclassical, Art Deco and Brutalist – or modern structures with taut glass envelopes, many with applied decorative treatments. To reconcile these two competing strategies, 2050 M Street provides hyper-transparent, floor to ceiling glass, without view-impeding mullions. From the exterior, the panels appear scooped or concave, establishing that an all-glass building can also have a high-relief facade befitting of the nation’s capitol.
Courtesy of REX
Made with approximately 900 identical, insulated glass panels – 3.2 meters tall by 1.5 meters wide (11 feet six inches tall by 5 feet wide) – each curved to a 2.9 meter (9 foot 6 inch) radius, the facade yields structural efficiency that is thinner and more transparent than comparable all-glass buildings. Gaining rigidity in the compression process that forms them, the panels only need to be fixed to floor plates at the top and bottom. Adding to the illusion of weightlessness, exterior columns are set back along the building’s edges and the floor plates taper, aiding in the establishment of a “ethereal lightness of the skin,” say the architects.
Courtesy of REX
On the exterior, the glass is treated with a subtly-reflective pyrolytic coating and the insulating cavity is coated with a high-performance, low-E coating, both of which reduce solar gain and achieve thermal performance requirements. The combined effect of the coating and curves “creates an unusual kaleidoscopic effect of repetitive transparency and reflection that simultaneously animates and dematerializes the façade,” according to the architects.
Courtesy of REX
As a counterpose to the facade, the building’s lobby incorporates warm wood floors and ceilings, and book matched cowhides for wall panels. The effect is meant to be like that of a yacht deck, and the hides are intended to recall the use of stone patterns for ornament by Mies and other Modernists.
From the architect. A family is looking for a new home able to represent their trips around the globe, their desire to live in a garden and to embody the cinematic diversity of domestic life. The result is the design of two different houses on the same plot.
he Tobogan House is a generic three-storey house on a southern slope. The project juxtaposes two houses and a void that houses a car park, an entrance and two staircases, working as a thermal regulator and constructing a tracking shot between a garden, a folie and a picturesque grotto while crossing through the lounge, sauna-fitness center, bar, dining room and kitchen.
Model
One of the houses is organized to inhabit the soil with its habits and routines. The other was made light-heartedly, emancipated from the ground, in the air, is flying at a double height over the garden. Both are totally different each other in materiality, shape and weight. The most important spatial interest of the complex is the heterogeneous, ambiguous and membranous space that appears between the two houses.
The scenic load of this space is achieved through the exposure of domestic life circulating between floors. The ground floor is contained between two long concrete walls. These walls cut into the soil to accommodate two ‘ conventional and modern’ volumes, connected by a corridor surrounding the empty greenhouse-stage. In the South there is a garden for “the Good Life”, to the North lurks the “Grotesque Garden”— in the middle is the promising double height greenhouse.
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Over this green sequence along the plot, a smooth surface, based at ground level, lets Nature to cross over the slab and the car to pass through one side to the other over the dining-kitchen area. The upper floor is formed by wrapping three empty cylinders with corrugated iron, curtains, air and mirrors. Inside the cylinders inhabit the “super-interior”, offering total privacy to 9 rooms padded with wood, cotton, linen and silk, surrounded by “souvenirs”.
Mecanoo has unveiled plans for the Namdaemun Office Building in Seoul. The tower takes its name from the Namdaemun Market, the oldest and largest market in South Korea, which is next to the ancient southern gate of the city. Opened as a government managed marketplace in 1414, the market is now an important 24-hour destination for trade and tourism. The slim 14-story, 5,900 square meter (65,000 square foot) building rests on a corner opposite the commercial activities of the market.
Courtesy of Mecanoo
The design of the tower is informed by its historic location and desire create a contemporary office building that merges the past with the present. To integrate into this context, the facade is a reinterpretation of windows found on traditional Korean houses. The external framing is not meant to be merely decorative, but, say the architects, “to continuously [create] different atmospheres, filtering incoming light and making shadows across the interior spaces.” The building’s monochromatic coloration is a counterbalance to the colorful and frenzied atmosphere of the market and its nonstop activity. While during the day the facade reflects sunlight, at night the building glows from within revealing the patterning of its facade.
Courtesy of Mecanoo
Namdaemun Office Building is on schedule to be completed before the end of 2016.
The project is located on a long, narrow strip of land partially occupied by a five-story building, in the traditionally working-class Belleville district of Paris. A significant piece of the neighborhood’s heritage and the site’s unifying building, it has been rehabilitated and its base hollowed out to allow passage.
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Backbone of the complex, the internal street is the structuring element that irrigates the project. It becomes a semi-private common space for all the housing units, where interaction and socializing take place. Aligned with the central passage, the new building “pierces” the existing building.
This effect is accentuated by the treatment of the facades: the five “small” houses and the existing building, given a matte white plaster finish, come to rest on a base covered with shiny white enamel bricks, a reminder of the neighborhood’s past. Paved with Parisian paving stones, the little street becomes a pathway for strolling, with vegetation planted along the new buildings and the adjoining wall. These features define the passage route and clearly identify access points.
LEGO® today unveiled “Big Ben” as the company’s newest kit in its Creator series. Aimed at adult LEGO® fans (meaning 16 and older) the 4,163 piece design pays tribute to the engineering and architecture of the 19th century Gothic Revival clock tower adjoining the Palace of Westminster and Elizabeth Tower. Highlighting the set’s complexity, LEGO® has outlined the its unique features, including “detailed facade with statues, shields and windows, and a clock tower with 4 adjustable clock dials and a removable roof allowing access to the belfry, plus buildable exterior elements including a sidewalk, lawn and a tree depicting the building’s location.” Big Ben measures over 23 inches (60 centimeters) tall and will be available to purchase on July 1, 2016.
Located in the Pampa plains, in the east of the province of Cordoba, Saint Bernard´s Chapel (the local patron saint) rises in a small grove, originally occupied by a rural house and its yards, both dismantled in order to reuse their materials, especially its one-hundred-year-old bricks. The site does not have electricity or any other utilities; nature imposes its own conditions.
Courtesy of Nicolás Campodónico
Courtesy of Nicolás Campodónico
Courtesy of Nicolás Campodónico
In the limit between the trees and the open country, the chapel´s volume opens up towards the sun, capturing the natural light of the sunset in the interior. Outside, a vertical and a horizontal poles are placed separately and projected towards the interior. As a result, every day all year round, the shadow of these, slides along the curved interior, finishing its tour overlapping with each other.
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Currently we all know Jesus Christ only carried the transverse pole on his back on his way to Gólgotha. The crucifixion is conceptually completed with the reunion of both poles, recreating the cross. Every day, the shadows of the poles make their way separately, just as in the “Via Crusis”, to finally meet and recreate the cross, not a symbolic cross but a ritual one, where the Passion happens again every day thanks to the sun, acquiring a cosmic dimension.
Sig Nordal 