© Cristhian Guerrero, Natura Futura

Architects: Natura Futura Arquitectura

Location: Babahoyo, Ecuador

Architect: José Fernando Gómez M

Collaborators: Luis Roby, Fausto Quiroz, Verónica Guerrero

Project Area: 85.0 m2

Project Year: 2016

Photographs: Cristhian Guerrero, Natura Futura

© Cristhian Guerrero, Natura Futura

From the architect. Tradition as strategy and place as resource

Located in the city of Babahoyo, Provincia de los Ríos, Ecuador, House for someone like me is built in a young ans highly vulnerable neighborhood, with security problems, population growth, new constructions and neighborhood individuality.

Diagram

Vero, the owner, a young entrepreneur and mother of two children, manages her own business downtown, she sells fruits and vegetables. We propose a house that makes the best use of the site 7×20 meters. The proposal within the minimum site includes 2 bedrooms (one with bathroom), a public area that consists of a dining room, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and service courtyard.

© Cristhian Guerrero, Natura Futura

Ecuador has a total population of 14’483.499 inhabitants (INEC), approximately 40% are employed and make around 1 and 3 minimum wages. For their ability to pay, workers have access to housing that ranges from $ 20,000 to $ 30,0000 dollars. Within the economic framework in the country there is now a bond for urban social housing, with credit for the builder and the owner of up to $ 30,000, within this range we propose to define a house than can expand in the future and become a business, based on a participatory process generating positive impacts through different strategies such as the application of principles of sustainable design, use of natural and local materials with low embodied energy and participation of local labor.

© Cristhian Guerrero, Natura Futura

Its materiality consists of basic types of enclosures, using composition as a tool for creating different types. It is built with masonry concrete blocks with overlap, entirely raw bricks, doors and windows of traditional archetypes in wood and metal, large eaves in response to the tropical climate of the region.

Plan

To promote dialogue with the outside, the living room doors fold entirely, becoming a space of connection and convergence of activities. The composition of the enclosure seeks to create, through openness and visual relations, to enhance the sense of belonging, acquired security, community relations, situations of proximity, trust and care that are generated at the neighborhood level and encourage neighborly relations.

© Cristhian Guerrero, Natura Futura

Architecture that incites play and reflection on the way we question the possibility of a solution of the city closer to reality.

© Cristhian Guerrero, Natura Futura

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Courtesy of Society of Architectural Historians

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has announced the winners of the 2016 Publication Awards and SAH Award for Film & Video as part of their annual International Conference Awards ceremony in Pasadena, California.

Awarded annually, the SAH Publication awards honor excellence in “architectural history, landscape history, and historic preservation scholarship,” alongside outstanding architectural exhibition catalogs. Eligible publications must have been published in the two years immediately preceding the award, with nominations for the 2017 Publication Awards and SAH Award for Film & Video opening on June 1, 2016

Learn more about the winning publications after the break.

Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award

Honoring the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture published by a North American scholar.

Winner: Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

Courtesy of Society of Architectural Historians

From the publisher: The postwar American stereotypes of suburban sameness, traditional gender roles, and educational conservatism have masked an alternate self-image tailor-made for the Cold War. The creative child, an idealized future citizen, was the darling of baby boom parents, psychologists, marketers, and designers who saw in the next generation promise that appeared to answer the most pressing worries of the age.

Designing the Creative Child reveals how a postwar cult of childhood creativity developed and continues to this day. Exploring how the idea of children as imaginative and naturally creative was constructed, disseminated, and consumed in the United States after World War II, Amy F. Ogata argues that educational toys, playgrounds, small middle-class houses, new schools, and children’s museums were designed to cultivate imagination in a growing cohort of baby boom children. Enthusiasm for encouraging creativity in children countered Cold War fears of failing competitiveness and the postwar critique of social conformity, making creativity an emblem of national revitalization. [Amazon]

Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award

Honoring excellence in a published work devoted to historical topics in preservation.

Winner: Miles Glendinning, The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation (Routledge, 2013)

Courtesy of Society of Architectural Historians

From the publisher: In many cities across the world, particularly in Europe, old buildings form a prominent part of the built environment, and we often take it for granted that their contribution is intrinsically positive. How has that widely-shared belief come about, and is its continued general acceptance inevitable?

Certainly, ancient structures have long been treated with care and reverence in many societies, including classical Rome and Greece. But only in modern Europe and America, in the last two centuries, has this care been elaborated and energised into a forceful, dynamic ideology: a ‘Conservation Movement’, infused with a sense of historical destiny and loss, that paradoxically shared many of the characteristics of Enlightenment modernity. The close inter-relationship between conservation and modern civilisation was most dramatically heightened in periods of war or social upheaval, beginning with the French Revolution, and rising to a tragic climax in the 20th-century age of totalitarian extremism; more recently the troubled relationship of ‘heritage’ and global commercialism has become dominant.

Miles Glendinning’s new book authoritatively presents, for the first time, the entire history of this architectural Conservation Movement, and traces its dramatic fluctuations in ideas and popularity, ending by questioning whether its recent international ascendancy can last indefinitely. [Amazon]

Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award

Recognizing excellence of architectural history scholarship in exhibition catalogues

Winner: Katherine A. Bussard, Alison Fisher, and Greg Foster-Rice, The City Lost & Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980 (Yale University Press, 2014)

Courtesy of Society of Architectural Historians

From the publisher: American cities underwent seismic transformations in the 1960s and ’70s, from shifting demographics and political protests to reshaping through highways and urban renewal. Amid this climate of upheaval, photographers, architects, activists, performance artists, and filmmakers turned conditions of crisis into sites for civic discourse and artistic expression. The City Lost and Found explores photographic and cinematic responses to the changing fabric of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles that contributed to a reconsideration of cities in popular media and urban policy during this period. This book raises timely questions about the role of art within the social, political, and physical landscape of cities.

Featuring contributions from more than 20 noted scholars in fields including art history, urban planning, architecture, and cultural studies, this is the first publication to address an important shift in photographic, cinematic, and planning practices based on close observations of streets, neighborhoods, and seminal events in the country’s three largest cities. Over 200 illustrations bring together works by major artists and newly rediscovered projects to complete this outstanding resource on the art and architectural production during these turbulent decades. [Amazon]

Spiro Kostof Book Award

Recognizing a work in a discipline related to urban history that has made the greatest contribution to our understanding of historical development and change

Winner: Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

Courtesy of Society of Architectural Historians

From the publisher: In the three decades following World War II, the French government engaged in one of the twentieth century’s greatest social and architectural experiments: transforming a mostly rural country into a modernized urban nation. Through the state-sanctioned construction of mass housing and development of towns on the outskirts of existing cities, a new world materialized where sixty years ago little more than cabbage and cottages existed.

Known as the banlieue, the suburban landscapes that make up much of contemporary France are near-opposites of the historic cities they surround. Although these postwar environments of towers, slabs, and megastructures are often seen as a single utopian blueprint gone awry, Kenny Cupers demonstrates that their construction was instead driven by the intense aspirations and anxieties of a broad range of people. Narrating the complex interactions between architects, planners, policy makers, inhabitants, and social scientists, he shows how postwar dwelling was caught between the purview of the welfare state and the rise of mass consumerism.

The Social Project unearths three decades of architectural and social experiments centered on the dwelling environment as it became an object of modernization, an everyday site of citizen participation, and a domain of social scientific expertise. Beyond state intervention, it was this new regime of knowledge production that made postwar modernism mainstream. The first comprehensive history of these wide-ranging urban projects, this book reveals how housing in postwar France shaped both contemporary urbanity and modern architecture. [Amazon]

Honorable Mention: Christine Stevenson, The City and the King: Architecture and Politics in Restoration London (Yale University Press, 2013)

Courtesy of Society of Architectural Historians

From the publisher: The City of London is a jurisdiction whose relationship with the English monarchy has sometimes been turbulent. This fascinating book explores how architecture was used to renew and redefine a relationship essential to both parties in the wake of two momentous events: the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, and the Great Fire six years later.

Spotlighting little-known projects alongside such landmarks as Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, it explores how they were made to bear meaning. It draws on a range of evidence wide enough to match architecture’s resonances for its protagonists: paintings, prints, and poetry, sermons and civic ceremony mediated and politicized buildings and built space, as did direct and sometimes violent action. The City and the King offers a nuanced understanding of architecture’s place in early modern English culture. It casts new light not only on the reign of Charles II, but on the universal mechanisms of construction, decoration, and destruction through which we give our monuments significance. [Amazon]

Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award

Recognizing the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of landscape architecture or garden design

Winner: Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (Yale University Press, 2014)

Courtesy of Society of Architectural Historians

From the publisher: In Wasteland, Vittoria Di Palma takes on the “anti-picturesque,” offering an account of landscapes that have traditionally drawn fear and contempt. Di Palma argues that a convergence of beliefs, technologies, institutions, and individuals in 18th-century England resulted in the formulation of cultural attitudes that continue to shape the ways we evaluate landscape today. Staking claims on the aesthetics of disgust, she addresses how emotional response has been central to the development of ideas about nature, beauty, and sublimity. With striking illustrations reaching back to the 1600s—husbandry manuals, radical pamphlets, gardening treatises, maps, and landscape paintings— Wasteland spans the fields of landscape studies, art and architectural history, geography, history, and the history of science and technology. In stirring prose, Di Palma tackles our conceptions of such hostile territories as swamps, mountains, and forests, arguing that they are united not by any essential physical characteristics but by the aversive reactions they inspire. [Amazon]

Honorable Mention: Finola O’Kane, Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting and Tourism 1700–1840 (Yale University Press, 2013)

Courtesy of Society of Architectural Historians

Via CAA Reviews: Finola O’Kane’s Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting, and Tourism, 1700–1840 addresses Ireland’s little-studied influence on European landscape design and stands as a timely intervention in the literature regarding the picturesque. From the outset views of Ireland were heralded as the best examples of picturesque beauty; but, as O’Kane points out, “the picturesque’s ability to appropriate and reconfigure the colonial environment led to an early appreciation of antiquities, ruins, and setting,” demonstrating that picturesque theory may have developed independently and, furthermore, may have taken hold earlier in Ireland than in England. As such, the book traces the physical formation of Ireland into a landscape to be viewed. [Amazon]

Founders’ JSAH Article Award

Recognizing an article published by an emerging scholar in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians that exhibits excellence of scholarship and presentation

Winner: Lukasz Stanek, “Architects from Socialist Countries in Ghana (1957–67): Modern Architecture and Mondialisation,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 4 (December 2015): 416–442.

2016 SAH Award for Film and Video

The SAH Award for Film and Video was established in 2013 to recognize annually the most distinguished work of film or video on the history of the built environment.

Winner / Oeke Hoogendijk, The New Rijksmuseum

Honourable Mention /  Dieter Reifarth, Filipp Goldscheider, Haus Tugendhat

News via the Society of Architectural Historians

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The latest video in French architect and filmmaker Vincent Hecht’s Japanese Collection series features the Gifu Media Cosmos by Toyo Ito. The library/gallery features an undulating wooden ceiling and multiple large, suspended translucent funnels that define areas for different activities. A series of intermittent openings in the roof allows natural light into the space. 

View more of Vincent Hecht’s work on his website and Instagram.

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Courtesy of Meier Architekten

Architects: Meier Architekten

Location: Uitikon, Switzerland

Project Year: 2014

Photographs: Courtesy of Meier Architekten

Courtesy of Meier Architekten

From the architect. My architecture should provide quality, comfort, and design enabling the highest quality of life”. These words spoken by the architect Egon Meier perfectly apply to the object number 254. This is a family residence newly built in the Zürich area of Switzerland. According to the office of Meier architects the client is always the centre of focus when designing any architectural space. According to their philosophy object 254 offers very spacious living in an almost sculptural composition.

Courtesy of Meier Architekten

From the outside the building presents a clean white facade with large glass windows. This creates a strong connection between inside and outside. A terrace, partly covered is located on the first floor which can be enjoyed all year round. It also offers a fine view of the garden and pool area. 

Courtesy of Meier Architekten

Plan 1

Courtesy of Meier Architekten

On the inside the lines are straight, pure and reduced to a minimal form. Particular attention has been given to the functionality of all rooms. The kitchen, dining and living rooms are conveniently interconnected to facilitate communication and entertainment.

Courtesy of Meier Architekten

Plan 2

Courtesy of Meier Architekten

Materials and colors are based on nature. Wood, stone and natural brown ceramic tiles shape this dwelling and create a welcoming and warm yet elegant ensemble.

Courtesy of Meier Architekten

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City of London. Image © Jason Hawkes

The following article was first published by Volume Magazine in their 47th issue, The System*. You can read the Editorial of this issue, How Much Does Your System Weigh?, here.

Neoliberal post-fordism poses a dramatic challenge to urbanism as we have come to know it since the early 20th century. The public planning process has become more and more an embarrassment and obstacle to urban and economic flourishing. It’s a relic of a bygone era. The high point of urban planning was the post-war era of socialist planning and re-construction of the built environment. With respect to this period we can speak about physical or perhaps ‘positive planning’, in the sense of governments formulating concrete plans and designs about what to build. This era has long gone as society evolved beyond the simple fordist society of mechanical mass production to our current post-fordist networked society. When a few basic standards were functionally separate, optimized and endlessly repeated, central planning could still cope with the pace of societal progress. The world we live in today is far too multi-faceted, complex and dynamic to be entrusted to a central planning agency. The old model broke apart as it could not handle the level of complexity we live with and our cities should accommodate. The decentralized information processing mechanism of the market was indeed capable of managing such levels of complexity and, for this reason, has effectively taken over all positive decision-making processes.

Alongside the dramatic contraction of public investment in construction, public planning was reduced to setting constraints; it became ‘negative planning’ via restrictions and veto powers without any power to make any real positive decisions. Zoning restrictions can be imposed, for example, and then planners wait and see if investments from the private realm come forward. It’s possible that no investments come, which could be a politically intended result (nimbyism), or prompt the adjustment of planning constraints. In theory, such a trial and error process might allow planners to find a set of restrictions that attracts certain investments while avoiding others considered undesirable. However, the present state of public planning is too slow to adapt and prevents the exploitation of myriads of opportunities. Development processes based on negative planning are inherently conservative compared to an unhampered market-driven process of land use allocation. Even worse is when planners assume discretionary powers rather than operating via strict rules due to the paralyzing uncertainty this creates. Indeed, to give permission is often riskier than to refuse it. Another mounting problem is that any rule change creates problematic windfalls and losses. In short, the public planning process turns the process of urban development into a precarious gamble and makes the power of officials liable to be treated as fiefdoms for the extraction of bribes – an endemic problem (not only) in the developing world.

The world we live in today is far too multi-faceted, complex and dynamic to be entrusted to a central planning agency.

We are witnessing a sustained drive towards urban concentration in global hub cities like London. Within our contemporary networked society, one’s productivity depends on being plugged into professional and cultural networks. In the provinces, productivity is constrained by relative disconnection. Productivity gains depend on continuously re-calibrating what each of us is doing in response to what everybody else is doing. This requires a new level of communicative density that is only available in the metropolis and underlies what economists measure as ‘agglomeration externalities’.[1]

Since the neat division between work and leisure has disappeared, a spell of desire has been cast for unprecedented degrees of urban intensification and mixture. It’s my contention that present-day market-driven processes of urbanization, if unleashed and harnessed, could deliver exactly this. This desire for a new urban dynamic is currently stifled by outmoded planning restrictions and requires new degrees of freedom. Urban entrepreneurs need space to experiment with and discover optimal ways of garnering potential synergies through intricate programmatic juxtapositions and weaving a new urban texture. With its information processing capacity and agility, only an unhampered market process can facilitate such a dynamic mechanism of creative experimentation and discovery. Planning brakes have to be released in terms of land use and density restrictions. Urban development has to escape from the paralyzing politics of nannyism and nimbyism.

Rules are of course required, but should be as general and abstract as possible. The maximization of value we might be able to expect from urban planning could be better and more flexibly provided by a combination of universalized property rights (unencumbered rights of land use or programming, rights of light, rights of access, generic protection from noise, pollution etc.) and free markets for their exchange. Private property rights are abstract enough to remain open to yet unforeseen future possibilities while being stable enough to allow for entrepreneurial planning. The idea of a competitive, market-based privatization (and commodification) of everything—from public spaces, streets and city management to policing, courts and systems of law—is not only intellectually stimulating but also, in fact, increasingly plausible. We should recognize that the tendency for consolidating land ownership into large integrated development parcels or even whole urban districts is already well under way for the purposes of long-term coordination and collective action. A free market of space will also generate vibrant urban districts in a bottom-up fashion by letting small entrepreneurs experiment with and discover the vital ingredients and synergies of pedestrian-scaled juxtapositions. There would be development at all scales and sizes, ranging from large development zones to infill slivers.  

The prospect of a market-based urban order does not spell the demise of planning, but rather points to its progressive transformation. Traditional public planners are shielded from adverse economic effects of their decisions and not exposed to profit and loss signals that would incentivize them to continuously check and fine-tune the relative optimality of space; that space is allocated to its most productive and most urgently desired use. Private planning agencies can be imagined with a vital incentive to get urban synergies right—within and between districts of varying scales—and who are inherently more agile and adaptive to new trends.

The artificially heightened price differential in residential land puts an increased cost burden on the desire to live in the city. What gives planners the right to frustrate the realization of this desire?

In the absence of exposure to risk and incentive to respond to such feedback, planners can persist in their misallocations and misaligned restrictions. Current sky-high land prices in London reflect artificial supply and density restrictions as much as they reflect the vital historical tendency of urban concentration within major global communication hubs. The extraordinary price differentials between land parcels zoned for residential use versus those for commercial use—in certain areas residential is four times that of commercial—also reflects the long persistence of artificial zoning restrictions. An unhampered land market would differentiate between locations on the basis of centrality, but not between land uses. Adjacent parcels would cost the same, independent of their use. The artificially heightened price differential in residential land puts an increased cost burden on the desire to live in the city. What gives planners the right to frustrate the realization of this desire? Planners also restrict the choices of those who want to live in the center by setting arbitrary minimum standards for apartments in terms of size and facilities. This normalizing bureaucratic paternalism compromises the quality of life and productivity of those who have desire and reason to trade centrality for size of accommodation.

Planners talk about ‘social justice’ and ‘milieu protection’, but this is pure conservatism. What gives planners the right to limit desired choices and impose that urban uses of far less value should remain entrenched in places where others are much more urgently desired? What is ‘just’ in protecting the monopoly position of those who happen to be the lucky owners of land already zoned for residential use? ‘Gentrification’ is supposedly a morally suspect process, but it’s really just another name for development: urban upgrading, urban intensification and enhanced land utilization. Resistance here is not different from any other resistance to progress; it’s like the Luddite smashing of machines, and planners have come to wield the tool of such rearguard action. Moribund planning deserves its long overdue coup de grâce.

End.

References

[1] Wouter Vermeulen, ‘Agglomeration Externalities and Urban Growth Controls’, SERC Discussion Papers, 0093, (London: Spatial Economics Research Centre (SERC), London School of Economics, 2011). [access] (accessed 16 February 2016).

This article was shared in collaboration with Volume Magazine. You can buy a copy of The System*, re-designed by Irma Boom and Julia Neller, here.

Introducing Volume #47: The System*

The Project of a Collective Line

Geographies of Uncertainty: Space and Territory in the Operational Logic of UPS

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© Kengo Kuma & Associates

Architects: Kengo Kuma & Associates

Location: 336 Route du Nant Jorland, 74310 Les Houches, France

Project Director: Matthieu Wotling, Chizuko Kawarada

Area: 2000.0 sqm

Project Year: 2016

Photographs: Kengo Kuma & Associates, Michel Denancé, Béatrice Cafieri

Project Manager: Silvia Fernandez

Site Supervision: TOP Frederic Reinert

Mechanical And Concrete Structure Engineer : EGIS Grand EST

Wood Structure Engineer: BARTHES

Quantity Surveyor: LTA

Façade Engineer : AR-C

Acoustician: ACOUSTB

© Michel Denancé

From the architect. Les Houches is a small village situated in the French Alpes, close to one of its most important peaks, the Mont-Blanc. The aim was to integrate as naturally as possible the project into the extraordinary mountainous landscape.

© Béatrice Cafieri

© Michel Denancé

Our idea was to create a wide roof perforated by lines of light running from north to south, following the natural slope, under which the program is implemented. The terrace in the middle of the roof offers a panoramic 360 degree view to the mountain ranges surrounding the building.

© Michel Denancé

Wooden boards of natural oak envelop the building creating an irregular rhythm both in the façade and in the roof. The intention was to keep the natural and rough aspect of the oak, so we decided to keep the bark as well as to not add any treatments so to highlight the natural aspect of the wood.

© Michel Denancé

Site Plan

© Michel Denancé

The large atrium creates a link between the north and main entrance with the views towards the mountains on the South. A maximum of modularity is foreseen for all the working areas and a double height space ensures maximum views to the exterior while giving the users bright and generous working spaces. 

© Michel Denancé

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© Roland Halbe

Architects: Matthias Bauer Associates

Location: Stuttgart, Germany

Project Year: 2015

Photographs: Roland Halbe

From the architect. Combining a stone cavern with a glass house, the building is shaped like a mountain crystal. The jointless walls and triangulated roof are made of monolithic insulating concrete. Uniting structure, insulation and technical installation in one massive layer beautifully balanced by the transparent and reflective nature of glass.

© Roland Halbe

In a strong engagement with context, site, and material the architecture of House 36 blends with the natural beauty of a steep site overlooking the urban valley of Stuttgart. It is made of a smart and warm concrete with rough-saw texture inside and outside – ideal for the desired variety of contemporary spaces and atmospheres.

Closed towards the hill and upper road while open towards the green spaces and the view over the city and towards the sky. The walls and triangulated roof geometries of House 35 are complemented with a flush mounted glass band, creating a contextual and unique architecture of both protective and open spaces to live.

© Roland Halbe

From the distance the house blends into the residential context harmoniously with its triangulated sloped roof. The main access from the east side leads to a single space for everyday family life that opens on the west to the garden. Beneath is the garden level with the sleeping, working and bath/sauna area. At the attic floor, the vivid geometry of the faceted roof becomes evident; the master bedroom and bathroom are accommodated under higher and lower edge lines, the space reminiscent of a mountain cavern.

© Roland Halbe

The three floors are connected by a central flight of stairs whose last eleven individual steps leading to the parent’s master bedroom are delicately floating between thin steel wire spider webs with no additional connections. Structurally the house is a monolithic folded shell bearing on two walls. Frameless glass panes placed flush with the outside edges create wide wooden window framings on the inside.

Section

Shelter and domesticity are balanced with large openings bringing light and dimension, connecting inside and outside. Fields of porthole windows are placed where privacy is required, and over the sunken bathtub create an intense interplay of light and shadow, day and night.

© Roland Halbe

A reduced material canon of glass, insulating concrete, sustainable wood of and mineral material join the rough-sawn concrete surfaces similar to a natural stonewall, haptic and warm.

Section

On a modest building footprint of 10x12m for the entire building, the architecture creates a spacious effect. The different moods afford a unique, varied living experience. House 36 (re)unites architecture, structure, insulation and systems in a one layer concrete-stone.

© Roland Halbe

With only two materials made from natural or recycled materials, the built structure’s environmental footprint is minimized. Massive walls and glass allow for active and passive solar and atmospheric gain. Resulting in a ‘slow’ house – similar to an old stone house – longer warm in winter and longer cold in summer. Comfortable room and warm surface temperatures are combined with ideal moisture balance and an absence of traditional thermal problems. Energy consumption and maintenance costs are exemplary reduced. House 36 is a prototype for new holistic architecture.

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Courtesy of Studio-02 Architectes

Architects: Studio-02 Architectes

Location: Île de Nantes, 44200 Nantes, France

Area: 4200.0 sqm

Project Year: 2015

Photographs: Courtesy of Studio-02 Architectes

Client: Eiffage Immobilier Ouest Societé d’aménagement Samoa (Nantes)

Program: Unencumbered offices

Partners: Cdlp / Elythis / Studio Joran Briand

Hqe Targets: 3,4,5,7,9,10

Environmental Approach: Performance level conforming to Ecofaur2 RT 2012 THPE

Technical Equipment: Thermal solar cells, Rainwater capture, External insulation

Budget: 5,600,000 €

Courtesy of Studio-02 Architectes

From the architect. The Kanoa tower is a project that fits into the vast urban development plan for the Island of Nantes.

This is a very understated building, whose shape, worked to the extreme, is the main feature.  To minimize the tower’s impact on the street, it was designed in a “boot” shape and discreetly covered in zinc, which was laid down in shingles to create a scaled effect.

Courtesy of Studio-02 Architectes

Inside, the lobby is notable for its functionality and the diversity of programs that can be offered simultaneously.  This is a place for meetings and conviviality, where the structure’s modularity allows for many types of events thanks to its ephemeral boundaries.

Courtesy of Studio-02 Architectes

The walls of wooden cladding incidentally serve as a place to park bicycles in suspension, and provide residents with individual lockers in which to store helmets and miscellaneous equipment.

Courtesy of Studio-02 Architectes

On the ground floor, a parking lot is equipped with a system of automatic, superimposed parking spaces (vehicle lifts), thus doubling its capacity.

Courtesy of Studio-02 Architectes

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© Yuko Tada

• Architects: MTKarchitects
• Location: Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan
• Architect In Charge: Akira Metoki
• Area: 128.59 sqm
• Project Year: 2015
• Photographs: Yuko Tada

• Structural Engineer: Hidemasa Nagata
• Construction: Matsumoto-Doken Co. ltd.
• Site Area: 300.17 sqm

© Yuko Tada

From the architect. The “ROKUTENGOKEN-DO” is two-storey single family home. This house is sited in a quiet and relaxing residential area and has wonderful views and the natural surroundings.

© Yuko Tada

“I like the house with a gable roof. The roof must be gable!” It was the request from the owner and was easily answered as I designed many gabled roofs in my previous projects.

© Yuko Tada

I always think that to look beautiful the gable should has a simple straight line. That’s why a simple and rectilinear plan is needed.

Plan 1

ROKUTENGOKEN-DO is simply put, a modest sized gabled building with a jet black metal roof. The roof slopes gently to accommodate the modulation, beyond which deep eaves extend and provide sun-shading. The linear and deep roof eaves will cast a shadow on the wall. The exterior of the house is a simple composition of textures, including of metal roof, black painted cedar siding, white painted plaster, which are layered horizontally.

© Yuko Tada

Wooden timbers were chosen as the main construction material for the house. The wooden timber is a Japanese traditional structure. The design reflects Japanese tradition, thoughts and esthetic sense and emphasises the structural beauty; beams of the roof, vertical of pillars, horizontal of beams. The staircase is skeleton type that is designed in consideration of the linearity and the timber structure.

© Yuko Tada

The interior is extremely impressive contrast of dark brown floor, white wall, black ceiling and timbers. The floor is a herringbone of Asian Walnut timber. The composition of the lines is considered deeply as well as the distribution of the colours to perfect the interior.

© Yuko Tada

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© Indiphos. Song Gi-myoun

• Architects: Yoon Space
• Location: Gakbuk-myeon, Cheongdo-gun, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea
• Architect In Charge: Yoon Seok-min
• Area: 90.0 sqm
• Photographs: Indiphos. Song Gi-myoun

• Design Team: Rita-kim / SP R&D. Park Jung-su
• Construction: SP R&D. Park Jung-su

© Indiphos. Song Gi-myoun

From the architect. The people who first the chocolate box may think it as a showroom or gallery, but the chocolate box is a work created for the studio of a writer Jeong Gil-Young. The studio expressed the writer’s and Yoon Space’s individuality through emptiness is part and the use of bold colors in part to make his work look better according to nature of the studio.

© Indiphos. Song Gi-myoun

It’s space was also made with special materials. You can probably tell that the floor is an ordinary urethane floor and the wall was made from common wood veneer and bricks. Those materials are very common. Not entertaining in style or with nothing special Such conditions were given to us. In these conditions. the space to give a special sense was made by using the bold colours on the floor and giving variety to the bricklaying method. The commonly used and ordinary materials were applied to the unfamiliar appearances and shapes for creating the challenging and differentiated space. Many people think the lighting is also very unique. but it is made of the ordinary fluorescent lamps.

© Indiphos. Song Gi-myoun

1F Plan

© Indiphos. Song Gi-myoun

The familiar and customary ways were just changed. Consequently. every effort has been made to express the unfamiliar appearances with these familiar material properties. I wanted to make new paradigm and sense through ‘defamilarization’ of our familiar things. But that does not mean what I have done is great. At the moment when giving variety to the height and arrangement even of the ordinary fluorescent lamps. it creates new design. With the concept of twist’ only, it breaks stereotypes and seems to be special. Colouring on the floor is in the same vein. Everything is sometimes very ordinary and sometimes very special.

© Indiphos. Song Gi-myoun

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