The Japanese architect Akiya Matakao has designed this house in Meiwamachi, Gunma Prefecture, Japan in white polished concrete. The very interesting part about this project I think is how this Japanse architect follows a very rigorous and sculptural idiom. More info and pictures on Akiya Matakao’s website!
Here are some pictures of a house, called ‘View House’ located in Rosario, Argentina and designed by American practice Johnston Marklee and Argentinian practice Diego Arraigada Arquitecto. The design aims to allow the occupant to enjoy as much as can from the surrounding views on all sides of the house without loosing some privacy. Interesting about the interior is a spiraling staircase that leads to the roof as you can see on the pictures below by Gustavo Frittegotto.
Some text from the architects:
The View House is designed under conditions generated by both the potential and limitations of large suburban developments. Situated near Rosario on the vast landscape of the Argentine plains, the 3200 sq foot house occupies a 22,750 sq foot parcel.
The design is driven by two conflicting desires: engaging the living experience of the house with the views of the surrounding landscape and preserving privacy from neighboors. Planning demands and the unique position of the peripheral corner lot demanded a specific approach to the massing of the house and its engagement with the landscape. A compact massing strategy with a minimal footprint liberates and preserves the ground, defining a two story structure.
By denying the traditional front, side, and rear yard designations, and instead intensifying the facade as a surface that continuously modulates the relationship of interior to exterior, the perception of the house unfolds through a sequence of oblique views where every surface of façade becomes primary. The formal and tectonic complexity of the house results from the repetition of four basic geometric subtractions from a primitive mass that create a dynamic exterior shape perceived simultaneously as embedded and lofted, cantilevered and slumped.
In the interior, these operations define a continuous and modulated space that spirals upwards from the ground level to the roof terrace in a sequence of living areas. The four geometric subtractions have differentiated volumetric impressions on the inside of the house, each of which, together with a contiguous aperture, results in an interior landscape of paired surfaces, views, and lighting effects.
The rotational strategy for the apertures results from the framing of desirable landscape features, the anticipation of neighboring developments and the choreography of internal circulation. The reduction of electric and HVAC demands by facilitating cross ventilation and natural light have also been taken into consideration. Varying in height, orientation, and depth, each framed opening captures a distinct view, providing alternating relationships between interior and exterior. The layering of subtractions and apertures also relates to the tectonic demands of the overall concrete shell. As a culmination of the internal circulation along a path of 360º, a flight of steps leads up to a panoramic roof deck, from which the expansive surrounding landscape can be perceived from a new height.
The rough concrete shell of the house was built using traditional local techniques and its form and finish retain the impression of the means and methods of its construction. In contrast, the interior of the house is smooth and polished in nature. Lightly hued terrazzo floors on the first floor are distinguished from the smooth plaster walls only by a degree of reflectivity and polish. The black window frames punctuate the views and define a contrast with the white interior atmosphere. In more intimate, private spaces, Lapacho wood covers the floors creating a new contrast with the walls and ceilings.
Photos by Gustavo Frittegotto
SMO Architektur designed this extension to the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl. Thiry year after Max Ernst’s death, his home town Brühl in Rheinland opened a museum for the art off Max Ernst. It has been set up in the former Brühl Pavilion, a neoclassical palais built in 1844, where Ernst went dancing as a schoolboy. Visit SMO Architektur website for more information and pictures.
Via Dailyicon
Max Ernst Museum by Van Den Valentyn Architektur/SMO Architektur
Photos by Rainer Mader
This project called the FLUX installation, is developed in 6 months by a team of CCA faculty and students. The project explores the possibilities of parametric modeling and digital fabrication through the production of the exhibition armature. The content of the exhibition is organized through a series of thematic categories in digital practices like cellular clusters, material systems, modular assemblages and etc.
FLUX: Architecture in a Parametric Landscape by CCA Architecture/MEDIAlab is an exhibition that focuses on the emerging field of advanced digital design. In the last two decades of architectural practice, new digital technologies have evolved from being simply representational tools invested in the depiction of existing models of architectural space to becoming significant performative machines that have transformed the ways in which we both conceive and configure space and material.
These tools for design, simulation, and fabrication, have enabled the emergence of new digital diagrams and parametric landscapes—often emulating genetic and iterative dynamic evolutionary processes—that are not only radically changing the ways in which we integrate disparate types of information into the design process, but are also significantly altering the methodological strategies that we use for design, fabrication and construction. After the early digital explosion of the 1990’s, new forms of rigor and production have entered into the field of architecture, supporting the emergence of parametric and building information modeling and the enhanced use of computational geometry and scripting that together represent the second critical wave of digital design practices.
That our current models of space are far more continuous, variant and complex, is specifically a result of the tools we are using to produce them, an inevitable byproduct of the ever-expanding capacities of digital computation and related fabrication technologies as these intersect with theoretical trajectories that long ago dismantled the social, functional and technological truths of the early part of this century.
Produced using CCA’s new CNC router and advanced parametric modeling techniques, the undulating structure expands and contracts as its volume extends down the center of the long nave space. Through the use of parametric modeling and a series of custom designed scripts, the installation design can be quickly updated to address new design criteria. From the thickness of the ribs to the overall twisting geometry and perforated skins, the spatial form of the armature is controlled through a complex set of relationships defined by its formal, performative, and fabrication constraints.
Official Credits to:
Architect: CCA Architecture/MEDIAlab
Location: San Francisco, United States
Date: 2008 – 2009
More info and text, click here!
Photos by Kory Bieg
Via Matsys (info and pictures from Matsys)
Artek is honoured to be the sponsor of La Biennale di Venezia and realises part of the furniture and furnishings for the premises of Palazzo delle Exposizioni della Biennale.
The assignment included a bookshop, a cafeteria and additional furniture elements for an educational area, that were submitted respectively by three artists, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tobias Rehberger and Massimo Bartolini, all selected for the 53rd International Art Exhibition.
Tobias Rehberger was awarded the Golden Lion as best artist at the 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Tobias Rehberger received the price for the cafeteria, for which he collaborated closely with Artek using customized Artek furniture in an ingenious way.
Artek’s founding manifest from the year 1935 is based on the symbiosis between art, technology and architecture. The partnership with the Venice Biennale is thus perfectly in line with Artek’s ideology.
Photos by Katja Hagelstam and Wolfgang Guenzel
Text and photos from Artek.fi
More stories about Artek click here!
Architect Pascal Grasso designed a temporary, transportable restaurant on the roof of Le Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris, France. The temporary structure, features a dining room for twelve people with a very nice panoramic view over the Seine and the Eiffel tower in Paris. The restaurant comprises a glass cabin with perforated metal screen that covers the central cooking area. Coloured LED lighting is placed between the metal skin and the glass cube .The glass cube is part of the ‘Art Home’ culinary project by the Palais de Tokyo and Electrolux.
The art center « Le Palais de Tokyo » asked us to imagine a temporay piece on the roof of the building. We designed a take-down and easily transportable module, which is a twelve seats dining room, with a panoramic view on Paris. Nomiya is the name of the very small restaurant in Japan. The structure is 18m long, 4m large, 3.50 m high and weights 22 tonnes. It has been constructed in the Cherbourg boatyard, in the North of France, and transported in two pieces by special trunks to Paris, and then set on the roof of the Museum.
This construction is composed by a glass volume, covered by a metallic skin on its central part. The dining area, entirely made of glass, is looking at the Seine and the Eiffel tower. The central part (cooking aera) is covered by a punched made-to-measure sheet metal. The perforations represent an aurora borealis drawing. The lightning system is put between the glass and the metallic skins.
Composed by lines of leds, it emphasizes the drawing of the facade and changes its colors, like a real aurora borealis. The interior design is minimalist, with a white Corian furniture and a grey wooden floor. Above the dinner table, suspended leds extend the sparkling of the city.
Artist associated : Laurent Grasso
Structure / facade engineer : ARCORA
Client: Palais de Tokyo / Electrolux
Photos are by Nicolas Dorval-Bory
Japanese architect Chikara Ohno from design form Sinato, designed a new shop interior for Patrick Cox in Tokyo, Japan. The designer positioned each of cylindrical steel pendant fixtures directly over a corresponding display pedestal.
Chikara Ohno describes the design:
The shop is in a 17-story building in Tokyo’s fashion-centric Aoyama district and it is only a few steps inside the building’s main entrance. The important point of this shop seemed to be lighting. The products can shine and get a better look if the light source is close by, not shining down from the ceiling. So I positioned each of cylindrical steel pendant fixtures directly over a corresponding display pedestal. These fixtures provide most of the lighting in the space without the lighting from the ceiling. As a result, this space gets unique conditions such as “dark in above and well-lighted in below”. The gradation of the wall is a promotion of it. At the same time, the pendant fixtures cut the void and shape the space. Pathways in the shop seem to meander beneath a canopy formed by the largest of the drum shades.
Photography by Toshiyuki Yano
Slovenia architectural firm, Bevk Perovic arhitekti designed this house that is located in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The basement contains a gym, pool, music room, study and three atriums. On the ground floor, we have the living room, dining room and a large terrace. Upstairs there is a bathroom and one bedroom with a large balcony that has the same size as the room. Enjoy the pictures! Comments are always welcome.
Massimiliano Fuksas Architects, completed a building complex in the middle of the city center of Mainz in Germany. Enjoy the pictures, made by Moreno Maggi.
Text and pictures are from Massimiliano Fuksas Architects:
The building complex is located in the middle of the city center of Mainz, Germany. Its existing “historical” facade shown to the Cathedral in Mainz and its new facade to the Rebstockplatz compose the entrances to a halfclosed inner courtyard, a weather-protected “Piazzetta”. This was designed as a half-open, spatially graduated free space, which extends from the underground level over the ground level and the third level, including terraces and access level for the offices and residences, up to the glass roof.
The “Piazzetta“ becomes a place of communication between the individual functions of the building. This connection is strengthened by the verticality of the white steles, shaped sculptures which direct the view of the visitor upward and creates a visible connection between the levels.
All Areas in the ground floor including trade and service are accessible for pedestrians from the atrium space as well as from the streets. An escalator in the atrium brings you into the underground level with its shops. Residences and offices, if not attached directly to the stairways are accessible through indoor pergolas resp. through daylight provided hallways.
The new facades are pulled tensionful over the entire building complex equally as an item of clothing over a human body.
More pictures, click here!
Slovenian office, OFIS Arhitekti have designed a chapel next to an existing graveyard near Ljubljana in Slovenia.
A farewell chapel is located in a village close to Ljubljana. The site plot is next to the existing graveyard. The chapel is cut into the rising landscape. The shape is following the lines of the landscape trajectories around the graveyard. Three curved walls are embracing and dividing the programs. External curve is dividing the surrounding hill from chapel plateau and also reinstates main supporting wall.
Services such as storages, wardrobe restrooms and kitchenette are on the inner side along the wall.Internal curve is embracing main farewell space. It is partly glazed and it is opening towards outside plateau for summer gatherings. Roof is following its own curvature and forming external porch. The cross as catholic sign is featured as laying feature positioned on the rooftop above the main farewell space. It also functions as luminous dynamic element across the space during the daytime and lighting spark at a night time.
Materials are polished concrete, larch wood and glass.
Inner space: 70m2
External plato: 65 m2
Budget: 180.000 EUR
Invited competition 2005 /
Construction start 2008 /
Completed 2009
Navigation: Krasnja, Slovenia
Photographs are by Tomaz Gregoric.
MORE PROJECTS OFF OFIS, CLICK HERE!
Blog op Wordpress.com.
Thema: Esquire door Matthew Buchanan.
